Coming up to the dry bed of the Kunya-Darya River, Chagatayev saw a camel which was sitting like a human being, resting its front legs on a drift in the sand. The camel was thin, its humps had sagged down, and it looked shyly out of black eyes like a thoughtful, grieving man. When Chagatayev came up, the camel paid no attention; it was following the movement of some dead grass being blown by the wind—would it come closer or would it blow past? One blade of grass fluttered across the sand close to its mouth, and the camel chewed it with its lips, and swallowed it. In the distance a round tumbleweed was being dragged along by the wind, and the camel watched this big living plant with eyes made gentle by hope, but the tumbleweed moved by on one side; then the camel closed its eyes because it did not know how to cry.
Chagatayev examined the camel carefully; the animal had long since grown thin from hunger and disease, almost all the hair had fallen out leaving only a few clumps, and as a result the beast was quivering with chills. It had probably been unloaded and abandoned here by some passing caravan as a result of its weakness— or else the master had himself died, and the animal was waiting for him, meanwhile hoarding the strength of life left in it. Having lost the ability to move, the camel had raised itself up on its front legs in order to see the blades of grass being driven past by the wind, and to eat them. When there was no wind it closed its eyes, not wishing to waste its vision to no good end, and stayed in somnolence. It did not want to sink back and lie down—since it was no longer able to stand up—and thus remained sitting all the time, now observing, now drowsing, until death should strike it down or until some insignificant desert animal should finish it with one blow of a little paw.
Chagatayev sat next to this camel for a long time, watching and understanding. Then he collected some armfuls of tumbleweed from quite a large area, and fed them to the camel. He couldn’t water it, for he had only two canteens of water for himself, but he knew that there were fresh water ponds and small wells farther along the Kunya-Darya riverbed. But it would be hard for him to carry the camel across the sand.
Evening set in. Chagatayev fed the camel, bringing it grass from nearby patches, until the camel put its head down on the ground; it fell asleep with the heavy sleep of new life. Night fell, it began to grow cold. Chagatayev ate a flat cake from his knapsack, then drew close to the camel’s body in order to get warm, and began to drowse. He smiled; everything was strange to him in this world, as if it had been contrived for a quick and amusing game. But this special game was being dragged out endlessly, to all eternity, and no one wanted to laugh any longer, or could laugh. The empty land of the desert, the camel, even the wandering, sparse grass—all of this ought to be serious, big, and exultant. Does a feeling exist inside poor people of some other, happy, assignment, essential and indispensable, and is this why they feel so burdened, waiting for something? Chagatayev curled himself up around the stomach of the camel and fell asleep, lost in the wonder of reality.
[5]
After six days of traveling along the Kunya-Darya, Chagatayev saw Sari-Kamish. All this time he took with him the revived camel, which could walk by itself although it could not yet carry a man.
Chagatayev sat down at the edge of the sands, at the place where they run out, where the land runs downwards into the valley leading toward the distant Ust-Urt. It was dark there, low-lying, nowhere could Chagatayev see either smoke or a nomad tent— only in the distance was the shining of a small lake. Chagatayev let the sand run through his hands—this had not changed: the wind had blown it back and forth through all the years that had gone by, and the sand had grown old from staying in this everlasting place.
It was here that his mother had once led him by the hand, and sent him out to live alone, and now he had returned. He walked farther with the camel, into the depths of his native land. Wild bushes stood like little old men; they had not grown at all since Chagatayev was a child.
He spent several days in roaming around the country of his childhood, trying to find his people. The camel walked independently after him, afraid to remain alone and become despondent; sometimes it looked at the man for a long time, tense and observant, ready to cry or to smile, and tormented by its lack of knowing.
Passing the nights in wild places, eating up the last of his food, Chagatayev still did not worry about his own well-being. He was making his way into the heart of the unpopulated valley, to the very bottom of this ancient sea, in a hurry, and unquiet in his mind. Just once he lay down in the middle of his day’s walking, and hugged the ground. His heart had suddenly started to hurt, and he had lost the patience and the energy to struggle with it; he was crying for Ksenya, ashamed of his feeling, denying it. He could see her now close up in his mind and in his memory; she was smiling at him with the sorry smile of a little woman who can love only in her spirit but doesn’t want to be hugged and is afraid of kisses as of some mutilation. Vera was sitting some distance away, sewing children’s clothes, shortening her separation from her husband and already almost indifferent to him because another, more beloved and more helpless man was stirring inside her. She was waiting for him, eager to see his face and frightened of parting from him. But it comforted her to think of the long years she would kiss and hug him whenever she wanted to, until he would grow up and tell her: “You’re bothering me, Mama, and I’m tired of you!”
Chagatayev raised his head. The camel was chewing some kind of thin, bonelike grass, a little tortoise was looking out of black, tender eyes at the man lying there. What was in its consciousness at that moment? Maybe a magical kind of curiosity about the enormous, mysterious man, maybe just the sadness of slumbering intelligence.
“We won’t leave you alone!” Chagatayev said to the camel. He worried about whatever was real around him as if it were something sacred, and his heart was too hungry for him not to notice whatever could serve as consolation to it.
He and the camel walked on farther, to Ust-Urt, where one old, forgotten man was living at the very foot of the mountain. The old man passed his nights in a mud hut dug into the dry slope of the hill, and he lived on little animals and on the roots of plants which could be found in crevices in the plateau. His great age and his squalor made him look unlike a human being. He had long outlived the human century, all his feelings had been satisfied, and his mind had learned and memorized the world around him with the exactness of truth that has been proved. He knew even the stars, many thousands of them, by heart and by force of habit, and now they bored him.
His name was Sufyan. He was dressed in an old Russian soldier’s greatcoat from the times of the Khiva war, wore a visored cap, and his feet were bound with rags. When he saw Chagatayev, he walked toward him out of his earthen dwelling, and stared into space with faded eyes. A man with a camel was walking up to him. Sufyan recognized the newcomer immediately; he was secretly aggrieved that there was nothing he did not know.
“I know you,” he told Chagatayev. “You were the little boy Nazar.”
“But I don’t know you,” Chagatayev answered.
“You don’t know, because you live the way you eat; what goes into you comes out again. But in me everything lingers on.”
The old man made a wry face somewhat resembling a smile of welcome, but his face even when relaxed was like the empty skin of a dead, dried-up snake. Amazed, Chagatayev touched Sufyan’s hand and his forehead. He told the old man that he had come from far away, because of his mother and his people. Were they still on earth or had they died a long time ago?