The taiga birds quickly recognized the predator in Ignatov and a close death in the thundering shots. They have become more careful. They flap their soft black wings in fear and take flight as soon as they hear his footsteps. It has become more difficult to bring back food. The time of easy procurement has ended and the time for genuine hunting has come.
Ignatov has never hunted in his life. I hunted for Denikin’s men, he gloomily jokes to himself as he makes his way through thickets in search of any kind of animal suitable for food. And the Czechs who fought for the White Army, and the Basmachi. But not wild game – there was no need. Now he wanders the forest for entire days, his hand holding a loaded revolver in front of himself, his eyes scanning for edible targets. Chipmunks’ striped little backs blaze between bushes, squirrels streak in tree branches like reddish flashes, mice of various colors dart underfoot, and unfamiliar gray-and-yellow birds with fancy ornate tufts scamper up and down tree trunks. It’s a shame to waste cartridges on such small prey. He needs something larger, heftier, like a deer or five grouse. But his stride is too heavy and loud, so neither Siberian deer nor roe deer nor any other large wild animals cross his path. It chills Ignatov’s heart a little to think he could encounter prey more powerful than himself – a bear or a boar – and he doesn’t know if his small revolver’s bullet could pierce a thick hide. Toward evening, when his eyes are already flickering from constant strain and his feet throb and ache, he usually somehow manages (after missing a few times and wasting about five cartridges) to shoot down a couple of squirrels or some grouse that lost its vigilance. Sometimes he’s lucky. Once he came out by a forest lake hiding among pleat-like hills and shot an entire family of beavers, whose meat turned out to be surprisingly tender and juicy, and another time he shot down a pair of ducks flying over the taiga. But their rations are becoming more meager with each day.
In the evening of the final day of summer, 1930 (Konstantin Arnoldovich is keeping a calendar on the wall of the underground house, sawing out a tiny notch in a log each day, a short one on a weekday, a slightly longer one on weekends, and the longest at the end of the month, so the exiles can keep track) they are in the house discussing the question of foodstuffs after a thin supper of an old, lame, and extraordinarily tough badger.
Ignatov is lying on his bunk with his eyes wearily half-closed. He sees fiery squirrel pelts, finely quivering pine needles, and zigzagging spruce branches among splashes of sunspots that are all breaking and falling away as if they were in a kaleidoscope. He listens in on the exiles’ quiet conversation through his drowsiness.
There are no hunters to be found among them (and even if there had been, Ignatov smirks to himself, they wouldn’t have received firearms) but one fisherman has turned up, the red-bearded Lukka, who’s as puny as an adolescent, all rumpled, worn down like a sliver of soap, and toothless. They ask Lukka if he could catch fish tomorrow and they lay out for him the tackle that Kuznets left behind. Lukka speaks Russian poorly but immediately understands what’s required of him. Without looking at the tangle of tackle and hooks on the floor, he answers in a small voice that crackles like a fire, “I need to look at the river, to listen and speak with it. Then to wait. If it gives, there will be fish. If not, there will be no fish.”
They send the diplomatic Konstantin Arnoldovich to Ignatov’s bunk to negotiate with the commandant and request permission to excuse Lukka from his labor obligations for a couple of days so he could fish. At Ignatov’s instruction, all the exiles have been preparing firewood from morning until night and have had no right whatsoever to be absent.
“Let him,” says Ignatov, not opening his eyes or waiting for Konstantin Arnoldovich to choose his words and state the overall request. “Let him go. I’ll give him two days for those conversations. If he doesn’t bring fish, then he’ll work it all off by sawing wood for me at night.”
The next day, Lukka catches horseflies and assembles fishing rods. He walks along the shore a while and has a talk with the Angara. In the evening he brings to camp a bucket with hefty silver fish bodies that quiver between velvety green burdock leaves. This is very welcome because it’s the first day Ignatov returns from hunting empty-handed.
September greets them with sun, breathing yellow and red on the hills. The sky turns entirely blue, making the earth’s colors look even warmer and cheerier. The days are dry, clear, and crisp, but the nights are already cold and winterishly long.
Gnats come.
There’s no escaping them. The mosquitoes and deerflies that the exiles had previously thought were the taiga’s harsh punishment for invading its territory have disappeared, yielding their place to their smaller brothers. The gnats swoop in like a cloud, like fog, filling the taiga, clearing, shore, and the underground house. They cram in under clothing, into folds of skin, the nose, mouth, ears, hair, and eyes. People eat them up with their food (they turn out to taste sweet, like berries) and inhale them with air. They are the air itself.
A person can run from deerflies and swat mosquitoes. But tiny gnats the size of a grain of sand? People swell from the bites (the gnats leave large, bleeding lesions) and lose their minds from the incessant itching on their bodies. Those with the strength swing their arms and legs or run along the riverbank like madmen – the running blows the midges off their skin – and some bathe arms and legs they’ve scratched raw in the icy Angara water. Yet others smoke themselves in the pungent smoke of a fire, which causes violent coughing and reddens eyes but rescues them a bit from the insects. Work is at a standstill because nobody can even contemplate going for firewood or game in the depths of the forest, where the cloud of midges has come from.
They’ll eat us alive, Ignatov thinks absent-mindedly as he plunges puffy hands covered with bold red dots into transparent and impossibly cold water. His hands go numb, either from the cold or from the bites. He senses someone standing behind him and turns to see Leibe. His lips are swollen and protrude like a camel’s, and his eyes are tiny because of his puffy pink eyelids.
“Pitch,” he says, “we need birch pitch. It’s a well-known insecticide. It’s just that I don’t know the method for preparing this pitch. It’s usually sold in pharmacies, in glass vials, thirty-two kopeks each.”
The peasant men know a method for preparing it. They immediately equip themselves to go for birch bark and strip all the birches near the clearing from top to bottom. They heap the bark in a kettle, cover it with a bucket, and surround it with firewood. They smoke the bark for a long time, right until sunset. The resulting liquid, which is as thick as honey and absolutely black, gets mixed with water and smeared over them from head to toe. They look dark-skinned, with only their eyes and their teeth gleaming white. The venerable Musa-hadji looks most hilarious of all since he had no desire to smear his beard with pitch like the other men, so it glows like a white flag on his glossy face, which resembles a generously polished boot.
The gnats retreat and the exiles are able to get some sleep that night.
For Yuzuf’s tender skin, Leibe suggests that Zuleikha mix the pitch with breast milk. From that day on, the title of “doctor” fastens itself to Leibe in her mind.