The Fierce and Beautiful World

by Andrei Platonov

  The bird closed its gray eyes, and then they opened by themselves, but they no longer saw anything—the bird was dead. It lay across Chagatayev’s body in the same position in which it had been falling, its breast against the man’s breast, its head on his head, burying its beak in Chagatayev’s thick hair, spreading wide its black, helpless wings on both sides of him, with its feathers and down strewed all over Chagatayev. Chagatayev himself fainted from the force of the blow, but he was not wounded; the bird had simply stunned him since the dangerous speed of its fall had been braked by the bullet. Chagatayev started up with sharp pain: the second bird, the female, had driven its beak into his right leg and having pulled out some of his flesh was flying off into the air. Chagatayev, holding the revolver with both hands again, fired twice but missed; the gigantic bird disappeared behind the sand dunes, and then he saw it flying away at a great height.

  The dead eagle was no longer on top of Chagatayev, but lying on the sand at his feet. The female must have pushed it there in an effort to make sure that it was dead, and to say good-bye to it.

  Chagatayev crawled over to the dead bird and began to eat at its throat, tearing the feathers away from it. The female eagle was still to be seen, but it had already climbed high up in the sky where the shadow of night, the dusk of dawn and sunset, stands even at full noon, and it seemed to Chagatayev that the bird would never come back, that there it had found the happy land in the air of all the birds that fly.

  When he had eaten a little, Chagatayev tied one leg of the dead bird to his belt and he put the other end of the belt deep inside his trousers, so he would know it if some beast of prey tried to steal the eagle away from him. Then he treated the wound torn in his leg, wrapped it in cloth, and lay down quickly, in order to recover a little of his strength.

  [12]

  Gulchatai felt no sorrow over her son, she had forgotten him. She walked along behind the others, bent over, feeling the sand with her hands whenever it seemed to her that something desirable might be lying on it. Molla Cherkezov hung on to Gulchatai by her clothing, trying all the time to remember that he was still alive. Nur-Mohammed, with despair in his heart, held on to Aidim’s hand; it was his plan to train this girl and fatten her so he could use her as a wife and then sell her to someone else. It worried him that there were too few women in the Dzhan tribe and that those who were still among the living had grown decrepit—there was hope only for Aidim because she was still a little girl. Women were priced higher than men because they could be used both for work and for love, although men could also be sold profitably in Afghanistan if they didn’t die on the long trip.

  On the morning when Chagatayev did not show up at the general stopping place, Nur-Mohammed smiled and made a detailed entry about the disappearance in his notebook. He was sure that Chagatayev had run away to save himself, as anyone would who had life and little courage, and Nur-Mohammed felt better without him. The people no longer kept on asking him if they would arrive soon at Sari-Kamish, and they never remembered now about eating. Nur-Mohammed himself might perish out of weakness, but he still had old reserves inside him because he had eaten a lot of rice and meat and fruit while he was living in the oases and when he had gone secretly into Afghanistan to see the Khan, Dzhunaid, who had run away a long time ago.

  Sufyan started to walk on this day with the wind, with the broken-off spears of dead grass and the tumbleweed; he knew that this was the direction the sheep must now have taken, once the wind had blown away without a trace their grazing path along which, in spots around old oases, some stable grass could grow. The rest of the people would have followed Sufyan, but Nur-Mohammed ordered them to walk in the opposite direction— against the wind, toward the southeast. He pulled Aidim closer, trying to feel her breasts which were just starting to grow, but all he could feel was her thin ribs.

  Nur-Mohammed looked at them all; the people were rocking in the wind, the sandy blast along the ground was beating against their legs, dead grass was flying in the faces of the walking people—the wind was ripping the grass out of the sandy wasteland by its roots with overpowering force. Some people fell down from the wind, others walked along in sleep, scattering in different directions, losing each other in the darkness of the blowing sand.

  Nur-Mohammed stopped.

  The wind was now blowing out of the southeast with the steady, oppressive strength of some great machine. The people were scattered by it and they no longer heard, or else they didn’t recognize, Nur-Mohammed’s voice calling each of them by name to follow him. He was panting himself, from impatience, from thirst and from hunger; his mind was already darkening under the shadow of indifference to his own fate. He had been planning until now to lead this insignificant, exhausted tribe into Afghanistan, and to sell it there in slavery to the old Khan, so that he might live out his happy life somewhere in an Afghan valley on the bank of a stream, in his own place filled with the good things of life. But now Mohammed saw, as he was all but swept off his feet by the wind and the sand, that the Dzhan people would either perish or be dispersed in unconsciousness: each person’s body had grown empty, and his heart was gradually dying. They would not get as far as Afghanistan, or if they did they would not be able to serve even as the lowest kind of farmhands, because now they no longer had that small desire to live which is essential even for a slave.

  Nur-Mohammed stood for a long time while the people were scattering in the darkness of the wind and lying where they had fallen in death or in sleep. Aidim wrapped herself around his neck, breathing quietly in her own oblivion. Mohammed held her carefully, and he watched the dying people with satisfaction, forgetting that he, too, wanted to drink and to eat. Sufyan sat down on the sand and collapsed. Gulchatai had been lying on the ground for a long time, with her blind husband, Cherkezov, folded against her on the side away from the wind as if he were trying to make himself comfortable with her in a bed. The Karakalpak nicknamed Tagan, who was thin but not very old, took off his clothes, his trousers and his robe, threw them into the wind, and buried himself naked in the sand so he could hardly be seen. Mohammed felt good, that the Soviet Union would now be diminished in numbers by an entire tribe. Even if nobody had known about this people, their potential usefulness to the government had now disappeared and these workers who once upon a time had dug whole rivers for the Beys and Khans would no longer be digging anything, even their own graves.

  Nur-Mohammed not only felt satisfaction now, he even skipped a little in a kind of dance while he watched these people fall into their last sandy sleep. He held his own value dearer now: there would be more good things for him in the desert as on all the earth, because there were fewer people living. It’s uncertain if he would have enjoyed selling this people into slavery more than now that he had lost it, now that nature had become more spacious, now that the mouths of all these greedy poor people had been closed forever. Mohammed made up his mind to go to Afghanistan for good, and to take Aidim with him so that he could sell her there, and recoup at least some of his losses from working in the Soviet Union.

  The wind suddenly let up, and it grew lighter all around. Nur-Mohammed clutched the girl so tightly to himself that Aidim opened her eyes. Then he took her into a comfortable cave in the sand to fondle her, lonely for the pleasure to be had from another’s body. Neither hunger nor long-felt grief could destroy in him the need for human love; it lived on imperishably in him, hungry and independent, breaking through all cruel misfortunes and not losing its strength in his weakness. He could have embraced a woman and made a child, in sickness, insane, a minute before his final death.

  It was getting dark in the desert, night fell, and it went by in darkness. Some people who had fallen on the sand from the wind the night before stood up the next morning and began to look around them in the clean light and in the quiet of another day.

  Not far away, from behind a desolate sand hill, a shot was heard. Sufyan, half asleep, sat up and began to listen. Aidim ran up to him, away from Mohammed who was sleeping
some distance away and did not wake up.

  The people were all alive although their lives were no longer supported by their own will and were almost beyond their strength. They looked straight in front of them although they had no clear idea of what they should now do with themselves; eyes that had been dark started to grow bright with indifférence, showing no attention to anything nor even that they still had vision, as if they were blinded or worn out. Aidim alone wanted to be alive, she had not yet used up her childhood nor her mother’s reserve of energy, she looked at the sand with eyes that were still full of life.

  Two more shots were fired behind the dune. Aidim walked out to see what it was but at first she could not find where the shots had come from. None of the other people moved; they feared no enemy and they expected no friend or helper.

  Aidim walked over the fourth row of dunes and saw below her a man lying either asleep or dead next to a dark bird. The girl slid down the bank of sand, and recognized Chagatayev. She felt his face with her hands; it was warm, and breath was coming out of his mouth.

  “Sleep!” Aidim said in a whisper, and she put her fingers on Chagatayev’s eyelids which had started to open in his sleep.

  Then Aidim untied the bird from the belt, took it by its leg and dragged it back across the sand to her people.

  The whole tribe gathered around the bird and looked at it without greed, they had lost the habit of hoping for food. Then Aidim took a knife from the trousers Tagan had thrown away and started to pluck the bird and to cut it into little pieces. She gave each person who could still eat a little piece of the flesh of the bird, and she herself sucked the blood and the juice from each piece before giving it away. The people devoured their portions, sucked the bones and nibbled at the shredded feathers, but they were not satisfied and only wanted more.

  Aidim went back to Chagatayev. The people, thinking there were more birds there, followed behind her. But the people walked too slowly now, some of them crawled, helping themselves with their hands. Chagatayev’s mother was one of these, helping Molla Cherkezov to crawl too. Others stayed where they were because they no longer had the strength to move their skeletons. Aidim, moving away a little, stopped and waited for the people struggling after her. It was evening before they all reached the sand hill behind which Chagatayev was lying. All the time the tribe was moving, Aidim could hear the rubbing and the scraping of the bones inside them; probably all the fat had dried up in their joints, she thought, and their bones were now torturing them.

  Nur-Mohammed watched this movement of the tribe from a distance but it did not interest him. He wanted first to look for some water in the neighborhood, even if it were salty, for without it he would not get to the Khiva oasis. He decided to come back for Aidim later, after he had found water, so he could give her some to drink and then go away with her forever to Afghanistan.

  [13]

  Pain made Chagatayev cry in his sleep, and he woke up; he thought he had dreamed the pain and it would quickly go away. Two dark birds—one the female of before, the other a new male—were walking away from him. They had pecked his body three times with their sucking beaks and had torn his flesh to the bone on his chest, his knee and his shoulder. When they had walked away a little, the birds stopped, turned their necks, and looked at Chagatayev—each bird out of one eye. Nazar pulled out his revolver and started to fire at the birds quickly, before a lot of blood had flowed out of his wounds and he had lost the strength that had been gathered while he slept. The birds rose into the air. He managed to fire at them twice, and one bird dropped its wings and floated down, folding its legs under itself; then it laid its head down on the sand and stretched out its throat as if in unbearable fatigue. Blood started to flow out of the bird’s throat, soaking into its feathers and into the sand around it. Indifference showed in the bird’s eyes as gray films were drawn over them. The other bird flew up into the sky where it gave a short, hollow cry, sounding as if it came from an empty underground cave, and disappeared into the mist of the sun’s shining.

  Aidim appeared from behind the sand hill. She walked up to the dead bird, and dragged it by its leg past Chagatayev.

  “Aidim!” Nazar called to her.

  The girl walked up to Chagatayev.

  “Give me a drink,” he begged.

  Aidim pulled the dead bird to him and, kneeling down, placed its throat next to Chagatayev’s lips while she began to squeeze the wet feathers so the blood would drop into Chagatayev’s mouth.

  “You go on lying there now, as if you’re dead,” Aidim told him. “The birds will fly down on you, and the jackals will come, you kill them all and we’ll have something to eat…”

  “Where are the other people?” Chagatayev asked.

  “Here they come,” Aidim told him.

  Chagatayev asked her to bring some water, if there was any, and wash his wounds. Aidim examined them, pulled away from them the wool of his clothing, and then licked them with her tongue, since she knew that saliva can heal a wound.

  “Don’t worry, you won’t die, your wounds are little ones,” she said. “Now lie back quietly, or else the birds won’t come back.

  Aidim dragged the dead bird behind the sand dune where her people had set up a new stopping place in the quiet of a deep depression in the sand. They ate the bird at once, and if people far away, who eat every day, could not have felt any slaking of their hunger from the tiny piece of shredded meat which Aidim gave to each person’, this insignificant morsel of food almost filled up a person with this great hunger, and in any case it gave the body hope, and comfort.

  It grew dark again. Sufyan dug down to a wet level in the sand with his hands, and started to chew it against his thirst. Some of the people saw what he was doing, walked up to him, and shared his supper of sand and water. Nur-Mohammed was afraid of the cold, and came back to the tribe in the night so he could lie down somewhere in their midst, and warm himself.

  Early in the morning, Mohammed woke up Aidim, took her in his arms, and walked off with her toward Afghanistan.

  Chagatayev was lying where he had been before, like a dead man, keeping watch for the birds. He had counted his bullets, there were only seven left. He was sure the birds would come back again, for it was the male he had killed, and the female with the colored feathers had flown away and would come back again, and not alone, to finish off the man who had murdered its first, and perhaps its favorite, mate.

  Aidim jumped out of Nur-Mohammed’s arms and ran to say good-bye to Chagatayev. He kissed her, stroked her face with his thin hand, and smiled. It was still not light. Nur-Mohammed was waiting for the girl a short distance away.

  “Don’t go away, Aidim,” Nazar told the child. “We’ll soon have some luck ourselves.”

  “I know,” Aidim answered. “But he ordered me…”

  “Call him,” Chagatayev said.

  Aidim beckoned to the tall Nur-Mohammed with her hand.

  “You still dying?” Nur-Mohammed asked Chagatayev. “I thought the birds had eaten you up a long time ago.”

  “Why do you take the girl with you?” Chagatayev asked him.

  “It’s necessary, it must be,” Nur-Mohammed said.

  “Let her stay with us,” Nazar said.

  Aidim sat down on the sand next to Chagatayev. “I’m staying,” she said, “I’m still a little girl, and I’m tired to death of walking. I don’t have to go!”

  Chagatayev leaned his elbows on the ground, and pulled the girl toward him. Dew had fallen, and Nazar quietly licked his tongue along Aidim’s hair on which there were little drops of moisture.

  “Go away by yourself!” he told Mohammed.

  “It’s high time for the dead to shut up!” Nur-Mohammed declared. “Lie back on the ground and sleep!” He kicked Chagatayev in the face with his foot in its canvas shoe.

  Chagatayev fell backwards. He noticed that Mohammed’s official briefcase was still hanging around his neck; Nur-Mohammed thought of his whole life as just temporary assignments to dis
tant places, and perhaps the only pleasure he took in his own existence was in being able to leave one place and move to another: let those who were left behind perish by themselves!

  Without thinking, Chagatayev got quickly to his feet. Now he felt empty and light, his body had become free, and he swayed like a weightless man. Aidim put her arms around his stomach, to keep him from falling. But Nur-Mohammed grabbed Aidim around her body, and walked away with her. Chagatayev started after them, but fell down, and then stood up again, trying to summon all his strength. His weakness made the whole world swing in front of his eyes: first it was there, then it wasn’t. Nur-Mohammed went on walking away, without hurrying; he was not afraid of a man already half dead.