Gorelov darts into the water without taking off his shoes. He catches the boat’s pointy bow and pulls it to shore. He hurriedly says something, his shaggy, dog-like head nodding slightly and his spine bending to one side, then the other. He’s trying to win favor. The chief’s not listening. He jumps ashore, tosses the line to Gorelov, and strides off to the commandant’s headquarters.
Ignatov sits at the table and places a tough little fish with white streaks of salt on a half-crisped, crumbling rusk. He doesn’t have a chance to take a bite before Kuznets abruptly flings the door wide open without knocking. He enters quickly, as if he’s at home. He looks at Ignatov, frozen with the rusk in his hand, and plunks a newspaper folded into quarters on the table in front of him. “Read,” he says, “and I’ll take a look around here on my own – don’t worry about me.” And out he goes.
The newspaper is worn along the edges, badly yellowed, and coming apart at the folds. Ignatov takes it as carefully as if it were a snake and unfolds it. There’s a violet stamp of the Krasnoyarsk Municipal Library in the upper right-hand corner and two ragged holes in the side, as if the newspaper had been torn out of a binder. Ignatov’s heart thumps low and cold in his chest. No, Kuznets hadn’t bluffed about the library.
The front-page feature tells of a speech by Kalinin about heroes of industrialization. Further on, there’s a group letter from female weavers in Paris that calls on female workers in the Soviet Union to envelop the Red Army’s fighters with special love and care, as well as a plea from unemployed people in Germany for the ‘wreckers’ who sabotaged socialist construction in Soviet Siberia to face the firing squad. Ignatov pages through rough, brittle paper that smells of sweetish dust. “Achieve the Five-Year Plan in Four Years!” “Let’s Produce More Steel!” “Exemplary Tending of Sugar Beets!” In the feuilletons are pieces from worker correspondents and worker-peasant correspondents, a poem about a tram…
And then suddenly, huge letters hurry, slanting, across the center spread: “They Sheltered the Hydra.” Unknown and vaguely familiar faces flash from an array of photographs. (Maybe we met in the hallways?) And there’s Bakiev, his face stern and solemn. He’s taken off his glasses so his gaze is a little childlike and dreamy; the Order of the Red Banner is silvery on his chest. This photograph of Bakiev was taken for his Party membership card. The article is long and detailed, with the small type spilling over the double spread. There’s a drawing in the corner of someone’s powerful hand squeezing the neck of an old woman whose insane eyes are bugging out and who has a good dozen snakes instead of hair. Her neck is skinny and flabby, like it’ll snap any minute now, and the snakes are as mean as demons, baring their fangs and attempting to bite the hand that’s caught them.
Ignatov rubs his throat, which is suddenly ticklish and starting to itch.
And so Bakiev sent him on this trip specially. Yes, that’s obvious now. What did he say back then? “It’s for you, you damned fool…” something like that? He wanted to save him, that was it, pull him out of danger, send him far, far away. And Bakiev had been acting strangely around then, downcast, because he knew. He knew but hadn’t fled, sitting in his office, sorting papers, and waiting.
Ignatov takes his head in his hands. Mishka, Mishka… Where are you now?
The half-strangled hydra gawks from the table.
The freshly planed door swings open and Kuznets’s broad smile is in the opening.
“Well, how about that, comrade commandant,” he says. “Nice work! Your dining hall’s a palace. The infirmary, too – you could put everyone in there at once. You’re straightening out these exploiters’ lives. It’s about time to talk about regular workdays now. They’ll need to labor doubly hard to earn a dining hall like that.”
Ignatov smoothes the newspaper with his hand and throws a couple of fish on it.
“Sit down, chief.”
“I thought you’d never offer,” smirks Kuznets. He sits, plunges his hand into the voluminous map case on his hip, and pulls out a long, narrow, transparent bottle.
“They still haven’t brought glasses,” says Ignatov, trying to cut the little fish bodies. They’re as tough as wood on the newspaper. “We’ll have to swig from the bottle.”
Kuznets waves a hand – well, of course! – and uncorks the bottle, inhaling the smell from its thin neck with delight. Ignatov saws at the dense fish fibers and bones using a crooked knife made from a former one-handed saw. It’s right on the scared hydra’s face and the blade keeps clunking at the newspaper, cutting the hydra, slashing and hacking it to shreds.
In June of 1931, the population of the still-unnamed settlement totals one hundred and fifty-six inmates, including the old-timers who survived the first winter. Plus ten guards and the commandant.
They live in three barracks that seem unbelievably spacious and bright after the close quarters in the underground house. Walls of long, even logs have been planed and the doors are hanging on hinges. There’s a promise of iron stoves from the city. Each person has their own – very own! – bunk, though people still line them with boughs and cover themselves with clothing. Women and children have been settled in one building; men are in the other two. The guards share a small log house that’s been added on, kitty-corner, to one of the barracks. The commandant, as chiefs should, lives separately, in the commandant’s headquarters.
They eat in the dining hall (or “the restaurant,” as Konstantin Arnoldovich likes to call it). Food is still cooked over a fire but they’re already savoring taking meals in a civilized manner, sitting under a roof in even rows at festive yellow tables smelling of pine pitch. They eat fish soup (they’ve established a three-person fishing artel, working under Lukka) and game less frequently (Ignatov sometimes allows the guards into the taiga to stretch their legs), and even more rarely they get porridge, rusks, and macaroni brought from the city. The standard serving is small, as if it were a child’s portion, but they have food! Sometimes they come into some sugar and once there were even splendid, nearly rock-hard, plain crackers. They are fed twice a day. Lunch is brought in buckets to the work site in the forest, and they eat supper in the dining hall. They still eat with spoons made from shells. They have dishes and mugs now, but the spoons were forgotten in an oversight. Happiness isn’t about spoons, though!
They’ve built a large, ten-bed infirmary from logs. In the front there’s a waiting area and bunks for the patients (one-tier, at Leibe’s insistence), and in the back there’s a cubbyhole for staff. This is where Leibe has taken up residence. He gave Kuznets a list of two hundred items – medications and instruments – for purchase. Kuznets smirked and on his next visit he brought a dilapidated, flat traveling bag with the red cross half worn off and something clanking and rolling around at the bottom. Maybe not two hundred items but even so.
Under an agreement concluded between the Joint State Political Administration and the government agency overseeing the timber industry, the settlement has been handed over to the agency for timber work. Each morning, to the guards’ brisk shouts, the inmates crawl out for the morning roll call then go into the taiga.
The detested one-handed saws have been relegated to the past and they now work using two-handed saws and axes in teams of three. Two fell the tree and the third lops off the small branches and collects them in bundles; they saw the trunk into lengths (six meters or two meters long, for different construction purposes), and drag them to a sled, to which three workers are harnessed. They bring the sled to the timber landing on the shore, not far from the settlement, where the wood is stacked and tied together.