“I’M GOING TO HANG myself,” Roman said. Every night there was another mandatory meeting. Everyone was at their wits’ end. The Lazars had requested and received a steel plow. To accommodate Zhuk’s demands, they turned over ten acres of their land to cultivate wheat and some sugar beets. They used their horses, their plows, and all available manpower to prepare the land and plant in April.
But every morning, a member of the Communist brigade arrived at the farm—either an old man or a rude Ukrainian youth hungry for power who decided to become a Komsomol, a young Communist—and walked around the fields and the stables. He took notes and reported on the Lazars’ daily progress. Roman got so tired of it that he was about to send Ostap to puncture the tires on the Soviet trucks, except someone had beaten him to it. Efros took fifteen people into custody before the saboteur came forward and confessed. It turned out to be a middle-aged beet farmer named Andreyus, whose family was arrested two weeks prior and put on trains out of Ukraine. When they arrested him, he threw a bottle at Efros’s head and was promptly taken out to the square and shot in full view of everyone. Andreyus’s sabotage provided a brief respite—the tires had been slashed, and for a few days until the trucks were fitted with new tires there was relative peace on the farm. It didn’t last.
Despite Roman’s pledge to work together, Soviet apparatchiks, be they AgitProp activists or political instructors, could not walk the village roads alone or unarmed. They were constantly being dragged into the bushes and beaten. And every time there was an incident, Efros drove out to the farm reinforced with a half-dozen chekists to interrogate Roman.
In the middle of April all nineteen Lazars and Kovalenkos, even the pregnant and furious Yana, were dragged to an especially galling meeting.
Zhuk wanted to discuss ways to boost productivity. Not of the farmers, but of the chickens, cows, and horses. The mandatory meeting was poorly attended. Barely fifty fed-up people showed up, one-third of them Lazars. There were more Bolsheviks at this meeting than villagers. The Lazars came because they had been compelled to.
“We are going to solve the chicken problem once and for all,” said Zhuk. “Please meet Comrade Potapov, who is here from Moscow. He is an expert on animal husbandry, and he is going to provide helpful guidance and suggestions, especially regarding horses.”
“Excuse me for the interruption, Comrade Potapov,” Roman said, standing up, even though both Cici and Isabelle were pulling on him to sit the hell down. “What do you mean regarding horses? Comrade Zhuk himself told me some months back that horses were a Tsarist remnant. Horses were obsolete, he said, they could not help us on the farm. We had tractors and threshers; we no longer needed horses. Why do we have to make more productive an animal we don’t need?”
“Sit down, Comrade Lazar,” Potapov said in a shrill, reedy voice. “Because this month there is a new directive from Moscow.”
“This month there is a new directive from Moscow,” mimicked Isabelle, in an impression so spot-on it bordered on professional. She yanked on her brother. “Sit down, Comrade Lazar,” she said in Potapov’s voice.
“Tonight,” Potapov said, his pointed nose quivering above his thin lips, “we resolve to adopt a new resolution, not just for Ispas but for all villages in the region. From this moment forward, until further notice, every horse farmer, like you, Comrade Lazar, will strive, no, not strive—achieve!—yes, achieve, 100 percent pregnancy rate of all women horses!”
When the fifty people in the hall remained speechless, Potapov pressed on. “Is that clear? Is anything I said not clear?”
“Is anything I said not clear?” repeated Isabelle.
“Um, yes, Comrade Potapov,” said Roman. “A number of things are not clear.” Both Isabelle and Cici pinched him, Isabelle continuing to whisper in Potapov’s unpleasant tenor, “One hundred percent pregnancy rate of all women horses!” Cici nearly laughed out loud.
Roman pushed away from his wife and sister, and walked out into the aisle where he could speak undisturbed by them.
“Did you say you are the animal breeding expert from Moscow?” Roman said. “Please instruct us on how we achieve such extraordinary results.”
Ostap stood up—Ostap, who never spoke at these meetings! Even Yana was shocked; especially Yana. “Excuse me,” Ostap said, his expression one of disbelief at his own audacity, “but is this what they call female horses in Moscow, women horses? Because here in Ukraine we call them mares.”
“Whatever,” said Potapov.
“And the mares are not pregnant,” Ostap continued, his black eyes blazing with hatred, his voice low with contempt, “the mares are with foal.”
“Fine—with foal.” Potapov pointed at the Lazar family sitting together with Mirik and Petka. “Comrade Zhuk told me about you Lazars,” Potapov said. Petka immediately got up and moved to a different seat. Mirik, too, slid his chair away—only a few centimeters, but still! He moved away, lest he be lumped in with those troublemaker Lazars, Isabelle thought. Unbelievable. Troublemakers like his own wife.
“We believe,” Potapov said, “you are using your horses as a means of sabotage against the Soviet state.”
“And how are we accomplishing this?” asked Roman, standing next to his brother.
“By having your female horses give birth only once a year!”
“The gestation period for a mare is eleven months,” Roman said. “I do not create a horse, Comrade Potapov, I merely breed it.”
“You must do better! Why are your horses, which you are supposedly so famous for, giving birth to only one calf each?” Potapov said. “Why is their pregnancy so long? Nearly a year? That is unacceptable! Couldn’t you induce labor earlier and mate them again? Or you could see if there are ways to stimulate the horse to carry two calves instead of one? Now that would be very productive!”
The Lazars looked straight ahead and not at each other, lest they be arrested for undermining the Soviet Union with their visible disdain. You could not respect what you held in contempt, Christ was right about that, Isabelle thought, willing Roman to stay quiet. Poor Stan and Vitaly, Oleg Tretyak, the evicted Koval, and the recent Andreyus were witnesses and victims to Stalin’s slavish devotion to the rule by terror. All pretense about the rule of law was about to be abandoned.
Yana struggled to her feet, holding on to the back of the chair. “I need to leave this meeting,” she said. “As you can see, I’m a pregnant female about to give birth. But the experts from Moscow may wish to spend some time around a stable during foaling season before they start making their recommendations.” Yana nodded at Roman, at Ostap, and waddled out. Isabelle thought Yana was exaggerating the slowness of her gait for the benefit of Potapov. Just hours ago she had been hopping on and off a horse with no help and no effort.
Potapov paid barely any attention to Yana’s words or her departure. “We need to solve the horse problem!” he said to the men. “The horses must produce more than one calf.”
“You mean foal?” said Roman.
“Whatever. And cows too—more than one foal.”
“You mean calf,” said Ostap.
“Foal, calf, whatever fucking thing!” said Potapov. “But also, it’s imperative that chickens make more than one egg a day.”
“Lay more than one egg a day?” said Roman.
“More than one egg a day?” said Ostap.
“You mean to tell me with all your great expertise and technique, you have not found a way to make your farm animals more productive, comrade?” said Potapov. “This is why Comrade Zhuk and I believe you are actively sabotaging the Soviet efforts with your antiquated methods of animal reproduction!”
“Could the expert from Moscow please instruct us how to achieve these results?” Roman said. “For the entirety of human stewardship over animals, chickens have laid one egg a day, mares foaled once a year, and cows calved once a year.”
“The capitalist infiltration is everywhere,” Potapov said. “Even in animals. The Motherland reveres horses. We need more horses, more cows, more eggs. We must solve the horse problem, the chicken problem, and the cow problem. To help the Motherland, we must!”
“So do we revere the horses or are they an imperial artifact?” Roman said. “I can never be sure.”
“Horses are the future!” said Potapov.
Roman stared hard at Zhuk. “Tractors and threshers are no longer the future?”
“Comrade Lazar,” Zhuk said, standing next to Potapov, “don’t tell us you are not partly responsible for the terrible horse attrition in Ukraine. In 1927, there were 130,000 horses counted in your region. Last year, that number was only 40,000. I dread to think what the number will be this year—15,000? Lower? Why is this happening if it’s not intentional disruption?”
“Are you asking me about the socio-political situation in Ukraine, Comrade Zhuk?” said Roman. “All I know is that last year I had thirty horses, and this year, I have nineteen.”
“You see!” cried Zhuk and Potapov in unison.
“I should have had thirty-eight horses this year,” Roman continued. “But many of my horses died over the winter.”
“Because you killed them, Comrade Lazar!”
“Because they were starving, Comrade Potapov,” Roman said. “Because there wasn’t enough to eat, and a weakened mare is not going to let a stallion near her when she knows she cannot carry a foal.”
“You must force him!” Potapov cried.
“I hope this is one of the questions before us on the agenda tonight,” Roman said. “What do we do about the problem of the vital role that men horses—or, as we like to call them on the farm, stallions—play in making pregnant our revered women horses? The stallions are starving, you see, comrade, and when the animal is hungry, it’s simply not going be in as amorous a mood. So how do we, in a Communist utopia, force a six-hundred-kilo male horse to mount an unwilling, hungry, infertile woman horse and make her pregnant so that she can have two or three calf babies after about five or six months of pregnancy? We must figure this out,” Roman said, “so I can do more for my part in the Revolution. But since it’s after midnight, and we all must be up at sunrise to tend our farms, perhaps we can continue discussing this fascinating problem on the morrow?”
The discussion did not continue on the morrow. That night Oleg Potapov was beaten to death. He’d had vodka by himself at the village center and was drunkenly meandering down the street toward his boarding house when he was dragged into a side alley and killed with a blunt object that cracked his skull. The only reason Roman was not summarily executed was because he had an alibi. He had been taken into custody right after his performance at the meeting and kept overnight in the village prison, which had been constructed by the OGPU in February in the back of the Koval house they had appropriated. Before then, Ispas didn’t have a need for a prison.