“I wanted to gather some nuts or berries,” she whispers. “I want so badly to eat.”
“Everybody wants to!” shouts Ignatov. They can probably hear him at the lumbering site.
“It’s not for me.” She continues backing away until she runs into an old birch bursting with torn black spots. “It’s for him.”
She looks down at the dark top of a head that’s peeping out from her chest. Ignatov strides right up to Zuleikha and hovers over her. His breathing is still heavy and loud.
“Obey me,” he says, “without exception. If you’re ordered to stay in the camp, then sit there. If I order you to go for berries, you’ll go. Clear?”
The baby on Zuleikha’s chest suddenly yelps restlessly, stirring and grumbling. A tiny, wrinkled little hand with hook-like fingers appears in the opening of her dress for a moment and then disappears.
“See? It’s ‘Give me milk’ again.” Zuleikha unfastens the buttons on her chest. “Go on, then, go. I need to feed him.”
Ignatov stands, angry and unmoving. The baby is crying, snuffling his little nose and rooting around with his open mouth.
“I said go! It’s a sin to watch.”
Ignatov doesn’t budge; he’s looking straight at her. The baby is bawling, sobbing, as if from bitterness and offense, wrinkling his old man’s face. Zuleikha takes a heavy breast out of the opening of her dress and places a swollen nipple with trembling drops of milk on the end into his wide-open mouth. The crying ceases immediately and the child feeds hungrily, moaning as he quickly stretches and squeezes his taut, bright-pink little cheeks. White milk flows along them, mixing with tears that haven’t yet dried.
Her breast is small, round, and full. Like an apple. Ignatov is watching that breast and he can’t tear himself away. Something hot, large, and slow stirs in his belly. They say a woman’s milk is sweet to the taste. He takes a step back. Sticks his revolver in the holster and fastens it. He walks off into the forest and turns after a couple of steps:
“Go to camp when you finish feeding. Bears want to eat, too.”
He strides away along a path that’s already been trodden between the spruces. He sees before him a small hand diving into the opening of the dress, clasping and reaching a taut, round, milky-white sphere of a breast with light-blue lines of veins and a large, shining, dark pink berry of a nipple that’s burning, quivering with rich milk.
Some joke, half a year without a woman.
And so Ignatov tries not to look at Zuleikha after that. It’s not easy in the crowded underground house. When their eyes happen to meet, he feels that same hot stirring in his belly again and turns away immediately.
Ignatov has selected the best snowshoes for himself. The exiles wove several dozen pairs but these, produced by the gnarled fingers of Granny Yanipa, a taciturn Mari woman with a brown face and small eyes lost amid shaggy eyebrows and deep wrinkles, are the best for walking because they sit nicely on the foot, don’t fall through a thin crust on top of the snow, and don’t let snow through. He’s already been wearing them for three months. The birch cane has worn on the curves and is in shreds. Ignatov wants to order a second pair from her but she’s been sick and hasn’t gotten out of bed for several weeks.
The snowshoes the other peasants make are heavy and clumsy so they’re suitable for short trips to fetch firewood but not for long, fast-moving hunting outings. The Leningraders’ handiwork is so unsightly that it’s difficult to recognize them as snowshoes; they’re reminiscent of either an intricately shaped twig broom or an unsuccessful basket. “It’s an example of Suprematism,” Ikonnikov once said incomprehensibly, scrutinizing the shaggy woven something his hands had just created. The zealous Gorelov had wanted to throw Suprematism out of the house but Ignatov wouldn’t allow it, ordering that it be hung under the ceiling because there was no longer any space on the floor.
Ignatov is stepping, placing his snowshoes on a dense, hard crust of ice. He’s listening to the sound of his feet. The January sky is gray and cold. Dark clouds hang motionless, their inner white linings showing and a pre-dusk sun shining golden through them. It’s time to go back.
He’s returning empty-handed today.
Ignatov has not embraced hunting during his months in the taiga. He can tread quietly, hear keenly, and shoot accurately. He can already distinguish tracks in the snow as if he’s reading dispatches left by the animals. Long and sparse are hares’, larger and heavier are badgers’, and light and sweeping are squirrels’. Sometimes he even senses the animals and he thrusts out his hand holding the revolver, squeezing the trigger before his head manages to grasp that it, his prey, is flashing between the bushes. But he hasn’t been able to genuinely come to love hunting. He likes chasing and shooting but in a different way, where there’s an open and comprehensible target. As in a battle, when you see an adversary and fire at him or chase him and hack him with a saber. Everything’s clear and simple. But hunting is complex. Sometimes he imagines forest animals crawling out of their burrows and dens, and skipping along a huge field in even rows without hiding, meandering, or covering their tracks. He’s behind them on a horse. He aims his revolver, shooting one after the other, one after the other. Now that would genuinely be hunting. But this?
Hunting fortune has been harsh for Ignatov, rarely gladdening him with success. Of course the largest prey was the elk. That happened in December, just before the new year. By chance, Ignatov had wandered to the bear pit he’d dug and forgotten about in the autumn and seen that something had landed inside. Dumbfounded by the premonition of sizable prey, he peered in at something large and dark gray that was lying there, tired. Its shaggy long legs with hooves as long as fingers were shaking slightly. Brownish-crimson guts, still lightly steaming, were entwined on the sharpened stake that stuck out over the elk. Ignatov dashed right off for camp. He ran in, panting and wild-eyed, scaring everybody. They gathered the men, grabbed sleds and homemade torches, and quickly went back into the woods. Ignatov was afraid the smell of meat would attract wolves but they encountered only a lynx in the pit. It had already torn at the carcass pretty well and it bared its crooked fangs wickedly, bubbling elk blood at them. Ignatov killed the lynx, too, and they dragged the animals to the underground house and ate for nearly a week. That was how they celebrated New Year’s.
Nothing else has landed in the pit. There has been only small, insubstantial prey since that elk, which seems to have expended Ignatov’s entire allotted share of hunting successes all in one go. There is help, thanks to Lukka. The Angara was already covered with ice in November but the men sawed about a dozen large holes under Lukka’s supervision, so Lukka has been spending days at a time on the ice ever since. He brings back bream that are as broad and flat as dishes and shimmer like copper, spotted green pikes with spiteful bared teeth, and fishes unknown to Ignatov that gleam with pearlescence and have large, rhomboidal fins on their fatty backs.
Lukka has recently fallen ill, though. Many have taken to their beds since New Year and only Ignatov is hanging on. He’s been forced to abandon sending two shifts into the forest for firewood so now only one shift works, only the healthy people, which really means those who are least ill. With misgivings, Ignatov excuses Professor Leibe from his labor duties because someone has to look after the sick. Because of Lukka’s illness, they’ve been forced to feed themselves with stored fish. The dried fish doesn’t last long; they’ve eaten everything they prepared in autumn within a couple of days. Ignatov is now their only hope.
He is striding through the taiga. Spruces float past him, their broad boughs pillowed in snow and bent toward the ground, resting against snowdrifts. Bushes swell like steep white boulders, and golden trunks of pine trees flash with a coating of thick hoarfrost. He goes down to the familiar clearing, where the giant skeleton of a lightning-charred birch tree stands in the corner, and he crosses a frozen stream where mounds of rocks are frosted with drifted snow. The camp is already close and the faint, bittersweet smell of smoke touches his nostrils.