Light, careful steps could be heard all this time behind Chaga-tayev’s head, now coming closer, now going away. Nazar waited, holding his breath, for this slinking thing to hurl itself upon him, not yet sure that he was dead. He worried only that the animal might sink its fangs into his throat at its first pounce, or that, wounded, it might run far away. He could now hear the little steps right next to his head. Chagatayev pulled the revolver a little more out of his pocket, feeling inside him a real strength compounded out of all the little scraps of life left in him. But the steps moved past his body, and went beyond. Nazar half-opened his eyes: just beyond his feet two enormous birds were walking, moving away toward a sand dune opposite him. Chagatayev had never seen such birds; they looked like the eagle-carrion vultures of the steppes and at the same time like wild, dark swans. Their beaks were like vultures’ beaks, but their thick, powerful necks were longer than those of eagles, and their solid legs carried high the delicate, airy bodies of true swans. The strong wings of one bird were a pure gray in color, while the other had blue, red, and gray feathers. This one was probably the female. Both birds seemed to have on trousers of snowy-white down. Even from one side, Chagatayev noticed little black spots on the female; these were fleas digging through the down into the stomach of the bird. Both birds looked like enormous nestlings which were not yet used to being alive, and were moving with extreme care.
The day had grown hot and dreary, little sandstorms were whirling across the surface of the sand, evening still stood high in the sky, above the light and the warmth. The two birds walked onto the sand dune opposite Chagatayev and looked at him with their thoughtful, farseeing eyes. Chagatayev watched the birds from under his half-closed eyelids, and he could see even the gray, thin color of their eyes as they looked at him full of thought and of attention. The female was cleaning the talons of its feet with its beak, and spitting out of its mouth some kind of old leavings, perhaps a remnant of the clawed-up Nazar-Shakir. The male rose into the air, but the female stayed where it was. The enormous bird flew low to one side, then soared upward with several flappings of its wings, and almost at once began to fall straight toward him. Chagatayev felt the wind in his face before the bird hit him. He could see its white, clean breast in front of his face, and its gray, clear eyes, not wicked but thoughtful, because the bird had now noticed that the man was alive, and watching it. Chagatayev lifted his revolver, held it with both hands, and fired straight at the head of the bird dropping down upon him. In the white down of the bird’s breast, blown out by the speed of its downward flight, a dark spot appeared, and then the wind blew all the down and wisps of feathers around the spot of the direct hit, and for a moment the body of the eagle held itself motionless in the air above him.
The bird closed its gray eyes, and then they opened by themselves, but they no longer saw anything—the bird was dead. It lay across Chagatayev’s body in the same position in which it had been falling, its breast against the man’s breast, its head on his head, burying its beak in Chagatayev’s thick hair, spreading wide its black, helpless wings on both sides of him, with its feathers and down strewed all over Chagatayev. Chagatayev himself fainted from the force of the blow, but he was not wounded; the bird had simply stunned him since the dangerous speed of its fall had been braked by the bullet. Chagatayev started up with sharp pain: the second bird, the female, had driven its beak into his right leg and having pulled out some of his flesh was flying off into the air. Chagatayev, holding the revolver with both hands again, fired twice but missed; the gigantic bird disappeared behind the sand dunes, and then he saw it flying away at a great height.
The dead eagle was no longer on top of Chagatayev, but lying on the sand at his feet. The female must have pushed it there in an effort to make sure that it was dead, and to say good-bye to it.
Chagatayev crawled over to the dead bird and began to eat at its throat, tearing the feathers away from it. The female eagle was still to be seen, but it had already climbed high up in the sky where the shadow of night, the dusk of dawn and sunset, stands even at full noon, and it seemed to Chagatayev that the bird would never come back, that there it had found the happy land in the air of all the birds that fly.
When he had eaten a little, Chagatayev tied one leg of the dead bird to his belt and he put the other end of the belt deep inside his trousers, so he would know it if some beast of prey tried to steal the eagle away from him. Then he treated the wound torn in his leg, wrapped it in cloth, and lay down quickly, in order to recover a little of his strength.
[12]
Gulchatai felt no sorrow over her son, she had forgotten him. She walked along behind the others, bent over, feeling the sand with her hands whenever it seemed to her that something desirable might be lying on it. Molla Cherkezov hung on to Gulchatai by her clothing, trying all the time to remember that he was still alive. Nur-Mohammed, with despair in his heart, held on to Aidim’s hand; it was his plan to train this girl and fatten her so he could use her as a wife and then sell her to someone else. It worried him that there were too few women in the Dzhan tribe and that those who were still among the living had grown decrepit—there was hope only for Aidim because she was still a little girl. Women were priced higher than men because they could be used both for work and for love, although men could also be sold profitably in Afghanistan if they didn’t die on the long trip.
On the morning when Chagatayev did not show up at the general stopping place, Nur-Mohammed smiled and made a detailed entry about the disappearance in his notebook. He was sure that Chagatayev had run away to save himself, as anyone would who had life and little courage, and Nur-Mohammed felt better without him. The people no longer kept on asking him if they would arrive soon at Sari-Kamish, and they never remembered now about eating. Nur-Mohammed himself might perish out of weakness, but he still had old reserves inside him because he had eaten a lot of rice and meat and fruit while he was living in the oases and when he had gone secretly into Afghanistan to see the Khan, Dzhunaid, who had run away a long time ago.
Sufyan started to walk on this day with the wind, with the broken-off spears of dead grass and the tumbleweed; he knew that this was the direction the sheep must now have taken, once the wind had blown away without a trace their grazing path along which, in spots around old oases, some stable grass could grow. The rest of the people would have followed Sufyan, but Nur-Mohammed ordered them to walk in the opposite direction— against the wind, toward the southeast. He pulled Aidim closer, trying to feel her breasts which were just starting to grow, but all he could feel was her thin ribs.
Nur-Mohammed looked at them all; the people were rocking in the wind, the sandy blast along the ground was beating against their legs, dead grass was flying in the faces of the walking people—the wind was ripping the grass out of the sandy wasteland by its roots with overpowering force. Some people fell down from the wind, others walked along in sleep, scattering in different directions, losing each other in the darkness of the blowing sand.
Nur-Mohammed stopped.
The wind was now blowing out of the southeast with the steady, oppressive strength of some great machine. The people were scattered by it and they no longer heard, or else they didn’t recognize, Nur-Mohammed’s voice calling each of them by name to follow him. He was panting himself, from impatience, from thirst and from hunger; his mind was already darkening under the shadow of indifference to his own fate. He had been planning until now to lead this insignificant, exhausted tribe into Afghanistan, and to sell it there in slavery to the old Khan, so that he might live out his happy life somewhere in an Afghan valley on the bank of a stream, in his own place filled with the good things of life. But now Mohammed saw, as he was all but swept off his feet by the wind and the sand, that the Dzhan people would either perish or be dispersed in unconsciousness: each person’s body had grown empty, and his heart was gradually dying. They would not get as far as Afghanistan, or if they did they would not be able to serve even as the lowest kind of farmhands, because now they no longer had that small desire to live which is essential even for a slave.