Chapter Text
"Dear comrades, dear people of the Union! With a feeling of deep sorrow, that I announce to you, Comrade Valery Mikhailovich Sablin, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Supreme Party of the Soviet Union ......"
The radio, with its hoarse electric static, chopped the female announcer's mournful recitation into fragments, but not so fragmented that one couldn't hear clearly the content she was stating. A wrinkled, rough hand stroked the radio's speaker, then moved upwards, felt for the switch, and swiftly turned it off before the female announcer could utter that word.
The wrinkled hand lingered on the radio's switch for a moment; it trembled, the veins on its back slightly protruding. The hand then suddenly gripped the radio's antenna tightly, yet hesitated for a long time without the next movement.
"...Too early." An old voice said, even hoarser than the static yet far calmer. It should have had an undertone of sorrow, but when spoken aloud, it resembled nothing so much as a sigh, dissipated into the air.
The owner of the voice stood dazed before the worm-eaten wooden table for a long time. Only when her peripheral vision filled with sunlight pouring into the room did she slowly turn her neck—bones creaking—to look at the setting sun outside the window—
"You are leaving too, are you?"
Spring came late, the sky still darkened early; earlier still, there had already been one drop in temperature. Only the woman felt a vague worry: this year, she feared, might be colder than previous years.
That night, the first little wooden hut in the whole village to extinguish its light after nightfall was the woman's. This was unusual, but almost no one noticed it; everyone was immersed in sorrow. Light, shallow sobs followed the cooking smoke, drifting quietly up to the sky, finding nowhere to land, scattering without a trace when the wind blew them to another direction. The weeping sounds only gradually ceased after midnight. Scattered wooden huts flickered with lamplight, emitting warmth like night watchmen. Finally, the light too vanished, leaving only the lonely wind, the lonely darkness, the lonely wilderness stretching out within this extremely long, long night, causing one to lose all sense of time.
The sun still had to rise. It brushed aside the remnants of weeping from the previous night, letting those tears evaporate, leaving behind nearly imperceptible tiny salt grains on rooftops and the ground. The woman greeted the sunrise with a wisp of thick, black cooking smoke. She had risen very early, kneaded a lot of dough, and without having time to brush off the flour stuck in the wrinkles of her hands, picked up the straw she had saved by the stove, throwing it all into the brick oven in one go.
The woman gazed blankly at the crackling flames in the brick oven. Embers from the straw, flickering with sparks, drifted before her face, losing their warmth just as they were about to touch the tip of her nose. As usual, she baked some leb, hot and steaming. Eaten while hot, a sweet, grainy aroma would seep out from the dough. Today she baked extra, and for this, she had also risen extra early.
The Siberian morning held a touch of cold, still retaining a bit of dampness. The woman wondered: would it dampen the cloth? She leaned her head out and saw a few windows glowing with warm, yellow lamplight. Last night no one slept peacefully, and the whole village would not slumber in the dawn light as it usually did.
When taking out that familiar square cloth, the woman hesitated for a moment. Her fingertips touched a slight dampness; it couldn't be used like this. She had no choice but to take it before the unextinguished oven fire to dry it a little. Only then did she evenly place the larger portion of the leb she had baked inside it, swiftly wrapping it up tightly. She rose laboriously, lifted the leb, and went out the door, limping toward the village secretary's dwelling.
A rubythroat flying across the transparent sky emitted a shrill cry, carrying a melodious tremolo, like a red meteor, like a red teardrop, weeping as it streaked across the morning.
"It’s too much for today. You just used up all your flour... to make these?"
The village Party secretary was a middle-aged man not much younger than the woman. He looked to be over sixty (yet he was far from this number); his hair could still barely be dyed black, but years of toil made him resemble a walking piece of dried wood. Seeing the leb the woman had placed on the table with a thump sound, still steaming hot, he asked her in surprise.
“I need to leave for a while.” The woman finally spoke her first words of the day. “This should be enough for them to eat for a few days.”
The woman was referring to the orphans in the village. The secretary went silent for a moment. He untied the cloth bundle; the leb on top, freed from its constraint, tumbled onto his desk like a small mountain.
“Are you going to Moscow?”
The woman nodded: “I can afford the travel expenses.”
“That’s not what I meant,” said the secretary, picking up a leb that was about to roll off the desk. He rubbed his still puffy eyes; only then did the woman notice his eyes were also bloodshot. “There’s no need for you to go.”
The woman lowered her head and didn’t answer. She clearly disagreed, but she didn’t want to tell her answer so directly. The secretary knew this too; the woman was as stubborn as a cow, just as her strength during labor-work was also like a cow’s. Every movement was so rough, so forceful.
“People in this village always have to go. One more won’t make a difference.”
“You know what they’ll do to you. You, Mitya, you’re practically a walking piece of kompromat.” The secretary pinched the bridge of his nose. Yesterday’s thunderstruck news had nearly broken him. A night had passed, and he hadn’t expected the first one to bring him trouble would be this woman.
“I’m almost sixty years old. What can they really do to an old bone like me?” Mitya stared at the steam rising from the leb on the desk and murmured, then laughed briefly – though it wasn’t clear at whom. “If I’d still been of any use at all, I wouldn’t have been here in the first place.”
The secretary remained silent. Mitya was right. If she had been of even the slightest use in Moscow, she would never have had the chance to live safely until now in this remote Siberian village.
At first, the secretary hated her. Back then, he could have risen steadily within the NKVD, but because he made a mistake, followed the wrong person, he fell overnight from the vicinity of power. The rest of his life would be wasted in this unnoticed village. And he had to carry out a task: his superior, a cautious Latvian, had carefully instructed him to "keep a close eye on that woman." That woman, Dmitriya Timofeyevna Yazova, Glavkoverkh of the Black League, that deranged madwoman, that damned executioner, that woman who had ruined him, ruined everyone's lives.
And that woman, at that moment, was dragging her crippled leg through the cowshed, collecting dried dung, changing urine-soaked bedding. She had no interest in the newly arrived secretary, just silently threw all the newly gathered straw into the cowshed by herself. Those villagers told him not to bother with that scar-faced crippled woman, that she was mentally unsound. As they spoke, their faces showed disgust and fear, as if she were a witch emerged from deep mountains, her every move casting spells upon the good peasants around her.
The secretary was half-skeptical of their words: rumors couldn't possibly have leaked this fast, making everyone know this woman's true identity. In reality, he had never agreed with this decision, not even if it came directly from Comrade General Secretary himself. Who knew what consequences releasing a political prisoner so easily might bring – colluding with her remnants, bloody revenge by victims, and more possibilities he dared not imagine. Any one of them, should it come true, would bring unimaginable storms to the Union, which had only recently stabilized. It was too risky. And the reason behind this order was absurdly simple. He wasn't sure about the truth of the information, only knowing the directive his superior received was: "The time has come."
So it was true, he had always found Comrade General Secretary's orders troublesome. Of course, not all orders; he wasn't that bold. But clearly, the General Secretary had greater daring than him, greater daring than those older Party members. The young man's casually spoken words landed on the village secretary's head as an absolute order that must be carried out. After all, if anything went wrong, the one who would have to sign his name on the documents and accept punishment would be the secretary himself.
Life in the countryside was no easier than in Moscow. Physical exhaustion overwhelmed all mental anguish; sweat proved to be the best anesthetic. When night fell, you rubbed your aching thighs, pounded your lower back which creaked faintly as you moved, and naturally, you wouldn't remember anything hundreds of kilometers away that needed worrying about. Things like tomorrow's weather, so-and-so borrowing farm tools and not returning them, counting the days until the tractor arrived in the village – these were everything that needed attention right now. To avoid neglecting the task of monitoring Yazova amidst his busy schedule, the secretary thought of a method: help Yazova integrate among the villagers. In a sense, it was a way to mobilize the whole village to watch Yazova's every move.
This process was never easy: why should villagers, whose families had lived on this land for generations, accept a malformed outsider? She carried no Party directive, she looked ugly and crippled, her expression was gloomy as if at a funeral. No one had any reason to approach her – she was like a walking plague. Who would dare get close to an old woman radiating misfortune?
Perhaps the stalemate had lasted too long; no one could maintain any more patience for Yazova: either leave, or show sincerity. There were no other options, and no standard answer. What kind of sincerity? Yazova retorted thus to the secretary responsible for conveying the message: Did you want me to wail and weep, kneel on the ground and knock my head until it bleeds, wring out the mistakes of my whole life like wringing a towel, like a flattened earthworm vomit out even its guts for you to watch? I refuse to do so. Now please go back, I have more chores to do.
Obstinate to the core! The secretary thought furiously. His face, far more aged than his actual years, twisted together. He opened his mouth only to close it again after a long moment, able only to heave a resentful sigh before turning and leaving.
In the end, it was still Yazova herself who pried open the villagers' defenses. At that time, barely a year had passed since the War's end. Countless people still hadn't emerged from the shadow of their sons and kinsmen buried in the distant West, near the Dnieper—though they had achieved victory, retaken their homeland under the leadership of Comrade General Secretary, and settled decades of resentment and despair in a single stroke. Yet Death, using the River Styx as thread, wove a knot named "Pain" upon each person's heart. The old people of Russia had already experienced two wars, even more than two. Pain was their old friend, their relationship so familiar they could drink and make merry with it, easing that suffocating, paralyzing dull ache.