He slowly removes the collar from his neck, throws his sheepskin coat on his shoulders, and shoves his feet into his felt boots. The door slams behind him.
Zuleikha rushes to the window, melts the jagged patterns in the frost on the glass with her fingers, and presses her eye to the little hole. There’s Murtaza opening the gate, fighting the beginnings of the snowstorm. A dark horse thrusts its muzzle out of swirling white flakes and a rider powdered with snow leans from his saddle toward Murtaza, whispers something in his ear, and dissolves into the blizzard again a moment later, as if he’d never been there. Murtaza returns.
Zuleikha falls to the floor, fumbles for the brush that rolled away, and sticks her nose into the hem of the kaftan. A woman shouldn’t display excessive curiosity, even at a moment like this. The door lets out a long squeak as fresh, frosty air comes in. Her husband’s lumbering steps slowly float past behind her back. They’re not good steps; they’re slow and tired, somehow doomed.
Her chest is pressed to the cold floor, her face to the soft kaftan. She’s breathing shallowly and soundlessly. She hears how loudly the fire is crackling in the stove. She pauses, then turns her head slightly. Murtaza is sitting on the sleeping bench in his sheepskin coat and snow-covered, shaggy fur hat; the bushes of his eyebrows have come together at the bridge of his nose, the sparkle of large white snowflakes in them slowly dimming. A wrinkle furrows his brow and his eyes are expressionless, lifeless. And Zuleikha understands: yes, again.
And Allah, what will happen this time? She squeezes her eyes shut and lowers her forehead, which has instantly broken out in a sweat, to the cold floorboard. She feels moisture there. Snow is melting from Murtaza’s felt boots and streaming across the floor.
Zuleikha grabs a rag and crawls on her knees, mopping up the water. The top of her head bumps into her husband’s toes, which are as hard as iron. She slaps the rag at the melted snow around his feet, not daring to lift her head. A large, prickly felt boot comes down on her right hand. Zuleikha wants to tear her hand away but the boot presses down on her fingers like a rock. She looks up. Murtaza’s yellow eyes are right next to her. Reflected light from the fire dances in pupils as huge as cherries.
“I’m not giving it up,” he whispers quietly. “I won’t give up anything this time.”
Sour breath burns at her face. Zuleikha moves aside. And she feels the other felt boot fall on her left hand. Just so long as he doesn’t crush her fingers; how would she work without fingers?
“What’s going to happen, Murtaza?” she babbles plaintively. “Did they say? Grain has to be turned in now? Or cattle?”
“What business is it of yours, woman?” he hisses in response.
He takes her braids and winds them around his fists. Zuleikha’s eyes are next to his hot mouth. Gobs of spittle glisten in the deep, brown crevices between his teeth.
“Maybe the new authorities don’t have enough women? They’ve already taken grain and cattle, too. If they want land, they’ll take it away. But women, now that’s a problem.” Murtaza’s spittle is spraying Zuleikha’s face. “The Red commissars don’t have anybody to mate with.”
His knees are squeezing her head. Oh, how strong her husband’s legs are, even though he’s gone all gray.
“They ordered all the women be rounded up and turned in to the chairman of the rural council. Whoever disobeys will be assigned to that collective farm place. Forever.”
Zuleikha finally realizes that her husband’s joking. She just doesn’t know if she should smile in response. She understands from his sharp, heavy breathing that she shouldn’t.
Murtaza releases Zuleikha’s head. Removes his felt boots from her fingers. Stands and wraps his sheepskin jacket tighter.
“Hide the food, like always,” he quickly tells her. “We’ll go to the secret storage place in the morning.”
He takes the horse collar from the sleeping bench and goes out.
Zuleikha pulls a ring of keys from a nail, grabs a kerosene lamp, and runs into the yard.
There hasn’t been a warning for a long time now and many people have begun storing their food in the old ways, in cellars and storehouses, instead of hiding it. That turned out not to be a good idea.
The storehouse is locked and a slippery ball of snow is stuck to the big, paunchy lock. Zuleikha gropes at the keyhole with the key, turns once, twice, and the lock gives unwillingly, opening its mouth.
The meager kerosene light illuminates the wall’s smooth yellow logs and high ceiling, where a black square gapes – the trapdoor to the hayloft – but it doesn’t reach the darkening corners in the distance. The storehouse is spacious, solid, and built to last, like everything in Murtaza’s household. The walls are hung with tools: vicious sickles and scythes, toothy saws and rakes, heavy planes, axes, and chisels, blunt-faced wooden hammers, sharp pitchforks, and crowbars. There’s also horse tack and harnesses: old and new collars, leather bridles, stirrups that are rusted or gleaming with fresh oil, and horseshoes. Several wooden wheels, a hollowed-out trough, and a copper basin with shiny curves (thank you, Murtaza, for bringing it from the city a couple of years ago). A cracked cradle hangs from the ceiling. There’s a smell of grain hardened by frost, and cold, spicy meat.
Zuleikha remembers the times when dense, plump-cheeked sacks of grain towered to the ceiling here. Murtaza would walk between them, satisfied, smiling serenely, and tirelessly re-counting them, placing a palm on each sack with a tremble, as if it were a magnificent female body. It’s not like that now.
She places the kerosene lamp on the floor. There are fewer sacks than fingers on her hands. And each is thin, with flabby, drooping sides. Back in 1919, they’d learned to pour grain from one sack into several, as soon as the food confiscation detachments neared Yulbash. Everything had been unfathomable then and those raiding parties became more and more like wanton spirits with every year that passed: scarier than a demonic alabasty woman, as gluttonous as a giant evil dev, and insatiable, like Zhalmavyz, the huge cannibal woman. It was difficult to hide a tightly stuffed sack, and besides, then all the grain was gone immediately if it was found. It’s a different story if there are several skinny ones: they’re easier to store (each one in a different place) and not so awful to part with. What’s more, Zuleikha could drag the thin sacks around, one at a time, without Murtaza’s help, hiding them herself while he went around to the neighbors to figure out what was happening.
If not for the snowstorm, many villagers would have made their way into the forest this evening. Each prudent homeowner had a hiding place under the protective cover of fir boughs and crackling fallen branches. Murtaza had one, too. But where could you go in a blizzard? The only hope was for mercy from the heavens. Allah grant that nobody arrive before morning.
Zuleikha starts hiding the grain and food.
She buries a couple of sacks right there, in the storehouse; the cellar in the earthen floor by the wall has served them loyally for the last ten years. She’s afraid to store them in the hayloft because many people hide theirs in lofts. She places several precious sacks of seed grain marked with white paint in the false bottom of the steel water tank in the bathhouse.
Now it’s the horsemeat’s turn. Long horse intestines resembling wrinkly fingers, tightly stuffed with dark red spiced meat, hang in bunches from the ceiling. Oh and do they smell! Zuleikha’s nostrils draw in the sharp, salty aroma of kyzylyk. It’s best to hide this sausage in a place where the smell can’t be picked up. In the summer, it would have been possible to climb up on the roof and lay it in even rows on the little brick ledges inside the chimney; that wouldn’t have done anything to the meat except make it smell more delicious from the smoke. But the roof is covered in ice now so she can’t climb up there without Murtaza. She’ll have to put it in the house, under a floorboard, securely sealed in thick iron boxes, to keep out rats.