One of the Khan’s assistants went up close to the old people from Sari-Kamish and asked them:
“What do you want, and why do you feel so happy?”
Someone answered him, maybe it was Sufyan or some other old man:
“You’ve been teaching us to die for a long time, now we’re used to it, and we’ve come all together and at the same time—give us our death quickly, before we’ve lost the idea, while the people are still rejoicing!”
The Khan’s assistant went back, and never returned. The horsemen and the foot soldiers stayed around the palace, never touching the people: they could have killed only those to whom death was frightening, and once the whole people was marching happily past them to its death, the Khan and his chief soldiers did not know what to make of this or what to do. They did nothing, and all the people who had come out of the valley walked on farther, and soon they saw the bazaar. Merchants were trading there, food was lying in piles around them, and the evening sun shining in the sky lit up green onions, melons, watermelons, grapes in baskets, yellow grain for baking bread, gray mules drowsy with tiredness and with indifference.
Then Nazar asked his mother:
“And when will it be death? I want it!”
But the mother herself did not know what would happen then; she could see that everyone was still alive, and she was afraid to go back to Sari-Kamish again and once more to live on there.
The people started to pick up various fruits at the Khiva bazaar and to eat them, having no money, and the merchants just stood there silent and did not beat these thieving people. Nazar ate slowly, he kept looking around, waiting for murder, and he managed to eat only one melon. When they had eaten, the people grew uneasy because their happiness had passed, and there was no death. Gulchatai led Nazar back into the wilderness. All the people also went away, back to the old place where they lived.
Nazar and his mother returned to Sari-Kamish. They had rested then, on this same gray, harsh grass where Chagatayev was standing now with Sufyan, and the mother had told her son:
“Let’s live again, we haven’t died!”
“We’re both alive,” Nazar had agreed. “You know what, Mama, we’ll live.”
“Lucky the one who dies inside his mother,” Gulchatai said.
Then she looked at her son; happiness and pity filled her face.
Now Nazar just patted the ancient grass which had stayed there unchanging up to the present time because it had really died before Nazar’s birth, but still held on, as if living, by its deep, dead roots. Sufyan understood that some kind of deep emotion was now working inside Chagatayev, but he was not interested in it: he knew that a man needs something to fill his soul, and that if there is nothing, then the heart will greedily squeeze out its own blood.
After four days, Sufyan and Chagatayev wanted to eat so badly that they began to see dreams even while their legs still moved and their eyes looked at the usual daylight. The camel did not leave them, but moved along some distance off, where it could find a little forage in the grass along the way. Sufyan watched his flowing dreams hopelessly, while Chagatayev smiled at them sometimes, and was sometimes tormented by them. When they got to the Daryalik channel at Mangirchardar, the two walkers stopped for the night, and Sufyan mixed some water on the shore so it would be muddy, thicker, and more nourishing, and then, having drunk it, both men lay down in a cave, so the body might forget it was alive, and the night be over sooner. When he woke up in the morning, Chagatayev saw the camel dead; it was lying nearby with its eyes turned to stone, on its neck the blood stood still in a deep cut, and Sufyan was digging deep into its interior, as into a sack filled with goods, taking raw pieces out with clean blood on them and stuffing himself with them. Chagatayev too crept to the camel, a smell of warmth and satiety came from the open body, the blood was still flowing in droplets down the creases of the dead body, life was taking a long time to die. When they had eaten, Chagatayev and Sufyan blissfully fell asleep again, and they didn’t wake up quickly.
Then they walked farther—into the flooded places at the estuary of the Amu-Darya. They took with them a reserve of camel meat, but Chagatayev ate it without appetite: it was hard for him to nourish himself with the sorrowful animal; it too had seemed to him a member of humanity.
[6]
The residents of the Sari-Kamish valley were scattered among the reeds and bushes along the estuary of the Amu-Darya River. About ten years had gone by since the Dzhan people had come here and settled in this wet-loving vegetation. At first the mosquitoes ate the people so badly that they tore the skin off their bones, but after a little time their blood became used to the mosquitoes’ poison and began to develop an antidote from which the mosquitoes became helpless and fell to the ground. Because of this the mosquitoes were now afraid of people, and would not come near them at all.
Some of the people had settled apart from each other, in order not to suffer for others when there was nothing to eat, and in order not to have to weep when people close to them died. But some of the people lived in families; in these cases they had nothing but their love one for another, because they had neither good food, nor hope for the future, nor any other happiness to distract them, and their hearts grew so weak that they could hold only love for a wife or for a husband, which is the most helpless, poor and everlasting of all feelings.
At first Sufyan and Chagatayev wandered for a couple of days through the gloomy reeds on the sodden ground before they saw a single grass hut. A blind man, Molla Cherkezov, lived in it, fed and taken care of by his daughter Aidim, a girl of twelve. Molla recognized Sufyan by his voice, but he had nothing to say to him.
They sat facing each other on the litter of reeds, and drank tea made out of the dried, ground-up roots of those same reeds, and then they said good-bye to each other.
“Do you have any news?” Sufyan asked as he took his leave.
“No. Life goes on just the same way,” Cherkezov answered. “My wife, my dear Gyun, fell into the water and died.”
“Why did your worthy Gyun fall in the water?”
“She couldn’t stand living. Take my daughter Aidim, and bring me instead a young she-ass. I’ll live with her at night, to avoid thinking, and sleeplessness.”
“I’m a poor man,” Sufyan said, “I haven’t any she-asses. You should trade your daughter for an old woman. Live with an old woman; it’s all the same to you.”
“It’s all the same,” Molla Cherkezov agreed. “But old women die off quickly, and there aren’t enough of them.”
“You’ve heard, Nazar has come to us from Moscow. They’ve ordered him to help us live a good life.”
“Four men have come before Nazar,” Cherkezov reported. “The mosquitoes bit them, and they went away. I’m a blind man, my business is the dark, nothing will do me any good. But if I had a wife, life would go by without my knowing it.”
The girl Aidim sat on the ground, with her legs apart, and rubbed a small stone against a large reed rhizome; she was the cook here and she was preparing food. Beside the girl, in addition to the reeds, were several bunches of marsh and desert grass and one clean bone of a donkey or a camel, picked up in the sand somewhere faraway, for cooking. A scrubbed kettle stood next to her and she threw into it from time to time what her hands were getting ready, for she was fixing a soup for dinner. The girl was not interested in her guests; her eyes were engrossed with her own thoughts—probably she was living some secret, independent dream and doing the housework almost unconsciously, distracted from all the world around her by her concentrated heart.