Zuleikha looks around and sees the railroad car has emptied out. Nearly all the peasants left, other than a few lone women and a couple of feeble old people, who having given their parting son or grandson a long and tight embrace, now sit on the bunk, their unmoving, sunken eyes looking at the hole in the ceiling where they recently disappeared.
The majority of the Leningrad “formers” have stayed; only a couple of young female students flitted off. Izabella is sitting on the bunk, firmly squeezing her husband’s hand. A smiling Ikonnikov is dreamily looking at the sparkling stars in the ceiling’s torn opening, for some reason whispering, “Thank you, thank you.” Professor Leibe, who’s been sitting alongside Zuleikha the whole time, leans back, sighing with relief.
“Freedom is similar to happiness,” he purrs under his breath, “harmful for some, useful for others.”
“Goethe?” Konstantin Arnoldovich comes to life on the neighboring bunk.
“Novalis,” says Ikonnikov, joining in.
“No, forgive me, but I’m certain it’s Goethe!”
“I won’t forgive you. It’s definitely Novalis.”
Gorelov wriggles on the floor, groaning. Nobody has thought to untie him yet.
Zuleikha suddenly realizes she’s still holding the board in her hands; she tosses it to the floor. A golden scattering of stars quivers in the splintered gap in the ceiling.
The country where Zuleikha lives is very large. Very large and red, like bull’s blood. Zuleikha is standing in front of a huge map that covers an entire wall, where a giant scarlet blot resembling a pregnant slug has sprawled – it’s the Soviet Union. She has already seen this slug once before, on an agitational propaganda poster in Yulbash. Mansurka-Burdock had also explained: “Here it is,” he’d said. “Our motherland is immense. It stretches from ocean to ocean.” Zuleikha hadn’t understood then where those “oceans” were, but she remembered the slug, which was awfully funny, with a beard and a hilarious hook-like paw out front. And now, on this high wall, it truly seems immense because even two people, let alone one Zuleikha, couldn’t stretch their arms across it. Along its bilberry-red body there wriggle dark blue veins of rivers (is her dear Chishme among them?), and cities and villages are black dots, like beauty marks (who could show her where Yulbash is?). Zuleikha reaches her fingers toward the shiny surface of the map but doesn’t have time to touch. Ignatov’s stern voice lashes like a whip:
“Is it true you helped them escape?”
Zuleikha jerks her finger away from the map. Ignatov is standing by a window wide open to the night, looking out, and smoking. Yellow light from a kerosene lamp on the table illuminates the fabric of his uniform tunic, which is stretched taut between his shoulders under the cross of his tight belts.
“Don’t deny it,” he goes on. “People saw.”
The night is warm and velvety outside the window. She keeps silent.
“Why did you stay?”
It would seem that Gorelov, that malicious soul, had gone out of his way to report the matter, venting his fury. Nobody had untied him, after all, and he’d lain about, wrapped up like a sacrificial lamb all night, until they reached Pyshma. Everything was discovered in the afternoon, during the stop in Pyshma. Ignatov came into their car for inspection and his face twitched and blanched when he saw the hole in the ceiling, then everyone started running in and shouting, their feet stamping. Gorelov was taken – under guard! – in one direction and the others were taken – under guard! – in the other. The hole in the ceiling was quickly boarded up but the escapees… well, just go and find them. And of course they weren’t fed today because there was too much going on. In the evening they took Leibe from the railroad car first, then Izabella, Konstantin Arnoldovich, and somebody else. They were taken away and then brought back. Interrogation, said Ikonnikov. And Izabella asked him: “My dear Ilya Petrovich, is that really called interrogation?” And she was laughing very cheerfully.
It was during the night that they shook Zuleikha awake and brought her here. It’s a large room where the skeleton of a once-beautiful chandelier is suspended like a huge bronze spider from a ceiling that rises into dark heights; where walls that were once covered with tinted whitewash have now been reduced to dark-brownish bricks; where a couple of mismatched black chairs have cracked varnish on their sharply bent backs; where a large, carved table in the center is burned on one side and has a stack of books in place of one leg; and where, over an austere cube of a safe in the corner, there hangs a portrait of the same wise, mustached man Zuleikha saw on the clock tower of the Kazan kremlin. Zuleikha is glad to see him – his squinting eyes look at her in a warm, fatherly way, as though they’re calming and protecting her from Ignatov, who’s angry in the extreme.
Ignatov turns to Zuleikha. His eyes are blacker than black, and it’s as if the skin is pulled tightly over each bone of his face.
“So what’s the meaning of this silence? We have an escape, about four dozen souls bolted from the train, and you’re playing dumb?”
A tiny reddish flame – a hand-rolled cigarette – breathes in his fingers. He approaches the table and forcefully stubs it out in a small wooden dish filled with cigarette butts. The bowl clunks, tumbles, and falls to the floor; cigarette butts fly everywhere. “Damn it,” Ignatov grumbles and starts gathering them up. Zuleikha hurries and crouches beside him. It’s unheard of that a man would pick trash off the floor in a woman’s presence while she watches!
The cigarette butts are cold and small, like worms. They’re crumbling with ash and there’s a smell of stale smoke. And Ignatov smells of warmth.
“You could be facing the camps, you fool,” he says, his voice right beside her. “Or the ultimate punishment. Do you know what the ultimate punishment is?”
Zuleikha looks up. It’s completely dark here under the table and Ignatov’s pupils are as black as coal in the whites of his eyes.
“I don’t understand Russian well,” she finally says.
Harsh, hot fingers clench her chin.
“You’re lying!” hisses Ignatov. “You understand everything, you just don’t want to say anything. Well, talk! Did they make an arrangement to run away together? Where did they want to go? Talk!”
Her chin hurts.
“I don’t know anything. I saw the same as the others saw. I heard the same as the others heard.”
Ignatov’s face, with its black holes for eyes, comes right up to her ear and his breath is on her cheek.
“Oh, what a stubborn Tatar woman. Zuleikha, that’s your name, isn’t it?”
She turns her face toward him.
“It’s too bad I didn’t go with them. Now I’m sorry I didn’t.”
The door creaks open.
“Guard!” calls out the rattled voice of the chief of security operations at Pyshma. “Where did they get to?”
The thudding of the guard’s feet is hurried and frightened, like the sound of potatoes scattering from a pail. Ignatov’s fingers release her chin and her skin burns as if it’s been scorched. He rises from under the table and straightens his uniform:
“Yes, we’re here, don’t fret.”
Zuleikha rises after him, placing the dish with the cigarette butts on the table. Her hands are as black as if she’s been rubbing coal.
A young, pimply escort guard holding his rifle horizontally sighs with relief. He looks at Zuleikha and bursts out laughing: there are long dark streaks extending along her cheeks and chin. Ash. He wipes the grin off his face when he meets the Pyshma chief’s stern gaze, then he backs toward the exit and closes the door behind him. Ignatov turns to Zuleikha and starts cackling, too, flustered.