During the night Chagatayev walked around the stopping place, counting the living sheep with the one ram, collecting the sheepskins and the heads in one place, and he started to look into the darkness: what was Ksenya doing there now, far beyond this dark, under the electric lights of Moscow; and where was his dead Vera lying, what was there left on the earth of her big, shy body? Chagatayev walked among the sleeping people, they lay uncovered on the sand as if they had been slaughtered themselves and had left no gravediggers. But some of the husbands and wives were still stirring, making love to each other. Molla Cherkezov was lying with Gulchatai. Chagatayev saw this, and he wept. He did not know what to do here now, to teach this small people socialism. He could not leave them to die alone because he himself, abandoned by his mother in the wilderness, had been taken care of by a shepherd. Soviet power and an unknown man had fed him and nurtured him, for life and for growing.
The sick and the weak were dozing in their fever. Two of them had gone to sleep with sheep bones in their hands which they had been sucking before they slept, to build up strength. Chagatayev walked out to the wet hole dug in the sand, and fixed up a little well. When some water had collected in it, he went back to the sick, wakened them, gave each one a quinine powder, and then kept running back to the little well in the sand, bringing them water in which to drink the medicine.
It had already grown late. Chagatayev felt cold, he lay down next to one man who was feverishly ill, to get heat from his body, and fell asleep. By morning the ram and all the sheep had disappeared. Judging by their tracks, they had gone off into the open sands, abandoning their usual grazing path.
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Sufyan figured it out in his head and then said that the sheep would inevitably come back to their grazing round or else wander over into another, larger circle which ran through Kara-Kum. But both these nomadic trails came out at the dirty Sari-Kamish lakes, not far from which was the native land of the Dzhan people, so that sooner or later the sheep would show up at Sari-Kamish in the valley of eternal shadow and they would see the dark Ust-Urt hills where many of the persons now here had lived their whole lives. Nur-Mohammed agreed with Sufyan.
“We’ll follow them,” he said. “We’ll drink their blood, and eat their meat. In seven or eight days, we’ll come out at Sari-Kamish…. Did somebody die last night?” Nur-Mohammed asked.
They told him that one old woman had died, a Karakalpach, and Nur-Mohammed conscientiously marked it down in his little notebook. Chagatayev could not remember this old woman and he had not seen her—she had spent the night alone, going far away from the general camp, and had died there quietly.
The people moved in a long file along the tracks of the fleeing sheep. The sick and the weak walked behind, and sat down often to rest, drinking water out of their homemade wineskins. Chagatayev walked behind all of them, so that no one could fall down and die without being noticed. The animals had probably been running fast; this was Sufyan’s guess from the tracks left by the sheep, and Chagatayev agreed with him. He walked up on a high sand hill and as far as the horizon stretched in front of him he . could not see the smallest cloud of dust from the moving herd— the sheep had already gone too far.
An old woman serf from Khiva gave Chagatayev a rag which she tore from the hem of her skirt and he tied it around his head, which was hurting from the sun. The people moved patiently along; Aidim had recovered completely and she was cheerful—for her, since she knew nothing, there were enough things around to spark all the feelings and impressions she was capable of. When she grew tired, Chagatayev took her in his arms so she could sleep on his shoulder, making a little scream sometimes, and muttering in her strange dreams. But what dreams could nourish the consciousness of this wandering people, once it could accept its own fate? It could not live with the truth; it would perish of sadness at once if it knew the truth about itself. But men live because they’re born, not by truth or by intelligence, and while the heart goes on beating it scatters and spreads their despair and finally destroys itself, losing its substance in patience and in work.
Late that night the people had not yet caught up with the sheep. By morning Nur-Mohammed was asking again: did someone die during the night, or were they all still living? Only one little boy had died, and Mohammed marked down the fallen soul with satisfaction in his little notebook. There were only two children left by now in the whole Dzhan people: Aidim and another little girl who had been born by accident three years before after some stranger had joined the people out of the sands and then, having lived with it for half a year, gone off again, leaving the child to be born to Guzel, who was the widow of a bandit from the Stari Urgench region.
On the second day the people found two sheep lying on the road; they had grown weak from running and from sickness and now they were dying. Their thinning wool was stuck together with fever sweat, their lean muzzles looked wild and wicked, they had begun to resemble jackals, there was no fat left in their tails. The people killed one sheep at once and ate him, without lighting a fire, and they divided up the bones and took them along for supper. In the next two days they found nothing edible at all except for a few stray blades of grass, and they found water twice in old holes.
The people moved now only in the evening and the morning; during the day they buried themselves in the sand from weakness and from the heat, and slept. Nur-Mohammed marked down the dead each day, and Chagatayev verified their deaths, listening carefully to the heart and examining the eyes because one time Sufyan and another old man, the slave Oraz Babayev from Ferg-han, had pretended to be dead. But Chagatayev heard the hollow, distant heartbeat through their bones, lifted them to their feet, and ordered them to go on farther.
“Why did you want to die?” Chagatayev asked them.
“Our souls have fallen ill from living,” Sufyan said. Their bones had dried out and grown twisted, their sinews had all tightened up, they wanted just to stretch out, let the rain wet them and the wind dry them and the worms chew them.
Oraz Babayev just stood there looking at Chagatayev and could say nothing: he probably considered himself already dead.
“We just can’t live,” he said out loud, “every day we’ve been trying to.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll learn how together,” Chagatayev told him.
“We’ll stand it a little longer,” Sufyan agreed, “and then suddenly we’ll all die.”
One old Russian, called Stari Vanka, walked up to Sufyan, felt his throat, lifted up his eyelids and looked carefully into each of his eyes, then felt his ribs, and hold him:
“What’s the matter with you? You’re hardly weaned from your mother’s breast, and you think you’re dying! Hang on, we’ll survive, we’ll win, for sure, and we’ll come to the land of honey yet.”
The Russian walked away, smiling. His own life should have been finished almost every day for sixty years, but he hadn’t yet died a single time so now he had lost his faith in the power of death and of all bad luck in general, living calmly and indifferently like some happy and immortal man. Chagatayev knew that Stari Vanka at one time—some thirty years before—had escaped from penal servitude in Siberia, had fastened on to this people which was not kin to him, and got along well with them all, having forgotten the road back to Russia.
A dark desert wind blew in the night and the sand started wandering under this wind and gradually closed over forever the faint traces where the sheep had run. Early in the morning Chagatayev walked away from the sleeping, drowsy people when he realized that the herd of sheep was now gone for good and that to go after them made no sense, so that his enfeebled people found itself in the middle of the desert, without food or help, without the strength to go on to Sari-Kamish and at the same time unable to turn back to the floodlands of the Amu-Darya.
A queer morning wind was blowing into Chagatayev’s face, sand swirled around his feet and groaned like a Russian blizzard outside the shutters of a peasant hut. Sometimes you could hear the plaintive sound of a musical cow’s
horn, sometimes a harmonica was playing, or a faraway trumpet, or most often of all a two-stringed instrument called a dutar. All this was really the sand singing, tortured by the wind, one grain of sand being reduced to powder by rubbing against another. Chagatayev lay down on the ground, to think about the future of his job: he hadn’t been sent here for this, to die himself and to give his people nothing better than death…. He felt his face with his hand, it was covered with hair; lice had settled on his head; his unwashed, thin body was mourning from neglect. Chagatayev thought of himself now as a sorry, uninteresting person. Who even remembered him now, except for Ksenya? And probably even she had started to forget him; youth was too excited about its own happy problems. Chagatayev fell asleep in the unquiet sand, apart and fairly far from all the unsleeping people. Everything was standing stock-still inside him, deep down and for a long time, holding its breath inside his body, in order not to die completely. He woke up in darkness, half covered with sand; the wind was still blowing and it was already a new night. He had slept the whole day through. Chagatayev walked back to the camping place, but his people were not there. All of them had wakened long before and gone on farther and faster, away from death. Only Nazar-Shakir was lying there; he had died, his mouth was wide open and now the wind and the sand were saying something inside it. When Chagatayev found the dead man he felt him for a long time to be sure that he was really dead, and then he covered the man with sand so he would be invisible to anybody.
Chagatayev walked all night. Sometimes when he leaned over he could see the tracks of his people in front of him, and sometimes when the tracks had been wiped out by the wind, he went on by hunch.
In the morning Chagatayev noticed a place where there should be water, and he found an old well which had been filled in with sand. He dug with his hands into its damp bottom and began to chew the sand, but he had to lose more in spitting than he managed to swallow; then he started to gulp the wet sand itself, and the torment of his thirst left him. For the next four days Chagatayev tried to go forward across the desert but his weakness never let him go far and he would return to the wet sand so that, weak as he was from hunger, he should not die of thirst. On the fifth day he stayed where he was, determined to recover his strength in drowsing and unconsciousness and then to catch up to his people. He ate the two quinine powders he had left, and some crumbs from the lining of his pockets, and this made him feel better. He realized that his people must be close by, for they too had no strength to go far, but he didn’t know the direction in which they had gone. Chagatayev pictured to himself the secret satisfaction with which Nur-Mohammed would mark down his death in his notebook. He smiled over one of his old ideas: why people counted so much on grief and destruction when happiness is just as inevitable and often easier to find than despair…. Chagatayev protected himself from the sun with wet sand and tried to sink into unconsciousness, to rest and save his strength, but he couldn’t, and he kept right on thinking all the time, living a little, and watching the sky where a warm wind blew from the southeast through a weak haze, and where everything was so empty that there was no believing in the existence of a hard, real world, anywhere.
Still lying down, Chagatayev crawled to the nearest sand hill where he had noticed a tumbleweed bush half covered with sand. He crawled up to it, broke off several of its dried-out twigs, and chewed them, and then he pulled the rest of the bush out of the sand and set it off rolling with the wind. The bush bumped its way along and disappeared behind the dunes, headed off somewhere into distant places. Meanwhile Chagatayev, crawling around the vicinity, found some dried-out blades of grass growing in little sandy crevices, and he ate these, too, just as he found them. Sliding down the sand hill, he fell asleep at its base, and different memories flooded over him in his sleep, useless, forgotten impressions, the faces of uninteresting people he had seen at one time or another—all the life he had lived through turned back upon him. Chagatayev followed it helplessly and quietly, unable to forget for good the small unimportant things which had later been covered over by important happenings—and now he realized that everything had stayed intact, indestructible and safe. Here his friend Vera was leaning over him, hardly seen by him then, leaning over him and not going away, torturing the awareness of this man drowsing in the desert and not going away; and behind her, against a bank of clay were moving the shadows of silver branches which had grown at some time in the sunshine, perhaps at Chardzhoui, perhaps somewhere else; a Khiva donkey was looking at Chagatayev with familiar eyes and crying out plaintively, without interruption, as if reminding him that he should untie it and set it free; many more eternal little things like rotting trees, a village post office, unpopulated hills under the noonday sun, the sounds of a wasting wind, and tender embraces with Vera—all of this flooded into Chagatayev at the same time and stayed inside him, motionless and stubborn, even though in the past, in actuality, these happenings and people had been gentle ones, doing no harm to the conscience or the feelings of a man. But now these images, these thoughts, gnawed at Chagatayev’s brain, and he wanted to scream but didn’t have enough strength to do so. He started to listen hard—for infrequent, dripping, resonant sounds in the distance, from beyond the black, dead horizon, out of the dark, free night where the last shining of the sun was being swallowed whole, like a river falling down into the desert sands. Sometimes he heard the sounds of nature far away, not knowing the reason for them or their full meaning.
Chagatayev stood up on his feet, to get rid of sleep and this whole world sticking to the inside of his head like a prickly bush. Sleep flowed out of him, but all the strange thickness of memory and thought stayed alive in him even when he was awake. He saw something on a sand dune next to him, either an animal or a tent, but he couldn’t understand what it was, and he fell backwards out of weakness. And whatever it was on the neighboring sand dune, an animal or a tent or a machine, moved now into Chagatayev’s consciousness and boldly began to torment him, though he did not understand it or even have a name for it. This new phenomenon, tied in with all that had preceded it, overpowered Chagatayev, and he fell into unconsciousness again, to save his soul.
He woke early on the following day. The wind had disappeared without a trace, a shy silence stood all around him, so empty and so weak that a storm might suddenly have burst out inside it. The shadow of night moved up into the sky and lay there across the world, higher than the light of day. Chagatayev was well by now, his mind had cleared, and he thought about his problems as he had before; his weakness had not left him but it no longer tortured him. He foresaw that he would probably die here, and his people, too, would be lost as corpses in the desert. Chagatayev did not regret this for himself, his bigger nation would still be alive, and it would still bring general happiness to the unhappy, but it was hard that the Dzhan people, which stood in need of life and happiness more than all the other peoples of the Soviet Union, should be dead.
“It won’t be,” Chagatayev whispered.
He began to lift himself, pressing with all his body on his trembling hands placed flat against the sand, but immediately he fell back again: behind him, right behind the back of his neck, something was moving; Chagatayev could hear the quick, retreating steps of something alive.
Chagatayev closed his eyes and felt in his pocket for the handle of his revolver; now he was only afraid that he might not be able to cope with the heavy weapon because his hand had only a child’s strength left in it. He lay there for a long time, not moving, pretending to be dead. He knew about a lot of animals and birds which eat dead people on the steppes. Probably wild animals were moving in a long, unseen procession behind his people, eating those who fell. Sheep, his people, wild animals—this triple train was moving in order across the desert. But the sheep, having lost their accustomed grazing round, began sometimes to follow the wandering tumbleweed being blown by the wind, so the wind became the true guiding force, of everything from grass to men. Probably they should be following the wind, in order to catch up with th
e sheep, but Nur-Mohammed didn’t know anything, and Sufyan had become bored with living, and had stopped thinking.
Chagatayev wanted to jump up at once, shoot at the animal, kill it, and eat it, but he was afraid he might miss, out of weakness, and frighten the animal away for good. He decided to let the animal come right up to his body, and kill it at point-blank range.
Light, careful steps could be heard all this time behind Chaga-tayev’s head, now coming closer, now going away. Nazar waited, holding his breath, for this slinking thing to hurl itself upon him, not yet sure that he was dead. He worried only that the animal might sink its fangs into his throat at its first pounce, or that, wounded, it might run far away. He could now hear the little steps right next to his head. Chagatayev pulled the revolver a little more out of his pocket, feeling inside him a real strength compounded out of all the little scraps of life left in him. But the steps moved past his body, and went beyond. Nazar half-opened his eyes: just beyond his feet two enormous birds were walking, moving away toward a sand dune opposite him. Chagatayev had never seen such birds; they looked like the eagle-carrion vultures of the steppes and at the same time like wild, dark swans. Their beaks were like vultures’ beaks, but their thick, powerful necks were longer than those of eagles, and their solid legs carried high the delicate, airy bodies of true swans. The strong wings of one bird were a pure gray in color, while the other had blue, red, and gray feathers. This one was probably the female. Both birds seemed to have on trousers of snowy-white down. Even from one side, Chagatayev noticed little black spots on the female; these were fleas digging through the down into the stomach of the bird. Both birds looked like enormous nestlings which were not yet used to being alive, and were moving with extreme care.
The day had grown hot and dreary, little sandstorms were whirling across the surface of the sand, evening still stood high in the sky, above the light and the warmth. The two birds walked onto the sand dune opposite Chagatayev and looked at him with their thoughtful, farseeing eyes. Chagatayev watched the birds from under his half-closed eyelids, and he could see even the gray, thin color of their eyes as they looked at him full of thought and of attention. The female was cleaning the talons of its feet with its beak, and spitting out of its mouth some kind of old leavings, perhaps a remnant of the clawed-up Nazar-Shakir. The male rose into the air, but the female stayed where it was. The enormous bird flew low to one side, then soared upward with several flappings of its wings, and almost at once began to fall straight toward him. Chagatayev felt the wind in his face before the bird hit him. He could see its white, clean breast in front of his face, and its gray, clear eyes, not wicked but thoughtful, because the bird had now noticed that the man was alive, and watching it. Chagatayev lifted his revolver, held it with both hands, and fired straight at the head of the bird dropping down upon him. In the white down of the bird’s breast, blown out by the speed of its downward flight, a dark spot appeared, and then the wind blew all the down and wisps of feathers around the spot of the direct hit, and for a moment the body of the eagle held itself motionless in the air above him.
The Fierce and Beautiful World Page 9