Occasionally someone laughed inside the tent in a silly voice. Chagatayev lifted the lattice hanging from the pole and walked into the dwelling. It was quiet and stifling in the tent, and nothing could be seen. Chagatayev knelt down and crawled around, trying to find out who was there. The hot, woolen air was suffocating him. Chagatayev was groping for the unknown man with his exhausted hands when he felt someone’s face. This face puckered up suddenly under Chagatayev’s fingers, and out of its mouth came a warm flow of words each one of which could be understood although what they said made no sense at all. Chagatayev listened in amazement, holding the face in his hands and trying to understand what it was saying, but he couldn’t. The inhabitant of the tent stopped talking for a moment, and laughed quite reasonably, then started to talk again. It seemed to Chagatayev that he was laughing at what he was saying, and at his own mind which was now thinking something, but what it thought had no meaning. Then Chagatayev guessed, and he smiled, too: the words could not be understood because they were only sounds—they held no interest, no feeling, no life, as if there were no heart inside the man.
“Take put go to Ust-Urt bring something and carry it to me put it in my breast,” the man was saying, and then he laughed again.
The mind was still alive and perhaps a man was laughing inside it, afraid and not understanding that his heart was beating, his soul was breathing, entirely without interest or desire. The complete solitude, the night darkness inside the tent, a strange man—all this made no impression on him, producing neither fear nor curiosity. Chagatayev touched this man on his face and arms, felt his body, he could even have killed him, but the man just went on babbling as he had before, without any concern, as if he were already a bystander in his own life.
Outside the night was just as it had been. Walking on, Chagatayev wanted to turn back, to take the muttering man along with him, but where could he take him, once he was so worn out that he needed not help, but oblivion? He looked around; the silent dog was walking behind him, people were sleeping and dreaming in the reed huts, the slight trembling of a weak breeze stirred sometimes along the tops of the reed thickets, blowing from here all the way to the Aral Sea. Someone was talking in a low voice inside the hut next to the one where his mother and Aidim were sleeping. The dog walked up to it and then turned back, hurrying off home as if afraid of forgetting where its master and its safety were.
Chagatayev also went back to his mother’s, and lay down, without undressing, next to Aidim. The girl breathed little and very quietly in her sleep; it was terrifying to think that she might forget to breathe, and then she would die. Lying on the clay, Chagatayev listened as he drowsed to the sleepy muttering of his people in this God-forsaken bottom of the earth, and to the tortured churning of the grasses in their stomachs. In the hut right next to him a husband was talking to his wife; he wanted them to have a child, maybe now was the time to begin it.
But the wife answered:
“No, you and I have nothing but weakness, for ten years we’ve been starting one but it never grows inside me, I’m always empty, like the dead…”
The husband was silent, then he said:
“Well, let’s do something together, the two of us, we’ve got little enough to be happy about together.”
“Of course,” the woman answered. “I’ve got nothing to wear, nor have you, either; how are we going to live in the winter?”
“When we’re sleeping, we’ll get warm,” the husband answered. “What more can we do, poor as we are?”
“There’s nothing else,” the woman agreed. “There’s not another thing you and I have that’s any good; I’ve thought and I’ve thought about it and I see only that I love you.”
“I love you, too,” the husband said, “otherwise there’d be no living…”
“There’s nothing cheaper than a wife,” the woman answered. “When we’re so poor, what do you own except my body?”
“We don’t have enough of anything,” the husband agreed. “Thank goodness a wife is born and raised all by herself; otherwise a man would never get one. You have breasts, and lips, a stomach, your eyes can see, and most of all I think about you and you think about me, and the time goes by…”
They grew quiet. Chagatayev cleaned the wax out of his ears and tried hard to listen—would he hear something more from where the husband and wife were lying?
“You and I have plenty of what’s bad,” the woman began again. “You’re thin, and without much strength, and my breasts have dried up, my bones hurt inside me…”
“I’ll love whatever’s left of you,” the husband said.
Then they grew silent for good; probably they were embracing each other, so as to hold in their hands their only happiness.
Chagatayev whispered something to himself, smiled, and fell asleep, content that happiness should exist between two people in his native land, even in a poor way.
[9]
In the morning Gulchatai paid no attention to her son or to the young girl he had brought with him. Her strength of spirit had been just strong enough to recognize him when he was sleeping on the grass by the trail next to Aidim; now she was living her own life alone again. There was nothing to be done inside the hut, but for a long time the mother evened up the stems of the reeds in the sloping walls, collected all the wisps of grass, cleaned the inside of the cooking pot, straightened out and rolled up the reed mat, and did all this with the utmost concentration and zeal, anxious that her household goods should be intact because she had no other links at all with life or with other people. Since a person needs something to be thinking about all the time, it was clear that she was imagining something while she worked at her small, almost useless, tasks; she didn’t know how to think without working; the cooking and the hut, while she picked it up, gave her memories, filling her weak, empty heart with feeling.
She asked her son to give her something. She asked this timidly, without hope and without greed, just so she might have a few more things and increase, by having them, her involvement with the world—the time of her living would go better. Nazar understood his mother, and he gave her his raincoat, the holster of his revolver (he put the revolver in his trouser pocket), a notebook, and forty rubles in money, and he instructed her at the same time to provide food for Aidim. But the girl went off herself to collect grasses for soup, and Gulchatai stayed at the hut.
“Do you know Molla Cherkezov?” Nazar asked her.
“I know everybody,” his mother told him.
“Well then, go over there, live with him, it will be better for you. He’s blind, but he’ll take care of you until he dies.”
The bent-over old woman stared at the ground; she could not understand why Cherkezov needed her since her heart was already beating not with emotion but simply out of habit, and since life had become for her almost imperceptible. But she went, taking nothing with her from her home except the things her son had just given her, and these only because they happened to be in her hands. It looked as if she didn’t like her older belongings any longer because she didn’t have enough strength of spirit to be greedy for them.
Chagatayev stayed behind to live with Aidim, hoping that his mother’s heart would be warmed by living with Molla Cherkezov. Aidim began right away to run the place, collecting and boiling grasses, catching fish, cooking the food for dinner. One time she walked far beyond the channels of the river and the area it flooded, all the way to a grove of leafless trees growing in the desert, and brought back firewood as a reserve against the winter. Then Chagatayev, too, went to this grove a couple of times and brought back wood, and he forebade the girl to go—she was supposed just to kindle a little fire in the stove inside the hut and to fix a pot of soup every day. But soon he had to do the household work all alone, because Aidim fell ill and was hot, burning, soaked with perspiration. Nazar covered her with grass against chills, wiped her parched eyes, and poured into her thin soup made of the grasses, but the young girl could not cope with the disease, and grew thin,
silent, headed straight for death. Her eyes looked at Chagatayev without consciousness, she had nothing to think about to console her. Chagatayev sat with her through long, empty days, and tried to protect the sick girl from grief and fear.
There were sick and helpless people lying in the other huts and tents. Chagatayev figured that there were forty-seven persons in the Dzhan people, and of these twenty were sick. There were eleven women, and only three children under twelve, including Aidim. The women, who were the hardest workers, died first of all, and those left alive gave birth to children very rarely.
While Aidim was sick, the commissioner of the district government, Nur-Mohammed, came to see Chagatayev. Chagatayev told him he had been sent here to help his people, whom he was to make happy, progressive, and more numerous. Nur-Mohammed answered him that the people’s hearts had long ago sickened in their hunger, that their minds had gone deaf, and that there was therefore nothing left with which happiness might be felt. Better to leave these poor people in peace, forget them forever, or else lead them off somewhere in the wilderness, in the steppes and the mountains, so that they might get lost for good, and then be considered nonexistent.
Chagatayev looked at Nur-Mohammed for a little while: he was a big man, already old, his eyes looked out through tightly cut eyelids as if through constant pain. He wore an Uzbek robe, with a skullcap on his head, and his shoes were felt slippers—the only man among the whole people who had kept such clothing. This was explained by the fact that Nur-Mohammed was not himself a member of the Dzhan people but had been sent to them six months before, and he looked at the people with a stranger’s eyes.
“What have you done in this half year?” Chagatayev asked him.
“Nothing,” Nur-Mohammed reported. “I can’t resurrect the dead.”
“Then what are you hanging around for? Why are you here?”
“When I came, this people numbered a hundred and ten persons, now there are fewer. I dig graves for the dead—it’s impossible to bury them in the swamp, it would cause an epidemic—so I carry the dead ones far away into the sandy desert. I’ll go on burying them until they’re all gone, then I’ll go away myself, and I’ll report: my mission is accomplished….”
“The people can bury its own—you’re not needed for that.”
“No, they won’t bury them, I know.”
“Why won’t they?”
“The dead should be buried by the living, and there are no living here, just those who haven’t died yet, living out their time in sleep. You won’t make happiness for them, they don’t even know their own grief now, they don’t worry any longer because they’ve been worried out.”
“What are we to do with you?” Chagatayev asked.
“Not a thing,” Nur-Mohammed answered. “It’s impossible to torment a man too long, but the Khiva khans thought it was possible. You do it a long time, and the man dies; you must do it a little bit, and then give him a rest, so you can begin it again…”
“I’m not going to dig their graves,” Chagatayev said. “I don’t know who you are; you’re a stranger, you’d better go away from here and leave us alone.”
Nur-Mohammed stroked the sleeping Aidim’s forehead, and then stood up.
“My business is in my head, and yours in yours. I’ll be putting this girl in the ground soon. Good-bye.”
He walked back to his own dirt hut. Chagatayev wrapped Aidim up in grass and then in the reed mat and carried her quickly to his mother and Molla Cherkezov: he told them to give her liquids to drink from time to time, and to protect her from the night cold. And Chagatayev himself set off for Chimgai, a hundred or a hundred and fifty kilometers away. He walked through dry stream beds, and channels of the river, through reeds and thickets of mixed growth for the rest of that day, all night, and still another day, getting scratched and hungry on the way, losing his path and carrying all the weight of his impatience, his mind darkening, until he lay down somewhere with his face to the ground. Then he woke up, and he saw a large ruin not far away, and he walked up to its walls of clay. The sun, already high, was pouring intense heat down on the old walls; sleep and oblivion, the unconsciousness of sweltering air, seeped out from under the wall, where the dry clay was aging. Chagatayev walked inside the fort, through a broken place where freshets had torn a gap in the wall. Inside, it was even stuffier with quiet; the heat of the sky was all collected in one pocket, overgrown by enormous grasses with thick, greasy stalks because there was no one here to eat them. Chagatayev looked at these fatty plants with disgust, searching under them for some kind of smaller, edible grass. He found some small, broken bones; they had been chopped up, to produce a thicker fat, or cut several times with a sabre, if this had been a man. Farther on he found some more bones and a whole half of a human skeleton, with the skull; this man had died with his face down, and his rib cage had fallen apart, as if to ease his breathing after his death, and the point of one rib had punctured a rumpled Red Army cap, already rotting now and with pale grass growing through it. Chagatayev pulled it out from under the rib; the cap still held the shadow of its five-pointed star, and inside it, on the cloth protecting the forehead, there had been written with a chemical pencil: “Oraz Golomanov” —the name of the Red Army soldier who had fallen here. Chagatayev cleaned the cap and put it on his head, and he placed his own cap on Golomanov’s skull. On the clay wall inside the fortress, Golomanov or some other soldier had cut, probably with a bayonet, the words: “Long live the soldier of the revolution!” and the bayonet had cut too deep into the clay for time, wind and rain to smooth out the words and wash away the trace of this hope of the dead and of the living. It must have been that in 1930 or 1931 a Red Army unit had found itself here, fighting against the basmachi bandits and against the troops of the Khiva and Turkmen slaveowners, and Golomanov with his comrades had just stayed here to rot in peace, as if convinced that his unlived life could be lived out by others just as well as by himself. Chagatayev scattered some flowers and earth on Golomanov’s skeleton, so eagles or wandering animals should not pilfer his bones, and he walked on to Chimgai.
In Chimgai he bought a box of medical supplies packaged for collective farms, and through the district government office he procured several dozen quinine powders, although he knew that none of these would really help his people which stood in need most of all of another kind of life, which could be endured without dying of it. On the off chance, he went to the post office, to ask if there were not, perhaps, a letter for him from Moscow. Placards hung inside it with descriptions of distant air routes, and signs pasted onto columns in the building gave examples of correct postal addresses, in Moscow, Leningrad, and Tifiis, as if all the local people were writing letters only to those places, and were homesick only for those splendid cities.
Chagatayev walked up to the General Delivery window, and they handed him a plain letter from Moscow which had been sent on here from Tashkent by thoughtful workers in the office of the Communist party central committee of Uzbekistan. Ksenya wrote: “Nazar Ivanovich Chagatayev! Your wife, my mama Vera, died in the second clinical hospital in the city of Moscow from the birth of a daughter who when she was born was also dead and I saw her body. They put the daughter in the hospital in one coffin with my mama, Vera, your wife, and they buried it in the earth at Vagan-kovsky Cemetery, not far from the writer Batyushkov. I’ve gone to the grave twice, stood there, and gone away. When you come, I’ll show you where the grave is. Mama told me to remember you and love you, and I remember you. With Pioneer’s greetings, Ksenya.”
A Turkmen girl looked out of the window, and said:
“Wait a minute, there’s a telegram for you, too. It’s been here for six days.”
And she handed Chagatayev a telegram from Tashkent: “Letter about wifes death read here because of difficulty communication with you excuse us you have permission go moscow for one month then return greetings organization department isfendiarov in case of nondelivery after twenty days return to tashkent sender.”
Chagatayev put away the letter and the telegram, picked up his box of collective farm medicine, and walked out of the post office. Chimgai was nothing much—a few mud huts almost unnoticeable in the middle of the open space of the empty world around it. Chagatayev bought himself a loaf of barley bread and in five minutes was out of the town with his face into the breeze. The sun was shining high and hot, but all its light was not enough to warm a human heart. Chagatayev stopped thinking; he looked at some of the things along the road—at the blades of dead grass which had fallen from some wagon, at the clumps of digested food dropped by donkeys, at a decrepit Russian bast sandal left by some unknown wanderer; these remains and leftovers from strangers’ lives or activities distracted Chagatayev from his own thoughts. Finally he saw a little tortoise: it was lying with its swollen neck stuck out, its feet helplessly extended, no longer defending itself inside its shell; it had died here, on the road. Chagatayev picked it up and looked at it. Then he took it to one side and buried it in the sand. This tortoise was now closer to his dead wife Vera than he was himself, and Chagatayev stood there in wonderment. He sat down on the ground, confused but still understanding that he was alive and acting with an established goal; the usual phenomena of nature in front of him were foreign to him and boring; he felt no need any longer for something to look at or to enjoy. He threw away with revulsion the barley loaf which was getting hot in his hand. Then he started to cry out as he had in childhood when his mother took him out of Sari-Kamish, and he began to look around in this unfamiliar place trying to see if someone were not listening to him—as if behind every man there walked his tireless helper just waiting until the final moment of despair before coming forward…. In the distance, in the silence, as if behind a dead curtain, in some close-by but different world, a noise kept on repeating itself. The sound had no meaning or precision. Chagatayev listened; he remembered that he had known these sounds before but he had never understood them and he let them slip through his attention. The sounds were repeated again, they came slowly, with dead pauses, as if wetness were falling in enormous, congealing drops, as if a small horn were being carried deeper and deeper into a blue forest and was being blown briefly from time to time. Or maybe these sounds came from much closer, inside Chagatayev’s own body, coming from the slow throbbing of his own soul, reminding him of that other life which was now forgotten by him, smothered by the sorrow in his contracting heart.
The Fierce and Beautiful World Page 7