Leibe has been examining some old man whose skin has begun peeling off in layers, like pine bark, from exhaustion. Zuleikha places her son on the table right between the old man and the doctor, catches hold of Leibe and howls, unable to explain anything. He examines the little boy, listens, frowns, and gives him a shot of some sort of sharp-smelling medicine from a glass syringe as long and thin as a finger.
“It’s just as well that they brought all this last month,” he says, “both the medicines and the syringes.”
Yuzuf comes to a minute later, sleepy, and his little eyes blink. Zuleikha’s still howling; she can’t calm down at all.
“All right, that’s enough, now…” Leibe catches his breath, unbuttons his collar, and drinks half a mug of water. “And if anything happens again, come straight to me.”
Zuleikha carries Yuzuf back to the kitchen. As she walks through the settlement, everything rocks around her, and she’s clutching her son to herself; she just can’t hug him enough. She starts cleaning fish and her eyes are constantly drawn under the table, where sleepy Yuzuf has crawled. She crouches down every minute to check that everything’s all right, that he hasn’t fallen again. He’s curled into a ball and gone to sleep. Zuleikha leans over him and listens. Is he breathing? “I’d let you go home today, Zuleikha, but the administration might not like that,” Achkenazi tells her, as if apologizing. That’s the longest sentence he’s ever said to her.
The problem repeats several weeks later, this time in the evening, as Zuleikha is putting Yuzuf to bed. She again brings him to the doctor, who gives another injection.
She stops sleeping at night. How can you fall asleep if that can happen at night, too? She lies alongside her son, listening to his breathing, guarding him. Her periods away from Yuzuf, when she takes lunch to the workers at the logging sites, have become torture. Zuleikha runs along the path with full buckets, worrying, wondering if it’s happening again. Or will in a minute? Or two? Achkenazi doesn’t look up from the cutting board so he wouldn’t notice. And Yuzuf’s constantly resting under the table. She comes back in a lather every time, her heart exploding from the running, and then she throws herself under the table. Is he alive? She’s begun handling her kitchen tasks poorly. She’s afraid Achkenazi will complain and they’ll banish her from the kitchen, for general assignment work. But Achkenazi turns out to be a person with heart and puts up with it.
It happens again one night in August. Zuleikha’s open eyes are gazing into the darkness, and she’s listening to Yuzuf’s breathing. It’s as if she’s rocking on waves: inhale-exhale, inhale-exhale, up-down, up-down. The exhaustion of the past weeks is dragging her by the feet, down into a heavy, heavy sleep. It feels sweet and cozy to close her eyes for a moment and give up resistance. The water’s rocking and persuading her and then Ignatov’s face is suddenly alongside her, calm and affectionate. Give me your hand, he says. Come on, you’ll drown in the honey. Lo and behold, everything around her is yellow, as if it’s made of gold. She sticks out the tip of her tongue and it truly is honey. It wakes her up. Her mouth is thick with saliva and she can taste sweetness. The sounds – her neighbors’ breathing and snoring and nocturnal stirrings – are all far away, not with her. It’s quiet and serene next to her.
Yuzuf isn’t breathing.
She shakes him. No, he’s not breathing. Barefoot, with her braids undone, she rushes him to the infirmary. The moon in the sky is as round as a coin, the wind is whipping off the Angara, and there are pine cones, sticks, rocks, and soil underfoot, but she doesn’t notice anything. She pounds on the front window first, almost knocking out the newly installed glass, but there’s nobody there. After coming to her senses, she runs around to the back of the building, to the living quarters.
Disheveled from sleep, Leibe runs to her in just his drawers, which are threadbare and almost transparent. He lights the kerosene lamp and puts the boy on his own bed. Yuzuf’s hands, forehead, and the tip of his nose are already ice cold. After the injection, he begins breathing, groaning, and crying. He calms in his mother’s arms then falls back to sleep. And Zuleikha’s own arms are shuddering hard, not in a good way; she nearly drops the child.
“Lay your son here,” Leibe whispers to her. “And calm down.”
She places Yuzuf on the doctor’s pillow, a shaggy fur hat turned inside out. Her legs buckle, not supporting her. She positions herself so her knees are on the freshly planed floorboards, her torso’s on the bed, and her face is by her son’s warmed-up little fingers.
“It worked out fine this time, too,” says Leibe, extending a mug of water to her. “It’s good you noticed. If it had been another few minutes…”
Zuleikha grabs the doctor’s wrinkled hand, sprinkled with brown spots, and stretches to reach it with her lips. Water splashes from the mug to the floor.
“Stop that immediately!” He angrily tears his hand away. “You should take a drink!”
She takes the mug. Her teeth chatter loudly against the tin; she doesn’t want to wake Yuzuf so she sets the water aside to drink more later.
“Doctor,” whispers Zuleikha, without rising from her knees (she surprises herself: are these her lips speaking?), “let us live in the infirmary for a while, me and Yuzuf. I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to him. Don’t send us away, let us stay. Save him. And I’ll do everything for you. I’ll launder, tidy up, and pick berries. And I can help with patients if you need. Just so Yuzuf will be here at night, closer to you.”
“Live here as long as you want,” shrugs the doctor. “If the commandant’s not against it.”
A half-hour later, Zuleikha has dragged her simple belongings to the infirmary and Yuzuf hasn’t even had a chance to wake up – he’s slept calmly through the whole night, all the way until morning, on the doctor’s furry pillow.
Leibe goes to the commandant himself rather than waiting for questions. “Here’s how it is,” he reports. “The patient requires care in the infirmary. This situation will not affect Zuleikha Valieva’s capacity for labor in any way.” Ignatov looks at him sullenly and unkindly, but doesn’t object.
Zuleikha and Yuzuf are allotted a bunk walled off by a curtain. After the stuffiness of the communal barracks, the strong-smelling air at the infirmary – with carbolic acid, alcohol, juniper, lingonberry leaves, St. John’s wort, and Labrador tea – seems clean and fresh. In the mornings, Zuleikha runs off to the dining hall with Yuzuf under her arm. In the evenings, she hurries back and cleans the infirmary rather than taking her usual outings into the forest for bent milk-stool mushrooms or cattails. She washes the floors, walls, tables, benches, windows, and bunks (even those that are empty), battling unsanitary conditions. Then she makes her way into the residential half, where she scrubs the floorboards and the large stove made of stones, and scours the front steps. She washes all the doctor’s clothes in the Angara. She learns to boil bandages and basic medical instruments in a kettle.
“Don’t strain yourself, I beg of you!” Leibe tells her, raising his long withered hands toward the low ceiling. “You should get some sleep!”
They take turns watching over Yuzuf’s bedside, half the night each. Leibe maintains that he’s already sleeping an elderly person’s short hours, making nightwatch duty easy for him. If he had been anyone else, Zuleikha would not have been able to go to sleep, but she trusts the doctor. She goes to bed and drops into the blackness of sleep, without thoughts and without dreams.