She’d grasped long ago that if her rifle doesn’t shoot that squirrel or wood grouse, there will be another predator – be it a marten or a fox – that will tear it to pieces the next day. And in another month or year, the predator itself will die from illness or old age, feed the worms, dissolve into the earth, nourish trees with its juices, sprout up on them as fresh needles and baby cones, and then become food for the children of the killed squirrel or the wood grouse that was torn to pieces. Zuleikha hadn’t grasped that on her own. The urman taught her.
Death is everywhere here but death is simple, understandable, and wise, even just in its own way. Leaves and needles fall from the trees and rot in the earth, bushes break under a heavy bear paw and dry out, grass becomes quarry for a deer, just as a deer is quarry for a pack of wolves. Death is tightly, seamlessly interwoven with life, so it’s not scary. Beyond that, life always triumphs in the urman. No matter how terrible the peat fires rage in autumn, no matter how cold and harsh the winter is, no matter how rife the starving predators, Zuleikha knows that spring will come, the trees will burst with young greenery, silken grass will flood land that has been burned to black at one time, and cheery, abundant young will be born to the animals. Because of that, she doesn’t feel cruel when she’s killing. To the contrary: she feels herself part of a big and strong world, like a drop in an evergreen sea.
Not long ago she suddenly recalled the grain buried in the Yulbash cemetery, between her daughters’ graves. And she got to thinking that it hadn’t all been wasted. Some of the grains, if only a few, would have grown shoots through the cracks in the wooden coffin when spring came, and though the rest might have rotted, they’d have become food for the young sprouts. She imagined the tender shoots of the wheat spikes fighting their way between the uneven gravestones, overgrowing, hiding, and swaddling them. That warmed her soul, put her more at ease. Who can say if the spirit of the cemetery is still caring for her daughters?
She still hasn’t figured out if there are spirits in the urman. She has never run into one during her seven years of making the rounds of so many hills, walking through so many ravines, and crossing so many streams. Sometimes it seems, for an instant, that she herself is a spirit…
Zuleikha first checks the snares and traps along paths she’d identified as favored animal routes to her Chishme River: one by a large, half-rotten spruce where, on close inspection, the grass is trampled a little (small animals apparently couldn’t jump over the trunk, so they ran around it), and another near a deep, icy-cold pool as narrow as a crack and concealed in a spruce thicket. She makes the rounds to the snares twice a day, morning and evening, so a captured hare won’t fall into a predator’s clutches. Then she goes upstream, along the Chishme, toward the swampy ravines, to see the ducks’ favorite spots. The trip isn’t brief and she treks on until noon. She walks, perpetually on the lookout (any animal she runs into on the path, in the bushes, or on the spruce branches, could prove to be quarry), and thinks. Zuleikha didn’t think as much during her entire previous life in Yulbash as she does now during one day of hunting. During her years as an unrestricted hunter, she has recalled her entire life and taken it apart, piece by tiny piece. She recently and suddenly grasped that it’s good that fate has cast her here. She’s taking shelter in a cubbyhole in a state-owned infirmary, living among people who aren’t blood relations, speaking a language not native to her, hunting like a man, working enough for three, and she’s doing fine. Not that she’s happy, no. But she’s fine.
Toward midday, when there’s only a half-hour’s walk left to the duck creeks, her thoughts habitually turn to a dangerous topic. She’s tired of forbidding herself to think about it. But if she doesn’t forbid herself, she could hit upon something too scary to imagine. Zuleikha throws her rifle over her other shoulder. Thoughts aren’t a stream and you can’t block them with a dam, so let them flow. She often recalls that day at Round Clearing, seven years ago. How black boots, part of a uniform, sprang from grass strewn with bilberries, how Ignatov sat down in front of her on the ground and stretched a hand toward her headscarf. And she wasn’t afraid of him then but of herself, of how all of her, every bit, had turned to honey instantly just from his gaze, how she’d flowed toward him, blinded, deafened, having forgotten everything, even her son playing nearby. And she’d aimed the rifle not at him but at her fear, at her fear of committing sin with her husband’s murderer. But she didn’t commit sin – the bear had helped.
She left her kitchen job soon after, and Achkenazi’s new helper started taking lunches to the commandant’s office. Ignatov hasn’t sought her out since, and whatever went on between them receded, remaining in the past, as if it never happened. Sometimes she thinks maybe it didn’t. Maybe it just seemed to happen. But then she’ll see in Ignatov’s lowered eyes that it did. She knows by the way something inside her melts and thaws when she looks up at the commandant’s headquarters that it happened. She knows because she thinks about this every day; it happened.
He began drinking soon after, and hard. Zuleikha can’t stand drunks. There it was, she’d thought, her medicine. Seeing the commandant drunk, stupid, and berserk should have immediately snatched away all her unworthy thoughts. It didn’t work. The sight of Ignatov’s red eyes and his face, puffy from alcohol, made her feel pained instead of disgusted.
When yet another batch of new arrivals came, he picked out a slut with short red hair, sharp little breasts, and a firm rear end squeezed into the stretched fabric of a dress that was too tight. And when that same Aglaya began stopping by the commandant’s headquarters at the sight of Ignatov’s lighted cigarette at night, Zuleikha decided that was it: it was finally over. But was it really?
She shoulders her rifle and fires into a gap between shaggy spruce branches. A hazel grouse quivers its wings too late and its colorful body tumbles to the ground.
The day has flown by and has produced some success: a hazel grouse and a brace of ducks are bouncing on Zuleikha’s belt (the hidden spot for ducks didn’t let her down, giving her an emerald-headed drake with dressy white cheeks and a hefty black female), and a hare that got caught in the snare is in the bag on her back. She boldly strides home through the taiga, cracking branches and not hiding, since she’s done hunting. As she crosses the Chishme along the rocks, the bushes explode at the water’s edge and something small and nimble flies out, headlong. A small animal? No, it’s Yuzuf!
Zuleikha flings her arms wide open. Yuzuf’s long, long legs gleam out from under his short, patched pants as he flies toward her and embraces her, pressing his head into her. She lowers her face to the top of her son’s head and inhales his beloved, warm scent.
“I forbade you to wait for me here, ulym. It’s dangerous in the taiga.”
He just pushes harder into her chest, the nape of his neck dangling like a floppy ear. She could have scolded him more strictly for defying her rule again, but of course she can’t because she herself is glad he’s come so they can have this brief time to walk along the path together, calmly and unhurried, as if there’s an eternity ahead for the two of them, to gently jostle each other, listen to birds, talk, or keep silent. There won’t be more of these solitary moments today. As soon as Zuleikha gets back, she’ll clean the infirmary and Yuzuf will help her by lugging water from the Angara, burning garbage in the yard…