She goes into the urman alone and for long periods. That this truly is urman – gloomy and dense, with trees felled by wind – is something she understood on the very first day serving the lumber teams, her belly chilled from fear when she set off running to the felling area along a barely defined trail. She knows that prayers in the urman have no effect so she wastes no time on them, flying between trees like a shadow, not noticing the branches lashing at her face, her jaw clenching and eyes bulging from horror, and thinking all the while of her son waiting for her in the settlement, which means she must return. She remains alive; the urman doesn’t touch her. Soon she grows bolder and begins walking instead of running. She’ll notice a marten that flashes like black lightning in reddish-brown needles or a nimble yellow crossbill hurrying somewhere along a spruce branch or the giant hulk of an elk crowned by a branching bush of horns and solemnly floating between red pine trunks, and she grasped then that the urman is gracious to her, not angry about the intrusion. When she finds several bilberries by an old stump overgrown with shaggy moss, she picks them with gratitude, puts them away in the pocket of her smock for Yuzuf, and calms because the urman has accepted her.
She doesn’t know the local spirits so doesn’t know how to honor them; she just greets them silently when she enters the woods or goes down to the river. That’s all. It’s possible all sorts of forest and river imps can be found here, too, like long-fingered shurale rascals, darting around the forest’s thickets in search of travelers who’ve lost their way, or loathsome alabasty, who crawl out from under the earth at the smell of human flesh, and su-anasy, those shaggy water-dwellers known to grab people and drag them down to the riverbed. Zuleikha encounters none of them in the urman, so either spirits don’t live in these remote parts of the universe or they’re quieter and more submissive than their kin in Yulbash’s forests. One could try to feed them so they’ll let themselves be known, make an appearance, and then take you under their protection. But Zuleikha can’t even contemplate giving a piece of food – be it leftover porridge, boiled fish skin, or soft grouse gristle – to some imp instead of her son.
She’s stopped her daily commemorations of her husband, mother-in-law, and daughters. She doesn’t have the strength because she gives whatever’s left to Yuzuf and it seems silly and unwise to spend valuable minutes of her life remembering the dead. It’s better to give her time to the small living being who waits greedily all day for his mother’s affection or smile.
She works side by side for days at a time with a man who isn’t her kin. Her shoulders often bump into Achkenazi and their hands even touch – their working space in the dining hall is cramped.
Everything her mother once taught her – what was considered correct and necessary in her half-forgotten life in her husband’s house, and what seemed to constitute Zuleikha’s essence, foundation, and substance – is being taken apart and destroyed. Rules are being broken, laws are turning into their own opposites. New rules are arising and new laws are being revealed in exchange.
No abyss is opening up beneath her feet, avenging lightning isn’t flying from the heavens, and wild beasts from the urman aren’t capturing her in their sticky webs. People don’t notice those transgressions, either. They don’t see them because they have other concerns.
Zuleikha also brings dinner to the commandant’s headquarters every evening.
Inmates and guards eat supper together in the dining hall, workers at their tables, guards at their own separate table. Ignatov always eats alone in his own quarters. He rarely eats lunch, which is a meager snack of a couple of rusks or a piece of bread, but he asks that a hearty hot supper be brought to him.
After reheating leftovers of the lunch soup in a small kettle and tossing the fattiest, largest pieces of fish or the thickest porridge, from the bottom of the pot, into a large bowl, Zuleikha places all that on a wide board and carries it up the knoll from the dining hall, to a neat little house, the only one in the settlement with glass windows. The path upward is long and takes time, and Zuleikha walks along it slowly, carefully placing her feet and gathering her courage. She doesn’t know what’s happening. No, she knows. She knows what’s happening. There’s no point in hiding it from herself.
At first it seemed Ignatov didn’t notice her at all. She would enter after timidly knocking and hurriedly place the food on the table without hearing a word in response and she felt how stuffy and dense the air was there, as if it were water instead of air. After she’d ducked back out the door, she’d fly down the path, relieved and breathing deeply, understanding she’d been holding her breath in the commandant’s headquarters for some reason, as if she truly had been underwater. The commandant would stand by the window that whole time, facing outside, or lie on his bed with his eyes covered. Not only did he never look, he never once raised an eyebrow.
One time, though, he suddenly stared at her. She felt that gaze without looking up. “Is everything all right?” she asked. “Is the food salted enough?” Ignatov didn’t answer, he just looked. She slipped out and took a breath. As she walked down the path, she sensed that gaze on her neck, in the place where the hair starts to grow. She’s started wearing a headscarf to go to Ignatov’s. And he’s started looking at her. Now the air isn’t even water, it’s becoming honey. Zuleikha is in that honey, gliding, tensing all her muscles and stretching her sinews, but everything’s moving slowly, like in a dream. Try as she might, she cannot possibly move any faster; she wouldn’t be able to even if there was a fire. She walks out the door, tired, as if she’s been chopping firewood, and she needs something to drink.
She knows what’s happening because Murtaza had looked at her that way many years ago, when the youthful Zuleikha had just come into his house as his wife. Her husband’s killer is looking at her with her husband’s gaze.
If only she didn’t have to go to Ignatov’s, then she could stay out of his sight. But how could she get out of it? She couldn’t send Achkenazi to him with plates. And so she goes, slowly climbing up the path, opening the heavy door, inhaling deeply, and then ducking into the thick, viscous honey. She senses herself, all of her, gradually turning to honey. Her hands, which place the pot on the table and seem to flow along it, her feet, which stride along the floor and seem to stick to it, and her head, which wants to drive her right out of this place but softens, fusing and melting under her very, very tightly tied headscarf.
Her husband’s killer is looking at her with her husband’s gaze and she’s turning to honey. This is agonizing, unbearable, and horrendously shameful. It’s as if all her past and present shame has merged, absorbing everything she hasn’t felt shameful enough about during this mad year: the many nights spent side by side with unknown people, unknown men, in the darkness of dungeons and the crowdedness of the railroad car; her pregnancy, borne in front of others from the first months until the end; and giving birth around people. In order to somehow escape that shame and overcome the improper thoughts, Zuleikha often imagines a large black tent made of thick, crudely dressed sheepskins and resembling Bashkir yurts. The tent covers Ignatov and the commandant’s headquarters like a solid lid, and when the door curtain is drawn at the entrance, everything carnal, shameful, and ugly remains there, inside. Zuleikha leaps on a large Argamak horse, digs him sharply with her bare heels, and speeds away without looking back.