He suddenly understands he’s been making his way up the cliff this whole time. He hasn’t been here in a long while, since autumn. And there’s only a little further to the top. If only the damned sky would stop spinning for just a second. Ignatov gathers his strength and crawls up.
Even from a distance, he notices there are blindingly green shoots of fresh grass with bright yellow, star-shaped flowers at the very top, on a shred of earth that’s warmed by the sun between some rocks. He contracts his muscles, darts forward like a snake, falls face-first on the grass, tears it with his teeth, and chews. He mumbles from enjoyment as a wonderful fresh taste fills his mouth, spreads through his veins, and rushes to his head like young wine. Happiness! His stomach shudders hard and relentlessly. Poorly chewed emerald greens with little yellow flowers sprinkled in, mixed with mucus and gastric juices, spill out on the grass. Ignatov howls and coughs convulsively, pounding his revolver on the ground. He’s puked it all up, to the last blade of grass. His breathing is labored and his face drops in the grime, into the grass his innards rejected, and he understands. This is the end, he won’t make it home, he has no strength.
He didn’t keep the exiles alive. Didn’t save them.
Exerting himself, he brings the revolver’s cold, heavy body to his face and sticks the long barrel in his mouth: his teeth chatter against the metal and the sharp front sight scratches the roof of his mouth. Bastards, is the last thought that flashes through his mind.
He suddenly feels like the sky has stopped rotating above him. He looks up. In the distance, dark against the bright blue Angara water, is the long brown spot of a barge and a bold black dot alongside it. It’s the launch.
THE SETTLEMENT
Kuznets springs out of the boat. Big, cold splashes of water fall on sturdy boots carefully polished with wax, then skitter away and roll back into the Angara. He walks along the riverbank, unhurried, as his imperious gaze takes in the rocky beach and the knoll hanging over it. Other boats sputter behind him as their bows land against the shore. Oars knock, chains clank, and escort guards’ shouts carry, blending with their charges’ meek voices.
“What the…? Where the hell’re you taking all that? Toss it over by the water, let them sort it out themselves!”
“Stand still, you dogs! Closer together! Straighter!”
“Don’t you cry, Dima, we’re here now, see…”
“Comrade Kuznets! Should we put them in formation or let them stand like this, like rabble?”
“I thought we were going to a real settlement, where there are people, but there’s…”
“The lists, where’re the lists?”
“Count those heads again, Artyukhin! Some mathematician you are…”
The voices abruptly drop off. Kuznets turns his proud profile to the tense quiet that has set in behind his back.
A strange, dark figure is walking down from the knoll, reeling and bobbing oddly, as if it’s dancing on legs that won’t bend well. A person. The person’s wearing dirty, worn-out, and colorless rags, and something’s wound around his formless boots. There’s a threadbare woman’s shawl criss-crossed over his chest, his hair is like a mane, and his beard is scraggly. He’s walking slowly; it requires exertion. Soon they can see his mud-smeared face, along with his bugged, completely wild eyes, and the revolver in his tensely extended hand.
Kuznets narrows a brown eye. Is he imagining, or is it really…?
“Ignatov, it’s you! Holy Mother, he’s alive! I didn’t even think…”
Ignatov trudges along, seeing just one target in front of him: Kuznets’s radiant, round, ugly mug, which looks like it was outlined by a compass, with its dumbfoundedly wide-open slots of well-fed, kindly eyes. The despicable sky is spinning again, pulling Ignatov into its frenzied whirl but he stubbornly plods along, not giving in. The ugly round mug approaches for a long time, a very long time, hurriedly muttering something. Kuznets’s voice is carrying from far away, maybe from the forest, maybe from underwater.
“How’re you doing here, my friend? Where are your feeble buddies? They survive? Well, well, look at you, you devil, huh? Oh, you won’t believe how crazy things got after we left you! They’ve been dumping the kulaks on us by the trainload. There was no time for you, forgive me.”
The ugly mug is finally right alongside him. Ignatov wants to say some final words but they’ve all left his memory. He mumbles and places the shaking revolver to Kuznets’s broad chest. The trigger is heavy and tight, as if it’s taken root. He clenches his teeth and directs all his will, the remainder of his energy, into his index finger. He squeezes the trigger and the revolver dryly clicks.
Kuznets’s mug laughs, its eyes nearly shutting:
“Let bygones be bygones, as they say…”
Ignatov’s dry throat swallows and he squeezes the trigger again. Yet another click.
“Stop being offended, Ignatov,” says Kuznets. He’s laughing hard. “That’s it, your new life is starting. Look at these charges I brought you: you can plow away at the land with them.”
Someone’s hands carefully take the revolver from Ignatov’s bent fingers. Kuznets’s smile blurs and dissolves in the unbearably bright sunlight. The sky takes one final spin and covers Ignatov like a bedspread.
Kuznets’s round, satisfied face is the first thing he sees when he comes to. Ignatov starts moaning, as if from pain and Kuznets slaps him on the arm. “It’s fine, brother,” he’s saying, “you’ll be back to your old self soon. You slept through,” he adds, “two days. You woke up yesterday for a little while, chowed all my officer’s chocolate, then went back to sleep. You really don’t remember anything?” Ignatov shakes his head and raises himself a little on his elbows. He’s lying by a large spruce on some sort of sacks under a tarpaulin. Covered by a sheepskin coat. He’s surrounded by screeching saws, thudding axes, tapping hammers, and salty language.
“Where am I?” he says.
“Same old place,” laughs Kuznets. (Enough laughing, you mustached ass!) He’s sitting on a slab of wood next to Ignatov, scribbling in his map case.
“Where are my people?”
“Your deceased are alive, have no fear. Every last one of them. Hardy, the devils! I’ve never seen such gaunt people. We left them in the underground house for the time being so the wind doesn’t blow them away.”
Ignatov settles on his back again. He could lie like this forever, looking at the evergreen needles lazily stirring above his head, sensing the smell of spruce pitch, and hearing people’s businesslike voices. His hand gropes at the taut sides of the sacks under him.
“What’s this?”
“New provisions.” Kuznets pronounces this as simply as if he were speaking about water or air.
Ignatov turns on his side with a quick motion, ending up on the ground. His weak hands fumble with the ties, pull, and tear toward him, opening one of the bags. There’s fine loose grain inside; it’s sharp and dirty gray, in scrappy silvery husks. He plunges a hand into the sack’s cool depths and takes out a whole handful so a bitter, mealy, and slightly dusty smell touches his nostrils. Oats.
Kuznets is looking at Ignatov in a fatherly way, as if Ignatov were a small son delighted by a new toy. “Even better, take a look around – take a look.”
Ignatov overcomes his weakness, sits next to the sacks – he can’t lie on the grain – and leans his back against a spruce trunk sticky with pitch so he can look around. The camp has been transformed during the days that have passed. The underground house is still in place, with a thin creased ribbon of smoke spiraling out. (“They heated the stove up,” he sighs with relief. “Something to be thankful for.”) And life is simmering away around him. Unfamiliar people – a hundred? more? – are scurrying around, dragging logs that display even, shiny, creamy-yellow saw cuts, waving axes, and pounding hammers. The ground is generously sprinkled with sawdust and woodchips, pieces of bark, and scraps of wood, and the air is so thick with the fragrance of pitch that you could eat it with a spoon. A dozen rank-and-file soldiers, wearing gray and carrying weapons, are right there to oversee, urge on, and shout from time to time. Foundations for three long, broad structures – future barracks – are growing in the middle of the knoll.