“I’m dead tired, for we haven’t slept at all,” Vera said; “let’s say good-bye.”
“Don’t worry,” Chagatayev answered. “I’m going away soon; let’s be together a little longer.”
They walked on farther, covering long streets, and at one spot they stopped.
“Here’s where I live,” Vera said and she pointed to a big building.
“Let’s go to your place. You can lie down and rest, and I’ll sit with you and then I’ll go.”
Vera stood still in embarrassment.
“Well, all right,” she said, and she invited him in.
She had a big room with the usual furniture, but the room looked somehow sad, with its blinds pulled down, boring, and almost empty.
Vera took off her summer raincoat and Chagatayev noticed that she was heavier than she had seemed. Then Vera began to rummage around for something to feed her guest, while Chagatayev inspected an ancient double picture hanging over this woman’s bed. It was the picture of a dream, when the earth was thought to be flat, and heaven close to it. A large man stood on the earth, punched a hole with his head in the dome of heaven and leaned out with his shoulders on the other side, into the strange infinity of that age, and looked into it. And he had looked for so long a time into that unknown, alien space that he had forgotten about the rest of his body, left below the ordinary sky. The same scene was painted in the other half of the picture, but with the rest of his body. The man’s body was worn out, he had grown thin and, probably, died, and his withered head was rolling down in that other world—on the outside surface of the sky, which looked like a tin basin—the head of a seeker after a new infinity where there really is no end and from where there is no returning to the poor, flat place, the earth.
But all this now seemed to Chagatayev hateful and uninteresting. With a frightened heart, he put his arm around Vera as she stooped down near him to get something, and he drew her to himself strongly and carefully, as if he wanted to nestle as closely to her as he could, to warm himself and to grow calm again. Vera understood him right away, and did not push him off. She straightened up, held his head below her own, and began to caress his black, stiff hair, while she looked off to one side, turning her face away. Her tears dropped on to Chagatayev’s head and dried there. Vera was crying quietly, trying not to change the expression on her face, so that she wouldn’t sob.
“You see, I’m pregnant,” she said.
“That’s all right!” Chagatayev answered, forgiving her everything, as brave as a man condemned to death.
“No!” Vera said sadly, covering her face with the end of her sleeve to dry her eyes and hide her crying. “No. I can’t do anything.”
Chagatayev released her. It was enough for him just to be near her, to hold her hand, and ask her why she was crying—from grief or from outrage.
“My husband has just died,” Vera said. “And it’s so hard, you know, to forget the dead. The child, when he’s born, will never see his father, and having only a mother will not be much for him…. Isn’t that true, not much at all?”
“Not much,” Chagatayev agreed. “Now I will be his father.”
He embraced her, and they went to sleep while it was light, and the noise of building Moscow, of drilling into its depths, of citizens quarreling as they rode along the streets—all of this died away in their ears; they held each other in their arms, and each of them heard through sleep the toneless, gentle breathing of the other.
Toward evening, not long before the end of the working day in government institutions, they registered their marriage in the nearest marriage bureau. They stood between two large bouquets of flowers; the clerk in charge of the bureau congratulated them in a short speech, suggested that they kiss each other as a pledge of lifelong fidelity, and advised them to have many children so that the revolutionary generation might be extended into times eternal. Chagatayev kissed Vera twice, and said good-bye to the clerk in a friendly way while he thought to himself that it would have been good if the clerk had kissed Vera, too, and not limited himself to his professional duties.
Every evening after that day Chagatayev went to visit Vera, and she waited for him and was glad when he arrived. First, they embraced each other, Chagatayev holding Vera very carefully, protecting the child of the dead father. Then they would go out for a walk, arm in arm, along the streets, looking attentively at the store windows as if they were preparing to buy a great deal, studying the sky, and not overlooking any of the little things which took place around them, as if things were so hard for the heart in a time of loving that it had to be diverted constantly with trifles so it would not feel its heavy work.
But Chagatayev was not yet Vera’s real husband; with tenderness and with terror she kept turning him away so as neither to offend him nor to surrender to him. It was as if she was afraid of destroying in passion her poor consolation, which had come so unexpectedly and strangely; or else she was simply being cunning, in a prudent, intelligent way, wanting to keep the heat from cooling in her husband so that she could warm herself from it for a long time and safely. But Chagatayev could not maintain his feeling for Vera on a spiritual attachment alone, and he sometimes wept over her when she was lying on the bed, appearing so helpless but smiling and unconquerable.
[2]
The summer ran on. The peat bogs around Moscow began to smolder in the heat, and in the evenings there was a smell of burning in the air mixed with the warm, steamy smell of distant collective farms and fields, as if everywhere in nature people were getting food ready for supper. Chagatayev passed his last days with Vera: he had received his work assignment; he was to go back to his birthplace, in the middle of the wilderness of Asia, where his mother was either living or long dead. Chagatayev had gone away as a small boy, fifteen years ago. His old mother, a Turkmen woman named Gulchatai, had placed a little hat on his head, put a piece of old, flat bread in his knapsack, added a biscuit baked of the ground-up roots of Asian reeds, and then put a thin reed cane in his hand so that a plant might walk along with him like his oldest friend, and ordered him to go.
“Be off, Nazar,” she said, not wanting to see him dead by her side. “If you recognize your father, don’t go near him. You’ll see bazaars and riches in Kunya-Urgench, in Tashaouz, in Khiva—but don’t you go there, keep going right on past, go far away to strangers. May your father be an unknown man.”
The little Nazar did not want to leave his mother. He told her he was used to the idea of dying and he was no longer afraid he would have little to eat. But his mother drove him away.
“No,” she said. “I’m already so weak that I can’t love you. You live by yourself now. I will forget you.”
Nazar, beside his mother, began to cry. He hugged her thin, cold leg, and stood there for a long time, clutching her weakened, familiar body; his small heart failed him then, it suddenly tired, and started to pound. The little boy sat down in the dust on the ground, and told his mother:
“I’ll forget you, too. I don’t love you either. You can’t feed a little boy, and when you die you won’t have anybody.”
He lay face down and fell asleep in the dampness of his tears and his breathing. Nazar woke up in an empty place. His mother had gone. An insignificant, strange breeze was blowing out of the wilderness, without any fragrance and without any living sound. The little boy sat there quietly for some time, he ate his mother’s piece of flat bread, looked around him, and thought some thought which now with age he had forgotten. In front of him was the land where he had been born, and where he wanted to live. That childhood country stood in the black shadow where the desert ended; there the desert drops away into a deep valley, as if preparing its own burial, and the flat hills, eroded by the dry wind, fence in the low place from the sky which covers Chagatayev’s fatherland with darkness and quiet. Only the last light of the day breaks in there and throws a sad twilight on the sparse grass growing in the pale, salty ground, as if tears had dried on it but its grief had not gone away.
/> Nazar stood on the edge of the dark ground falling away below him; behind him began the sandy desert which was happier and lighter, and among the quiet little sand dunes, even in the stillness of that vanished day of childhood, a little wind was huddling, whining and wandering, driven there from far away. The boy listened to this wind and followed it with his eyes, trying to see it and to be joined with it, but he couldn’t see anything, and then he started to yell. The wind fell away from him, and nothing answered. Night was falling in the distance; shadow had already dropped on the dark, low land which his mother had ordered him out of, and only a white smoke curled up from the nomad tents and the mud huts where the boy used to live. Nazar mistrustfully tried out his legs and his body: was he really still alive and on the earth, once no one remembered or loved him any longer? He had nothing even to think about now, as if he had been living on the strength and the desires of other people close to him, and now they no longer existed, they had driven him away… A rough wandering bush called tumbleweed was rolling along the sand which stretched away before him. The plant was dusty, tired, hardly stirring after the hard labor of its life and its movement; it had nothing at all—no relatives, no close friends, and it was always traveling along. Nazar touched it with the flat of his hand, and he told it: “I’ll go with you, I’m bored by myself. You think about me, and I’ll do the same for you. I don’t want to live with the others, they don’t want me, let them all die!” And he shook the reed which was his walking stick threateningly at someone, probably at his mother who had abandoned him.
Nazar followed the tumbleweed and walked into the darkness. He lay down in the dark and fell asleep from weakness, touching the plant with his hand, so that it would stay with him. When he woke in the morning, he was suddenly frightened that the bush was no longer there: it had gone off alone during the night. Nazar wanted to cry, but then he saw the weed balanced on the top of a nearby sand dune, and the little boy caught up with it.
His fatherland and his mother had long since disappeared—let his heart forget them while it was growing up. On that day the wandering tumbleweed led Nazar to a shepherd, and the shepherd gave the little boy something to eat and to drink, and he tied the tumbleweed to a stick so that it could rest, too. For a long time Nazar followed the shepherd and lived with him, until snow fell; then his master let the shepherd go on some errand to Chardzhoui, because the shepherd was going blind, and the shepherd set off with the little boy, and in the city he turned him over to the Soviet authorities as someone not needed by anybody.
Many years went by, but nothing was forgotten, and memories of his lost mother warmed his heart, as if childhood had never ended. Chagatayev had never known his father. A Russian soldier in the Khiva expeditionary force, Ivan Chagatayev was killed before Gulchatai had given birth to Nazar. She was then the young wife of Kochmat, by whom she had already had two children, but these children by Kochmat died while Nazar was still very young, and his mother told him about them only later, saying only that once upon a time they had been alive. Kochmat was poor, and much older than his wife. He lived by going to work on the Bey’s lands in Kunya-Urgench and in Tashaouz, working in the fields so that at least in summertime he could give his family bread. And in wintertime he slept almost all the time in his mud hut, dug into one of the foothills of the Ust-Urt. He was saving up his failing strength, and Gulchatai lay there with him under the same cover; she also slept and dreamed through the long winters in order to eat less, and their children lay between them while they were still alive. Gulchatai went out occasionally, to get some plants to eat or to work as a farm girl in Khiva. One time she couldn’t find any work in Khiva; it was winter and the rich people were drinking tea and eating mutton while the poor were waiting for the warmth to come, and for plants to start to grow. Gulchatai was huddling in a bazaar where she ate what she could find on the ground, left there by the traders, but she was ashamed to beg. It was at this Khiva bazaar that the soldier Ivan Chagatayev noticed her, and began to bring her every day a little of the soldiers’ food in a pot. Gulchatai ate the soldiers’ soup with beef in it in the evenings when the bazaar was deserted, and the soldier talked to her a little and then hugged her. It was against her woman’s conscience to reject the man after the food he had given her, so she was silent and did not protest. She had been thinking: with what could she thank the Russian, and she had nothing except what nature had given her.
“Why do you have tears in your eyes?” Vera asked Chagatayev on the day of his departure for his own country.
“I was thinking of my mother, and how she used to smile at me when I was little.”
“Well, how was that?”
Chagatayev was flustered.
“I don’t remember…. She was happy for me and she was mourning me—people don’t smile like that now. With her, tears ran down her happy face.”
His mother had told Nazar that her husband, Kochmat, had not beaten her when he learned that Nazar was not his son but the son of a Russian soldier, nor had he become bitter at her, but just withdrawn and hostile to everybody. He went off by himself a great distance to catch his breath there from his sorrow; then he had come back and he had loved Gulchatai just as he had before.
Nazar Chagatayev went for a walk with Vera for the last time. That evening a train would take him to Asia. Vera had already fixed everything for his long trip: she had darned his socks, sewed on all his buttons, she had ironed his linen herself, and she tried out and tested all his things several times, caressing them and envying them because they were going away with her husband.
On the street Vera asked Chagatayev to go with her to a friend’s house. Maybe in a half hour’s time he would stop loving her forever.
They walked into a big apartment. Vera introduced her husband to an old woman and asked her:
“What’s Ksenya doing? Is she home, or somewhere else?”
“She’s home, she’s home. She just came in,” the housekeeper said.
A black-haired girl between thirteen and fifteen was sitting in a big, disordered room. She was reading a book, and twisting the end of her braided hair in her hand.
“Mama!” the girl shouted in delight to her mother as she walked in.
“Hello, Ksenya,” Vera said. “This is my daughter,” and she introduced the girl to Chagatayev.
Chagatayev shook her strange hand, childlike and feminine; the hand was sticky and dirty, because children do not learn cleanliness right away.
Ksenya smiled. She did not look like her mother—she had the regular face of a young person, a little sad and pale from the fatigue of growing. Her eyes had different colors—one was black, the other blue—which gave her whole face a meek expression, as if Chagatayev were looking at some regrettable and delicate abnormality. Only her mouth spoiled Ksenya—it had already grown thick, the lips were full, as if they were always thirsty for drink, and it was as if some strong, destructive plant were bursting through the innocent silence of her skin.
All of them were silent in the ill-defined situation, although Ksenya had already guessed what it was all about.
“Do you live here?” Chagatayev asked the girl.
“Yes, with my papa’s mother,” Ksenya said.
“And where is your papa, is he dead?”
Vera was at one side, looking out of the window at Moscow.
Ksenya laughed.
“No, what are you saying! My papa is young, he’s living in the Far East, and he builds bridges. He has already built two.”
“Big bridges?” Chagatayev asked.
“Big ones… One of them is a suspension bridge, another With two supporting piers and with sunken caissons, they’ve disappeared forever, they’re lost!” Ksenya said happily. “I’ve got photographs of it from the newspaper.”
“And does your papa love you?”
“No, he loves some strangers, he doesn’t want to love Mama and me.”
They talked some more: Chagatayev felt a confused regret inside his heart; he sat there with
the light, sad feeling of being asleep, or traveling somewhere. Forgetting ordinary life, he took Ksenya’s hand in his, and held it, not letting go.
Ksenya sat there in terror and amazement, her different-colored eyes looked out poignantly, like two people who are very close but do not know each other. Her mother, Vera, stood apart, quietly smiling at her daughter and her husband.
“Isn’t it time for you to go to the station?” she asked.
“No, I’m not going today,” Chagatayev said. He felt an attachment to Ksenya, a feeling of human kinship and of anxiety about what would be best for her. He wanted to be a protecting strength for her, a father, and an eternal memory in her heart.
Excusing himself, Chagatayev went out for a half hour, bought various things at Mostorg, and brought them back as presents for Ksenya. If he hadn’t done this, he would have regretted it for a long time.
Ksenya was delighted by the presents, but not her mother.
“Ksenya has only two dresses, and her last shoes have gone to pieces,” Vera said. “For her father doesn’t send us a thing, and I have only just started to work…. Why did you buy all this nonsense? What need does a girl have for expensive perfume, or a suede bag, or some kind of gay-colored bedspread?”
“Now, Mama, never mind, let it go!” Ksenya said. “They’ll give me a dress for free at the children’s theater, I’m an activist there, and the Young Pioneers will be giving out mountain-climbing boots soon, so I won’t need shoes. Let me keep the bag and the bedspread.”
“It all makes no sense,” Vera complained. “And he needs the money himself, he has a long way to go.”
“I’ve got enough,” Chagatayev said. He took out four hundred rubles more, and left them for Ksenya’s board.
The girl walked up to him. She thanked Chagatayev, holding her hand out to him, and she said:
“I’ll soon be able to give you presents. I’ll be rich soon!”
Chagatayev kissed her, and said good-bye.
The Fierce and Beautiful World Page 3