And he begins beating her.
A broom on the back isn’t painful. It’s almost like a bundle of birch leaves. Zuleikha lies still, as her husband ordered, but she shudders and scratches the shelf with her nails at each strike so he doesn’t beat her long. He cools off quickly. She was given a good husband after all.
Then she steams and washes him. When Murtaza goes out into the changing room to cool off, she washes all the laundry. She no longer has the strength to wash herself – her exhaustion has returned, filled her eyelids with heaviness, and clouded her head – but somehow she draws the scrubber along her sides and rinses her hair. All that’s left is to wash the bathhouse floors and then sleep, sleep.
As a child, she was taught to wash floors on her hands and knees. “Only a lazybones works bending from the waist or crouching,” her mother taught her. Zuleikha doesn’t consider herself a lazybones and now she’s wiping the slippery dark boards, sliding along them like a lizard on her elbows and knees. Her belly and breasts hover right over the floor, her leaden head is bent low and her rear end is raised high. She’s feeling unsteady.
The steam room is soon washed clean and Zuleikha moves on to the changing room: she hangs the damp rugs on the storage racks that line the wall under the ceiling – let them dry out – gathers the shards of the pottery pitcher and sets to scrubbing the floor.
Murtaza is still lying on the bench, undressed, wrapped in a white sheet, and resting. Her husband’s gaze always forces Zuleikha to work harder, more diligently, and faster: let him see she’s not a bad wife even if she isn’t tall. And so now she’s gathered the remains of her strength and – sprawled on the floor – is drawing the rag along the already clean boards in a frenzy: back and forth, back and forth, her mussed, wet hair bouncing in time with her uncovered breasts creeping along the floorboards.
“Zuleikha,” utters Murtaza in a low tone, gazing at his naked wife.
She straightens up, still kneeling and holding on to the rag, but doesn’t have time to raise her sleepy eyes. Her husband clasps her from behind and throws her, stomach down, onto the bench, brings all the weight of his body upon her, breathing heavily and wheezing as he begins to rub against her, pressing her into the hard boards. He wants to make love to his wife, but his body doesn’t want to; it has forgotten how to obey his desires. Finally, Murtaza stands and begins dressing. “Even my flesh doesn’t want you,” he tells her without looking, and leaves the bathhouse.
Zuleikha slowly rises from the bench, the same rag still in her hand. She finishes washing the floor. Hangs up the wet sheets and towels. Dresses and trudges home. She lacks the strength to be upset about what happened with Murtaza. The Vampire Hag’s scary prophecy – that’s what she’ll think about, but only tomorrow, tomorrow. When she wakes up.
The light is already off inside the house. Murtaza isn’t sleeping yet; he’s breathing loudly in his part of the house; the boards of the sleeping bench creak under him.
Zuleikha gropes her way to her corner, her hand guiding her along the warm, rough side of the stove, then she falls on the trunk without undressing.
“Zuleikha,” Murtaza calls out to her; this voice is satisfied and affectionate.
She wants to stand but cannot. Her body spreads on the trunk like a thin pudding.
“Zuleikha!”
She crawls down to the floor and kneels in front of the trunk, but can’t tear her head from it.
“Zuleikha, hurry up, you pathetic hen!”
She rises slowly and drags herself to her husband’s call, reeling. She crawls onto the sleeping bench.
Murtaza’s impatient hands pull down her baggy pants (he grunts peevishly: Now that’s a lazybones, hasn’t even undressed yet), lays her on her back, and lifts her smock. His uneven breathing grows closer. Zuleikha senses her husband’s beard, long and still smelling of the bathhouse and frost, covering her face; the recent beating on her back aches under his weight. Murtaza’s body has finally responded to his desires and he hurries to fulfill them, greedily, powerfully, at length, and triumphantly.
When she’s fulfilling her wifely duty, Zuleikha usually pictures herself as a butter churn inside which a housewife’s strong arms beat butter using a fat, hard pestle. Today, though, there are none of those thoughts, only a heavy blanket of exhaustion. She is distantly aware of her husband’s stifled snorting through a shroud of sleep. The unceasing jolts of his body lull her, like a rhythmically rocking cart…
Murtaza climbs off his wife, wiping the damp back of his head with his palm and calming his labored breathing; he’s breathing wearily, with satisfaction.
“Go to your own place, woman,” he says and pushes her unmoving body.
He doesn’t like her to sleep next to him on the bench.
Without opening her eyes, Zuleikha’s feet slap off to her trunk, and she doesn’t even notice she’s already sleeping soundly.
A KNOCK AT THE WINDOW
Will I die?
A deep-blue storm drones outside the window. Zuleikha is kneeling and cleaning Murtaza’s kaftan with a bristle brush. The kaftan is the main decoration in the house: quilted felt, covered in velvet, smelling of a strong male, and as huge as its owner. It hangs on a fat copper nail, its magnificent sleeves shimmering, and it graciously allows the frail Zuleikha to grovel at its feet and clean drops of mud from its hem.
Will I die soon?
The mud in Kazan is rich and of high quality. Zuleikha hasn’t been there; she’s never once left Yulbash, except to go to the forest or cemetery. She’d like to, though. Murtaza once promised to take her with him some day. She is afraid to remind him, so all she can do is watch silently whenever he is preparing to leave. He’ll tighten the harness on Sandugach, pound the loosened wheels with a heel, and pretend not to notice her.
So if I die, then I won’t see Kazan?
Zuleikha narrows her eyes at Murtaza. Now, he’s sitting on the sleeping bench and fixing the horse collar. Fingers with brown nails as hard and strong as the trunks of young oaks nimbly thread a slippery leather strap into the wooden base. He’s just returned from the city but he went to work immediately. A good husband – what can you say.
Will he marry someone else quickly if I die?
Murtaza grunts with satisfaction: It’s ready! He puts the collar on his own powerful neck, testing the strength of his handiwork, his thick tendons swelling under the steep wooden curve. Yes, a man like this would marry, and very quickly.
And what if the Vampire Hag was wrong?
Zuleikha’s brush swishes. Whoosh-whoosh. Whoosh-whoosh. Shamsia-Firuza. Khalida-Sabida. First and second daughters. Third and fourth. She often runs through those names as if they were prayer beads. The Vampire Hag foretold all four deaths: Zuleikha had simultaneously found out from her mother-in-law about each pregnancy and each newborn’s impending death. Four times she had carried to term both the fruit in her womb and a hope in her heart that this time the Vampire Hag would be wrong. But the old woman turned out to be right every time. Could she really be right now, too?
Work, Zuleikha, work. What was it Mama used to say? Work drives away sorrow. Oh, Mama, my sorrow doesn’t obey your sayings…
There’s a knock, the signaling knock, at the window: three quick knocks, two slow. She shudders. Did she imagine it? Then again: three quick knocks, two slow. No, she didn’t imagine it, this can’t be a mistake; it’s the same knock. The brush falls from her hands and rolls along the floor. Zuleikha looks up and meets her husband’s heavy gaze. May Allah protect us, Murtaza, not again?