Only the fire sentry is dozing when Ignatov climbs up to the knoll. Everyone else has dispersed to the shelters to sleep. He takes the gray folder from a pile of things and opens it, not even noticing the smell of meat coming from the pot, which is still warm. On an empty corner he writes with the charcoal in large, crooked, slanting letters: “Yuzuf.”
THE FIRST WINTER
Ignatov wakes up an hour later with the thought that they should dig an underground house. Everyone’s still asleep and sounds of snoring and someone’s groans carry from the shelters. Impatient birds expecting daybreak occasionally call out in the thicket and a wave splashes lazily at the shore. Realizing that sleep has left him for good, Ignatov decides to go down to the river to wash.
They’ll get by for a week in the shelters. They won’t just melt away, he convinces himself, sitting on stones at the riverside and furiously wiping his face with icy Angara water. And then when Kuznets comes, they can even put up two-story wooden mansions if they want. Without me!
And if they have to get by for two weeks? Or longer? After all, nature here knows no calendar and winter could even descend in September.
He looks at the Angara’s flawlessly smooth, mirror-like surface breathing with an almost invisible morning fog. A transparent blue sky gleams to the east, waiting for the sun. It will be a hot day, sultry. There’s such quiet that the sound of drops falling from Ignatov’s face are audible. He looks down. A gloomy, unshaven face with black circles under the eyes gazes out of the water. His beard will soon grow out, as the exiles’ have, and they’ll become indistinguishable. Ignatov slaps his palm at his reflection, which shatters into small pieces and disperses in circles.
Ignatov takes his peaked hat, which he’d set aside on the rocks, and puts it on. They’ll start digging an underground house today. They can’t sit around the whole week with nothing to do.
His exacting gaze examines their site as if he’s looking for the first time. The Angara takes a smooth bend at the place where they landed and the shore seems to jut out, forming a broad, gently sloping promontory. The earth by the water is dense and clayey, with lots of large and small rocks mixed in. It spreads low, then flares up into the spacious knoll where they’ve now made their camp. A good place, the proper one. Not right next to the water (where the river’s coolness would chill their shelters) but still close enough to the Angara that it’s not far to run for water. It’s inconvenient, though, since the descent from the knoll is steep and crumbly. Ignatov decides they’ll need to make steps out of rocks.
The knoll itself is so wide that an entire village could fit on it. It faces the river and a dense line of spruce trees borders its back. Jagged spruce tops rise upward, forming a wall; the forest is clambering up the high hill. The cliff from which Ignatov observed his surroundings yesterday protrudes somewhere there, too, up high, but it’s not visible from the shore. Several lanky, broad-boughed spruces are scattered along the knoll, which is covered with bushes and waist-high grass. It’s as if the trees ran out of the forest toward the river but just froze there. The tattered shelters stand like large, green nestled haystacks under three of them. Two shelters are already tipping to one side, their shaggy roofs a little disheveled; but one still stands evenly and tidily. Ignatov notices it’s the shelter that one-armed Avdei built.
The tools and other items Kuznets left are lying in a messy heap by the fire. Kuznets had apparently scraped together everything that was on the boat, either the remains of his own supplies or surplus from someone else’s stockpile of goods. There’s a sizable but depleted box of matches (they need to be used sparingly; being left without fire would be trouble); a sack and a half of salt (they could salt all the animals in the taiga and then all the fish in the Angara on top of that); a scruffy clump of nets all tangled up with hooks, ropes, floats, and wires whose intended uses Ignatov doesn’t understand; a generous armful of thin, flimsy one-handed saws (Kuznets should be forced to saw firewood with those himself!); a couple of sturdy fisherman’s knives and kettles blackened with soot; several buckets and ropes rolled into coils; the half-empty bottle of home brew; and a bulky sack with revolver cartridges. That’s all. Well then, thank you for that. Ignatov pulls his cap a little lower, right down to his eyebrows.
They need a large, spacious underground house that holds everybody. It will be crowded, but it will be warm. And for him to have everyone in sight will make things easier. He’ll appoint Avdei head of building and Gorelov to keep order. The majority of them will be busy with construction and the rest will be sent into the forest once a day to prepare firewood. They’ll always have one person in charge of the fire, not allowing it to go out under any circumstances. Everyone is to work, men and women, with no exceptions for age. Rest strictly during breaks. Unauthorized absences in the forest forbidden. Criticism, complaints, and other troublemaking conversations to be cut short immediately. All violations of procedures will be punished with loss of food privileges. Ignatov himself will go hunting again and bag as many black grouse as he can. He’ll examine the taiga more carefully as he does. He’ll take the sack of cartridges with him – he’s decided to hide it in the forest so none of the exiles get any nasty ideas into their heads.
He pulls his revolver from the holster and pounds the handle on a bucket standing by the fire: Time to get up, you sons of bitches! Get to work! The loud tinny sound of the alarm carries over the sleepy clearing. Birds go silent in the forest. The shelters shudder and shake as frantically as anthills when the frightened exiles crawl out, pushing each other and looking around wildly.
There you go. He’s not going to spoil anybody by letting them break the rules.
Avdei turns out to be a surprisingly sensible and skilled guy. He builds the underground house as if he’s been doing this his whole life. He sends all the men into the forest to get logs for the framework. He keeps the women with him for digging – without any negotiations, they’ve appointed Zuleikha as ongoing cook and keeper of the fire, until the baby gets stronger. Avdei finds a suitable place and drives in four tall pegs to form the corners of a long rectangle, carefully measuring the distance with string. He uses a stick to draw in the outline. That’s the base.
They neatly cut out the sod and set it aside; it will come in handy. They begin digging, poking around with sticks, rocks, and hands, whatever works for them. Seeing that the job isn’t going well, Avdei proposes they pull blades from a few saws and use them to scrape at the ground. The work starts moving faster as some scrape and poke, while others use kettles to remove the softened earth and throw it away outside. They finish in two days, digging out a pit so deep that the whole of stocky Avdei, including his head, can get fully inside when he goes down there. Not even his shiny bald pate sticks out of the ground. Wielding a homemade plumb line made from stone attached to a string, Avdei painstakingly evens the walls, smoothing in some spots with his hand. Lick it with your tongue, too, Ignatov thinks angrily. He’s been urging, hurrying, and swearing at them, wary of rain that could halt work and flood the pit. The days have been dry and warm thus far, though, so the weather isn’t impeding them.
Cursing the one-handed saws, the men somehow prepare and haul logs to the camp. The stronger ones saw the wood, the weaker ones strip off branches and bark. A couple of days later, everybody’s hands are calloused and covered in red spots from splinters and squiggly scratches, and their backs and shoulders ache unbearably.