Zuleikha threads the plucked carcasses on a long stick and they sear over the fire. It’s already completely dark when she sets to cutting the meat into pieces and the exiles settle in around the fire, one by one, to wait for dinner after they’ve finished their work. Their nostrils hungrily inhale the sweetish smell of singed feathers.
They had enough time to build three shelters under a canopy of wide-boughed spruces. The large tree branches served as a beam on which to lay, crosswise, sizable shaggy boughs with slightly thinner branches over them; the same boughs were used for bedding. Someone proposed tossing birch branches and armfuls of grass on the tree needles inside the shelters for softness, but they didn’t have either the energy or the time for that. They prepared firewood for the night, bringing over a mountain of brushwood and fallen dead wood. There was no axe and the large branches had to be sawed. The one-handed saws squealed, bent, jerked, and broke free from unaccustomed hands; it was awkward to work with them but the exiles somehow prevailed and cut up the wood. Before dark, they dragged logs from the thicket and arranged them around the fire. Now they’re all squeezed together on the logs, propping each other up with chilly shoulders and warming themselves, their mouths releasing shaggy clouds of steam. It cools towards evening.
A large bucket on two flat rocks at the center of the fire is sending out steam and waiting for meat. Zuleikha tosses generous pieces of the birds into the bubbling water and the inviting smell of food floats over the fire and flies up into a black velvet sky with stars like large beads.
“Such illumination,” Ikonnikov quietly says, extending work-worn hands with a couple of fresh cuts toward the orange fire. “It’s pure Rembrandt.”
“It’s meat,” Gorelov corrects him, surprisingly kindly, blinking oily eyes that are riveted on the bucket with the soup. “Meat.”
The others are silent. Their sunken eyes gleam in the darkness and their pinched-looking faces, with sharp, angular features, flare in the light of the sparks.
Zuleikha sprinkles half a handful of salt in the bucket and stirs the concoction every now and then with a long stick. It will be a thick soup, hearty. Her stomach is shuddering from the anticipation of food. She hasn’t had meat in half a year and she’s ready to eat the raw meat right now, pulling it out of the boiling broth with her bare hands. It seems as if everyone sitting around the fire is experiencing the same thing. Saliva pours into the mouth, flooding the tongue. The stick knocks against the sides of the bucket. Branches crackle in the fire. A long howl sounds somewhere far away.
“Wolves?” asks one of the city dwellers.
“On the other shore,” answers one of the village dwellers.
Footsteps sound and Ignatov emerges from the darkness. People move, freeing up a spot. They’d felt like they were sitting very close together, but after the commandant comes and takes a seat on the logs, there’s so much space around him it seems like five people must have got up.
Ignatov takes something loose and jingling out of his pocket and tosses it on his palms: cartridges.
“This,” he says, as if he’s continuing a conversation begun long ago, “is for anyone who wants to escape.” Two fingers pick up a round cartridge that’s blazing like gold in the firelight.
He inserts it in the revolver’s cylinder – the cartridge slips in softly, with a gentle sound, like a kiss.
“This” – he raises a second cartridge – “is for anyone who tries to start a counterrevolution.”
The second cartridge enters the cylinder.
“And these” – Ignatov inserts four more – “are for anyone who disobeys my orders.”
He spins the cylinder. The even metal clicking isn’t loud but it can be heard distinctly above the crackling of the fire.
“Is that clear to everyone?”
The soup is gurgling desperately, bubbling over the brim. It needs to be stirred but Zuleikha is afraid to interrupt the commandant’s speech.
“Count yourselves off, one at a time,” commands Ignatov.
“One,” answers Gorelov, as lively as if he’s been waiting only for those words.
“Two,” another chimes in.
“Three.”
“Four.”
Many peasants don’t know how to count and the city dwellers help, counting for them; they lose track, start the count again, and somehow finally manage to do it.
“Citizen chief!” Gorelov leaps from his spot, sticks out his chest, and points his splayed hand at his shaggy head. “A detachment of migrants numbering twenty-nine persons–”
“As you were!” Ignatov makes a face and Gorelov plops back down on the log, offended. “So, a total of twenty-nine heads,” he says, looking around at gaunt, creased faces with prominent cheekbones, hollowed cheeks.
“What do you mean?” says Izabella’s soft voice. “Counting you, citizen chief, it’s thirty.”
Zuleikha looks down quickly, expecting a shout or at least a reprimand. Quiet again hangs over the fire, crackling and hotly snapping with sparks.
Ignatov is still looking at Izabella when Zuleikha dares glance up. Glory be to Allah. It seems to have passed. Zuleikha exhales noiselessly, raises herself up a little, and extends the stick to stir the soup in the bucket. The baby awakens in her belly at that moment and begins tearing her to pieces inside. She wants to shout but it’s as if there’s no air in her chest and her throat is constricted, making it hard to breathe. She sinks to her knees and falls backward. She’s seeing stars.
“Looks like these people are already starting to… reproduce,” says Gorelov, sounding bewildered and somehow very distant.
“Boil some water or something!” comes Ignatov’s anxious voice.
“I think it’s best for the men to leave us.” This is Izabella.
“We’ll freeze to death without the fire. What, you think we’ve never seen a woman give birth…”
And then there are other voices and shouts, but they gradually float away, float far away, merge, and disappear. Or maybe she’s the one floating away, carried upon waves of overwhelming pain? The stars are growing; they come closer, and crackle loudly. Or is that the fire crackling? Yes, yes, it’s the fire. It blazes up and sears the eyes, engulfs her; Zuleikha closes her eyelids tightly and escapes, tumbling into a deep and silent blackness.
CHILDBIRTH
Volf Karlovich Leibe has been living in an egg.
It developed around him on its own over many years, possibly even decades ago, though he’d never troubled himself with counting because time didn’t pass inside the egg so had no meaning.
He remembers when its iridescent top first began shining – it was something like a halo or an umbrella – over his vulnerable bald spot. That happened a short while after the October Coup. Professor Leibe had just walked out onto Voskresenskaya Street, pushing very hard to open one side of a massive, shiny, varnished oak door at Kazan University; the uniformed doorman by the main entrance had already been gone for several weeks, for the first time since the day the educational institution opened in 1804. Through a forest of white columns, Volf Karlovich saw a crowd running. People were screaming and falling, and behind them galloping horsemen were shooting them, point-blank. He didn’t manage to discern if these were newly minted insurgents with red armbands on their sleeves or simply the bandits who had multiplied in Kazan by that time. The people they were firing on were civilians, though: a peasant woman in a checked headscarf with a basket (the basket fell and eggs rolled along the road, breaking into star-shaped yellow blots); a woman in a frivolous lacy turban; a couple of ungainly grammar school students in green uniforms; and some beggar with a dog on a raggedy rope leash (a shot pierced the dog and the beggar kept dragging its shaggy body behind him, not letting go)…