The bear takes a step toward Yuzuf. A second. A third. Then it collapses to the ground, parting the grass on both sides in broad, green waves. The shaggy carcass continues shuddering for a time, like a huge piece of brown aspic, before going still. Yuzuf turns his puzzled face toward his mother then back toward the beast.
“There, there.” Ignatov places his hands on her fingers, which have turned to stone on the rifle butt, and unhooks them one by one. “Now that was good… good…”
He finally releases the rifle and sets it aside. Zuleikha doesn’t notice because she’s watching as Yuzuf toddles over to the dead bear, wobbling a little on his slightly crooked little legs. His first step, second, third…
A shining bear eye clouds over with a murky film and a thick gray foam flows out from behind yellowed fangs. Yuzuf walks over, loudly slaps his little hand on the bear’s bumpy forehead, grabs at its hairy ears and pulls, then turns toward his mother and jubilantly laughs, firmly standing on both feet.
A GOOD MAN
“Leave.” Ignatov slows his rapid breathing and rolls on his back; there’s a tired emptiness in his body.
“Something happen, Vanya?” Aglaya adjusts her rumpled dress and sits on the bed.
“Leave.”
She looks at him a little longer as her slender fingers run through the fasteners on her stockings (the creamy skin of a magnificent thigh flashes among dark woolen folds). Did they come undone? No, there wasn’t time. She stands. The soft soles of her feet noiselessly tread over to a tin washbasin, where a crooked sliver of mirror has taken refuge between the logs.
“You’re going crazy, Vanya,” she says, primping short red ringlets that barely cover her ears. “More and more every day.”
Without getting out of bed, Ignatov gropes on the floor for her heavy shoe, a man’s shoe with a thick sole and squared toe. He hurls it, hitting her in the back, right, as it happens, on the spot where the dark little delicacy of a beauty mark sits on a round shoulder blade that looks like marble under threadbare cotton. Aglaya cries out and steps backward.
“I told you to leave!” He hurls the other shoe.
“You really are a madman!” Aglaya hastily gathers up her shoes and scampers out the door.
Ignatov stretches an arm under the bed and pulls out a long, narrow-necked bottle. There’s still something cloudy and yellowish splashing like oil at the bottom – not much, though, no more than a finger or two.
“Where…?” he tiredly asks the ceiling, as if he’s repeating it for the tenth time. “Gorelov, you dog… where are you?”
Tangled in a balled-up blanket, rumpled pillows, and his own feet, he falls out of bed. He has trouble rising and holds the walls as he trudges to the door, which he opens wide. A mean, cold wind hits him in the face; the summer of 1938 happens to be cool. Semruk is sprawled below. In the middle are three broad, long barracks that take up almost all the settlement’s area, and a couple of dozen outbuildings that cluster around them, forming the semblance of a crooked little street. A small cook in a white apron hits a gong with a ladle, and the harsh, quavering sounds fly along the knoll, rolling further, beyond the Angara and into the taiga. Small figures hurry from every corner of Semruk to the dining hall for supper.
Standing on the front steps in just his underclothes and shaking the empty bottle, Ignatov screams into the evening settlement from the heights of the commandant’s headquarters:
“Where are you? I’ll kill you, Gorelov! Where are you?”
Gorelov is already running out from behind a corner. He’s out of breath and lugging a second bottle, pressed carefully against his chest, where something viscous and gray with an orange tinge gurgles heavily inside, bubbling from being shaken.
“There!” he says, panting with his mouth open, like a dog. He places his burden on the front steps. “It’s made from cloudberries, nice and fresh.”
Reeling, Ignatov bends, drops the empty bottle, lifts the full one, and goes inside, miraculously not stumbling on the threshold.
“My master’s dissertation, back in Munich in 1906, was devoted to ideas about the nourishment and cultivation of cereal crops. I saw my work as mostly theoretical, having strategic rather than concrete practical importance. I never imagined for a moment that I would one day cultivate that same wheat myself!” Konstantin Arnoldovich Sumlinsky shakes the brownish flatbread he’s clutching in a withered hand with broken fingernails. “Moreover, to eat bread prepared from it!”
There’s a quick, even clatter of metal spoons all around them. The exiles are eating supper, sitting at long wooden tables that their elbows and hands have buffed to a pleasant, almost homey smoothness over the years. Two hundred mouths hurriedly chew, wasting no time on unnecessary words. They’d expanded the dining hall several years ago, adding on a second log building that’s longer and broader than the first, but four hundred people still won’t fit, so Semruk’s residents now eat in two shifts, taking turns.
The guards’ table, which is spacious and spread with a clean checked tablecloth once a week, remains in its previous spot, not far from the serving area. They eat there watchfully, without hurrying, enjoying the simple but thoroughly decent flavor of the food that’s served. It’s here – at one end, not taking much space, and prepared to leap right up when summoned – that Gorelov gulps down his thin soup. None of the guards remember when and under whose permission he’d started eating with them, but they tolerate him and don’t send him away. He’s sitting there so there must be a reason.
“And you consider all this,” says Ikonnikov, waving around a worn metal spoon whose handle is a spiral twist and whose sides look like they’ve been bitten, “reasonable payment for the opportunity to, as you stated it, cultivate wheat?”
Ikonnikov gulps angrily from his bowl. He chews and removes a thin, crooked fish bone from his mouth using fingers stained with ultramarine and cobalt.
“No, not at all, nothing of the kind!” Konstantin Arnoldovich fidgets on the bench, squashing the bread in his small hand. “Now you, Ilya Petrovich, what truly important thing did you create when you were at liberty? Twenty-three busts with mustaches?”
“Twenty-four,” Izabella corrects him, neatly tilting her bowl away from herself and spooning out the last remaining brownish leaves in cloudy gray broth.
“And you would have sculpted that many more!” Konstantin Arnoldovich’s hand hammers threateningly at the table.
Gorelov rises at the guards’ table and surveys the dining hall, looking concerned about the noise.
Izabella slaps her husband’s hand affectionately.
“And here” – Sumlinsky can’t calm down so he’s speaking quickly and loudly – “you’re Raphael! Michelangelo! You’re not painting a clubhouse, it’s the Sistine Chapel. Do you yourself realize that?”
“By the way, Ilya Petrovich, my dear fellow!” Izabella is firmly and significantly squeezing her husband’s hand. “You promised to show us–”
The gong – made from a large tin plate that hangs by the dining-hall entrance – suddenly groans, swings, and quivers from a strong strike. A revolver is vigorously pounding it. People exchange glances, set their spoons aside, rise from the tables with their heads down, as usual; some pull the caps off the tops of their heads. The commandant bursts in, wearing wrinkled, mud-spotted breeches he’s somehow pulled over his drawers, and a dirty under-shirt tautly caught up in uneven suspenders. A lock of brown hair, slightly touched with white, hangs over his eyebrows and his sharp cheekbones wear a brush of uneven stubble.
“Get up!” the commandant booms. He seems to reel slightly from his own shout. “To work! You think I’m going to spoil you?”