Zuleikha is a full-fledged unit of labor for the artel, but another half of her is registered as an aide in the infirmary, so there’s not just one of her but an entire one and a half. Leibe has explained that she needs an official occupation, on paper, for the summer season. The bureaucratic mathematics don’t trouble her; if that’s the way things have to be, fine.
It’s more complicated for other members of the arteclass="underline" there aren’t many “vacancies” for a hunter who disappears in the taiga for days at a time. Formally registering them for lumbering jobs would mean having to automatically increase a work quota that already takes tremendous effort to fulfill and sometimes isn’t fulfilled anyway. They get around the system however they can: one person might be made a file clerk, another an assistant to the settlement’s bookkeeper. They’re forbidden from joining the staff in the kitchen, lest the team there get too large. The hunters try to work off their half-time jobs at least partially, however and whenever they can, so that the summer assignments aren’t pure deception; this additional burden on them is considered worth it, though, for the opportunity to remain an artel member without restrictions. Back at the central office, Kuznets graciously closes his eyes to these hidden violations (the problem with the hunters is resolved the same way in all the other labor settlements), though he doesn’t miss chances to remind Ignatov that, “Yes, my dear man, I know everything about you and I see through you, as if you were a glass of you know what.”
Zuleikha works off her half honestly. She returns from the taiga before supper, when it’s still light, and goes to the infirmary to scrub, scour, clean, wipe, and boil. She’s also learned to apply dressings, treat wounds, and even poke a long, sharp syringe into skinny male buttocks covered in hair. At first Leibe waved her aside and sent her to bed (“You’re on your last legs, Zuleikha!”) but then he stopped. The infirmary has grown and he can no longer get by without her help. Zuleikha truly is on her last legs but that’s only later, at night, when the floors are clean, the instruments sterilized, the linens boiled, and the patients rebandaged and fed.
As before, Zuleikha and her son are living in the infirmary, with Leibe. Yuzuf’s seizures are gone, and they’d gradually stopped sitting watch at his bedside during the night. Leibe hadn’t turned them out, though. More than anything, he seems glad for their presence in the housing provided by his job. Leibe spends little time in his living quarters, only sleeping there at night.
Living in a small, comfortable room with its own stove is their salvation. Adults as well as children get sick in the freezing common barracks, with the wind blowing through. And so Zuleikha gratefully accepts this gift and works for her happiness every day until she’s exhausted, with a rag and bucket in her hands.
In the beginning, she thought that because she was living under one roof with a man unrelated to her, that meant she was his wife before heaven and people. And was thus obligated to pay back a wifely debt. How could it be otherwise? Every evening after lulling her son to sleep, slipping out of his bed unnoticed, and thoroughly washing, she would sit on the stove bench, her belly chilled until it ached, to wait for the doctor. He would appear after midnight, barely alive from fatigue, hurriedly swallow, without chewing, the food she’d left for him, and collapse in his own bed. “Don’t wait up for me every night, Zuleikha,” he’d scold her, his words slurred from fatigue. “I’m still in a condition to cope with my own meal.” And he’d quickly fall asleep. Zuleikha would sigh with relief and duck behind the curtain, to her son. Then she would sit on the stove bench the next evening, to wait again.
One time, after falling face down on his sleeping bench, as usual, without even taking off his shoes, Leibe suddenly grasped the reason for her night vigils. He abruptly sat up in bed and looked at Zuleikha, who was sitting by the stove, her hair in neat braids and her eyes cast downward.
“Come over here, Zuleikha.”
She walked over to him, her face white, mouth a straight line, and eyes darting along the floor.
“Sit right here with me…”
She sat down on the edge of the bench, not breathing.
“And look at me.”
She slowly looked up at him, as if her eyes were heavy.
“You don’t owe me anything.”
She looked at him, frightened, not understanding.
“Absolutely nothing at all. Hear me?”
She pressed her braids to her lips, not knowing what to do with her eyes.
“I order you to put out the light immediately and sleep. And don’t wait up for me again. Ever! Is that clear?”
She nodded slightly and suddenly began breathing loudly and wearily.
“If I see you do this again, I’ll send you to the barrack. I’ll keep Yuzuf here but I’ll send you the hell out!”
He didn’t have a chance to finish because Zuleikha had already darted to the kerosene cooker, blown on the flame, and vanished into the darkness. That’s how the question of their relations was conclusively and irreversibly resolved.
Lying in the dark with her eyes wide open and her loudly pounding heart covered with a pelt blanket, Zuleikha agonized and couldn’t go to sleep for a long time. Would she fall into sin by continuing to live under the same roof with the doctor, not as a husband but as a man unrelated to her? What would people say? Would heaven punish her? Heaven kept silent, likely agreeing to the situation. People simply accepted how things were – the aide lived at the infirmary, what of it? She’d arranged things well for herself, been lucky. When Zuleikha couldn’t hold back and shared her doubts with Izabella, Izabella just laughed in response: “What are you talking about, child! Sins are completely different for us here.”
Zuleikha is making her way through the forest. The trees ring out in birdsong and the awakening sun beats through spruce branches, their needles blazing with gold. Zuleikha’s leather shoes bound easily along the rocks to cross the river she calls the Chishme and run along a narrow path next to reddish pines, through Round Clearing, past the burned birch, and further, into the thick wilderness of the taiga’s urman, where the animals are the most fattened and delicious.
Surrounded here by blue-green spruces, she must slip noiselessly, barely touch the earth – not trample the grass, not break a branch, not knock down a pine cone – while leaving neither a trace nor a scent. She must dissolve into the cool air, the buzz of mosquitoes, and a ray of sun. Zuleikha knows how because her body is light and obedient, her motions quick and precise; she herself is like a wild animal, like a bird, like the wind as it sweeps between spruce boughs and weaves through juniper bushes and fallen trees.
She’s wearing a gray double-breasted jacket with large, light gray checks and broad shoulders; it was left behind by one of the brand-new residents who’d passed into another world, and it warms her on cold days and protects her from the sun in the heat. Small, unintelligible letters – “Lucien Lelong, Paris” – dance in a circle on the shiny, deep-blue buttons the previous owner had sewn on very tightly with coarse thread. There is a faded lily on a lining that was once turquoise. It’s a good jacket and reminds Zuleikha of the kaftans her father’s guests from faraway Kazan wore when they came to visit.
A rifle, heavy and cold, nestles into her back; it will spring into her hands on its own if necessary, stretch toward the target, and never miss. “You cast a spell on it or something?” the others in the artel ask, half-joking, half-envious. Zuleikha keeps quiet. How can you explain that it’s not a rifle at all but practically a part of her, like her arm or eye? When she rasies the long, straight barrel, resting the butt on her shoulder, squinting at the sight’s opening, she’s merged, fused with the rifle. She feels it tense as it anticipates the shot. She senses the bulky bullets waiting, still, preparing to fly out of the barrel, each one a small, leaden death. She squeezes the trigger lovingly and smoothly, without hurrying.