“Forrrrrward!” he shouts. “Hurrah, comrades!”
Revolver taken from holster, door kicked with boot, and out. Ignatov and Gorelov follow.
The sky is already a smoky, pre-dawn blue. The stars are dimming quickly, one after another. Ignatov runs forward, behind his commander’s white back, and feels joy expanding and growing in his body. The ground springs underneath his feet, tossing him up so he flies forward, lightly and swiftly. This always happens during an offensive. Who’s hiding up ahead, waiting in ambush like a coward? White Army? Narrow-eyed Basmachi? For some reason there’s neither a revolver nor a saber in his hand. He picks up a blade that someone has dropped on the ground and waves it. The saber cuts the air with a whistle.
“For the revolution!” he shouts at the top of his lungs. “For the Red Arrrrm—”
Kuznets shoots. The echo slams along the river like thunder, rolling.
In the buildings ahead, faces distorted by fear are peering out of windows. Uh-huh, they’re scared, the sons of bitches!
“The enemy,” screams Kuznets. “I’ll slaughter them all!”
“I’ll slice them up!” Ignatov chimes in and starts hacking everything around.
They burst in, but where? Voices squeal loudly and shrilly, people scatter in all directions. Ignatov slices at something white and soft (the air fills with down, grassy debris, and dust) and at something hard and wooden (the saber in his hand breaks off for some reason but he finds a new one) and at something human and soft (someone screams, swears, howls).
They abruptly end up outside again and there they are up ahead, the enemy, hopping in all directions, escaping as they wail, and running fast – those sons of bitches! – so they can’t catch up. Kuznets shoots after them again, then again and again, and the shouts become more desperate, changing to a screech. Kuznets suddenly falls, either overwhelmed by a treacherous bullet coming from the other side or from simply stumbling.
Ignatov, who’s been running behind Kuznets, trips on his large body, and drops to the ground alongside him, where his face gets stuck in something slimy and viscous (mud?) and his skull cracks, exploding with pain. The joy disappears immediately, evaporating as if it had never been there, and a familiar, loathsome, and gnawing anguish is again sloshing in his chest. He looks at the saber in his hand. It’s not a saber, it’s a stick that he tosses it away. Ignatov wipes his face with his palm and finds sludgy clay. He crawls toward Kuznets’s body, stretched out near him. It’s hard to move because it feels like his body has been replaced with gluey aspic.
“Zin,” whispers Ignatov, the mud crunching distinctly on his teeth, “let me out of here. I can’t stay here any longer, you hear? I can’t.”
Kuznets is snoring, his shaggy chest swelling toward the heavens.
THE SHAH BIRD
Zuleikha opens her eyes. A ray of sun is pushing through shabby cotton curtains, creeping along a reddish curve on a log wall, over a flowered, coarse cotton pillow with the black tips of grouse feathers poking through, and further, toward Yuzuf’s delicate ear, rosy in the shaft of light. She extends her hand and noiselessly pulls at the curtain – her boy still has a long time to sleep. But it’s daybreak, time for her to get up.
She carefully frees her arm out from under his head, lowers her bare feet to a floor that’s cooled during the night, and places a scarf on her pillow so when her son decides to wake up, he’ll stretch, nestle his face into her scent, and sleep a little longer. Without looking, she takes her jacket, bag, and rifle from their nail. She pushes the door – the babbling of birds and the racket of the wind burst in – and noiselessly slips out. In the hallway, she puts on simple leather shoes that Granny Yanipa crafted from elk skin, quickly braids her hair, and then it’s onward, into the urman.
Zuleikha has always been the very first among the camp’s hunting artel – a work group of five – to go out into the taiga. “Your animal is still sleeping, dreaming, but you’re already set for work,” grumbles the red-bearded Lukka. Sometimes they meet when he’s coming to the settlement after night fishing and she’s leaving to hunt. She doesn’t deny it, she just silently smiles back; she knows her quarry will never escape from her.
She has fond memories of her first bear, the one she killed in 1931 at Round Clearing: if it hadn’t been for that bear, she would never have discovered how accurate an eye and steady a hand she has. All that remains of the bear is a yellowish-gray skull on a pole. She visits it occasionally and strokes it, in thanks.
The settlement’s hunting artel was founded back then, seven years ago. Achkenazi had tried to change Zuleikha’s mind when she decided to leave her job in the kitchen. He had even scolded her: “How will you feed your son?” That evening, she brought him a brace of wood grouse for the evening soup. He accepted the meat and stopped trying to change her mind. They found him another kitchen helper.
In the spring and summer, she comes back from the taiga carrying fat grouse and heavy geese with thick, tough necks. A couple of times she’s been fortunate to take down a roe deer and, once, even a quivering, frightened musk deer. She sets snares to catch hares, and for foxes she sets traps sent by the central office, at the artel’s request. In winter she hunts animals whose thick, glossy fur has already grown in – squirrels, Siberian weasels, and occasionally sables.
In summer, the hunting artel’s capacity goes primarily toward the settlement’s needs: they eat and preserve fowl, baking the feathers and down in the sun for use in pillows and quilts. The only thing they send to the central office are beaver pelts, but those don’t turn up often. The areas around Semruk aren’t for beavers.
Winter is another matter, the most hectic time. Headquarters takes all the fur animals, whether they’re ordinary squirrels and martens or rare sables that sometimes need to be tracked for two or three days. The settlement is paid for the pelts, most often in money transfers, only rarely in hard cash. The majority of the money goes toward the settlement’s budget, with some offset by taxes and other deductions (as well as state taxes, there are settlement fees of five percent added on, plus payments on the settlement’s credits), and the remainder is given to the hunters themselves. Zuleikha has already been earning money this way for seven years.
People say it’s best to hunt with dogs but the settlers aren’t allowed to have them, “as a precaution.” Even rifles are permitted only reluctantly, probably because hunting wouldn’t work out very well at all with just snares and bear spears, but no firearms. All five of Semruk’s guns are registered with the commandant’s office. Strictly speaking, they’re supposed to be given out in late autumn, only for hunting season, and then returned to the commandant in early spring, but Ignatov doesn’t follow the rules as tightly as he should. The hunters supply the settlement with meat in the summer and everyone eats well during those three warm months, making up for the long, hungry winter, which takes away a good quarter (if not an entire third) of Semruk’s population each year, as if winter is licking them away with its tongue. Those who perish are generally newcomers, the ones who arrive toward the beginning of cold weather and don’t have time to adjust to the harsh local climate.
At first they processed the pelts themselves, each on their own, but then they banded together, putting everything in Granny Yanipa’s hands. By that time, there was little use at the logging site for an old woman who was half-blind, but she didn’t need to see to remove membranes and boil the pelts, afterward drying and combing them. And so they count the working group as five and a half people, meaning five hunters plus one half, Yanipa.