Chagatayev went up to Mohammed and asked him: where was, he taking the people?
Nur-Mohammed greeted Chagatayev, and answered him:
“What people? Their souls left them long ago, it’s all the same to them whether they live or not.”
He went on walking. Chagatayev walked beside him. Mohammed was smiling to himself and looking away; even in the darkness nature looked sorry and hateful to him, and behind him walked the almost nonexisting people.
The road wound around the little mound on which Chagatayev had just been. A new idea came to him as he looked at this hill of dirt mounded up over another small people which had mixed up its bones and lost its names and bodies in order no longer to attract the attention of those who would torment it. Slave labor, exhaustion, exploitation never take away just physical strength, just arms to work with—no, they take over the mind and the heart, too, and the soul is destroyed first of all, and next the body falls, and then man hides himself in death, sinks into the ground as if into a fortress and a refuge, not realizing that he has been already weaned from worldly interests, his brain already accustomed to just believing, seeing dreams, imagining what is not real. Was it possible that his Dzhan people would soon be lying somewhere nearby, the wind covering them with soil, and even the memory of his people vanishing simply because they had never succeeded in erecting something of stone or steel, had never dreamed up eternal beauty? They had dug the dirt out of irrigation canals, but the flowing of the water had filled them up again, and the people had dug out the silt and the extra soil, and then the muddy flow had brought new silt and covered up their labor, leaving no trace of it.
“Where are the others? Are they asleep?” Chagatayev asked Nur-Mohammed.
“No, they stayed behind, but they’ll come after us; they’ll catch up.”
Aidim, who had been close to them among the ones in front, fell fast asleep, and lay down. Chagatayev noticed this, and looked around: two more sleeping people were lying behind them.
“Let them be!” Mohammed told him. “They’ll recover in a while, and they’ll come along.”
But Chagatayev picked up Aidim in his arms and carried her. She was sleeping, no longer shivering with fever, her sickness had probably left her. In spite of the grass diet and her illness, her body was not thin, it had absorbed into itself all the goodness in even the dry stalks of the reeds, and she seemed now set to live for a long time and happily.
“Where are you taking them?” Chagatayev asked Nur-Mo-hammed.
“To Sari-Kamish, their birthplace and native land,” Nur answered, “where they used to live.”
“Why?”
“They’ve got to go somewhere…. I’m leading them by the long road, around the flooded areas. Anyone who walks always feels better for it.”
“And the sick?” Chagatayev asked.
“They can walk a little, too. The road will make them well. We’ve left the swamps, and there’ll be no more fever.”
Chagatayev did not believe in Nur-Mohammed’s good intentions. He didn’t know—would the sick be able even to feel good health once their minds had been distracted from their own interests for so long and their hearts had become so used to languishing? This was why they had stood disease and suffering so mute and unfeeling, as if it were none of their business. Chagatayev dropped back from Nur-Mohammed, in order to look at his mother. Aidim was sleeping quietly in his arms. Gulchatai opened her eyes when Nazar walked up to her but said nothing to him; the blind Molla Cherkezov, weak and childish, was holding on to her hand. The mother looked absentmindedly at her son, whom she recognized, but she could not remember if she had seen him up close. Nazar went on looking at his mother and she turned her eyes away from him because she was ashamed to be alive in front of him so weak and so unhappy; she would have liked to love him with all her earlier, forgotten strength, but now she couldn’t, now she had heart enough only for her breathing, and she was pleased by her son’s Red Army cap and she thought that she must get it from him as a present, to keep her head warm while she slept.
A little later the wandering people found dry, warm sand along their road and they lay down on it to sleep until morning. Chagatayev did not want to sleep; he put Aidim down between his mother and Molla Cherkezov and stayed by himself, not knowing what to do until morning. Sometimes bored, sometimes smiling, he mumbled something to himself, living out his useless life.
[10]
Those who had fallen by the roadside the day before or had stayed behind out of weakness arrived by morning, and once more they all moved on behind Nur-Mohammed. Aidim was walking now, and she even laughed with Chagatayev. He felt her forehead —there was no fever, she had become alive and frisky.
About noon the old Sufyan called Chagatayev to one side of the road. He told him that near the channel of the Amu-Darya River two or three old sheep might sometimes still be found, sheep which lived alone and had forgotten men except that, when they saw one, they remembered their shepherds of long ago, and ran up to him. These sheep had survived mysteriously, left behind from the enormous wild flocks which the Bey had wanted to drive into Afghanistan but had not been able to. The sheep had lived with their sheepdogs for some years; then the dogs began to eat them, or died, or ran, away out of grief, and the sheep were left by themselves, gradually dying of old age or being killed by wild animals, wandering around the waterless sandy desert. But some of them still survived, and were still wandering, shivering, one next to another, afraid to stay alone. They walked in huge circles around the impoverished steppe, never deviating from their circular paths; it was to this intelligence they owed their lives, because the close-cropped grass which they had eaten grew up again while the sheep were covering the rest of their circular route before returning to the original spot. Sufyan knew four of these grassy circles around which the survivors of these dying wild flocks kept on moving until they died. One of them was not far away, and they were almost at its junction with the road along which the Dzhan people were now walking back to Sari-Kamish.
Sufyan and Chagatayev walked out to a small, damp depression in the sand, and stopped there. Sufyan dug a hole in the sand with his hands, and at the bottom it was wet. The old man explained that the sheep raked the ground with their front legs, and then chewed the damp sand, to slake their thirst. Here was the place to wait for them; he knew the time required for them to complete their whole circular route, and he figured it was time for them to show up here. The year before he had walked behind the flock and come as far as this place. Then the flock had numbered forty head, of these Sufyan had eaten six, seven had died along the road, and the rest had gone on farther.
Nur-Mohammed led the people, too, to where Chagatayev and Sufyan were waiting for the sheep, and they all lay down and drowsed beside the path where the year before the sheep had chewed the wet sand. All the people slept again, although it was still a long time before evening and only a little time had gone by since morning. Chagatayev walked alone among the sleepers, fearing that none of them would wake up again; he was bored and exhausted with his own thoughts and memories. He walked up to Aidim—she was sleeping with her eyelids closed sweetly over her eyes, and smiling in oblivion or in a dream. Having no happiness in her real life, she found it in feeling and in thinking, when she had her eyes closed. Molla Cherkezov had buried his head in Gulchatai’s breasts, holding close to her, sleeping, not remembering that he was blind. Nur-Mohammed was lying off to one side; he was tossing on the ground, and whispering something.