Chagatayev got up and went quickly back to his people’s village. Toward evening he was so exhausted that he fell asleep, without having taken refuge in a warm crevice in the ground. All night long he heard a confused murmuring, many kinds of agitation all around him, the uneasy stirrings of nature, believing in what it was doing and what it meant.
On the second night he was already inside the limits of the reed forest, close to all his relatives. He thought that the Dzhan people were asleep at that moment, and hoped the night might be a long one, a night when they were not hungry and not in torment, so that in the morning they would have, so as not to die, at least some weak sense of reality, something no bigger than a dream. This was why Chagatayev usually worried less at night; he realized that it was easier for sleeping people to live, and that right then his mother remembered neither him nor herself, while the little Aidim was lying alone, keeping herself warm, like a happy person who needs no one else.
He walked slowly, as if resting, past low, leafless desert trees, and he crossed a little channel; the late, yellow moon shone on the flowing water. A shimmering dust hung in the moonlight over the ancient caravan road running from Khiva to Afghanistan. Chagatayev could not understand this. The road had been abandoned for whole centuries; it ran on hard, packed sand; only in one place did it cross a crust of loess where just then, probably, it was dry, and a thick walker’s dust was rising. Camels and donkeys don’t make a dust like that, their dust rises higher and thickens over the rear end of the caravan. Chagatayev left his path, and walked diagonally across the wilderness in a southerly direction, to see what was moving there where there should have been nobody. For a long time he walked across the bowl of the reed forest, away from the marshes, parting the prickly, sweet-smelling bushes with his hands, before he came out on a dry, clean burial mound, swept by the winds, beneath which some forgotten prehistoric town was lying in its grave.
The old road bent itself around this mound at its base and then disappeared into the southeast, toward China and Afghanistan, into the darkness. The unknown walkers had not yet got this far, they were moving quietly, you couldn’t hear them at all—perhaps they had turned off the road, or gone back, or laid down to sleep on the ground. Chagatayev went out to meet them; he did not expect to find anything happy or joyful, and he knew the dust might be rising in the moonlight from wild beasts coming from deep in the delta of the Amu-Darya and headed for the distant oases, for the collective farms, where there were sheep to be eaten.
People were walking toward him. Chagatayev lay down by the side of the road and watched them. The district commissioner Nur-Mohammed was leading the blind man, Molla Cherkezov, by the hand; behind them Chagatayev’s mother was walking, and Aidim with her. Farther back were other people, among them the aged Sufyan, the muttering Nazar-Shakir, his wife whom he loved as the only gift in his life, then Durdi together with his wife, altogether fourteen persons, maybe eighteen. The rest of the people had probably not been able to wake up, or had lost all strength and desire to move.
Gulchatai was carrying some reed roots as a food reserve wrapped up in her son’s raincoat; Aidim was dragging a sheaf of grasses along the road at the end of a stalk; Nazar-Shakir had a big bundle of blankets on his head; Molla Cherkezov was holding on to Mohammed with his left hand while his right hand was groping for something in the air—all of them had their eyes closed, they were walking in their sleep, some of them whispering or muttering, accustomed to living in their imagination. Only Nur-Mohammed had his eyes open, seeing the whole world clearly. He was smoking herbs wrapped in the dried leaf of a swamp bullrush, and he was silent.
Chagatayev went up to Mohammed and asked him: where was, he taking the people?
Nur-Mohammed greeted Chagatayev, and answered him:
“What people? Their souls left them long ago, it’s all the same to them whether they live or not.”
He went on walking. Chagatayev walked beside him. Mohammed was smiling to himself and looking away; even in the darkness nature looked sorry and hateful to him, and behind him walked the almost nonexisting people.
The road wound around the little mound on which Chagatayev had just been. A new idea came to him as he looked at this hill of dirt mounded up over another small people which had mixed up its bones and lost its names and bodies in order no longer to attract the attention of those who would torment it. Slave labor, exhaustion, exploitation never take away just physical strength, just arms to work with—no, they take over the mind and the heart, too, and the soul is destroyed first of all, and next the body falls, and then man hides himself in death, sinks into the ground as if into a fortress and a refuge, not realizing that he has been already weaned from worldly interests, his brain already accustomed to just believing, seeing dreams, imagining what is not real. Was it possible that his Dzhan people would soon be lying somewhere nearby, the wind covering them with soil, and even the memory of his people vanishing simply because they had never succeeded in erecting something of stone or steel, had never dreamed up eternal beauty? They had dug the dirt out of irrigation canals, but the flowing of the water had filled them up again, and the people had dug out the silt and the extra soil, and then the muddy flow had brought new silt and covered up their labor, leaving no trace of it.
“Where are the others? Are they asleep?” Chagatayev asked Nur-Mohammed.
“No, they stayed behind, but they’ll come after us; they’ll catch up.”
Aidim, who had been close to them among the ones in front, fell fast asleep, and lay down. Chagatayev noticed this, and looked around: two more sleeping people were lying behind them.
“Let them be!” Mohammed told him. “They’ll recover in a while, and they’ll come along.”
But Chagatayev picked up Aidim in his arms and carried her. She was sleeping, no longer shivering with fever, her sickness had probably left her. In spite of the grass diet and her illness, her body was not thin, it had absorbed into itself all the goodness in even the dry stalks of the reeds, and she seemed now set to live for a long time and happily.
“Where are you taking them?” Chagatayev asked Nur-Mo-hammed.
“To Sari-Kamish, their birthplace and native land,” Nur answered, “where they used to live.”
“Why?”
“They’ve got to go somewhere…. I’m leading them by the long road, around the flooded areas. Anyone who walks always feels better for it.”
“And the sick?” Chagatayev asked.
“They can walk a little, too. The road will make them well. We’ve left the swamps, and there’ll be no more fever.”
Chagatayev did not believe in Nur-Mohammed’s good intentions. He didn’t know—would the sick be able even to feel good health once their minds had been distracted from their own interests for so long and their hearts had become so used to languishing? This was why they had stood disease and suffering so mute and unfeeling, as if it were none of their business. Chagatayev dropped back from Nur-Mohammed, in order to look at his mother. Aidim was sleeping quietly in his arms. Gulchatai opened her eyes when Nazar walked up to her but said nothing to him; the blind Molla Cherkezov, weak and childish, was holding on to her hand. The mother looked absentmindedly at her son, whom she recognized, but she could not remember if she had seen him up close. Nazar went on looking at his mother and she turned her eyes away from him because she was ashamed to be alive in front of him so weak and so unhappy; she would have liked to love him with all her earlier, forgotten strength, but now she couldn’t, now she had heart enough only for her breathing, and she was pleased by her son’s Red Army cap and she thought that she must get it from him as a present, to keep her head warm while she slept.
A little later the wandering people found dry, warm sand along their road and they lay down on it to sleep until morning. Chagatayev did not want to sleep; he put Aidim down between his mother and Molla Cherkezov and stayed by himself, not knowing what to do until morning. Sometimes bored, sometimes smiling, he mumbled something to himself,
living out his useless life.
[10]
Those who had fallen by the roadside the day before or had stayed behind out of weakness arrived by morning, and once more they all moved on behind Nur-Mohammed. Aidim was walking now, and she even laughed with Chagatayev. He felt her forehead —there was no fever, she had become alive and frisky.
About noon the old Sufyan called Chagatayev to one side of the road. He told him that near the channel of the Amu-Darya River two or three old sheep might sometimes still be found, sheep which lived alone and had forgotten men except that, when they saw one, they remembered their shepherds of long ago, and ran up to him. These sheep had survived mysteriously, left behind from the enormous wild flocks which the Bey had wanted to drive into Afghanistan but had not been able to. The sheep had lived with their sheepdogs for some years; then the dogs began to eat them, or died, or ran, away out of grief, and the sheep were left by themselves, gradually dying of old age or being killed by wild animals, wandering around the waterless sandy desert. But some of them still survived, and were still wandering, shivering, one next to another, afraid to stay alone. They walked in huge circles around the impoverished steppe, never deviating from their circular paths; it was to this intelligence they owed their lives, because the close-cropped grass which they had eaten grew up again while the sheep were covering the rest of their circular route before returning to the original spot. Sufyan knew four of these grassy circles around which the survivors of these dying wild flocks kept on moving until they died. One of them was not far away, and they were almost at its junction with the road along which the Dzhan people were now walking back to Sari-Kamish.
Sufyan and Chagatayev walked out to a small, damp depression in the sand, and stopped there. Sufyan dug a hole in the sand with his hands, and at the bottom it was wet. The old man explained that the sheep raked the ground with their front legs, and then chewed the damp sand, to slake their thirst. Here was the place to wait for them; he knew the time required for them to complete their whole circular route, and he figured it was time for them to show up here. The year before he had walked behind the flock and come as far as this place. Then the flock had numbered forty head, of these Sufyan had eaten six, seven had died along the road, and the rest had gone on farther.
Nur-Mohammed led the people, too, to where Chagatayev and Sufyan were waiting for the sheep, and they all lay down and drowsed beside the path where the year before the sheep had chewed the wet sand. All the people slept again, although it was still a long time before evening and only a little time had gone by since morning. Chagatayev walked alone among the sleepers, fearing that none of them would wake up again; he was bored and exhausted with his own thoughts and memories. He walked up to Aidim—she was sleeping with her eyelids closed sweetly over her eyes, and smiling in oblivion or in a dream. Having no happiness in her real life, she found it in feeling and in thinking, when she had her eyes closed. Molla Cherkezov had buried his head in Gulchatai’s breasts, holding close to her, sleeping, not remembering that he was blind. Nur-Mohammed was lying off to one side; he was tossing on the ground, and whispering something.
“What are you whispering about here?” Chagatayev asked him.
“More than forty people are still left,” Mohammed said. “That’s still a lot.”
He was counting the people, how many had died, how many were still alive.
Chagatayev talked a little with Sufyan; the old man was not asleep but just keeping his eyes shut as if he were saving his vision and didn’t want to waste his spirit on impressions of the visible real world. Chagatayev told him that his wife had died in Moscow, but Sufyan did not share his grief and just muttered something, and then said that Chagatayev should go out to meet the sheep, or else they might find wet sand in some other place and pass to one side of the sleeping people.
Gulchatai had wakened. She was sitting up now, holding the head of the sleeping Molla Cherkezov on her knees. Chagatayev walked up to his mother to talk to her, but he didn’t say anything. He realized that he was turning to the old man and to his mother just to get comfort from them, to be able to go on living. But was this all his existence was about, to secure for himself some spiritual peace, the consolation of people close to him? He had been wrong not to write a postcard to Ksenya—from that place where there had been a post office—telling her to go to the Communist party’s central committee if it was hard for her to live without her mother, while he, her father, was far away and maybe not coming back at all to help her.
Chagatayev patted Gulchatai’s bare head, and then put his Red Army cap on her, because the strong sun must be making his mother’s head ache. She took it off, and hid it under her; she believed in property and saved it, this was why her blouse was now unbuttoned, inside it next to her naked body, hung the various things she owned, warming her breast. Close by his mother, a Kirgiz woman was lying face down in the sand. She was sleeping, and crying in her sleep in a child’s voice, going off sometimes into a fit of childish weeping and then falling back into quiet, even breathing. Chagatayev raised her face a little by the temples, and he saw that she was an old woman and that her mouth did not open when she went off into her little baby cries. It seemed as if a child was crying inside her, a child so alone and so foreign to her that it did not wake her from her sleep. Or else this was the crying of her own child’s soul.
Chagatayev laid the woman’s head back on the ground and walked off to meet the wandering sheep. At first he walked slowly, but then when daylight began to be covered by the night he ran on faster, so as not to miss the sheep in the darkness. Sometimes he stopped and panted, then hurried on again. When it became quite dark, Chagatayev ran with his body bent far over, so he could see occasional little blades of grass and touch them with his hands— this was the direction in which the sheep might go. Otherwise he might wander off to one side, end up in the hungry sands, and not see the roving flock.
He ran for a long time along the empty sheep path. Midnight came, or perhaps it was later. From fatigue and grief, which he was not conscious of but which was smothering his heart, and from the cool, weak wind, Chagatayev lost his memory as he ran—he fell asleep, fell down, and could not stand up again. He slept hard, alone in the desert, in the thin silence, where nothing stirred. Four little blades of short grass, as lonely as orphans, stood around the sleeping man as if they were sorry that he would get up and go, and they would be there alone again.
Chagatayev opened his eyes at dawn, his consciousness lit up for a moment, and then went out, and he fell asleep again in warmth and oblivion. Two sheep were lying by Chagatayev’s side, warming him with their body heat. Others stood around, waiting for the man to raise his face. There were forty of them, they had been missing their shepherd for a long time, and now they had found him. From time to time an old ram came up to Chagatayev and carefully licked his neck and the hair at the back of his head. The ram kept moving his body from side to side, trying to see the shepherd’s dog, but no dog was there. He was tired of leading the sheep, of quieting them at the watering places, of guarding them at night from lonely animals. He could remember the good times of long ago when the shepherd and his dogs took care of all these worries. Now he had grown intelligent, thin, and unhappy, and the sheep hated him for his weakness and for his indifference to them, and they also could remember shepherds and dogs, even if the dogs, when they kept order among them at a watering hole, had sometimes bitten scraps out of their wool which they had a hard time growing back on the desert grass they ate.
When he woke up, Chagatayev drove the flock of sheep off toward his people, and he got there by nightfall. The people were drowsing as they had before, only Aidim was playing in the sand, making little streams and roads in it. Chagatayev woke the people and instructed them to collect firewood and some dead, dry grass, to light fires, and to cook the meat. Sufyan eagerly started to cut the throats of the sheep, and was the first to drink the blood from the neck veins but he then caught it in a basin and gave it to the othe
rs to drink.
Chagatayev ordered that not more than ten head should be butchered, with the rest kept for breeding and for eating later. The ram was left, he walked off and lay down in the distance, and all the sheep still living collected around him. Thin and hardened by their wild wandering life, from a distance they looked more like dogs.
The people started to cook the carcasses whole on the fire, without cutting them into pieces, and when they were browned they put them on the sand at one side. Then the eating started. The people ate the meat without greed or enjoyment, pulling the meat off in little pieces, and chewing it in weak, opened mouths. Only Nur-Mohammed ate a lot and quickly, he tore the meat off in layers and gulped it, then when he was full he gnawed the bones until they were clean and sucked the marrow out from inside them and at the end of eating licked his fingers and lay down on his left side to sleep. The married folk walked off to sleep at one side. Molla Cherkezov also led Nazar’s mother away into the distance, the single people and the orphans stayed around the dying fires— they had grown so weak and they slept so hard that it was as if the food they had eaten had broken their strength and they were conquered by it.
The Fierce and Beautiful World Page 8