This part of the legend is the most incomprehensible to Zuleikha herself. How could anyone treat good and bad equally? And consider that correct and necessary, too? Yuzuf nods his head almost imperceptibly in time with his strides, as if he understands everything and agrees.
“The rest ended up in the Valley of Unity, where each felt himself to be all, and all felt themselves to be each. The tired birds rejoiced, tasting the sweetness of unity. But it was too soon!”
“It was too soon!” Yuzuf whispers, confirming it.
“In the Valley of Confusion – which was shaken by thunderstorms – night and day, and truth and untruth were muddled. Everything the birds had come to know through such hardship during their long journey was swept away by a hurricane, and emptiness and hopelessness reigned in their souls. The progress they had made seemed useless to them, the life they had already lived, worthless. Many of them fell here, defeated by despair. The thirty most steadfast remained alive. Bleeding, mortally tired, their feathers singed, they crawled to the final vale. And there, in the Valley of Renunciation, all that awaited them was a smooth, unending watery surface, with eternal stillness over it. Beyond, there began the Land of Eternity, to which there was no entry for the living.”
Yuzuf and Zuleikha are striding along a path strewn with crunching evergreen needles and cones. There’s already a blue gap ahead between the trees – it’s the settlement. The closer they are to home, the slower Yuzuf walks; he wants his mother to be able to finish the story. When he sees the walls of the clubhouse, he stops so he can hear the end of the story in silence.
“The birds realized they had reached Semrug’s dwelling place and they felt his approach through the growing gladness in their hearts. Their eyes squinted from the bright light that filled the world and when they opened them, they saw only one other. In that instant, they grasped the essence – that they were all Semrug. Each individually and all of them together.”
“Each individually and all of them together,” Yuzuf repeats. He sniffles and strides into the settlement.
After his mother goes to the infirmary to scrub the floors, Yuzuf makes his way to the kitchen to give today’s birds to Achkenazi. The dead hazel grouse and the drake and the hen duck have come a long way in his hands without even knowing it: not just through a small taiga settlement – from a rickety log-house infirmary to a little kitchen smelling of fish guts and millet porridge. No. They’ve flown over red deserts and blue oceans, over black forests and fields spiked with wheaten gold, to the foot of a mountain chain at the edge of the world, then further, on foot this time, without using their wings (the hazel grouse quickly picking up its short, shaggy little legs, and the drake and hen duck, somehow or other, quacking any which way and waddling heavily on their broad, webbed feet), through seven wide and treacherous valleys, to the abode of the storybook shah bird. They don’t have time to learn the essence of the matter and behold in one another the illustrious image of Semrug, though, because when Achkenazi sees out the window that the little boy is playing with the birds, he takes them away and gives Yuzuf a light, friendly cuff. The door to the kitchen slams shut with a bang and a huge feather tinged with emerald remains in the air, to soar.
THE FOUR ANGELS
The world is enormous and vivid. It begins at a pearl-gray, wooden threshold – ornately eaten away by a beetle – in the house that Yuzuf and his mother share with the doctor. It extends through a broad yard flooded with waves of lush grass: where cracked wood blocks rise like islands with axes and knives crookedly sticking out of them, a woodpile climbs like a steep cliff, a crooked fence stretches like a broad mountain ridge, and laundry drying in the wind flutters like multicolored sails. It flows around the house, and toward the squeaky infirmary door, behind which there’s a kingdom of hidden floors his mother scrubs until they’re yellow, cool white sheets, intricate instruments gleaming with an unbelievable shine, and bitter medicinal aromas.
From the infirmary, the world spreads further along a well-trodden path to the rest of the settlement: three very long log-built black barracks dominate; the agitational stand stretches broad wings where resounding slogans blaze on glossy posters; in the mysterious building with the kitchen something is constantly rustling and sizzling, shrouded in the smells of food; the gloomy commandant’s headquarters gazes from the top of the hill like an unassailable bastion; and shining bright in the distance between blue spruces there stands the clubhouse, where Ilya Ikonnikov makes magic day and night with strong-smelling paints.
Yuzuf’s world ends here because his mother has forbidden him to go further, into the taiga. He tries not to upset her so obeys. Some evenings, though, the wait for her to return from hunting becomes unbearable, so he hurries off, his eyes squinting from fear, past the clubhouse, past the crooked poles with cracked skulls (elks, deer, boars, lynxes, badgers, and even one bear), some baring long fangs, onward, following a barely noticeable little path toward the ringing Chishme, so he can hide under a trembling rowan bush and look out for his mother’s slight figure flashing among reddish pine trunks.
The Angara is another border of this world. Yuzuf loves sitting on the shore and peering into its ever-changing depths. The heavy, cold water hides within itself every shade of dark blue and gray, just as the urman hides every shade of green and the fire in the stove holds red and yellow.
The world is so large you could pant after running from one border to another, and it’s so vivid that Yuzuf sometimes can’t get enough air. It makes him squint, too, as if the light were blinding him.
Somewhere far away, beyond the mighty backs of the hills, there’s another world where his mother and the other settlement dwellers lived before coming to Semruk. In Yulbash, his mother told him, there were as many as a hundred houses – not ten and not twenty – and each was the size of the infirmary. It’s hard to imagine such a giant settlement. It’s probably even harder to live there because if you went out for a walk, later you’d be in the middle of a hundred houses, so how could you find your own? Strange, scary creatures that Yuzuf knows only through his mother’s stories wandered the streets of Yulbash: cows trudged sedately accompanied by the rumble and boom of little tin bells tied to their necks (these beasts vaguely resembled elks but had fat, bent horns and long tails like whips); nasty, loud-voiced goats darted around (about the size of a musk deer but shaggy, their horns curving to their backs and their beards sweeping the ground); and mean-tempered dogs bared their teeth from under fences (these were tame wolves who would lick their master’s hands and rip at a stranger’s throat). Each time Yuzuf hears his mother’s stories about her native land, he feels a chill in his belly and senses tremendous relief inside that she’d known to move from Yulbash to peaceable, cozy Semruk before it was too late!
From what he can gather, mysterious Leningrad, which Izabella keeps calling Petersburg and Ilya Petrovich calls Petrograd, is smaller than Yulbash – nobody ever marveled about the number of houses there. On the other hand, the buildings are all made of stone. And not just the buildings, either, but the streets, embankments, and bridges – everything, in fact, is made of granite and marble. Yuzuf pities the poor Leningraders who are forced to take shelter in cold, damp stone dwellings. He imagines Izabella and Konstantin Arnoldovich shuddering, their teeth chattering, as they crawl down from stone bunks on foggy Leningrad mornings, huddling together and going outside the stone barrack to the stone-covered shore of the narrow little Neva River, which is smaller than the Angara but larger than the Chishme. Attempting to warm up, they wander along the shore among crowded bunches of marble lions (large, shaggy lynxes with magnificent manes), granite sphinxes (lions with human heads), and bronze statues (huge dolls as tall as a person, similar to those Ilya Petrovich sometimes molds out of clay), past the barrack called the Hermitage, as green as grass and tall as a powerful spruce, past the yellow barrack called the Admiralty, whose roof is decorated with a long and even needle (like a young pine tree) with a sailing ship at its point, past the gray barrack called the Stock Exchange, and past the fat, red, log-like Rostral Columns on whose tops there burns a pale fire that gives no warmth. A dim sun peeks through clouds that keep sprinkling a fine, slanting rain.