The open door squeaks as it swings on its hinges. Zuleikha climbs the stairs. She stands. Then she extends a hand, draws aside a heavy curtain that’s soft to the touch and smells sharply of sheep hides, and steps inside the black tent.
Time turns inside out within the black tent. It doesn’t flow straight but sideways, slanting. Zuleikha swims in it like a fish, like a wave, either dissolving fully or appearing again within the boundaries of her own body. Sometimes after closing the squeaking door of the commandant’s headquarters behind her, she’ll discover a few moments later that morning has come. Other times, after placing her hand on Ignatov’s broad back and pressing her face to the base of his neck, she senses an infinitely long flow of minutes measured by occasional ringing drops that fall into a bucket from the tip of a spout on the tin washstand. There’s an eternity between the first drop and the second.
There’s no place for recollections and fears in the black tent – its bulky animal hides reliably protect Zuleikha from the past and future. There is only today, only now. That “now” is so teeming and palpable that Zuleikha’s eyes mist over.
“Say something, don’t be silent,” Ignatov has asked her, his face nearing hers.
She looks into his clear gray eyes and draws a finger along his even forehead striped with fine wrinkles, along his steep and smooth cheekbone, along his cheek and chin.
“So beautiful,” she murmurs.
“Is that really the sort of thing you should say to a man…?”
She seems not to have slept that autumn. She puts her son to bed, kisses the warm top of his head, and then quickly leaves the infirmary and climbs the path where the little red flame persistently summons her each night. They don’t close their eyes; there are never enough hours in those nights. In the morning she comes to see her sleeping son, then she goes hunting, and in the evening there’s the infirmary to clean. Zuleikha has no time to sleep. And she doesn’t want to anyway. Her strength hasn’t diminished, it’s increased and overflowed. She doesn’t walk, she flies; she doesn’t hunt, she simply takes her dues from the taiga; and for entire days she awaits the nights.
She’s not ashamed. Everything she was taught and learned by rote as a child has left her, gone away. What’s new and has come in exchange has washed away the fears, just as a flood from melting snow washes away last year’s twigs and decayed leaves.
“A wife is the tilled soil where her husband sows the seeds of his descendants,” is what her mother taught her before sending her off to Murtaza’s home. “The plowman comes to till when he desires and tills while he has the strength. It does not befit the land to defy its tiller.” And she did not defy – she gritted her teeth, held her breath, and tolerated it, living that way for so many years, not knowing it could be otherwise. Now she knows.
Her son senses something and has become pensive and reserved when he peers into her eyes. He takes a long time to go to sleep, tossing and turning, constantly waking up, and not letting his mother go. He’s also maturing rapidly and growing more serious.
Yuzuf started school that autumn. There are eighteen children in Semruk and all are gathered into one classroom and seated in two rows: older and younger. They study together. There are only five textbooks (all about arithmetic) for the entire school, but what books they are! They’re hot off the presses, still crackling at the bindings and smelling deliciously of printer’s ink. A certain Kislitsyn handles the teaching duties. He’s from the latest batch of newcomers, maybe an academician, maybe some former official from the People’s Commissariat of Education. Izabella had already taught Yuzuf to read so when he saw the author’s surname on a textbook cover – which says “Y.Z. Kislitsyn” – he walked up to Yakov Zavyalovich, bewildered, and asked, “Do you have the same surname?”
“Yes,” the teacher cheerlessly smirked, “one might say I have the exact same name.” Zuleikha is glad her son is busy at school during the day, since he’s fed and cared for. When he helps her with cleaning in the evenings, she asks if he likes school. “Yes,” he answers, “a lot.” “Well, good, it’s important to learn to count and write.”
It tortures her that she no longer gives all her warmth to her Yuzuf, that her nighttime kisses are more ardent and plentiful than the evening ones for her son, that he could wake up at night in bed alone and be afraid, and that she now has a secret from him. So she hugs Yuzuf harder and longer, smothers him with kisses, and showers him with caresses. Sometimes he breaks loose from his mother’s arms when they grip him too tightly and looks out at her guiltily from under his brow. Is she offended? His mother just responds with a broad, happy smile.
People in the settlement evidently suspect something. Zuleikha hasn’t given any thought to what they would say as she doesn’t interact much with people, and then only with the old-timers, and she disappears into the forest for days at a time anyway. If not for Gorelov, she wouldn’t have found out that people had noticed her relationship with Ignatov.
One morning, he catches Zuleikha on her way to the taiga. By this time, he has been living in his own small, squat log cabin for a couple of years (Gorelov was the first to put up a privately owned house, and settled in well, fencing it in and putting glass in the windows), and he’s made an earthen bench at the front of the house, where he loves to relax, watching the settlement’s residents pass by.
Zuleikha is walking through still-sleepy Semruk on a dark-gray autumn morning and Gorelov is already sitting by his little house, smoking every now and then. He has obviously risen this early on her account and has been sitting waiting for her.
“Well, hello there, hunting artel! Going to the taiga to hunt down your daily quota?”
“That’s right.”
“Here, have a seat, let’s have a chat. There’s something we need to talk about.”
“I don’t have time to hang around, my prey’s waiting. So go on, just say it.”
Gorelov rises from the bench – under the uniform jacket draped over his shoulders is a dirty, striped sailor jersey and legs like crooked matches dressed in close-fitting drawers and boots. He slowly walks around Zuleikha with his loose gait, examining her as if he’s seeing her for the first time.
“Not so bad,” he says quietly, as if to himself. “Ignatov chose a woman for himself, a fine one. Nice job. I hadn’t spotted that right away.”
“You need something?” Zuleikha feels blood pounding in her face.
“Nothing from you, sugar. You just keep having your love affairs. Just come and see me every now and then, won’t you, to have a chat about the commandant. Our man’s a hothead. The chief instructed me to look after him. And you, hunting artel, you should take care not to have a falling out with the chief if you want to keep doing your artel thing instead of rotting at the logging site.”
Gorelov’s drilling his narrow, slightly flattened eyes into her and she sees their color distinctly for the first time. They’re impenetrably black.
Aglaya runs out of the house wearing an old sheepskin coat over a beige lace slip and shoes on bare feet, and her red curls are corkscrewed in all directions. She’s bringing Gorelov a quilted jacket. She tosses it on his shoulders and wraps it proprietarily over his chest: See that you don’t freeze! She looks jealously at both of them and runs off, back into the house. Aglaya has been living with Gorelov for a year now, not hiding it, instead proudly showing off their relationship to the settlement at every convenient occasion.
Zuleikha adjusts the rifle on her shoulder and walks away.
“So can I expect you to stop by then?” Gorelov yells after her.