The old man was silent.
“Did you meet your father somewhere?” he asked.
“No. Did you know him?”
“I don’t know,” Sufyan answered. “I heard that word ‘father’ once from someone going by, and he said it was something good. But I think not. If it is good, let it show up in Sari-Kamish, for this is the hellhole of the whole world, and I live here worse than any other man alive.”
“So I have come to you,” Chagatayev said.
The old man’s face puckered in a distrustful smile.
“You’ll soon be going away from me. I’ll die here all alone. You’re still young, your heart beats strongly, you’ll get tired.”
Chagatayev walked up to the old man and embraced him.
“You’ll die here of regret, of memories. Here, the Persians said, was the hellhole of the entire earth…”
They went into the mud hut where Sufyan lived on a litter of rushes. He gave his guest a flat cake made out of the roots of grasses which grew on the tableland. Through the opening of the entrance the shadow of the evening could be seen, running into the pit of Sari-Kamish where the world’s hellhole used to be in ancient times. Chagatayev had heard this legend in his childhood, and now he understood its full significance. In the far-distant Khorosan, beyond the Kopet-Daga mountains, surrounded by gardens and pashas, lived the clean god of happiness, fruits and women— Ormuzd, defender of agriculture and of human reproduction, lover of quiet in Iran. And to the north of Iran, beyond the slope of the mountains, lay the empty sands; they stretched in the direction of the middle of the night, where only rare grasses languished—and these broken away by the wind and blown to the dark places of Turan, in the middle of which the soul of man is forever grieving. The dark people, unable to endure despair and death of hunger, ran away to Iran. They dug themselves into the depths of the gardens, into the women’s quarters, into the ancient cities, and they hurried to eat, to look, to forget themselves, until they were destroyed and those who were spared chased back into the depths of the sands. Then they hid themselves at the end of the wilderness, in the Sari-Kamish valley, and they pined away there for a long time until need and memories of the limpid gardens of Iran raised them again to their feet…. Once more the horsemen of the black Turan appeared in Khorosan, beyond Atrek, in Astra-bad, among the properties of the hateful, fat, settled people, destroying and enjoying…. One of the old residents of Sari-Kamish was named Ariman, which was equivalent to the devil, and this poor wretch was driven to fury by his grief. He was not the most evil of them, but he was the most unhappy, and all his life he knocked his way across the mountains to Iran, to Ormuzd’s paradise, wanting to eat and to enjoy himself, until he bowed his weeping face over the barren land of Sari-Kamish and passed away.
Sufyan took Chagatayev in for the night. The economist was tired of sleeping: days and nights were going by in vain, he had to hurry to create happiness in the hellish valley of Sari-Kamish. He could not sleep for a long time because of his impatience as he considered how time was passing. The stars were shining in the sky like the light of conscience, the camel was puffing outside, the withered grass, broken loose by the daytime wind, scraped carefully over the sand as if it were trying to move independently, using its little blades as legs.
The next day Sufyan and Chagatayev went off together to try to find the missing people. The camel went with them, being afraid of solitude as any affectionate man fears it who is living separated from his own people.
At the very edge of Sari-Kamish, Chagatayev recognized a place he knew. Gray grass was growing here, but no higher than it had in Nazar’s childhood. It was here his mother had once told him: “Don’t be afraid, little boy, we’re going out to die,” and she had pulled him close to herself by the hand. All the people were gathered around, so that they made a crowd of perhaps a thousand men, together with women and children. The people were noisy and happy; they had decided to go to Khiva, to be killed there all together and at once… not to live any longer. The Khan of Khiva had tortured this shy, insignificant people with his power for a very long time. At first seldom, but then more and more frequently, he sent horsemen from his palace into Sari-Kamish, and each of them picked up several men from among this people, and these were either executed in Khiva or else thrown into darkness without hope of return. The Khan was looking for thieves, criminals, and godless men, but it was hard to sort these out. So he then ordered that all mysterious and obscure people be taken, so that the inhabitants of Khiva, watching their execution and their torture, should know terror, and the shivering of horror. At first the Dzhan people were afraid of Khiva, and many of them experienced nervous breakdowns in advance; they stopped worrying about themselves and their families and simply lay flat on their backs in uninterrupted weakness. Then all the people began to be afraid— they kept looking into the empty wilderness, waiting for their horsed enemies to appear. They stood stock-still with terror in any kind of breeze which blew the sand from the top of the dunes, thinking that the mounted men were tearing toward them. When one third or more of the people had been taken off to Khiva without any news of them, the rest became accustomed to waiting for their doom; they realized that life was not as dear as it had seemed in their hearts and in their hopes, and each one who stayed safe was a little bored because they had not taken him off to Khiva. But young Yakobdzhanov and his friend Oraz Babadzhan did not want to go to Khiva for no purpose, if it was possible to die in liberty. They threw themselves with knives on four of the Khan’s mounted guards and left them where they found them, stripped of their glory and their lives. The little Nazar, seeing strange, armed men, ran to his mother to get a sharp piece of iron which he had hidden away for playing, but when he had run back again it was already late: the guards had died without his sharpened iron. After this Oraz and Yakobdzhanov disappeared, riding the horses of the murdered soldiers, and the rest of their people walked to Khiva in a crowd, happy and peaceful; the people were equally ready then to destroy the Khan’s regime, or to give up their lives without regret, since to be alive seemed happy or good to none of them and to be dead not hard or painful. The melon growers walked in front, muttering their song, and Sufyan, then already an old man, was right beside them. Nazar looked at his mother; he was surprised that she was happy now although she was going to die, and all the other people walked along just as eagerly.
Ten or fifteen days later the Sari-Kamish people could see the Khan’s towers. The road to Khiva had been hard and long, but the difficulty and the demands of stationary life also required strong hearts, so that people felt no irritation at the extra fatigue. When they got to Khiva itself, the people were surrounded by a small mounted detachment of the Khan’s men, but then the people, seeing this, began to sing and to rejoice. Everybody sang, even the most silent and awkward; Uzbeks and Kazaks danced first of all, one unhappy old Russian played a mouth organ, Nazar’s mother held up one arm as if she were getting ready for a mysterious dance, and Nazar waited full of interest for the soldiers to kill them all, and him too, immediately. Heavy-set guards were standing around the Khan’s palace, to protect the Khan from everybody. They watched with amazement the approaching crowd which marched proudly past them and was not afraid of the power of bullets or of steel, as if it were both deserving and happy. These palace guards, together with the horsemen, were supposed gradually to surround the Sari-Kamish people and drive them into underground prisons, but it is hard to punish happy people because they do not understand what evil is.