They lower logs into the pit and begin lining the walls. They drive in fat logs, horizontally along the perimeter, laying long beams behind them, all the way up to the very ceiling, as a retaining wall. They stuff the wall’s crevices with pieces of spruce so earth won’t sprinkle in.
“Braces, girders, supports, purlins, rafters, joists…” Ikonnikov mutters under his breath, vigorously knocking on the top of a log with a heavy stone to force it into the ground. “But oh, has my vocabulary been enriched.”
“The main thing is the experience,” puffs Konstantin Arnoldovich alongside him, placing spiky spruce branches in the gap between the retaining wall and the earthen wall. “How your practical experience has been enriched, colleague! It’s one thing to paint clouds and fields of wheat on the walls at some cultural center and something else entirely to build a real house. Don’t you find that?”
“A house?” Ikonnikov is looking at half a fat pink worm sticking out of the ground. “Well, I suppose!”
“You are intending to live here,” says Konstantin Arnoldovich, gasping slightly for breath. He wipes his sweaty forehead with his hand and looks up questioningly. Green spruce needles gleam playfully in his narrow beard, which has grown out in a half-year. “Or aren’t you?”
Sinking support poles for the roof’s ridge beam turns out to be a difficult and unexpectedly lengthy task because the soil becomes dense and rocky, and the holes for the posts just don’t want to reach the proper depth. Wary of clouds swooping in from the north, Ignatov demands they continue working and embed the posts in the resulting shallow holes, but Avdei displays an unexpected rigidity.
“I was hired to dig an underground house, not a grave,” he says, tugging his sparse blue-gray beard with his only hand and looking out from under his brow at the commandant. “If you’ve decided to bury us, commissar, then there’s the pit, it’s ready. No need for us to wear ourselves out more here.”
Ignatov backs off. They just manage to dig down to the required depth for the holes, embed the supports, strengthen them with stakes, and reinforce them with stones.
Overhead they lay a long log as a purlin and secure it with rope. On that they place poles as rafters, smoothing them at the joints with stones for stability. For the roof covering they decide to take spruce branches from the shelters, which have already collapsed by this point. They place boughs across the rafters, constantly strewing earth and cementing them with clay that Avdei spent half the day searching for before finally finding what he needs – the clay is thick, black, and dense to the touch.
The arrival of the clay brings out an unusual liveliness among some of the builders. The previously apathetic Ikonnikov suddenly becomes cheerful and excited, and his eyes start glistening. He keeps tilting his head toward Konstantin Arnoldovich, who’s flushed with pleasure, and Ikonnikov shows him something in his hands, then they explode in fits of loud, irrepressible laughter. No matter how he tries, Gorelov can’t determine the reason for their jollity. Each time he sidles up to them, he sees only small clumps of clay in Ikonnikov’s hands.
They place two layers of sod on top of the triangular roof so the first layer has its roots up and the second has its roots down. From front and back, the underground house now resembles a small hill rising out of the ground.
That’s the first night they spend in the half-finished underground house. They sleep poorly, freezing terribly, either from the dampness of the deep-set earthen floor that’s still completely uncovered, or because autumn is approaching so relentlessly with every passing day. In the morning, many are coughing and the Georgian woman with the aristocratic name Leila has come down with a fever. They decide to assemble a stove before finishing construction, and the women are sent down to the riverside to find large stones suitable for the purpose. Leibe asks Ignatov’s permission to go into the forest to collect medicinal herbs and Ignatov squints at the pale professor in his absurd dress uniform, which is torn to shreds in places, and agrees.
A very basic stone stove, with a chimney, rises up in the middle of the underground house. It’s like a magical vessel, an Aladdin’s lamp that fulfills only one wish, albeit the most important, giving warmth. While they’re at it, they fortify the path down to the river with large flat rocks, making it more convenient to go for water. Gorelov now hums a song about stone stairways each time he goes down to the Angara. He always puts his hands in his pockets as he goes, holding his chin high, slightly tilted.
It requires a few more days to lay the floor, construct the bunks, and complete the exposed sides of the house at each end of the roof: one has an entrance burrowing down to the doorway and a vestibule below. They’ve just finished digging small drainage channels along the sloping roof when a persistent rain begins to fall.
In the evening the exiles sit, huddled together in the dark and still rather damp underground house. “In a couple of days it’ll be baking inside and dry out,” Avdei promises. They aren’t warm but it’s not very cold, either. They haven’t managed to eat even once today but a bucket of black grouse meat is already bubbling on the stove. Their faces have darkened in the sun, become weather-beaten, and been covered with blistering mosquito bites. Some have no strength left and are already asleep, their heads laid on a neighbor’s shoulder, while others watch the bucket of soup with a fixed stare. The stove drones and there’s a strong smell of smoke, half-raw meat, and the herbs the professor gathered. All their simple belongings – tools, buckets, tackle, and bundles of clothing – are piled up in the corner. The loud beat of heavy rain carries through thin little windows formed by gaps between the house’s roof and side walls.
“What good fortune that we’re under a roof,” Izabella loudly says. “And have matches and salt and everything else… Thank you, Avdei. You simply saved us.”
Ignatov is lying on his bunk, which was built at some distance from the others, and he’s gloomily thinking about how they haven’t been able to prepare enough firewood. What they have will only last through the night. If the bad weather continues until morning, they’ll be forced to go into the forest in the rain.
The seventh day of their stay on the riverbank is ending.
A son.
She’s given birth to a son for the first time in her life and he’s tiny, completely red, and by all appearances premature. When the professor held out the newborn to her – still wet, slippery, and covered in her own blood – she placed him to herself, under her smock, clasped him to her breast, and pressed her face to the top of a head as soft as bread, and felt the rapid beating of his heart on her lips. The soft spot on the crown of infants’ heads isn’t usually large, only the size of a coin, but it was huge, hot, and greedily pulsating on this child.
She instantly sensed that he was very beautiful, even before she could make out the child’s face in the night darkness. Eyelashes stuck together in clumps of dried mucus, half-blind cloudy little eyes, neat nose holes peering up, the small pleat of a mouth always open partway, wrinkled, flat little clumps of ears, and thread-like fingers without nails stuck together – all that was beautiful, bringing tingling and butterflies to her stomach.
She looked him over more closely at dawn. A large head the size of a man’s fist. Small legs gnarled like a frog’s and slightly fatter than her fingers. A rounded belly like an egg. Thin little bones showing through so much in places that it seemed an incautious touch could break them. His skin was creased, bright-purple with marbled light- and dark-blue blotches of veins, as soft to the touch as a flower petal, and covered in places by wispy dark hairs. He was the most beautiful of all the children she had given birth to. And he was still living.