It’s already dark when Konstantin Arnoldovich comes to the commandant’s headquarters; the hushed settlement is sleeping after supper. He scratches meekly at the door for a long time and then, after not receiving an answer, he takes small, shuffling steps around the building, and finally peers in a window. There he encounters the commandant’s stern face, with the bold reddish spark of a hand-rolled cigarette in his teeth. Ignatov’s sitting on the windowsill, smoking.
“Well, Sumlinsky?”
“Comrade commandant,” says Konstantin Arnoldovich, pronouncing the vowels with special care, letting them fully develop in his mouth, so they come out long and smooth. “Comrade commandant, we have a matter to take up with you.”
“Well?”
Konstantin Arnoldovich steals closer and wraps his soiled, completely buttonless little jacket around his chest.
“Our settlement doesn’t have a name.”
“Doesn’t have a what?” Ignatov doesn’t immediately understand.
“A name. A title, if you like. There’s a settlement but there’s no title. We’ve living in a populated spot that’s unnamed and unplotted on the map. Maybe it’ll cease to exist tomorrow but today – today! – it exists. And we exist in it, too. And we want our home to have a name.”
“And you don’t want plumbing and hot water?”
“No, we don’t want plumbing.” Konstantin Arnoldovich sighs, serious. “A name requires no material expenditures. The settlement will be given a name sooner or later. And so we… hmm… as its very first residents, would like to exercise the right to name it.”
Ignatov inhales. The orange cuff on the tip of his hand-rolled cigarette flares and Sumlinsky’s sharp cheekbones catch fire for a second and then dissolve back into the darkness so only his eyes glisten. He lost his pince-nez in the forest back in the autumn and has had to get by without; his eyes have seemed overly piercing, even impertinent, since they’ve been deprived of their customary gold frame.
“So what do you want to call… all of this?”
Konstantin Arnoldovich grins, flustered, and nods his head for some reason.
He finally utters it, solemnly: “Vila.”
“What?”
“It’s an acronym,” says Sumlinsky, whose speech suddenly becomes hurried. “You see, it’s an abbreviation formed by joining initial letters. We took four names: Volf, Ivan, Lukka, and Avdei. It works out V, I, L, A, Vila. It’s all very simple!”
Ignatov knows three of them but Ivan? There’s no Ivan at all among the old-timers, Ignatov remembers that for sure. He releases smoke into the darkness, where Konstantin Arnoldovich’s anxious breathing is audible.
“The four people who saved our lives that winter – it’s worth naming the settlement after them, don’t you think?”
A hefty fish splashes loudly somewhere on the Angara.
“There’s one other thing…” Konstantin Arnoldovich takes a step toward the window, pressing his intertwined hands to his chest. “They don’t know we want to, hmm, immortalize them. Neither Volf Karlovich nor Avdei and Lukka. But now you know.”
How did the exiles find out his name is Ivan? Nobody calls him anything but “comrade commandant,” only the overstepping Gorelov sometimes says “comrade Ignatov.” And what is this? A labor settlement carrying his name? Damn it all to hell… Ignatov crushes the cigarette butt against a flat stone on the windowsill and flings it into the darkness.
“No,” he says.
“We’re proposing a completely different official explanation!” Konstantin Arnoldovich bobs up toward the window and his wizened little paws catch at the frame. “We understand. Don’t think we don’t. We’ll state that we’re naming the settlement in honor of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: Vi-la!”
He giggles, satisfied, rubbing his hands together.
“No,” repeats Ignatov. “No villas and mansions here.”
“Excellent!” For some reason, Sumlinsky, the “remainder,” is as cheerful as if he’s received approval. “We thought as much, that you wouldn’t agree! So we prepared a reserve option – hmm, something more clandestine.”
“Go get some sleep, Sumlinsky,” says Ignatov, taking hold of the open window.
“Sem’ Ruk, named after your seven hands!” Konstantin Arnoldovich blurts into the closing window. “Because there are seven hands among the four of you. Let’s name the settlement that way – nobody will ever guess it, you hear me? And the name resonates. It’s possibly even unique.”
The window slams with a crash. Through a layer of glass, a skinny figure with drooping shoulders takes small steps down the path to the settlement.
It was as if Sumlinsky had known something in advance. A couple of weeks later, during another round of visits to his holdings, Kuznets says to Ignatov in passing:
“We want to give your settlement a name, commandant. You’ll now be Angara Twelve. That’s what we’ll put on the map.”
“It already has a name,” objects Ignatov, surprising even himself. “There wasn’t anything to do in the underground house during the winter and people thought it up.”
“Well? Why’d you keep quiet?”
“Who was I to tell? And you didn’t ask.”
“So how are you now to be named and extolled?” Kuznets’s gaze is attentive and persistent.
“Sem’ Ruk,” is Ignatov’s delayed response.
“Tricky. Did a priest fit you out with that name by any chance?”
“What?”
“You’re a nut! That name reeks of religious prejudice, that’s what. Of six-winged seraphs and the like.”
“You’re a fool, Kuznets, even if you’re my chief.” They’d recently switched to using first names, but when they argued they lashed each other with surnames, as before. “My contingent is entirely Tatars and Mordvins and Chuvash who’ve likely gone their whole lives without ever seeing a priest, not to mention a seraph.”
“To hell with you.” Kuznets waves his arm. “Sem’ Ruk it is!”
And so the name Konstantin Arnoldovich thought up survives, and zips through all the paperwork and the chain of command. Among the complete and extremely long list of newly formed populated spots – by that time there are already a good hundred in the Eastern Siberian territory – their name falls to the chairman of the Irkutsk Oblast Committee of the Party for approval. An empty-headed woman in the typing pool who’s hugely upset that she hadn’t been able to buy more longed-for lisle stockings at three rubles a pair from a greedy profiteer the day before, makes a mistake in the name, writing it all as one word and making it look like yet another bureaucratic neologism. The lists are approved. The typesetter at the printing house doesn’t see the mistake and so a no less sonorous, albeit slightly altered name for the settlement – Semruk, for “Sevenhands” – is entered into all the directories and maps.
It happens the first time in late June. Zuleikha doesn’t realize anything at the time. She’s just carried two buckets full of water into the kitchen and is dragging them to the worktable where Achkenazi is bent over like a fishhook and already practicing his magic on pearlescent fish fanned out on the table.
Yuzuf, who’s been crouching by the door waiting for his mother, darts toward her like a wild animal, but then suddenly collapses on the floor and lies motionless, as if he’s been shot. Zuleikha rushes over, grabs him, and shakes him. His face is white, his lips are gray-blue with an inky tinge, and he’s not breathing. “To the infirmary, fast!” says Achkenazi. Zuleikha picks up his motionless little body, which has cooled in an instant, and flies off.