“Let your daughter come with me,” Chagatayev asked the master of the hut.
“She’s not yet grown up, what will you do with her?” Molla Cherkezov said.
“I’ll bring you another one, an old one.”
“Bring her quickly,” Cherkezov agreed.
Chagatayev took Aidim by the hand; she looked at him out of black eyes, which had the shine of blind, unseeing eyes, and she was frightened and did not understand.
“Come with me,” Chagatayev said to her.
Aidim rubbed her hands in the dirt, to clean them, stood up and walked away, leaving all her things where they were, not looking at anything, just as if she had only lived here for a moment and as if she were not now leaving her own father.
“Sufyan, it’s all the same with you, whether you go on with me or not, isn’t it?”
“All the same,” Sufyan answered.
Chagatayev told him to stay with the blind man and to help Cherkezov eat and live until he came back.
Nazar walked off with the young girl along the narrow track of people who had moved before him through the forest of reeds. He wanted to see all the inhabitants of this overgrown land, the people hiding here from poverty. He had not asked Sufyan about his mother; he hoped that unexpectedly he might run into her, alive and remembering him, but if she was dead, he could always find out later where her bones were lying.
Aidim walked humbly behind Chagatayev the whole long way. In places the reeds ended. There Nazar and the girl would walk out into empty, sandy dunes, covered with silt, next to little ponds; they would walk around stiff bushes, and plunge again into the thicket of reeds where the little path ran. Aidim was silent; when she was dead tired, Chagatayev took her over his shoulder and carried her, holding on to her knees while she held on to his head. Then they would rest, and drink water from the clean sandy pools. The girl kept watching Chagatayev with a strange look which he tried to understand.
“Why is everything bad here,” he thought, “when what I need is what is good?”
Chagatayev put Aidim down against his arm, and ran his fingers through her hair. She fell asleep right away in his arms, trusting, and pitiful, born only to be happy and to be taken care of.
The evening came. It was too dark to go farther. Chagatayev gathered grass, made a warm bed of it to guard against the cold at night, placed the girl in this grassy softness, and lay down himself beside it, sheltering and warming the little person.
Chagatayev lay there sleepless; if he had gone to sleep, Aidim would have been uncovered and numb with cold. Huge black night filled the sky and the earth, from the foot of the grass to the edge of the world. The sun alone disappeared, but in return all the stars began to shine, and the vast, unquiet Milky Way, looking as if some march with no return had just taken place along it.
[7]
The first dawn light picked out the figures lying on the grass. One of Chagatayev’s arms was under Aidim’s head, to protect her sleep from the hard, damp ground, and the other was across his eyes, to guard them from the morning. A strange old woman was sitting next to the sleeping pair, looking at them with absorption. Barely touching him, she felt Chagatayev’s hair, his mouth, and his hands, then she smelled his clothing, looking around her, afraid someone might stop her. Then she carefully took Nazar’s hand out from under the girl’s head, so that he would feel no one, and love no one, and be only with her. Her back had long since become permanently bent, and when the old woman looked at something her face almost crawled along the ground, as if she were shortsighted and looking for something she had lost. She examined all Nazar’s clothes, tried with her hands the little straps and tapes of his trousers and shoes, rumpled the cloth of his jacket between her palms, and traced Chagatayev’s black, dusty eyebrows with her finger, moistened in her mouth. Then she relaxed, and lay down with her head at Nazar’s feet, happy and exhausted, as if she had now lived through to the end of life and there was nothing more for her to do, as if in these shoes, rotting inside from sweat and covered with the dust of the desert and with swamp mud, she had found her final consolation. The old woman either dozed or fell asleep, but then quickly got up again. Chagatayev and Aidim were sleeping as they had before: children sleep a long time, and even the sun, butterflies, and birds do not wake them.
“Wake up, quickly!” the old woman said, putting her arms around the sleeping Chagatayev.
He opened his eyes. The old woman started to kiss his neck and his chest, through his clothes; crawling with her face toward her son she tested and examined all his body very closely: were his members whole or not, had none of them sickened, or lost something, while he had been away?
“You don’t have to do that; you’re my mother,” Chagatayev said.
He got to his feet in front of her, but his mother was so hunched over that now she couldn’t see his face, and she pulled at his hand, so he stooped down and sat in front of her. Gulchatai was shaking with age, or with love for her son, and she could say nothing to him. She just passed her hands over his body, fearfully becoming aware of her happiness, and not believing in it, afraid that it would go away.
Chagatayev looked into his mother’s eyes, which had now become pale, unused to him, no longer lighted by their former dark and shining strength. Her thin, small face had grown rapacious and wicked, either from unceasing grief or from the effort of keeping herself alive when there was no reason to live, and no one to live for, when she even had to remember that her own heart was beating, and to force it to work. Otherwise she might die at any moment, forgetting or not noticing that she was alive, and that it is essential to try to want something and to keep on being aware of one’s own self.
Nazar embraced his mother. She was as light as air now, or as a little girl; she would have to start to live again from scratch, like a child, because all her strength had gone in the patient struggle against unending hardship. No part of her heart was any longer free of grief, able to feel the goodness of her own existence; she had never been able to understand who she was and to feel easy with herself before the time had come for her to be an old woman, and to die.
“Where are you living?” Nazar asked her.
“There,” Gulchatai pointed with her hand.
She led him through short grass and sparse reeds, and they quickly came to a little village set down in a clearing in the reeds. Chagatayev could see some reed huts and several tents, also fastened together with reeds. In all there were about twenty dwelling places, perhaps a few more. Chagatayev saw no dogs, no donkeys, no camels in this settlement, there were not even chickens walking around on the grass.
Beside the farthest hut a naked man was sitting, his skin hanging from him in folds like worn-out, tired clothing; he was sorting reed canes on his knees, weaving them into things for domestic use or for decorations. This man was not at all surprised by Chagatayev’s arrival, and did not even answer his greeting; he mumbled to himself, imagining something visible to no one else, giving his soul its own secret comfort.
“Do all our people live here, or are there others?” Chagatayev asked his mother.
“I’ve already forgotten, Nazar, I don’t know,” Gulchatai said, following him with a great effort, holding her head down low like a heavy burden. “There were some more people, about ten of them, they live in the reeds down toward the sea—that is to say, they used to live there, now it’s time for them to die, they must have died already, none of them comes back to us…”
The little huts and tents ended. Beyond them the reeds began again. Chagatayev stopped. Here it all was—his mother and his native land, his childhood and his future. Early daylight lit up the place: the green, pale reeds, the gray-brown ramshackle huts in the clearing with the sparse grass underfoot, and the air above filled with sunshine, the humid steam of the swamp, the loess dust of the oases which were drying up, stirred by some high, inaudible wind, a dull, exhausted sky, as if nature itself were nothing but a mournful, hopeless force.