“Well then, go over there, live with him, it will be better for you. He’s blind, but he’ll take care of you until he dies.”
The bent-over old woman stared at the ground; she could not understand why Cherkezov needed her since her heart was already beating not with emotion but simply out of habit, and since life had become for her almost imperceptible. But she went, taking nothing with her from her home except the things her son had just given her, and these only because they happened to be in her hands. It looked as if she didn’t like her older belongings any longer because she didn’t have enough strength of spirit to be greedy for them.
Chagatayev stayed behind to live with Aidim, hoping that his mother’s heart would be warmed by living with Molla Cherkezov. Aidim began right away to run the place, collecting and boiling grasses, catching fish, cooking the food for dinner. One time she walked far beyond the channels of the river and the area it flooded, all the way to a grove of leafless trees growing in the desert, and brought back firewood as a reserve against the winter. Then Chagatayev, too, went to this grove a couple of times and brought back wood, and he forebade the girl to go—she was supposed just to kindle a little fire in the stove inside the hut and to fix a pot of soup every day. But soon he had to do the household work all alone, because Aidim fell ill and was hot, burning, soaked with perspiration. Nazar covered her with grass against chills, wiped her parched eyes, and poured into her thin soup made of the grasses, but the young girl could not cope with the disease, and grew thin, silent, headed straight for death. Her eyes looked at Chagatayev without consciousness, she had nothing to think about to console her. Chagatayev sat with her through long, empty days, and tried to protect the sick girl from grief and fear.
There were sick and helpless people lying in the other huts and tents. Chagatayev figured that there were forty-seven persons in the Dzhan people, and of these twenty were sick. There were eleven women, and only three children under twelve, including Aidim. The women, who were the hardest workers, died first of all, and those left alive gave birth to children very rarely.
While Aidim was sick, the commissioner of the district government, Nur-Mohammed, came to see Chagatayev. Chagatayev told him he had been sent here to help his people, whom he was to make happy, progressive, and more numerous. Nur-Mohammed answered him that the people’s hearts had long ago sickened in their hunger, that their minds had gone deaf, and that there was therefore nothing left with which happiness might be felt. Better to leave these poor people in peace, forget them forever, or else lead them off somewhere in the wilderness, in the steppes and the mountains, so that they might get lost for good, and then be considered nonexistent.
Chagatayev looked at Nur-Mohammed for a little while: he was a big man, already old, his eyes looked out through tightly cut eyelids as if through constant pain. He wore an Uzbek robe, with a skullcap on his head, and his shoes were felt slippers—the only man among the whole people who had kept such clothing. This was explained by the fact that Nur-Mohammed was not himself a member of the Dzhan people but had been sent to them six months before, and he looked at the people with a stranger’s eyes.
“What have you done in this half year?” Chagatayev asked him.
“Nothing,” Nur-Mohammed reported. “I can’t resurrect the dead.”
“Then what are you hanging around for? Why are you here?”
“When I came, this people numbered a hundred and ten persons, now there are fewer. I dig graves for the dead—it’s impossible to bury them in the swamp, it would cause an epidemic—so I carry the dead ones far away into the sandy desert. I’ll go on burying them until they’re all gone, then I’ll go away myself, and I’ll report: my mission is accomplished….”
“The people can bury its own—you’re not needed for that.”
“No, they won’t bury them, I know.”
“Why won’t they?”
“The dead should be buried by the living, and there are no living here, just those who haven’t died yet, living out their time in sleep. You won’t make happiness for them, they don’t even know their own grief now, they don’t worry any longer because they’ve been worried out.”
“What are we to do with you?” Chagatayev asked.
“Not a thing,” Nur-Mohammed answered. “It’s impossible to torment a man too long, but the Khiva khans thought it was possible. You do it a long time, and the man dies; you must do it a little bit, and then give him a rest, so you can begin it again…”
“I’m not going to dig their graves,” Chagatayev said. “I don’t know who you are; you’re a stranger, you’d better go away from here and leave us alone.”
Nur-Mohammed stroked the sleeping Aidim’s forehead, and then stood up.
“My business is in my head, and yours in yours. I’ll be putting this girl in the ground soon. Good-bye.”
He walked back to his own dirt hut. Chagatayev wrapped Aidim up in grass and then in the reed mat and carried her quickly to his mother and Molla Cherkezov: he told them to give her liquids to drink from time to time, and to protect her from the night cold. And Chagatayev himself set off for Chimgai, a hundred or a hundred and fifty kilometers away. He walked through dry stream beds, and channels of the river, through reeds and thickets of mixed growth for the rest of that day, all night, and still another day, getting scratched and hungry on the way, losing his path and carrying all the weight of his impatience, his mind darkening, until he lay down somewhere with his face to the ground. Then he woke up, and he saw a large ruin not far away, and he walked up to its walls of clay. The sun, already high, was pouring intense heat down on the old walls; sleep and oblivion, the unconsciousness of sweltering air, seeped out from under the wall, where the dry clay was aging. Chagatayev walked inside the fort, through a broken place where freshets had torn a gap in the wall. Inside, it was even stuffier with quiet; the heat of the sky was all collected in one pocket, overgrown by enormous grasses with thick, greasy stalks because there was no one here to eat them. Chagatayev looked at these fatty plants with disgust, searching under them for some kind of smaller, edible grass. He found some small, broken bones; they had been chopped up, to produce a thicker fat, or cut several times with a sabre, if this had been a man. Farther on he found some more bones and a whole half of a human skeleton, with the skull; this man had died with his face down, and his rib cage had fallen apart, as if to ease his breathing after his death, and the point of one rib had punctured a rumpled Red Army cap, already rotting now and with pale grass growing through it. Chagatayev pulled it out from under the rib; the cap still held the shadow of its five-pointed star, and inside it, on the cloth protecting the forehead, there had been written with a chemical penciclass="underline" “Oraz Golomanov” —the name of the Red Army soldier who had fallen here. Chagatayev cleaned the cap and put it on his head, and he placed his own cap on Golomanov’s skull. On the clay wall inside the fortress, Golomanov or some other soldier had cut, probably with a bayonet, the words: “Long live the soldier of the revolution!” and the bayonet had cut too deep into the clay for time, wind and rain to smooth out the words and wash away the trace of this hope of the dead and of the living. It must have been that in 1930 or 1931 a Red Army unit had found itself here, fighting against the basmachi bandits and against the troops of the Khiva and Turkmen slaveowners, and Golomanov with his comrades had just stayed here to rot in peace, as if convinced that his unlived life could be lived out by others just as well as by himself. Chagatayev scattered some flowers and earth on Golomanov’s skeleton, so eagles or wandering animals should not pilfer his bones, and he walked on to Chimgai.