Chagatayev had wakened by now, and turned over, so it was easier for the girl to work. He opened his eyes, and he saw Aidim, and the dead birds, and the sand, as if through a heavy twilight, although the usual sunny morning had begun. He looked at the eagles again, and he saw that the biggest bird was the female, and the other two eagles were much smaller: they were its children. The female had flown back here with its husband’s truest friends, its own children.
[15]
For four days the people ate, recovering from their grief and their misery. Aidim saw to it that no one ate too much, and she stopped those who were especially zealous over their food, or rapped them across the eyes: otherwise they would not have felt it. The wounds on Chagatayev’s body began to heal over; he gave Aidim his underclothes and she sewed herself a skirt and a blouse, without which she would have been naked. Sufyan, who carried around with him all his life his own inventory of what was needed for day-to-day living—matches, a needle, thread, an awl, an ancient document attesting his identity, a small knife, and a few other things—asked Aidim to mend his clothes. She sewed up the large rips in the old man’s robe, then at the same time she fixed up the decrepit clothing of all the people in those places where their bodies showed through; for many people she had to shorten their garments to save material which she could use for those who had too little. Out of such scraps she made a whole pair of trousers and a shirt for Tagan because he had thrown his clothes away somewhere in the sand when he had thought it was time for life to end, and since then he had gone naked.
This work took Aidim four more days—only Stari Vanka and Chagatayev helped her with the mending and the sewing. Besides this, she checked up on the general way of life of her people, on the distribution of food, on their sleep, and on the remaining sheep, seeing to it that they were pastured and watered and that they did not get thin, using up their bodies to no good purpose. At night Aidim tied each sheep to a person, while she placed the ram next to herself and tied a leash around his neck with its other end fastened with a strong knot around her stomach. Thanks to these precautions not a single sheep ran away, even though this meant that they stayed lying down all night without grazing and adding to their weight.
One morning nine days after Aidim had brought in the flock of sheep, the people took to the road again, walking toward their native land. By now there were only ten sheep left, plus the ram as the eleventh; the people had eaten thirteen sheep and three eagles. The people walked well now, and they felt that they really existed, without having to strain their memories for recollections of who they had once been.
There were only three full days of easy walking left between them and Sari-Kamish. On the second day they could already see the gray plateau of Ust-Urt and the darkness around its base, the valley of empty land with its few miserable streams. They were all glad and they hurried on, just as if this were a place where happiness was guaranteed, with tidy houses and doors standing open for them, waiting for their masters. Chagatayev led his mother by the hand, and he smiled, just as if he found himself once more, as in his childhood, face to face with a great future, ready for all its agonizing, patient labor, his heart filled with confused, shy feelings of inevitable triumph.
On the evening of the third day the people crossed the last shining sand—the frontier of the desert—and began to drop down into the shadows of the valley. Chagatayev looked at this land, its pale salt marshes, its loamy soil, the dark antiquity of its ground which still held, perhaps, the bones of that poor Ariman who had not been able to achieve the brilliant destiny of Ormuzd and had not conquered him. Why had he not been able to be happy? Maybe because the fate of Ormuzd and others who lived in distant countries filled with gardens was foreign and repulsive to him, their lot did not really appeal to him or attract his heart; otherwise he himself, patient and energetic, would have been able to create in Sari-Kamish all that there was in Khorosan, or to conquer Khoro-san….
Chagatayev liked to turn over in his mind this question of what people before him had not been able to accomplish, because this was precisely what it was now up to him to work on.
Two days later the tribe had passed through the valley and was approaching the foot of Ust-Urt. Chagatayev found a small reservoir of fresh water here, filled by the spring runoff from the high plateau, and the people stopped next to it, to rest and to pick their permanent dwelling places. There were only three sheep left, and the ram was a fourth. But this was not frightening for a people like the Dzhan, who knew how to use the good things of nature even in its most barren places. On the first day there, Aidim found some ravines filled with tumbleweed. This grass had been blown here from the desert by the southeasterly winds, and only those bushes of tumbleweed which bypassed these blind gullies were lifted over the slope to the higher tableland and blown farther on, into the steppes.
Sufyan went back to his cave, where he had been living before Chagatayev’s arrival, and he advised the whole tribe to settle around it. It was a broad, spacious valley covered with grass, and a little stream which ran through it from Ust-Urt did not dry up until the middle of each summer. The people walked into this valley and on the way they found traces of their former stopping places, dating from the days of the Khans. Nothing much was left, just the usual wasteland, some handfuls of coal, some lumps of clay, the stake of a tent abandoned by everybody, worn by the heat and the wind. A child’s skullcap was half-buried in the ground; Aidim cleaned it and put it on her head.
The valley recommended by Sufyan was a good one to live in. Its grass cover stretched a long way, and even now, at the end of summer, not all the grass was dead; among the yellow stubble could be seen live, green blades of growing grass. The bed of the stream was empty, but in the heart of Sari-Kamish, a couple of kilometers away, you could see a mirror of water, a lake made by the mountain streams in spring and early summer; this was enough to exist on. When the people walked into the mouth of the valley a lot of tortoises had run out from under their feet and, at a safe distance, slowly stretched out their necks to look at the new arrivals, each tortoise with one black, vigilant, gentle eye. Chaga-tayev was delighted by it; now he could breathe deeply and collect himself; everything in life seemed possible to him now, as it had before, and the best part of it achievable right away.
He walked with Aidim far into the hills of Ust-Urt, up on to its high plains. He was looking for firewood, or at least the brushwood which grew sometimes in its ravines. Wood would be needed to make household tools and furniture. Along the way Chagatayev carried Aidim in his arms so that she would not get tired, and he kissed her cheeks, her eyes, her hair; this made him feel better in his heart. He loved to sense another’s life, it seemed to him that something more mysterious and beautiful, more meaningful, was there than in himself, and both his health and his feelings were often made better just by the chance to hold someone by the hand. Aidim hugged Chagatayev, too, around his head, and she stroked with her fingers the two bald patches on his scalp which had been made by the eagles’ wounds; she remembered that was the time when she had eaten an entire small eaglet all by herself.
Chagatayev had only a penknife, so it took him a long time to cut down and then cut up one not very big softwood tree growing all by itself in a stony gorge where nothing else was growing, as if some bird had once dropped the seed here from the air above.
For several days in the Ust-Urt valley which had been chosen to live in, only two people worked—Chagatayev and Aidim; the rest of the people drowsed in the caves which they dug out for night shelter along the slope of the valley, or they caught tortoises and fixed them for eating, but they ate little, and almost unwillingly, and they went once each day to the lake for drinking water. Chagatayev ordered that the three sheep and the ram were not to be touched, but kept in reserve against some extreme need. He counted the people, who was alive and who had died, and found one child missing, a three-year-old girl. No one could tell him, not her father nor her mother nor anyone else, where this little girl had disapp
eared or how she had died. No one could remember when she had slipped out of their arms and been blown away into the desert by the wind and the sand.
Chagatayev and Aidim started to collect the clay with which to make the first house, but no one helped them with the work. When Chagatayev ordered Sufyan and Stari Vanka, as the healthiest of them all, to help with the job, they carried clay twice, and then stopped. They sat down on the ground and thought, even though in all the years of their age they had long ago had time to think everything through and to arrive at truth.
Then Chagatayev summoned all the people, and he asked them: did they want to live? No one gave him any answer.
Many pale eyes were looking at Chagatayev with the strained attention needed to keep from closing, with fatigue and indifference. Chagatayev felt pain with his sadness; his people needed only oblivion, before the wind would first cool and then blow their bodies away into space. Chagatayev turned away from them all; his actions, his hopes now seemed to make no sense. He ought to take Aidim by the hand and go away from here forever. He walked off to one side and lay down with his face to the ground. He realized that no matter where he might go from here, he would come back again. For his people were the poorest in the whole world; they had squandered their bodies on the waterwheels and in the desert, they had been weaned from the goal of life and stripped of consciousness and of interest, because their desires had never been realized, in any degree, and the people had just lived mechanically. The skimpy daily food—of tortoises, and tortoise eggs and little fish caught in the same reservoir from which they drank their water—was not enough for them. Was there even a little spirit left in this people, enough for him, working with them, to create happiness for everybody? Or had it all been worn away long ago, with even imagination—which is the intelligence of poor people—now extinct? Chagatayev knew that any exploitation of a man starts with perverting him, adapting his spirit to death, to the master’s ends, otherwise the slave would not be a slave. And this forced deformity of the spirit continues and grows stronger until the slave’s intelligence has been transformed into insanity. The class struggle begins with the conquest of the “holy spirit” locked up inside the slave; then any insult to what the master himself believes in, his spirit or his god, is never forgiven, and the slave’s spirit is ground down by lies and by the ravaging of hard labor.
Chagatayev recalled Stari Vanka’s story about how once in Khiva, in the courtyard of a mosque, he had wanted to kill a peacock, so as to sell it later, as a stuffed bird to a Russian buyer. In a hurry, old Vanka had thrown a stone at the peacock, at the sacred bird itself, but had not hit it. In the distance, in the bushes, either the watchman or some other person had appeared. Stari Vanka picked up whatever was closest to his hand among the plants around him, and threw this object at the peacock. The bird immediately swallowed whatever it was that Vanka had thrown at it, and then uttered its mean, broken-throated cry, and Stari Vanka had run up to it to strangle it with his hands but had not managed to because some Moslems had appeared who grabbed Stari Vanka, carried him out to the street, and thrashed him until they thought he was dead, and then threw him into a disused irrigation ditch. While they were maiming him, Vanka held his face in his hands, and it was then that he realized, from the smell on his fingers, that the second missile he had thrown at the sacred peacock had been a piece of dried excrement. Vanka climbed out of the canal alive, but afterwards he loved to throw something unclean at all the flying or sitting birds he saw, especially if they were doves, until after many years he lost interest even in doing this.
Something alive was snuffling over Chagatayev’s head, and he thought it was a sheep. But the animal took Chagatayev’s ear in its mouth and began to rub it between its toothless jaws. This was the same ferocious but helpless dog Chagatayev had seen at the settlement where his people had lived on the Amu-Darya. It had not been with the people in the desert, it had fallen behind somehow, or perhaps it had stayed to be the solitary guardian of the abandoned settlement and then, having grown bored, come by a straight road to Sari-Kamish where it, too, had obviously lived in previous years. Chagatayev took the dog’s head and pushed it to the ground, to make the dog lie down. The dog lay down quietly, it was trembling with exhaustion—grown old and wild, without the strength either to end or to change its wretched life but still convinced of the felicity of its existence.
The dog fell asleep next to Chagatayev. Aidim went on puddling the clay by herself with her bare feet, carrying the water two kilometers in wineskins. When Chagatayev woke up, several people were sitting around him, waiting for him to regain consciousness. Sufyan, the oldest man, told Chagatayev that it was natural that the people now had no spirit, and did not know any goal in life, were not tempted by better food, and warmed themselves by the weakest sort of heat from their own hearts, getting this warmth from the grass, the tortoises, the fish, and from their own bones when they had nothing to eat.
Sufyan leaned down to Chagatayev’s ear, nudging the dog away. The dog looked at the people greedily and sadly. It had come all this way in pursuit of this tribe, separated from it, digging itself deep into the sand in the daytime so as not to be noticed by the eagles of the steppe and by other beasts of prey. Sufyan told Chagatayev:
“You figure this out the wrong way. The people must live, but they can’t. When they want to eat rice, drink wine, have robes, and tents to live in, strangers will always come up and say: take what you want, wine, rice, camels, whatever in life will make you happy…”
“Nobody gives things away,” Chagatayev said.
“They used to give a little,” Sufyan said. “A handful of rice, a flat loaf of bread, an old robe, songs in the evening, a few bribes, we had all these long ago, when we worked on the Bey’s water-wheels….”
“My mother ordered me to feed myself, when I was a little boy,” Chagatayev told him. “We had little, we were dying.”
“Very little,” Sufyan agreed. “But we always wanted a great deal: sheep, and a wife, and water from the irrigation ditches. There is always an empty place inside a man’s spirit where he can hide a little more of whatever he wants. And we worked for that little bit, for poor, infrequent food we worked until our bones dried out. We didn’t know any other life,” Sufyan went on. “I’m asking you: if we almost died from work and hunger, just for a little bit to eat, do you suppose even our death would be enough to earn real happiness for us on this earth?”
Chagatayev stood up.
“All you need is life! In the old days it was the slave’s spirit that died first, then he stopped even feeling alive. A tumbleweed plant was freer than one of us.”
“I’ve heard about that,” Sufyan said indifferently. “We know that the rich are all dead now. But you listen to me.” Sufyan was stroking Chagatayev’s old Moscow shoe. “Your people are afraid to live, they’ve lost the habit, and don’t believe in it. They’re pretending to be dead; otherwise happier and stronger ones will come to torture them again. They’ve left themselves the least bit possible, what’s not needed by anyone else, so no one will get greedy when he sees it.”
Sufyan walked off with the people who had been with him. Chagatayev went to Aidim and worked with her until evening. Then he put her to sleep in a dry cave and went on working himself, preparing adobe bricks out of clay mixed with old grass, for the building of the first house. There was no one near him or in the whole valley; everyone had gone off somewhere, perhaps to trap tortoises or to catch fish in the lake. Chagatayev worked more and more quickly and productively. It was not until late at night that he climbed up the slope to the plateau to see where all the people had gone. The clean, high moon made everything visible; moonlight stood over unpopulated Ust-Urt, covering the valley of Sari-Kamish with the shadow of the mountain, and then caught fire again far over the stinging deserts which stretched to the mountains of Iran. The three sheep and the ram were pastured in a nearby canyon, noisily turning over piles of tumbleweed as they looked for green grass that was still livi
ng. In the dark shadow of Ust-Urt, where Sari-Kamish began, a little bonfire was burning, and beyond the bonfire a thin cloud of mist hung over the lake. Chagatayev climbed down from the plateau and walked toward the bonfire. In a half hour he had come close enough to see that his whole people was sitting around the fire, on which desert underbrush was burning quietly. They were all singing a song, and did not notice Chagatayev. He listened to the song with delight; in his childhood he had heard a lot of songs from his mother, from various old men, and the songs were all beautiful but sad. This one had a meaning unfamiliar to him, there was a feeling in it which was not native to his tribe, but they all sang it as if carried away, still not noticing him. Chagatayev could make out even his mother’s feeble, shy voice. The song said: we do not cry when tears come to us, but neither will we smile with joy when good times begin, and those times are near at hand. The song ended. Stari Vanka stirred the fire with a stick and pushed out of it some baked fish, testing them to see if they were cooked, and those that weren’t ready he pushed back into the fire.
Chagatayev walked back, without having been seen by the people. He began to make bricks again, and he went on working until the moon went out in the sky and the sun began to shine. In the morning he noticed that the people were still sitting around the dead fire, while Stari Vanka was moving and shaking his whole body as if he were dancing. Chagatayev decided not to leave his work, since the night had gone by and there was no time to sleep. He shaped the bricks in the clay forms, putting all the strength of his heart into his labor. Aidim was still sleeping. Sometimes Chagatayev walked over to the hollow where she was lying, and covered her with grass to protect her from the flies and insects: let her refresh herself in sleep, for growing and for a long life. About midday Stari Vanka came up to Chagatayev; he took off the trousers which had been sewed for him out of various scraps by Aidim to replace those thrown away in the desert, climbed down into the trench where the clay was being mixed with water, and started to puddle it with his thin, hard feet.
The Fierce and Beautiful World Page 12