Looking around him, Chagatayev smiled at all these shadowy, uninteresting elements, not knowing what there was for him to do.
Over the top of the dense reed thicket, on the silver horizon, he could see a kind of disappearing mirage—the sea, or a lake with moving ships, and the shining white columns of a faraway city on its shore.
The mother was standing silently next to her son, her body sagging down toward the ground. She lived in one of these huts, built on clay, without a husband, without relatives. Two reed mats lay on the ground inside her dwelling—with one she covered herself, while she slept on the other. She still had an iron pot for cooking and a clay jug, and on a crossbeam hung the little trousers of her girlhood and a single rag, in which she had wrapped Nazar when he was nursing at her breast. Kochmat had died six years before, nothing was left of him but one trouser leg (Gulchatai had used up the other in patches for her skirt) and a piece of bast which Kochmat had used to wipe the sweat and dirt off his body when he had gone out to work on the pumps in the oases.
Nazar’s mother lived here as a poor, landless peasant. She was amazed that Nazar was still alive but she was not surprised that he had come back. She did not know about any other life in the whole world except the one she lived herself; she thought everything on earth was all the same. Chagatayev went back for the little girl Aidim; he woke her and took her into his mother’s hut. Gulchatai went out to dig up some grass roots, to catch little fish with a reed net dipped into water holes, to look for birdsnests in the underbrush and to collect eggs or little nestlings. She did not come back until evening, when she began to prepare food from the grass, the roots of reeds and some little fish. She was no longer interested that her son was now there, near her, she did not look at him at all and she spoke no word, just as if her thinking and her feeling were weighted down in some deep, uninterrupted meditation which took all her strength. The brief, human feeling of gladness about her living, grown-up son had either gone, or it had never been at all, and there was only a wonder about this strange meeting.
Gulchatai did not even ask if Nazar would like to eat, or what he was thinking of doing in his native land, in this settlement in the reeds.
Nazar looked at her; he watched her stir about at her usual tasks and it seemed to him that she was in fact asleep, not really moving around but in a dream. Her eyes were so pale and helpless that there was no strength left in them for seeing, they held no expression of any kind, like the eyes of the blind and the deaf. Her big, crusted feet showed that Gulchatai lived barefoot all the time; her clothing consisted of a single dark skirt pulled up to her neck like a cowl, patched up with different bits and pieces of cloth including pieces of a felt shoe which were stitched around its hem. Chagatayev felt his mother’s dress; it had been put on over her naked body and she had on no undershirt—his mother had long grown used to freezing at night and in the winter and to suffering in the heat. She had got accustomed to everything.
Nazar called his mother. She answered him, and understood him. He began to help her make a fire on the hearth which was built like a little cave under the slanting wall of reeds. Aidim watched these strange people out of her clear black eyes which still held the shining strength of childhood and the shyness which was sorrow, because what a child really wants is to be happy, not to sit in the dark of a mud hut wondering if they would give her anything to eat. Chagatayev remembered where he had seen eyes like Aidim’s, but still more lively, happy and loving—no, not here, and that woman was not a Turkmen nor a Khirgiz, she had forgotten him a long time ago, and he too could not remember her name, and she could not even imagine where Chagatayev was now or what he was doing: Moscow was far away, he was almost alone here, around him a wilderness flooded with water and dilapidated dwellings made of dead grass. He began to long for Moscow, for many comrades, for Vera and Ksenya, and he wanted to go out that evening somewhere on a streetcar, to visit friends. But Chagatayev quickly recovered himself; “No, Moscow’s here, too!” he said out loud, and he smiled, looking into Aidim’s eyes. She became frightened, and stopped looking at him.
The mother boiled a kind of stew for herself in the iron pot, ate it to the last drop and wiped the inside of the pot with her fingers and then sucked them, the better to get her fill. Aidim watched Gulchatai carefully while she ate, how the food slipped down past the sinews in her thin throat, but she watched this without greed or envy, only with amazement and with pity for the old woman who was gulping the grass in hot water. After eating, Gulchatai fell asleep on her spread-out carpet of reeds, because night had fallen all around them.
[8]
Chagatayev’s first day in his native land had been lived through. At first the sun had been shining, and there was something to be hoped for, then the sky had grown dark, and already one indistinct, paltry star showed far away in the sky.
It had grown raw and dead quiet. The people in this country of reeds were silent, Chagatayev could not hear them at all. He gathered some grass and made a bed out of it in his mother’s hut and laid Aidim down in the warm place so that she might sleep.
Then he went out alone, walked as far as an empty channel of the Amu-Darya, and then returned. A powerful night now stood over this land, the small, young reeds were rustling at the base of the older plants, like children in their sleep. People might think there was nothing in this wilderness, only an uninteresting wild place where a melancholy herdsman drowses in the darkness, with the dirty valley of Sari-Kamish lying at his feet, where once upon a time a human disaster took place—it is over, and its martyrs vanished. But in very fact here, on the Amu-Darya and in Sari-Kamish, there was an entire hard world busy with its destiny.
Chagatayev was listening: someone was talking near him, humorously and quickly, but getting no answer. Nazar approached one of the reed huts. He could hear the breathing of sleeping people inside it, and their uneasy tossing.
“Pick up the wool on the ground, and put it inside my shirt,” the voice of a sleeping old man was saying. “Collect it quickly, while the camels are shedding…”
Chagatayev listened next to the wall of reeds. Now the old man was whispering in delirium, what he was saying couldn’t be heard. He was dreaming some kind of life in perpetual motion, and his murmuring grew lower and lower, as if he were moving away.
“Dudri, Dudri!” a woman’s voice began to call; she was stirring, and the reed mat which covered her was rustling. “Dudri! Don’t run away from me, I’m dead tired but I’ll catch up with you…. Stop, don’t torment me, I’ve got a sharp knife, I’ll slash you to pieces, so you’d better give up.”
But the old man and the woman soon grew silent and slept peacefully again.
“Dudri!” Chagatayev called quietly from outside the hut.
“What?” the voice of the muttering old man answered from inside.
“Are you asleep?” Chagatayev asked.
“I’m sleeping,” Dudri answered.
Chagatayev remembered this Dudri from his earliest childhood. Then he had been a skinny man from the Iomud tribe who roamed from place to place with his wife, and ate tortoises. He would come to Sari-Kamish when he started to be bored, and he would sit silently in a group of people listening to them talk, and smiling, and he was content with the secret happiness of meeting them; then he would go out again into the sands to catch tortoises and to think about something in solitude. A lonely woman (to Nazar, then, she too seemed old) walked behind her husband, carrying all their worldly belongings on her back. The little Nazar would go with them for a long time until they disappeared in the shining light, transformed into flowing heads without a body, into a boat, a bird, a mirage.