PART THREE
TO LIVE
THIRTY
When viewed from the cliffs, the Angara is plainly visible. The splendid green left shore swells steeply, like risen dough in a vat, and its bright emerald reflection falls into the river’s leaden mirror. The water twists around lazily like a wide piece of heavy fabric before departing for the blueness of the horizon, toward the Yenisei. To where Kuznets’s launch recently departed from.
The right shore, where the exiles have settled, spreads low and obligingly at the water’s edge then boils up into a sprawling knoll, where it grows into hulking hills, and bares its cliffs like fangs. Ignatov is standing on one of those cliffs now, gazing at the taiga below. The camp isn’t visible from here; it’s somewhere below, deep down in the folds of the hill.
Ignatov doesn’t want to see anybody, though. Up until now, he’s been oddly removed from himself, taking in the situation like an onlooker. Who is that standing, clothed, in water up to his waist, brushing away snowflakes stuck to his hair? Is that really him? Who’s giving orders (“Light a fire. Break branches for a shelter. Not one step away from the camp, you bastards!”) then going out into the taiga to hunt? Is that really him? Who’s trudging along animal trails, snapping fallen brush, and creeping up to the cliff along rocks overgrown with moss and dry grass? Is that really him?
Now he sits down on a boulder heated by the sun and squints. He feels the stone’s warmth through the chill of his still-damp clothing. The fragile stubble of lichen pricks his palm. A couple of mosquitoes hover by his ear but the wind blows them aside and their buzzing departs, dissolving far away. Freshness from the large body of water floats into his nostrils along with the tart smell of the taiga: spruces, pines, larches, and various fragrant grasses. And that’s how it is. He, Ivan Ignatov, is here, in Siberia. He drowned more than three hundred enemy souls in the Angara. He’s been left on a knoll as commandant of a handful of half-alive anti-Soviet elements. Without foodstuffs or personnel. With an order to survive and await the arrival of the next barge.
Let’s say he didn’t drown them but attempted to save them. “Attempted” is a word for weaklings, according to Bakiev. A communist doesn’t attempt, he does. But I couldn’t save them, couldn’t! I tried my best, there was nothing else I could do. I myself nearly drowned…
But you didn’t! And they all drowned, so now they’re feeding the fish on the bottom…
Would it really have been better if I’d drowned along with them? And who were they anyway? Kulaks, exploiters, enemies, a burden for the Soviet authorities. They’ll multiply again, like Kuznets says…
You want to assuage your guilt with someone else’s words? And whose words? Kuznets’s, that son of a bitch.
Negative thoughts drive into his brain like nails, splintering it. Ignatov takes off his peaked cap, gathers his hair in his hand and pulls, as if he wants to tear it from his skull. As you were, he orders himself. Busy your hands with work and your feet with walking. Exhaust, expend, and enervate the body, so as not to think. Or at least think about something else.
He looks at the blurry, blue-gray edge of the horizon. That’s where the next barge will come from. When? Soon, Kuznets promised. It took them three days to get here. Kuznets had gotten here faster in his launch, in a day. Let’s say he needs a day for the return trip, a day or two for bureaucratic delays at the office and loading a new barge, then three days to return to Ignatov. A week total.
He’ll have to hold out for a week.
And what if Kuznets is late? That son of a bitch won’t hurry. He might well not even come for a week and a half or two weeks. Toward the end of August, maybe. And snow already came down today. It’s not like summer here at all, just a ripe, cold autumn.
How far had they come from Krasnoyarsk? They’d floated two days along the Yenisei – that’s about three hundred kilometers, if not more – almost an entire day going upstream along the Angara – another hundred kilometers or so. So four hundred in all. Four hundred kilometers of water travel separate him from Kuznets. And a boundless sea of taiga. Every now and then, Ignatov spotted settlements sheltered along the Yenisei’s shores – he kept wondering if they were active or abandoned – but not one on the Angara. There are no people here.
He flicks angrily at a beetle that has crawled out on the blue-gray stone; it flies off into the abyss. Ignatov stands and straightens his uniform tunic, which is still damp at the hem. Why did you get in the water then, you fool? You drenched yourself for nothing. He should have thought it through earlier, on the boat. Grabbed that rapscallion Kuznets by the scruff, by the neck, by the hair and not let him go, not let him go for anything. Let them tie him – Ignatov – up, put him under guard, bring him to Krasnoyarsk with escorts, then reprimand him for overreaching his authority. Somehow that would be better than what he has here now.
“A week,” Ignatov says sternly to the abyss gaping under him, wagging his finger. “I’m waiting exactly a week, no more. So you’d better watch out!”
The abyss is silent.
The black grouse here are pudgy and stupid. Their big, round black eyes gawk at Ignatov under fat, red arched brows and they don’t fly away. He approaches to a distance of several paces and shoots them point-blank. Their soft little bodies explode in fountains of black feathers, their wings shudder belatedly, and their tufted little heads fall into the grass. And their kin are already gaping with curiosity from neighboring trees. What happened there, what? We want to see, too. And so do we. He’s nailed six of them, the number of shells in the cylinder. He binds their little throats together with a piece of string left in his pocket and it turns out to be two hefty bundles. He goes back to the shore.
He had painstakingly noted the route from the camp. You won’t get lost if you don’t go too deeply into the urman – the Angara’s right there, next to you, everywhere – but it’s possible to stray. He thus committed to memory all the markers, whispering to himself under his breath, as if he were unwinding string. Now he’s winding it back into a tight ball as he returns: from the cliff, go down along the rocky path between the boulders – some are pinkish, some are whitish-green from the soft, curly moss – to the clearing that’s bright, almost as if it’s balding; further through sparse pines, walking along huge, flat rocks with smatterings of grass, to a gently sloping descent; through reddish candle-like pines and black brushlike spruces, down, a long way down, to a small, round clearing where a once-huge birch, now burned by lightning, stands, with its legs awkwardly sprawling; from the birch, walk along a cold and burbling brook, descend further toward the Angara; cross the brook at the large boulder that looks like a sleeping bear and go deeper into the forest. He should soon see an opening between the trees – that’s the shore, where the handful of exiles has found shelter.
Ignatov makes his way through the taiga. He strides loudly, crunching. His feet are squelching in his boots because he couldn’t hold on when he was jumping across the brook, on the rocks, and had taken a spill into the water. A heavy bundle of dead birds dangles from each hand. It will be an outstanding dinner. Here you are, citizen enemies, chow down. You’ll feed yourself on grouse all week with me and eat your fill after the hungry road.
He doesn’t even notice when evening falls. A thick brown dusk suddenly settles on the taiga. It has grown sharply colder. Carefree daytime birds have gone silent, and now there are sorrowful, distant night voices calling. All the sounds – the murmur of leaves, the whisper of evergreen needles, the hum of branches in the wind – seem closer and more resonant. Even the crunch of dead wood underfoot has turned to a loud crackling.