“Bunch closer together! Forward, at a jogtrot – march!” commands the soldier out in front, throwing open the door to the outside.
Daylight hits the face like a shovel. Eyes explode with redness and instantly squint to blink. Zuleikha grabs at a wobbling wall and leans against it. The wall wants to throw Zuleikha off and she finds herself sinking to the floor. She is roused by a shout:
“Stand up! Everybody stand, you bastards! You want to go back to the cell?”
She’s lying on a dirty stone floor by the dungeon exit. Outside the crooked open doorway is a painfully deep-blue March sky and the large, flat dish of the prison yard covered in mirror-like blotches of puddles. Several people are lying there beside her, groaning and pressing their hands to their eyes. Some are leaning against the wall, others are crouching, kneeling, and mumbling…
“I said forward! At a jogtrot! March!”
One by one, with their eyes narrowed like moles, people find their way outside. Reeling from the fresh air and holding on to one another, they crowd into a loose, limping bunch that keeps falling apart along the way as they lurch along Tashayak Street toward the train station at an uneven jogtrot. Brisk escort guards surround them on all sides. Their rifles are horizontal in their hands, in complete accordance with paragraph seven, instruction 122 bis four (dated February 17, 1930) on “The procedure for escorting former kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements.”
Their eyes quickly grow accustomed to the daylight and Zuleikha looks around. There are trains like giant snakes, with dozens of railroad cars, to her left and right. Underfoot are endless ribbons of train track and rib-like ties, along which stride the hurrying exiles’ worn shoes, felt boots soaked from clinging snow, and mud-smeared boots. There’s a strong smell of fuel oil. A whistle sounds ahead; it’s a train drawing closer. “Let it through!” is the command from up ahead.
The escort guards stop and point their bayonets: Get off the tracks. A huge steam engine breathing hot raggedy fumes is already hurtling toward them, cutting through the air with its fire-red fender. The flywheels are like millstones gone mad. There’s crashing and clanging; it’s frightening. Zuleikha is seeing a train for the first time in her life. Daubs of white paint on the side flash “Forward to happiness!” in uneven letters, heavy air whips at their faces; and then the steam engine speeds away, pulling behind it a long chain of rumbling railroad cars.
A lanky lad of around twelve – one of the sons of the peasant man with many children – unexpectedly takes off. He jumps, catches a handrail, dangles like a kitten on a string, and rides away with the train. An escort guard shoulders his rifle. The crash of the shot merges with the whistle of the engine and a cloud of thick, patchy steam shrouds the train. The din of the train recedes just as quickly as it had arrived. The steam disperses and a small body is left lying on the tracks, lost in a sheepskin coat of the wrong size.
The mother can only silently open her mouth before her arms droop like rope. The bundles of her babies nearly fall to the ground. Zuleikha grabs one, the peasant man grabs the other. The older children huddle against their father’s legs in fright.
“We’re moving along. We’re not loitering!”
Steel fingers of bayonets point at the track. One of them touches the woman on the shoulder: You were ordered to move forward! The peasant man takes his wife by the shoulders. She doesn’t resist and her head is twisted back like a dead hen’s, her gaze fixed on her son’s small body sprawled between the rails. Still not closing her mouth, she obediently walks away with everyone, placing her feet on the ties. She walks for a long time.
Then she lets out a guttural scream and thrashes in her husband’s firm grasp, swinging her arms and legs to no avail; she wants to go back. But another train is already flying toward them, roaring, and her scream is drowned out by a powerful iron chorus of flywheels, pistons, hammers, railroad cars, rails, wheels.
Zuleikha hugs the soft, warm bundle in her arms. This baby that doesn’t belong to her is pink like a doll, with chubby cheeks, a tiny button nose, and delicate fluff instead of eyebrows. Snuffling in its sleep. Only two months since it was born, no more. Not one of Zuleikha’s daughters lived to this age.
The exiles flow along the tracks in a long, wide stream. Another stream, smaller and made up of cold people under-dressed for the weather, is running toward them from the train station. And diagonally across the rails there rapidly strides a lone figure wearing a sharp-pointed hat and carrying a gray folder in his hand. They all gather by a large railroad car that was knocked together from crooked, poorly planed boards painted reddish orange.
“Stop!” the man with the folder quietly says.
Zuleikha recognizes him. It’s Red Hordesman Ignatov, Murtaza’s killer.
The convoy’s leader is already hurrying toward him, whispering something in his ear, and pointing at the peasant’s wife, who continues to wail. Ignatov listens, nodding from time to time and gloomily looking around at the crowd that’s clustered before him. His gaze meets Zuleikha’s. Does he recognize her? Or does it only seem so?
“Listen to me carefully!” he finally says. “I’m your commandant…”
She doesn’t know what a commandant is. And he said “your.” Does this mean they’ll be together a long time?
“…and I’m taking you, dekulakized citizens, and you, former people citizens, to a new life…”
Former people? Zuleikha doesn’t understand: former people are dead people. She looks around at the handful of people who’ve just joined them. Pale, tired faces. They’re shivering, huddling close to one another and dressed for autumn, wearing frivolous woolen coats and silly thin shoes. A cracked pince-nez’s frame gleams gold and an absurd ladies’ hat with a veil shines like a bright emerald spot so it’s immediately obvious that they’re city people. But not dead, no.
“…a life that may be difficult and filled with deprivations and ordeals but also with honest labor that benefits our fervently beloved motherland–”
“But where to? Where are you taking us, commander?” someone from the crowd insolently interrupts.
Ignatov shoots glances at their faces, seeking out the obnoxious one. He doesn’t find him.
“You’ll find out when you get there,” he says over their heads, with authority. “Well, then…”
“And if I don’t get there?” a daring voice rings out again, challenging.
Ignatov takes a breath. Then he pulls a pencil stub out of his shirt and thoroughly wets it with saliva.
“What’s the surname of the one killed while escaping?” he asks loudly.
After hearing the answer, he opens the folder and crosses one name off the list.
“Already, one won’t get there.” He raises the folder and waves it around in the air. “Does everybody see?”
A bold, crooked line on a sheet tattered by a typewriter floats over the crowd.
Ignatov clears his throat.
“You drank the blood of the laboring peasantry for a long while. The moment has come to atone for your guilt and prove your right to a life in this complex present time of ours as well as in a wonderful bright future that will come about very, very soon, no doubt about it…”
He uses words that are difficult and unfamiliar to Zuleikha. She understands little, other than Ignatov’s promise that everything will end well.
“My task is to transport you – unharmed and in one piece – to that new life. Your task is to help me with that. Any questions?”
“Yes!” one of the bunch of “formers” hurries to say, in an apologetic tone. He’s a stooped man with sorrowful eyes; the skin underneath them sags like sacks, like melted wax, and Zuleikha realizes he’s a drunk. “If you please. Will food be provided during the travel? You must understand that for so many weeks we’ve already–”