In sunset’s meager light, Ignatov sees tall poles on which two gray skulls bare their teeth between the trees. One skull is large and long, with a bent nose, large, flat chewing teeth, and the sturdy roots of horns growing right out of small, oval eye sockets – the elk. The second skull is small and round like a potato, with a hideous hole of a nose and fanged jaws that are thrust forward and tenaciously lying on top of one another – the lynx. Lukka hung up the skulls to scare off forest spirits. Ignatov had wanted to remove this appalling counterrevolution but gave up and left it after noticing the peasants’ imploring looks. He thought it would be better if the skulls scared off illness. But there they hang, seeing Ignatov off for hunting in the morning, their black eyeholes gawking after him. They greet him in the evening, peering indifferently into his hands. What are you bringing back? Is there something to feed the people? Or has the time come to die?
Ignatov turns away from the skulls’ unblinking gaze, gloomily hurrying past them to the underground house. As he walks, he again counts, out of habit, the tall round drifts – the woodpiles – that cover the clearing like mushrooms. There are fewer of them now than a month ago because the exiles have begun using up the firewood supply. Blizzards sometimes cover the taiga, howling over the house for several days, singing and shrieking in the stovepipe, and sending snow flying over the earth in a dense burst, carpeting the sun overhead. You’d perish in foul weather like that, so there’s no going into the forest. They even go out to the woodpiles on a tether: they grope with their hands in search of the wood, trudge through waist-deep snow, and return to the underground house, pulling a rope with one end tied around their middle and the other to the entrance. Their supplies began melting away faster when illnesses arrived, and even when the weather was good, the exiles couldn’t prepare as much firewood as before.
Ignatov sticks his snowshoes in a drift by the entrance, kneels, and crawls into the house. The outside door, woven from birch switches and reinforced with a mixture of turf and clay, is lying on the ground; it needs to be lifted and squeezed into a slot. Now Ignatov is in the cold “entrance hall.” He goes down the earthen steps, throws back curtains made of bast fiber and elk hide and ducks into the underground house’s crowded space, which is filled with heavy, warm air, the smell of herbs, fish, tree bark, spruce needles, smoke, scorching hot stones, and the sounds of coughing and quiet conversations.
He’s come home.
Somewhere in the depths of the house, listless voices go quiet right away. The uneven light of a splinter lamp burning brightly over a kettle of water illuminates somber faces with distinctly drawn angular cheekbones and wrinkly folds. A dozen eyes stare at Ignatov and his empty hands.
He makes his way to his bunk without looking in their direction. From underneath his homemade pillow of boughs he removes the sack of cartridges, which has been shrinking tremendously over the winter. With the onset of winter, he stopped hiding it in the forest and began keeping it with himself, at the head of his bed. He loads his revolver. Without kicking off boots wound with scraps of lynx hide, he lies down, placing the hand with the revolver under his head. He closes his eyes, continuing to sense the gazes directed at him.
In moments like these he usually feels rising tides of fury and wants to start waving his weapon and shout, “What are you staring at, you bastards?” But today he doesn’t have the strength. An unhurried, somber sort of tiredness has overcome him. He needs to dry out his boots and clothes, and at least drink some hot water to fill the sucking emptiness in his stomach. Right now, thinks Ignatov. Right now, right now.
“Very well, we’ll have some soup du jour, then,” says Izabella. She scoops a spoonful of salt out of a fat sack and drops it in a kettle that’s been bubbling away on the fire. The clear water clouds and turns white as if someone had mixed in milk, then it sputters and clears again a moment later. The salty soup is ready.
Not many people like it. The majority turn toward the wall and don’t even get out of their bunks. Only Konstantin Arnoldovich and Ikonnikov take seats by the pot.
For a long time, Konstantin Arnoldovich scrutinizes the bowl of his spoon, made from a pearlescent shell, then suddenly smiles:
“I feel like I’m on Avenue Foch. Saturday evening, oysters on ice, a glass of Montrachet…”
“The best oysters, though,” chimes in Ikonnikov, sipping his salty soup with gusto, “were to be found on Rue de Vaugirard. You won’t argue with that, will you?”
“My dear Ilya Petrovich! How would you know? You were just a youth then and saw nothing but your études. It’s surprising you even left your Montmartre!”
“Messieurs, ne vous disputez pas!” Izabella laughs as she knocks her spoon on the edge of the pot, as if she’s flicking off fatty pieces of meat, translucent lemon slices, and small olive rounds that have stuck to it.
Gorelov plops down alongside them, takes a spoon out of his shirt, licks it, and looks ravenously at his companions. The conversation dies down.
Zuleikha buries her face in Yuzuf’s hair. Ignatov came back from hunting empty-handed again. There’s nothing for supper tonight, meaning her milk won’t come in. Lately her milk supply has even been sparse after food.
It began running low in mid-winter. At first she thought it was from the meager food but she understood her milk was ending when they ate their fill of fatty, fragrant elk meat for a whole week in January and her breasts remained as weak and soft as before. She started giving her son meat and fish as a supplement. Potato or bread would have been better, of course, but where could she get that? She’d place a small piece of something in a rag and slip it into a space in his tiny toothless gums. Yuzuf spat it out at first but then he recognized the taste and sucked at it. He didn’t like salty things – he cried – so Zuleikha didn’t give him dried fish. When several completely hungry days came, she tried stewing some aromatic yellow cones that were left on the branches of a bough but that plant food gave her son sticky lumps of emerald green diarrhea and Doctor Leibe scolded her like nothing on earth. She hadn’t even known he could shout so loudly and threateningly.
Since all the illness, when Ignatov abolished the severe twice-daily outings into the forest, many of the exiles now stay in the house during the day – and so Izabella often relieves Zuleikha at the stove. Zuleikha can lie for a while without moving after she’s lowered her tired gaze to her sleeping son; she listens to his quiet, measured breathing. Yuzuf’s sleeping minutes have become a delight for her but they make the minutes when he wakes up and cries all the harsher and bitterer. Her little boy wants to eat all the time.
She can’t wait for him to start walking. She shuts her eyes and imagines Yuzuf when he’s grown a little: after being bow-legged and skinny, his legs have become sturdy and are padded in resilient baby fat, round pink fingernails have grown out on his small fingers, his head is covered in dense, dark hair, and he stamps through the underground house to greet her. He picks up one little foot after the other and waddles like a duck – he’s walking. Will she live to see that? Will he?