They return in the evening. Hardly anyone achieves the set daily target for processing logs – and women basically never do, so their rations are often cut. New people complain and the old-timers mostly keep quiet, like Ikonnikov, or joke it off, like Konstantin Arnoldovich. They want relentlessly to eat, and many hurry back into the taiga after supper for nuts, berries (cloud-berries and bilberries in summer, lingonberries and cranberries in autumn) and mushrooms (there are abundant ceps and bent milk-stools near the settlement, sometimes saffron milk caps, too, among the other types of milk cap). They have no aversion to cattails (they boil young shoots, which have a flavor somewhat reminiscent of potato, and dissolve its strong-smelling brownish-yellow pollen in water to drink); and they dig up meaty lily bulbs.
The administration doesn’t object. The guards are cheerful and spirited. They might shoot jays for supper so the soup will be richer or catch one of the settlement women in the bushes for a romp. They are down-to-earth, simple fellows. They’ll beat people for disobedience, and once they shot someone, maybe for planning an escape, maybe for something else. They’re afraid of the commandant (he’s horribly strict), but the forest offers a sense of freedom where they can relax.
They’ve installed an agitational propaganda stand at the center of the settlement and the bright-colored posters, which smell sharply of paint, keep changing. The agitation’s directed at accelerating the process of re-educating the exploiting class.
In short, life is taking shape.
The women ceded a lower bunk to Zuleikha and Yuzuf, one further from the entrance and away from the draft of the constantly opening door. Izabella’s bunk is nearby and Granny Yanipa’s, and several other Leningraders, too: the old-timers have tried to stick together whenever possible. Leila, the Georgian woman, settled on a top bunk, despite her solid age and weight. They had to nail a couple of strong beams on the frame so she can climb up to the second tier, as if on a ladder.
The efficient Zuleikha has been kept in the kitchen. As her supervisor, they’ve appointed Achkenazi, who isn’t yet old, though he’s already as withered as tree bark and stooped enough to be hunched. He’s one of the new people, with a skull that appears very fragile – it was shaved to bareness at one point and is now overgrown with sparse black shoots. He’s taciturn; his eyes are listless, scared, and half-closed; and his chin is lowered, as if he’s exposing the shaved back of his head to anyone who might want to take him by the scruff. Achkenazi was an excellent cook at one time (or so people say). He never cut but “julienned,” didn’t shuck but “peeled,” didn’t fry but “sautéed,” didn’t parboil but “blanched,” and didn’t stew but “simmered.” He calls soup broth “bouillon,” rusks “croutons,” and strips of fish are even “goujons.” He doesn’t converse with Zuleikha other than to exchange brief remarks. He most often uses gestures. She’s slightly afraid of Achkenazi since he’s one of several who’ve landed in the settlement under a commutation of sentences, meaning he should have been sitting in prison or a camp now, along with genuine thieves and murderers. Zuleikha doesn’t know his crime but she tries to fulfill his requests quickly and diligently, without annoying him, just in case. It’s nice to work with him, though, because he knows his craft and treats Zuleikha fairly, not quibbling over anything.
At first he had looked critically at his new assistant’s left hand, wondering if her injuries would impede her work. The ends of all five fingers are slightly mutilated and covered in strange short and crooked scars that look like commas. “It went into the thresher,” she explained to her new supervisor without waiting for his question. He stopped worrying about that after seeing how deftly she handled the game and fish.
The two of them are responsible for all the cooking, with Achkenazi as the “maître,” as Konstantin Arnoldovich puts it, and Zuleikha working alongside him, at his beck and call, washing, peeling, plucking, gutting, dressing, cutting, grating, scraping, and washing again. She carries lunch into the forest, too. A bucket with soup in one hand, a bucket with drinking water in the other and it’s onward, to the first work station then back, to the second station then back, to the third… By the time she’s run to everybody and fed them, it’s time to start supper. She only just makes it to her bunk in the evening, to collapse. And she thinks it’s good fortune that she’s in the kitchen.
Yuzuf grew slowly, if at all, during the winter’s starvation, which Zuleikha doesn’t like to recall. Her son’s hair was then weak and sparse, his skin pale blue, his nails as transparent and brittle as a bee’s wing, and he didn’t have a single tooth. He moved little and then only reluctantly, as if he were conserving his energy; he always observed things sleepily and moodily; and he never learned to sit up. She was grateful he stayed alive. In the summer, though, as soon as the sun showed itself and food appeared, he suddenly started making up for lost time and quickly began growing. Now he eats a lot, almost as much as an adult, and Achkenazi notices Zuleikha giving him extra food, but turns away without saying anything. Yuzuf has started smiling – showing wide, strong, blade-like teeth that have cut through – and babbling. He has learned to sit up and crawl quickly, like a cockroach. The hair on top of his head has darkened and became curly, and his arms and legs have grown out, even taking on a little baby fat. He doesn’t want to stand and walk at all, though. He will soon turn one.
He’s painfully and utterly attached to Zuleikha. She always feels his lively, clinging little hands at her hem when she’s working in the kitchen. He will crawl out from under the table, touch his mother, and crawl back. She knows he’ll look for her while she’s running her errands to the back yard or to the river for water. She hurries back, panting and sweaty from running, and he’ll already be sitting on the threshold and howling, his grubby little fists smearing plentiful tears on his face.
At first, she took him with her when she brought lunch into the taiga. It exhausted her because hauling two full pails and a hefty year-old baby turned out not to be an easy task. Nearly impossible. Not only that, but mosquitoes mercilessly devoured Yuzuf in the thicket and then he wouldn’t fall asleep for a long time, tormented by the bites covering his tender skin.
Only grudgingly did she first leave him in the kitchen for a long stretch. After feeding lunch to everyone from the settlement, she ran back to the kitchen several hours later and flung the door open, her heart pounding. Silence. She dashed in to find her son, and there he was, sleeping under the table, his face puffy, striped white from tears, and burrowed in the rag she usually used to wipe the counter. After that, she started leaving him her headscarf – it was better for him to burrow into that. She has to go around with her head uncovered.
Zuleikha has been doing many things of late that would have seemed shameful and impossible before.
She prays rarely and in haste. She became convinced during the recent starvation that Allah neither saw nor heard them, because if the Almighty had heard even one of the thousand tearful prayers that Zuleikha had dispatched to Him during that harsh winter, he would not have left her and Yuzuf bereft of His kindly care. Which means the supreme gaze doesn’t reach this out-of-the-way place. Living without the constant attention and stern supervision of an all-seeing eye was initially terrifying, as if she’d been orphaned. Then she got used to it and resigned herself. By habit, she sometimes sends hurried little prayers to heavenly heights; it’s like sending postcards from distant, savage places without any real hope they’ll reach the addressee.