Zuleikha decided to simply carry him on her chest, on her bare body under her smock. She didn’t sleep the first night. She kept clasping him to herself with all her might and then relaxing her arms, fearing she’d squeeze too hard. She kept opening the edge of her smock a little to let her son breathe fresh air, then closing it when the air seemed much too cold. In the morning she felt as fresh and strong as if there’d been neither childbirth nor sleepless pre-dawn hours. She could have sat like that for another year, warming the tiny little body with her own heat and listening to his weak, barely discernible breathing. In the morning she adjusted herself to carry him by arranging her newborn’s head between breasts swelled with milk, spreading his little body over her belly, and then binding him to herself with a rag. Then she could move around and even do her work while her son was always with her. She kept bending her face to the unfastened buttons on her chest, peering into her slightly opened smock collar and listening. The child was breathing.
She feeds him often, a lot each time. Glory be to Allah that the milk stands so high and taut in her breasts; just watch it doesn’t spurt. Sometimes her breasts fill so much that they harden, pulling at her shoulders. She doesn’t wait then; she hurriedly thrusts a swollen nipple oozing white drops into his mouth, not waiting for the child to wake up; but the baby smacks his lips without opening his sleepy eyes and latches on. When he takes a liking to feeding, he sucks greedily and quickly, moaning, and her breast empties and shrinks, feeling more comfortable for a while.
Zuleikha is glad when the child urinates and she feels something hot and wet on her belly because this person is living, his little body is working. She is even ready to kiss the spot on her dress and the pink squiggle of male flesh between her son’s tiny little legs.
As before, she constantly wants to eat. The forest unexpectedly bestows a lot of fatty meat upon them. When she catches sight of Ignatov’s tall figure at the forest’s edge with a colorful bunch of killed birds in his hand, she restrains herself from shouting, running out to greet him, and kissing his hand. Food has come! Food! She plucks the birds fiercely, in a frenzy; guts them, fighting the saliva gushing in her mouth; flings them in boiling water, then salts, stirs, and casts a spell over the fire to burn hotter, stronger, faster.
Gorelov had wanted to take the food allocation into his own hands here, too, but Ignatov sullenly looked at him and nodded at Zuleikha, saying to let her serve. She pours the prepared soup from the large bucket into kettles that are slightly smaller, and the exiles sit in several circles, grasping scorching hot pieces of poultry in their hands, and tearing it with their teeth, dirtying their smiling faces with fat and soot. After dispensing with the meat, they gulp down broth from the kettles using spoons made from shells attached to sticks. They leave a double portion for Zuleikha and she isn’t embarrassed. She eats it up quickly and gratefully, sensing that the meat now in her gut is already filling her blood with strength and her breasts with milk. She doesn’t like soft bird rumps or thick grouse skin covered on the inside with layers of fat, but she eats them so her milk will be fatty and hearty.
She stops thinking about everything unrelated to her son: about Murtaza, who remains somewhere far behind in her past life (she has forgotten that the newborn is the fruit of his seed); about the Vampire Hag with her scary prophecies; and about her daughters’ graves. She doesn’t think about where Fate has cast her and what will happen tomorrow. Only the present day is important, only this moment, with quiet snuffling on her breast and the heaviness and warmth of her son’s little body on her belly. She has even stopped fearing that one morning she won’t hear weak breathing inside the opening of her smock. She knows that if her son’s life is interrupted, then her heart will instantly stop, too. This knowledge sustains her, filling her with strength and some sort of unfamiliar courage.
She has started praying faster and more infrequently, as if in passing. It is frightening to admit, but a thought that is essentially sinful and horrifying has settled in her head: what if the Almighty has suddenly become so busy with other matters that He’s forgotten about these thirty hungry, raggedy people in the wilderness of Siberia’s urman? What if He turned his stern gaze away from the exiles for a little while and then lost them on the boundless expanses of the taiga? Or (this is possible, too) that they have floated off to such a distant place at the edge of the earth that the All-Powerful’s gaze doesn’t reach because there is no need. This offers Zuleikha the strange and wild hope that perhaps Allah – who has taken four children away from her and is apparently intending to take away the fifth – won’t notice them, that He will overlook them and forget the disappearance of a pitiful handful of creatures worn out from suffering. She can’t forgo praying completely (that would be scary!) but she tries to utter her prayers quietly, whispering, or even only muttering them to herself so as not to attract attention from on high.
Surprisingly, she is content during these days, with some sort of incomprehensible, fragile, and fleeting happiness. Her body freezes at night, suffers from heat and mosquito bites during the day, and her stomach demands food, but her soul sings and her heart beats with one name. Yuzuf.
Kuznets hasn’t come, not one week after the exiles came ashore, not two.
Ignatov goes to the cliff each morning, cursing himself for doing it, but unable to keep away. His hands cling to the rough ledges of boulders edged in coarse, blue-gray lichen as he clambers to the top, rapidly on clear, dry days and cautiously on rainy, cloudy days, constantly slipping on the wet rocks. He’ll stand for a long time, resting his gaze on the edge of the firmament where the river and sky come together and flow into one another. He’ll wait. Then he’ll abruptly turn and go hunting.
There’s no explanation for what’s happening. Maybe there’s been trouble with the launch and it’s vanished in the Angara’s waters, following the Clara? Maybe Kuznets has come down with typhus and is lying delirious on an infirmary bed, pouring out hot sweat. Maybe (and Ignatov likes this version most of all) Kuznets has turned out to be an enemy of Soviet power and has been taken into custody and sentenced. Maybe he’s even been shot?
Sometimes when Ignatov is on that peak, he’ll think he can discern the dot of the launch in the blue distance. Some evenings, when he’s already lying on his separate bunk in the underground house, he’ll suddenly leap up and run to the shore because he’s distinctly heard the sound of a rattling motor and anxious voices. At those moments, he’s prepared to forgive Kuznets for the endless days of waiting and the hunger and cold of the weeks that have passed, to embrace Kuznets and slap him on the shoulders, saying, “We’d grown tired of waiting for you, brother.” But that exciting instant would pass when the dot on the horizon dispersed, dissolving into the blue of an expanse of sky or water, when the roar of the motor turned into a drake quacking, and the voices became splashing water.
The exiles see his concern and probably guess at the reasons but they don’t ask anything. Only Gorelov, the scoundrel, once asked, conspiratorially narrowing his Kalmyk eyes at Ignatov, “Comrade boss, what do you think, will the launch bring reinforcements of gals? We only have old women in the camp, after all – there’s nobody to have a little stroll to the forest with.” Ignatov didn’t reply and just looked coldly at Gorelov. You, he corrected him mentally, you have only old women. The swine had gobbled down lots of meat and now he wanted broads. As if he had everything else and it pleased or suited him. One time Ignatov heard someone in the forest saying, “It’s time, let’s go home.” That was jarring. Did anyone really, truly consider this crowded, stuffy underground house with its lopsided little stove that looked like a fat-bellied toad to be a home? They’d quickly grown accustomed to it, resigned themselves. Ignatov can’t, though, and he hates Kuznets all the more with each day of waiting. The malice – muffled and confused – would rise in him, and he’d brandish his revolver as he shot at defenseless grouse. There you go! Die, you bastards!