“This isn’t freedom of the free. Procedures need to be observed,” he says didactically. “But I’ll be looking after you so nobody does anything foolish.”
Gorelov catches a louse behind his ear with an abrupt twitch, crushes it on his fingernail, and flings it into the stove.
“The bulls have got you by the horn,” he sings, taking up a new tune, his broad grin revealing a large, gleaming gold crown. “You’ve had it boys, now take your turn. You’ll soon be sorry you were born. You’re going where there’s no return…” He’s standing in the center of the car, hands in his pockets, his shoulders thrust back like wings. “Or is there someone here who can’t wait and is just burning for the eternal ‘no return’?”
Wary faces watch silently from the bunks. Gorelov takes a step behind the stove and knocks a wooden lid aside with his foot. Looking around belligerently, he unfastens his pants and releases a loud, taut stream into an open hole in the floor. Several women gasp, and stare at the long arc glistening in the firelight, entranced and unblinking. Their husbands tug at their sleeves and they look down, covering their children’s eyes.
Zuleikha comes to her senses and turns away, too. The sound of it rings in her ears, making her face warm in shame. So that’s the latrine? And what are women to do? In the cell, they went to a pail when necessary, though it was dark there. But here…
Gorelov smiles victoriously, flicking off the drops and in no hurry to tuck his manhood back into his pants.
“Herpes genitales, if I’m not mistaken,” says Leibe. The professor’s voice rings out beside Zuleikha as he looks pensively at Gorelov’s bared flesh. “Three parts essential oil of lavender, one part sulfur. Rub it on three times a day. And no sexual contact until full recovery.” He nods decisively, in firm agreement with himself, and then turns away indifferently.
Gorelov’s face shifts and he hastily crams his wrinkled member back in his pants and leaps over to Leibe, scrambling up to the second tier like a monkey.
“Take care of that mug of yours, buster,” he hisses into the vacant face, rubbing his fingertips on Leibe’s dress uniform as if it were a napkin. “And thank your lucky stars that I’m the minder here. Otherwise you might get your bell rung–” Gorelov lets out a yelclass="underline" he’s stabbed his finger on the small badge crookedly pinned to the lapel of Leibe’s uniform.
The railroad car abruptly begins moving, with a rumble.
“We’re on our way! We’re on our way!” The bunks boil over with excited whispers.
The hardened criminal casts a malevolent glance at Leibe and returns to his place.
Beside Zuleikha – right under the roof – there’s a small window, the size of the one on the stove, and it’s lined with even metal bars coated with velvety gray frost. On the other side of the grating she sees the central railway platform and the huge red station building with the lacy letters “Kazan” solemnly floating by. People are hurrying somewhere, surrounded by gleaming bayonet blades. A pair of horses neigh under militiamen. Women selling food bellow about snacks.
“We’re headed for Siberia, not Moscow,” someone notes.
“And where did you want them to send us? The Black Sea?”
The steam engine whistles long and loud, hurting the ears. A thick cloud of milky steam shrouds everything, creeping into eyes and mouths. When it dissipates, black skeletons of trees are already flying outside the window, silhouetted against white fields.
Zuleikha presses a finger to the grating: the frost on it is melting. The frost on the ceiling is beginning to drip, too, warmed by the stove and human breath.
They make themselves at home quickly. It doesn’t involve much since they have few things and very little space. The peasants are bunched at one end of the railroad car, the Leningrad “formers” at the other. Zuleikha and the professor have ended up in the “city” half.
They introduce themselves. The tall lady in the green hat bears a name befitting her stature: Izabella. She has a long patronymic, too, and a puzzling double surname that Zuleikha doesn’t remember. Izabella arranges her gray hair into a tall style each morning. Sometimes she recites poems that are intelligent, incomprehensible, and very beautiful, in Russian and occasionally, surprisingly, in French, which rumbles like the train wheels. She never recites the same poem twice. The railroad car listens. Zuleikha doesn’t understand how so many varied, complex, and very long lines can fit inside one head, and a female one besides. Izabella’s face remains calm and majestic, even when she’s catching lice under her arms or parading toward the latrine, which they’ve screened off with a piece of fabric.
Her husband, Konstantin Arnoldovich Sumlinsky, is a withered old man with a sparse, triangular gray beard; he mostly stays silent. He wakes early in the morning and takes up his place by the crack in the door to wait for the first rays of sunlight, under which he places his only book, open, to read. He smiles at some pages with an approving nod, wags a finger at others as he shakes his small head in distress, and even argues with others. When he reaches the last page, he slams the book shut, pensively looks at the cover, with its picture of a small, gray grain of wheat, and opens it up again. Sometimes he and his wife speak at length in a whisper, but Zuleikha doesn’t understand a single phrase, even though the conversation is in Russian, since they use such difficult words. He’s a strange person and Zuleikha is rather afraid of him.
She takes a disliking to the stooped Ikonnikov. Everything about him – the wrinkled blue-gray bags under his eyes, the fine trembling of his long fingers, his small fidgeting motions, and even how he loudly and lengthily swallows with his large, sharp Adam’s apple – indicates he’s a drunkard. Mama always said a drunk person was worse than a beast.
Zuleikha likes Gorelov least of all, though. Nobody likes him. The car’s minder holds everyone firmly by the throat. He always divides up the food himself, measuring out slimy porridge and herring soup with his own chipped mug, cutting bread with a coarse, stretched string, and mercilessly thrashing people’s outstretched fingers with a spoon: Don’t get ahead of the minder. He even pours out the drinking water from a half-rusty bucket covered with a crust of ice. He takes double portions for himself, for his labor. The peasant men look at him askance, keeping quiet. Gorelov is the first to leap from the bunks when the door opens for the daily inspection and the imperturbable Ignatov, his gaze severe and arrogant, enters the car surrounded by soldiers. The minder stands at attention in front of the commandant, poking a tense hand at his own forehead and loudly and diligently reporting that no incidents have taken place. Ignatov listens reluctantly, his body half-turned, and for some reason Zuleikha likes that he twitches his thin nostrils ever so slightly as he does. Sometimes Gorelov is summoned to the commandant’s car; he returns quiet, mysterious, and even dreamy – maybe they fed him there.
They always want to eat. The belly groans, demanding. It clenches like a fist, then straightens and swells. Food is meager on their journey and it inflames rather than consoles the innards. Zuleikha remembers her mother’s tales of the insatiable mythical giantess, Zhalmavyz, who eats everything that comes her way. And Zuleikha herself has become just the same. As voracious as a locust. As greedy as a turkey hen. She hadn’t even known such hunger could exist. Her vision darkens from it; that’s how bad things are. The bolt on the railroad car only needs to jingle a bit and her stomach immediately starts growling and churning: Are they bringing something to eat? Most often it turns out that no, it’s just another inspection or a head count or a train station doctor undertaking a hurried, embarrassing examination.