Another reed hut, built like a tent, was right next to him. A little dog was sitting by it. Chagatayev was amazed, because he had not yet seen a single domestic animal. The black dog looked at him, opened and closed its mouth in a threatening way, and barked, but made no sound. At the same time it lifted first its right, and then its left paw, trying to build up enough fury to lunge at the stranger, but it could not. Chagatayev leaned down to the dog and it took his hand in its mouth and pressed it between empty gums; the dog did not have a single tooth. He felt its body, and its cruel, pitiful heart was beating fast, and there were tears of despair in the dog’s eyes.
Occasionally someone laughed inside the tent in a silly voice. Chagatayev lifted the lattice hanging from the pole and walked into the dwelling. It was quiet and stifling in the tent, and nothing could be seen. Chagatayev knelt down and crawled around, trying to find out who was there. The hot, woolen air was suffocating him. Chagatayev was groping for the unknown man with his exhausted hands when he felt someone’s face. This face puckered up suddenly under Chagatayev’s fingers, and out of its mouth came a warm flow of words each one of which could be understood although what they said made no sense at all. Chagatayev listened in amazement, holding the face in his hands and trying to understand what it was saying, but he couldn’t. The inhabitant of the tent stopped talking for a moment, and laughed quite reasonably, then started to talk again. It seemed to Chagatayev that he was laughing at what he was saying, and at his own mind which was now thinking something, but what it thought had no meaning. Then Chagatayev guessed, and he smiled, too: the words could not be understood because they were only sounds—they held no interest, no feeling, no life, as if there were no heart inside the man.
“Take put go to Ust-Urt bring something and carry it to me put it in my breast,” the man was saying, and then he laughed again.
The mind was still alive and perhaps a man was laughing inside it, afraid and not understanding that his heart was beating, his soul was breathing, entirely without interest or desire. The complete solitude, the night darkness inside the tent, a strange man—all this made no impression on him, producing neither fear nor curiosity. Chagatayev touched this man on his face and arms, felt his body, he could even have killed him, but the man just went on babbling as he had before, without any concern, as if he were already a bystander in his own life.
Outside the night was just as it had been. Walking on, Chagatayev wanted to turn back, to take the muttering man along with him, but where could he take him, once he was so worn out that he needed not help, but oblivion? He looked around; the silent dog was walking behind him, people were sleeping and dreaming in the reed huts, the slight trembling of a weak breeze stirred sometimes along the tops of the reed thickets, blowing from here all the way to the Aral Sea. Someone was talking in a low voice inside the hut next to the one where his mother and Aidim were sleeping. The dog walked up to it and then turned back, hurrying off home as if afraid of forgetting where its master and its safety were.
Chagatayev also went back to his mother’s, and lay down, without undressing, next to Aidim. The girl breathed little and very quietly in her sleep; it was terrifying to think that she might forget to breathe, and then she would die. Lying on the clay, Chagatayev listened as he drowsed to the sleepy muttering of his people in this God-forsaken bottom of the earth, and to the tortured churning of the grasses in their stomachs. In the hut right next to him a husband was talking to his wife; he wanted them to have a child, maybe now was the time to begin it.
But the wife answered:
“No, you and I have nothing but weakness, for ten years we’ve been starting one but it never grows inside me, I’m always empty, like the dead…”
The husband was silent, then he said:
“Well, let’s do something together, the two of us, we’ve got little enough to be happy about together.”
“Of course,” the woman answered. “I’ve got nothing to wear, nor have you, either; how are we going to live in the winter?”
“When we’re sleeping, we’ll get warm,” the husband answered. “What more can we do, poor as we are?”
“There’s nothing else,” the woman agreed. “There’s not another thing you and I have that’s any good; I’ve thought and I’ve thought about it and I see only that I love you.”
“I love you, too,” the husband said, “otherwise there’d be no living…”
“There’s nothing cheaper than a wife,” the woman answered. “When we’re so poor, what do you own except my body?”
“We don’t have enough of anything,” the husband agreed. “Thank goodness a wife is born and raised all by herself; otherwise a man would never get one. You have breasts, and lips, a stomach, your eyes can see, and most of all I think about you and you think about me, and the time goes by…”
They grew quiet. Chagatayev cleaned the wax out of his ears and tried hard to listen—would he hear something more from where the husband and wife were lying?
“You and I have plenty of what’s bad,” the woman began again. “You’re thin, and without much strength, and my breasts have dried up, my bones hurt inside me…”
“I’ll love whatever’s left of you,” the husband said.
Then they grew silent for good; probably they were embracing each other, so as to hold in their hands their only happiness.
Chagatayev whispered something to himself, smiled, and fell asleep, content that happiness should exist between two people in his native land, even in a poor way.
[9]
In the morning Gulchatai paid no attention to her son or to the young girl he had brought with him. Her strength of spirit had been just strong enough to recognize him when he was sleeping on the grass by the trail next to Aidim; now she was living her own life alone again. There was nothing to be done inside the hut, but for a long time the mother evened up the stems of the reeds in the sloping walls, collected all the wisps of grass, cleaned the inside of the cooking pot, straightened out and rolled up the reed mat, and did all this with the utmost concentration and zeal, anxious that her household goods should be intact because she had no other links at all with life or with other people. Since a person needs something to be thinking about all the time, it was clear that she was imagining something while she worked at her small, almost useless, tasks; she didn’t know how to think without working; the cooking and the hut, while she picked it up, gave her memories, filling her weak, empty heart with feeling.
She asked her son to give her something. She asked this timidly, without hope and without greed, just so she might have a few more things and increase, by having them, her involvement with the world—the time of her living would go better. Nazar understood his mother, and he gave her his raincoat, the holster of his revolver (he put the revolver in his trouser pocket), a notebook, and forty rubles in money, and he instructed her at the same time to provide food for Aidim. But the girl went off herself to collect grasses for soup, and Gulchatai stayed at the hut.
“Do you know Molla Cherkezov?” Nazar asked her.
“I know everybody,” his mother told him.