The gnats retreat and the exiles are able to get some sleep that night.
For Yuzuf’s tender skin, Leibe suggests that Zuleikha mix the pitch with breast milk. From that day on, the title of “doctor” fastens itself to Leibe in her mind.
After mid-September has passed, Ignatov begins thinking about whether to prepare an expedition to Krasnoyarsk.
The exiles have settled in and made themselves at home during the past month. The underground house – where the stove burns hot and never goes out – has dried from within and thoroughly baked. Following Avdei’s advice, they’ve constructed wood piles in stacks on tall stones around the house: the firewood lies in circles, one circle on top of another, forming high towers. Someone proposed covering their tops with spruce boughs but Avdei forbade it because the firewood would rot.
Each morning, even before sunrise, Ignatov knocks his revolver on the bottom of an empty bucket to raise the camp for work. Grumbling and coughing, the sleepy inmates head out for firewood under Gorelov’s supervision. Ignatov sets a daily quota for wood processing and nobody dares return to camp until it’s fulfilled. One time they tried, complaining of cold, rainy weather. Without saying a word, Ignatov grabbed the bucket with the supper Zuleikha had prepared and flung the contents in the Angara. The quota has been rigorously fulfilled since then, and people crawl into camp worn out, barely alive, and sometimes not until night, but they bring the required quantity of sawed logs and ready kindling. The stacks of firewood are growing like mushrooms around the underground house, but Ignatov thinks there’s never enough, and that they absolutely need more.
“We’re preparing firewood as diligently as if we’re planning to feed ourselves with it all winter,” he heard Izabella say one time. The old witch was hinting that they had no edible supplies whatsoever. And where would those supplies come from if thirty mouths ate up absolutely everything he managed to shoot and Lukka could catch? Ignatov thought a bit and from that day on ordered that Lukka divide the catch in two, half for fish soup, the other half to be dried for future use. People tried to protest against reducing the fish ration – “We’re already living half-starved!” – but no one could really argue with the commandant.
The women have asked several times for permission to be excused to pick berries because when working on firewood, they often encounter bilberry and lingonberry patches in the forest and come upon rowan trees strewn with orange bunches. Konstantin Arnoldovich maintains that cranberries could certainly be found here. Ignatov is adamant that there’s not much satiety to be had from those berries and the working day would be lost. So much firewood could be prepared in that time!
Only Lukka the fisherman and Zuleikha, too, don’t go to prepare wood. Sometimes Leibe asks to be excused to gather herbs and Ignatov lets him go; he’s warmed slightly toward Leibe because of the gnat incident. The others work every day. One time, Ikonnikov started a conversation about how factory workers in backward tsarist Russia were provided with days off even under moribund capitalism but Ignatov quickly cut off that showboating: “You can talk about imperialism with a blizzard this winter.”
Firewood, firewood… The humble sight of scruffy woodpiles gladdens Ignatov immensely. The bundles of dried fish, which are growing little by little, do, too. Zuleikha hangs them outside on sunny days and brings them inside the underground house on rainy days. But clothing is worrisome.
Many of the dekulakized had managed during their travel to keep warm things they’d taken from home and Ignatov has noticed that some even have a pair of felt boots and a reddish shaggy fur hat. But the Leningraders have no winter clothing and their bundles contain mostly useless junk, like thin between-season coats with gleaming round buttons, wrinkled brimmed hats with bright-hued silk linings, iridescent-colored mufflers that are slippery to the touch and have long delicate fringes, and suede and light cotton gloves.
Ignatov, too, has only the clothes he’s wearing: his summer officer’s State Political Administration uniform with a tunic for a shirt, light jodhpurs, and boots. And a peaked cap, of course. And so his alarm grows as he tracks long, inky clouds moving along the horizon. They promise rain and snow. These clouds have appeared recently, floating in from the north and circling the firmament for several days; they’re now covering and obscuring it from all sides, breathing cold air. When the last piece of clear sky dissolves between the shaggy sides of low-hanging clouds, Ignatov realizes Kuznets isn’t coming.
His insides seem to crackle with hoarfrost from that thought, and his head throbs and heats up, filling with rage. Away with the suffering, he orders himself. Away with it. Just think about what can be done.
Should he send out scouts? They really can’t overwinter here. He could send a couple of the most sensible men to Krasnoyarsk (maybe Gorelov and Lukka). Slap together a boat for them and away they go along the motherly Angara and then the fatherly Yenisei, too. But three-quarters of the journey’s four hundred kilometers is upstream, in the cold and rain, and without food supplies. So they wouldn’t make it.
And what if they did make it? What would they report upon arrival? We were dekulakized, they’d say, and exiled to the Angara by Soviet power, but out of the kindness of his heart, our temporary settlement commandant let us come to Krasnoyarsk in a boat for an outing – he’s impatient, don’t you see. He’s waiting for his replacement so he can head home…
His scouts wouldn’t reach Krasnoyarsk. It was as plain as day that they’d run away. Even if Ignatov were to appoint Gorelov as their minder. In fact Gorelov would be the first to propose it. It’s around Ignatov, who has the revolver, that he’s so obedient and zealous. And if something were to go wrong, he’d go into hiding without blinking an eye. He’s a hardened criminal.
Or should Ignatov go on the scouting trip himself, leaving the exiles here? Even worse. He and Kuznets would return to an empty camp: the peasants would all run away and the Leningraders would all die the hell off during that time.
One way is bad, the other’s worse. No matter what happens, he – Ignatov, the commandant – would be to blame. And he’s already gotten into so much trouble, more than enough for three. He’ll have to answer to the fullest extent before the Party and his comrades, for the attrition on the special train and for the escape and for the sunken Clara. No matter how he looks at it, he has to sit here and wait, whether for Kuznets or for the damned devil himself so Ignatov can account for himself with deeds rather than words.
Another thought tosses and turns in the depths of his consciousness and for some reason it makes him uncomfortable: he must save them. He’s often dreamt that he’s drowning in the Angara again, and as he’s being submerged into its cloudy cold waters, there are hundreds of hands stretching toward him from the black depths, with their long white fingers billowing like seaweed, saying, “Save us, save us…” He always wakes up abruptly, sits up on his bunk, and wipes off his damp neck. That same “Save us” then rustles and rolls around in his head all day. And though he is afraid to admit it, it makes him realize that what he wants, desperately wants, is to save these enemies so they will actually live to see a new barge and survive, every last one of them. And he wants that not for them, nor for Kuznets, nor the impending tribunal for the mistakes he made. He wants it for himself. And that’s why he’s uncomfortable.
Ignatov picks up a hefty stick and knocks it on the scaly, reddish pine trunks as he strides back to camp. Then he swings his arm and tosses it into a thicket. He imagines it falling on Kuznets’s head – smack dab on the top – and his soul begins feeling brighter.