The Fierce and Beautiful World

by Andrei Platonov

  [5]

  After six days of traveling along the Kunya-Darya, Chagatayev saw Sari-Kamish. All this time he took with him the revived camel, which could walk by itself although it could not yet carry a man.

  Chagatayev sat down at the edge of the sands, at the place where they run out, where the land runs downwards into the valley leading toward the distant Ust-Urt. It was dark there, low-lying, nowhere could Chagatayev see either smoke or a nomad tent— only in the distance was the shining of a small lake. Chagatayev let the sand run through his hands—this had not changed: the wind had blown it back and forth through all the years that had gone by, and the sand had grown old from staying in this everlasting place.

  It was here that his mother had once led him by the hand, and sent him out to live alone, and now he had returned. He walked farther with the camel, into the depths of his native land. Wild bushes stood like little old men; they had not grown at all since Chagatayev was a child.

  He spent several days in roaming around the country of his childhood, trying to find his people. The camel walked independently after him, afraid to remain alone and become despondent; sometimes it looked at the man for a long time, tense and observant, ready to cry or to smile, and tormented by its lack of knowing.

  Passing the nights in wild places, eating up the last of his food, Chagatayev still did not worry about his own well-being. He was making his way into the heart of the unpopulated valley, to the very bottom of this ancient sea, in a hurry, and unquiet in his mind. Just once he lay down in the middle of his day’s walking, and hugged the ground. His heart had suddenly started to hurt, and he had lost the patience and the energy to struggle with it; he was crying for Ksenya, ashamed of his feeling, denying it. He could see her now close up in his mind and in his memory; she was smiling at him with the sorry smile of a little woman who can love only in her spirit but doesn’t want to be hugged and is afraid of kisses as of some mutilation. Vera was sitting some distance away, sewing children’s clothes, shortening her separation from her husband and already almost indifferent to him because another, more beloved and more helpless man was stirring inside her. She was waiting for him, eager to see his face and frightened of parting from him. But it comforted her to think of the long years she would kiss and hug him whenever she wanted to, until he would grow up and tell her: “You’re bothering me, Mama, and I’m tired of you!”

  Chagatayev raised his head. The camel was chewing some kind of thin, bonelike grass, a little tortoise was looking out of black, tender eyes at the man lying there. What was in its consciousness at that moment? Maybe a magical kind of curiosity about the enormous, mysterious man, maybe just the sadness of slumbering intelligence.

  “We won’t leave you alone!” Chagatayev said to the camel. He worried about whatever was real around him as if it were something sacred, and his heart was too hungry for him not to notice whatever could serve as consolation to it.

  He and the camel walked on farther, to Ust-Urt, where one old, forgotten man was living at the very foot of the mountain. The old man passed his nights in a mud hut dug into the dry slope of the hill, and he lived on little animals and on the roots of plants which could be found in crevices in the plateau. His great age and his squalor made him look unlike a human being. He had long outlived the human century, all his feelings had been satisfied, and his mind had learned and memorized the world around him with the exactness of truth that has been proved. He knew even the stars, many thousands of them, by heart and by force of habit, and now they bored him.

  His name was Sufyan. He was dressed in an old Russian soldier’s greatcoat from the times of the Khiva war, wore a visored cap, and his feet were bound with rags. When he saw Chagatayev, he walked toward him out of his earthen dwelling, and stared into space with faded eyes. A man with a camel was walking up to him. Sufyan recognized the newcomer immediately; he was secretly aggrieved that there was nothing he did not know.

  “I know you,” he told Chagatayev. “You were the little boy Nazar.”

  “But I don’t know you,” Chagatayev answered.

  “You don’t know, because you live the way you eat; what goes into you comes out again. But in me everything lingers on.”

  The old man made a wry face somewhat resembling a smile of welcome, but his face even when relaxed was like the empty skin of a dead, dried-up snake. Amazed, Chagatayev touched Sufyan’s hand and his forehead. He told the old man that he had come from far away, because of his mother and his people. Were they still on earth or had they died a long time ago?

  The old man was silent.

  “Did you meet your father somewhere?” he asked.

  “No. Did you know him?”

  “I don’t know,” Sufyan answered. “I heard that word ‘father’ once from someone going by, and he said it was something good. But I think not. If it is good, let it show up in Sari-Kamish, for this is the hellhole of the whole world, and I live here worse than any other man alive.”

  “So I have come to you,” Chagatayev said.

  The old man’s face puckered in a distrustful smile.

  “You’ll soon be going away from me. I’ll die here all alone. You’re still young, your heart beats strongly, you’ll get tired.”

  Chagatayev walked up to the old man and embraced him.

  “You’ll die here of regret, of memories. Here, the Persians said, was the hellhole of the entire earth…”

  They went into the mud hut where Sufyan lived on a litter of rushes. He gave his guest a flat cake made out of the roots of grasses which grew on the tableland. Through the opening of the entrance the shadow of the evening could be seen, running into the pit of Sari-Kamish where the world’s hellhole used to be in ancient times. Chagatayev had heard this legend in his childhood, and now he understood its full significance. In the far-distant Khorosan, beyond the Kopet-Daga mountains, surrounded by gardens and pashas, lived the clean god of happiness, fruits and women— Ormuzd, defender of agriculture and of human reproduction, lover of quiet in Iran. And to the north of Iran, beyond the slope of the mountains, lay the empty sands; they stretched in the direction of the middle of the night, where only rare grasses languished—and these broken away by the wind and blown to the dark places of Turan, in the middle of which the soul of man is forever grieving. The dark people, unable to endure despair and death of hunger, ran away to Iran. They dug themselves into the depths of the gardens, into the women’s quarters, into the ancient cities, and they hurried to eat, to look, to forget themselves, until they were destroyed and those who were spared chased back into the depths of the sands. Then they hid themselves at the end of the wilderness, in the Sari-Kamish valley, and they pined away there for a long time until need and memories of the limpid gardens of Iran raised them again to their feet…. Once more the horsemen of the black Turan appeared in Khorosan, beyond Atrek, in Astra-bad, among the properties of the hateful, fat, settled people, destroying and enjoying…. One of the old residents of Sari-Kamish was named Ariman, which was equivalent to the devil, and this poor wretch was driven to fury by his grief. He was not the most evil of them, but he was the most unhappy, and all his life he knocked his way across the mountains to Iran, to Ormuzd’s paradise, wanting to eat and to enjoy himself, until he bowed his weeping face over the barren land of Sari-Kamish and passed away.

  Sufyan took Chagatayev in for the night. The economist was tired of sleeping: days and nights were going by in vain, he had to hurry to create happiness in the hellish valley of Sari-Kamish. He could not sleep for a long time because of his impatience as he considered how time was passing. The stars were shining in the sky like the light of conscience, the camel was puffing outside, the withered grass, broken loose by the daytime wind, scraped carefully over the sand as if it were trying to move independently, using its little blades as legs.

  The next day Sufyan and Chagatayev went off together to try to find the missing people. The camel went with them, being afraid of solitude as any affectionate man fears it who is livin
g separated from his own people.

  At the very edge of Sari-Kamish, Chagatayev recognized a place he knew. Gray grass was growing here, but no higher than it had in Nazar’s childhood. It was here his mother had once told him: “Don’t be afraid, little boy, we’re going out to die,” and she had pulled him close to herself by the hand. All the people were gathered around, so that they made a crowd of perhaps a thousand men, together with women and children. The people were noisy and happy; they had decided to go to Khiva, to be killed there all together and at once… not to live any longer. The Khan of Khiva had tortured this shy, insignificant people with his power for a very long time. At first seldom, but then more and more frequently, he sent horsemen from his palace into Sari-Kamish, and each of them picked up several men from among this people, and these were either executed in Khiva or else thrown into darkness without hope of return. The Khan was looking for thieves, criminals, and godless men, but it was hard to sort these out. So he then ordered that all mysterious and obscure people be taken, so that the inhabitants of Khiva, watching their execution and their torture, should know terror, and the shivering of horror. At first the Dzhan people were afraid of Khiva, and many of them experienced nervous breakdowns in advance; they stopped worrying about themselves and their families and simply lay flat on their backs in uninterrupted weakness. Then all the people began to be afraid— they kept looking into the empty wilderness, waiting for their horsed enemies to appear. They stood stock-still with terror in any kind of breeze which blew the sand from the top of the dunes, thinking that the mounted men were tearing toward them. When one third or more of the people had been taken off to Khiva without any news of them, the rest became accustomed to waiting for their doom; they realized that life was not as dear as it had seemed in their hearts and in their hopes, and each one who stayed safe was a little bored because they had not taken him off to Khiva. But young Yakobdzhanov and his friend Oraz Babadzhan did not want to go to Khiva for no purpose, if it was possible to die in liberty. They threw themselves with knives on four of the Khan’s mounted guards and left them where they found them, stripped of their glory and their lives. The little Nazar, seeing strange, armed men, ran to his mother to get a sharp piece of iron which he had hidden away for playing, but when he had run back again it was already late: the guards had died without his sharpened iron. After this Oraz and Yakobdzhanov disappeared, riding the horses of the murdered soldiers, and the rest of their people walked to Khiva in a crowd, happy and peaceful; the people were equally ready then to destroy the Khan’s regime, or to give up their lives without regret, since to be alive seemed happy or good to none of them and to be dead not hard or painful. The melon growers walked in front, muttering their song, and Sufyan, then already an old man, was right beside them. Nazar looked at his mother; he was surprised that she was happy now although she was going to die, and all the other people walked along just as eagerly.

  Ten or fifteen days later the Sari-Kamish people could see the Khan’s towers. The road to Khiva had been hard and long, but the difficulty and the demands of stationary life also required strong hearts, so that people felt no irritation at the extra fatigue. When they got to Khiva itself, the people were surrounded by a small mounted detachment of the Khan’s men, but then the people, seeing this, began to sing and to rejoice. Everybody sang, even the most silent and awkward; Uzbeks and Kazaks danced first of all, one unhappy old Russian played a mouth organ, Nazar’s mother held up one arm as if she were getting ready for a mysterious dance, and Nazar waited full of interest for the soldiers to kill them all, and him too, immediately. Heavy-set guards were standing around the Khan’s palace, to protect the Khan from everybody. They watched with amazement the approaching crowd which marched proudly past them and was not afraid of the power of bullets or of steel, as if it were both deserving and happy. These palace guards, together with the horsemen, were supposed gradually to surround the Sari-Kamish people and drive them into underground prisons, but it is hard to punish happy people because they do not understand what evil is.

  One of the Khan’s assistants went up close to the old people from Sari-Kamish and asked them:

  “What do you want, and why do you feel so happy?”

  Someone answered him, maybe it was Sufyan or some other old man:

  “You’ve been teaching us to die for a long time, now we’re used to it, and we’ve come all together and at the same time—give us our death quickly, before we’ve lost the idea, while the people are still rejoicing!”

  The Khan’s assistant went back, and never returned. The horsemen and the foot soldiers stayed around the palace, never touching the people: they could have killed only those to whom death was frightening, and once the whole people was marching happily past them to its death, the Khan and his chief soldiers did not know what to make of this or what to do. They did nothing, and all the people who had come out of the valley walked on farther, and soon they saw the bazaar. Merchants were trading there, food was lying in piles around them, and the evening sun shining in the sky lit up green onions, melons, watermelons, grapes in baskets, yellow grain for baking bread, gray mules drowsy with tiredness and with indifference.

  Then Nazar asked his mother:

  “And when will it be death? I want it!”

  But the mother herself did not know what would happen then; she could see that everyone was still alive, and she was afraid to go back to Sari-Kamish again and once more to live on there.

  The people started to pick up various fruits at the Khiva bazaar and to eat them, having no money, and the merchants just stood there silent and did not beat these thieving people. Nazar ate slowly, he kept looking around, waiting for murder, and he managed to eat only one melon. When they had eaten, the people grew uneasy because their happiness had passed, and there was no death. Gulchatai led Nazar back into the wilderness. All the people also went away, back to the old place where they lived.

  Nazar and his mother returned to Sari-Kamish. They had rested then, on this same gray, harsh grass where Chagatayev was standing now with Sufyan, and the mother had told her son:

  “Let’s live again, we haven’t died!”

  “We’re both alive,” Nazar had agreed. “You know what, Mama, we’ll live.”

  “Lucky the one who dies inside his mother,” Gulchatai said.

  Then she looked at her son; happiness and pity filled her face.

  Now Nazar just patted the ancient grass which had stayed there unchanging up to the present time because it had really died before Nazar’s birth, but still held on, as if living, by its deep, dead roots. Sufyan understood that some kind of deep emotion was now working inside Chagatayev, but he was not interested in it: he knew that a man needs something to fill his soul, and that if there is nothing, then the heart will greedily squeeze out its own blood.

  After four days, Sufyan and Chagatayev wanted to eat so badly that they began to see dreams even while their legs still moved and their eyes looked at the usual daylight. The camel did not leave them, but moved along some distance off, where it could find a little forage in the grass along the way. Sufyan watched his flowing dreams hopelessly, while Chagatayev smiled at them sometimes, and was sometimes tormented by them. When they got to the Daryalik channel at Mangirchardar, the two walkers stopped for the night, and Sufyan mixed some water on the shore so it would be muddy, thicker, and more nourishing, and then, having drunk it, both men lay down in a cave, so the body might forget it was alive, and the night be over sooner. When he woke up in the morning, Chagatayev saw the camel dead; it was lying nearby with its eyes turned to stone, on its neck the blood stood still in a deep cut, and Sufyan was digging deep into its interior, as into a sack filled with goods, taking raw pieces out with clean blood on them and stuffing himself with them. Chagatayev too crept to the camel, a smell of warmth and satiety came from the open body, the blood was still flowing in droplets down the creases of the dead body, life was taking a long time to die. When they had eaten, Chagatayev and Sufyan bliss
fully fell asleep again, and they didn’t wake up quickly.

  Then they walked farther—into the flooded places at the estuary of the Amu-Darya. They took with them a reserve of camel meat, but Chagatayev ate it without appetite: it was hard for him to nourish himself with the sorrowful animal; it too had seemed to him a member of humanity.

  [6]

  The residents of the Sari-Kamish valley were scattered among the reeds and bushes along the estuary of the Amu-Darya River. About ten years had gone by since the Dzhan people had come here and settled in this wet-loving vegetation. At first the mosquitoes ate the people so badly that they tore the skin off their bones, but after a little time their blood became used to the mosquitoes’ poison and began to develop an antidote from which the mosquitoes became helpless and fell to the ground. Because of this the mosquitoes were now afraid of people, and would not come near them at all.

  Some of the people had settled apart from each other, in order not to suffer for others when there was nothing to eat, and in order not to have to weep when people close to them died. But some of the people lived in families; in these cases they had nothing but their love one for another, because they had neither good food, nor hope for the future, nor any other happiness to distract them, and their hearts grew so weak that they could hold only love for a wife or for a husband, which is the most helpless, poor and everlasting of all feelings.

  At first Sufyan and Chagatayev wandered for a couple of days through the gloomy reeds on the sodden ground before they saw a single grass hut. A blind man, Molla Cherkezov, lived in it, fed and taken care of by his daughter Aidim, a girl of twelve. Molla recognized Sufyan by his voice, but he had nothing to say to him.