«It's not that bad: if we die on the ground, they will not throw us into the river,» two women talked among themselves. «The river is so wide and fast. So many corpses were thrown on the road. Where did it take them?»
«You won't find them now!»
«Yes. And who's going to search?»
«Look! There are people on the hill!» one of the arrivals shouted. Everyone looked at the hillock, where the girl pointed. Indeed, there were locals, carefully looking at strangers. Their faces, stature and unprecedented clothes embroidered with patterns were very different from the guests.
A little higher, behind a long sandy shore, on a small hillock among the taiga wilderness, the Khanty village of Pitlourkurt hid.
«Maybe we'll survive. After all, people live here.»
«I know,» the boy intervened. «These are the Khanty. I read and they said at school that below the city of Tobolsk, along the river Ob, there were lands of the Khanty people, and the Nenets are closer to the Gulf of Ob.»
«Or maybe they are not Khanty or Nenets at all?» suggested his mother, restlessly holding the talkative boy. «Although you know everything, you are here for the first time.»
«No,» the boy objected. «We were not taken to the ice of the Gulf of Ob, to the tundra. It's the forest tundra, which means we are in the territory where the Khanty live.»
«Stop talking!» shouted the escort.
«Hush, look!» whispered the woman who was just talking animatedly. «I hope they don't hurt her».
A young pregnant Tatar shrank under the cries of the guards wearing the NKVD uniform and hurried to the shore, bent double.
«Look, the girl survived and got to the ground.»
«Everything mixed up in this world! Why are we punished? Why is this girl tormented?»
«I had only one cow and I'm here for it now. They say I'm a kulak…» a woman said, exhausted to the extreme. She became even thinner over the journey, and it seemed that her skeleton was covered with thin skin, which was about to tear. Her eyes shone with kind and quiet light.
«And I always had a good household,» her friend straightened in misfortune, remembering the past prosperity. «It's painful for people to look at someone else's good, and here we are destitute.»
The second woman did not get thinner during the long journey. She squinted her eyes and looked evilly at the escorts and strangers. Everything annoyed her. She seemed angry at the whole world.
The arrivals moved to the shore in a row.
«Faster!» Shouted the guards. «Hurry up!»
People silently looked around. They carried ashore the bodies of those who got frozen at the barge that night. The guards hastily distributed shovels among the settlers – to dig holes for the graves. They buried the dead, leveled the land, and drove people higher up the hill.
Autumn has already taken over. The morning was hazy, gray and inhospitable. Fog crawled low over the river, covering the dark waters of the Ob with a light haze. It went in colorless paths along dried Pitlyar litter, along small streams, stretched out like a mosquito haze along the taiga light forest, painted with cheerful colors of autumn, affectionately hiding the warm earth with gentle swan fluff.
At that moment, as if mourning the restless souls of all those who had died on the barge from hunger and cold, women cried higher on the hill. The guards were taking three men in old suede malica to the river.
Earlier that morning, when the horizon was slightly twisted with the silver threads of khutli – dawn, a kayak boat docked on the shore of Pitlourkurt. There were two reindeer herders and a man wearing the NKVD uniform. He jumped out first, followed by Iakov Matveevich Tyrlin. He helped the old man with sparse braided hair, faded like the feathers of an old haley – a Siberian gull. It was Taras Nikonovich Rusmilenko. Both were tired and tried to stretch their arms and legs.
People were brought from afar, from the villages of Vulykurt and Khashkurt that lay upstream of the river. Three days ago, shamans could not be found in their native villages where they arrested many «enemies of the people», but nevertheless they caught them in hunting huts. Now they had to catch up with the ship that was going towards Salekhard.
Seeing Iakov Matveevich, a fair-faced, fair-haired man over forty, the villagers respectfully bowed their heads, but hid their eyes. For many kilometers along the Ob, people revered this man, the Great Shaman, nicknamed «Lylan Luhpi Shepan iki» – the «Living Spirit», which had a special gift of healing serious illnesses. They could not help him in anything and therefore only bowed their heads in deference to the man who had helped them in difficult times, to his heavenly gift.
His married daughter, Vurty Matra Khashkurne, who was married in this village three years ago, ran to the boat. She had already been informed that the authorities had brought Lylan Luhpi. She rushed to the shore like a breeze, but even then she did not forget to cover her face with a beautiful burgundy shawl with long white tassels and a rim blue as a river. It was an ancient custom. She was not the one to establish it, and not the one to neglect it.
On the day of the matchmaking, each girl covered her face with the edge of her headscarf forever, hiding her from the eyes of her husband's older relatives. From that day, not a single self-respecting man: neither an old man whose hair was foamed with gray Ob waves, nor a father-in-law, nor any other of her husband's relatives – dared to look at her daughter-in-law. This has been done according to the traditions that were once established in ancient times.
Hashkurne wanted to rush into the arms of her father, but was blocked by the escort:
«Where are you rushing, you mad girl! You can't come here. Don't you see? These are enemies of the people!»
She hesitated and stopped halfway, puzzled, as if delving into something, carefully examining the escort. Knowing the calm nature of his daughter, her father prudently shouted:
«No need to cry, daughter, I'll be back soon!»
The quiet, obedient Khashkurne did not answer. She carefully covered her face with a handkerchief, as if hiding from everyone, and quietly fell silent, hidden in a crowd of curious women.
Residents of the Pitlourkurt village cried for people on whom their lives were based. One woman grabbed her husband's clothes and, unable to hold him, fell to the ground. She did not let go of the hem of his malica, and her body dragged lifelessly after him.
Vasily Ivanovich Khartaganov, local, was a young, forty-four-year-old shaman. He tried to pull the edge of his clothes from his wife's fingers, but apparently they had convulsions, so she couldn't unclench them. The guards withdrew her hands from malica with force, but nothing helped. The shouldered short man, trying to stay calm, continued to walk towards the shore after his fellow tribesmen.
Nearby villages that day were left without support, without shamans, without doctors. Since ancient times, they supported their people, served as a bright guiding star, a clear moon and a warm sunbeam in the life of this snowy land, which was not always easy.
«Damn shamans! Let him go, you fool!» Shouted the guard.
The guards were already used to the grief of others. Women cried in every village, some of them even rushed at people in uniform. Particularly active were beaten with whips. This was their task: to cleanse the society from dangerous people, the brave, wise freethinkers. To protect people from themselves, shuffle, reorganize, put them in place. It was like removing a leader from a deer herd, decapitating a motley stock and driving everyone into a snowstorm. If a wolf pack attacks, only the fastest, the strongest and, of course, the most cunning will survive.
Father of the nations Stalin was to foresee any discord in a large multinational family. Riots were eradicated without delay, using any methods. Otherwise, there could be trouble.
The leader's iron hand reached «to the very outskirts» of the Soviet Union. There was no way to hide in the taiga wilderness or in the endless tundra of nomadic reindeer herders, nor in the marshy swamps of the Ob North.
The