“What are you whispering about here?” Chagatayev asked him.
“More than forty people are still left,” Mohammed said. “That’s still a lot.”
He was counting the people, how many had died, how many were still alive.
Chagatayev talked a little with Sufyan; the old man was not asleep but just keeping his eyes shut as if he were saving his vision and didn’t want to waste his spirit on impressions of the visible real world. Chagatayev told him that his wife had died in Moscow, but Sufyan did not share his grief and just muttered something, and then said that Chagatayev should go out to meet the sheep, or else they might find wet sand in some other place and pass to one side of the sleeping people.
Gulchatai had wakened. She was sitting up now, holding the head of the sleeping Molla Cherkezov on her knees. Chagatayev walked up to his mother to talk to her, but he didn’t say anything. He realized that he was turning to the old man and to his mother just to get comfort from them, to be able to go on living. But was this all his existence was about, to secure for himself some spiritual peace, the consolation of people close to him? He had been wrong not to write a postcard to Ksenya—from that place where there had been a post office—telling her to go to the Communist party’s central committee if it was hard for her to live without her mother, while he, her father, was far away and maybe not coming back at all to help her.
Chagatayev patted Gulchatai’s bare head, and then put his Red Army cap on her, because the strong sun must be making his mother’s head ache. She took it off, and hid it under her; she believed in property and saved it, this was why her blouse was now unbuttoned, inside it next to her naked body, hung the various things she owned, warming her breast. Close by his mother, a Kirgiz woman was lying face down in the sand. She was sleeping, and crying in her sleep in a child’s voice, going off sometimes into a fit of childish weeping and then falling back into quiet, even breathing. Chagatayev raised her face a little by the temples, and he saw that she was an old woman and that her mouth did not open when she went off into her little baby cries. It seemed as if a child was crying inside her, a child so alone and so foreign to her that it did not wake her from her sleep. Or else this was the crying of her own child’s soul.
Chagatayev laid the woman’s head back on the ground and walked off to meet the wandering sheep. At first he walked slowly, but then when daylight began to be covered by the night he ran on faster, so as not to miss the sheep in the darkness. Sometimes he stopped and panted, then hurried on again. When it became quite dark, Chagatayev ran with his body bent far over, so he could see occasional little blades of grass and touch them with his hands— this was the direction in which the sheep might go. Otherwise he might wander off to one side, end up in the hungry sands, and not see the roving flock.
He ran for a long time along the empty sheep path. Midnight came, or perhaps it was later. From fatigue and grief, which he was not conscious of but which was smothering his heart, and from the cool, weak wind, Chagatayev lost his memory as he ran—he fell asleep, fell down, and could not stand up again. He slept hard, alone in the desert, in the thin silence, where nothing stirred. Four little blades of short grass, as lonely as orphans, stood around the sleeping man as if they were sorry that he would get up and go, and they would be there alone again.
Chagatayev opened his eyes at dawn, his consciousness lit up for a moment, and then went out, and he fell asleep again in warmth and oblivion. Two sheep were lying by Chagatayev’s side, warming him with their body heat. Others stood around, waiting for the man to raise his face. There were forty of them, they had been missing their shepherd for a long time, and now they had found him. From time to time an old ram came up to Chagatayev and carefully licked his neck and the hair at the back of his head. The ram kept moving his body from side to side, trying to see the shepherd’s dog, but no dog was there. He was tired of leading the sheep, of quieting them at the watering places, of guarding them at night from lonely animals. He could remember the good times of long ago when the shepherd and his dogs took care of all these worries. Now he had grown intelligent, thin, and unhappy, and the sheep hated him for his weakness and for his indifference to them, and they also could remember shepherds and dogs, even if the dogs, when they kept order among them at a watering hole, had sometimes bitten scraps out of their wool which they had a hard time growing back on the desert grass they ate.
When he woke up, Chagatayev drove the flock of sheep off toward his people, and he got there by nightfall. The people were drowsing as they had before, only Aidim was playing in the sand, making little streams and roads in it. Chagatayev woke the people and instructed them to collect firewood and some dead, dry grass, to light fires, and to cook the meat. Sufyan eagerly started to cut the throats of the sheep, and was the first to drink the blood from the neck veins but he then caught it in a basin and gave it to the others to drink.
Chagatayev ordered that not more than ten head should be butchered, with the rest kept for breeding and for eating later. The ram was left, he walked off and lay down in the distance, and all the sheep still living collected around him. Thin and hardened by their wild wandering life, from a distance they looked more like dogs.
The people started to cook the carcasses whole on the fire, without cutting them into pieces, and when they were browned they put them on the sand at one side. Then the eating started. The people ate the meat without greed or enjoyment, pulling the meat off in little pieces, and chewing it in weak, opened mouths. Only Nur-Mohammed ate a lot and quickly, he tore the meat off in layers and gulped it, then when he was full he gnawed the bones until they were clean and sucked the marrow out from inside them and at the end of eating licked his fingers and lay down on his left side to sleep. The married folk walked off to sleep at one side. Molla Cherkezov also led Nazar’s mother away into the distance, the single people and the orphans stayed around the dying fires— they had grown so weak and they slept so hard that it was as if the food they had eaten had broken their strength and they were conquered by it.
During the night Chagatayev walked around the stopping place, counting the living sheep with the one ram, collecting the sheepskins and the heads in one place, and he started to look into the darkness: what was Ksenya doing there now, far beyond this dark, under the electric lights of Moscow; and where was his dead Vera lying, what was there left on the earth of her big, shy body? Chagatayev walked among the sleeping people, they lay uncovered on the sand as if they had been slaughtered themselves and had left no gravediggers. But some of the husbands and wives were still stirring, making love to each other. Molla Cherkezov was lying with Gulchatai. Chagatayev saw this, and he wept. He did not know what to do here now, to teach this small people socialism. He could not leave them to die alone because he himself, abandoned by his mother in the wilderness, had been taken care of by a shepherd. Soviet power and an unknown man had fed him and nurtured him, for life and for growing.
The sick and the weak were dozing in their fever. Two of them had gone to sleep with sheep bones in their hands which they had been sucking before they slept, to build up strength. Chagatayev walked out to the wet hole dug in the sand, and fixed up a little well. When some water had collected in it, he went back to the sick, wakened them, gave each one a quinine powder, and then kept running back to the little well in the sand, bringing them water in which to drink the medicine.