Nur-Mohammed stood for a long time while the people were scattering in the darkness of the wind and lying where they had fallen in death or in sleep. Aidim wrapped herself around his neck, breathing quietly in her own oblivion. Mohammed held her carefully, and he watched the dying people with satisfaction, forgetting that he, too, wanted to drink and to eat. Sufyan sat down on the sand and collapsed. Gulchatai had been lying on the ground for a long time, with her blind husband, Cherkezov, folded against her on the side away from the wind as if he were trying to make himself comfortable with her in a bed. The Karakalpak nicknamed Tagan, who was thin but not very old, took off his clothes, his trousers and his robe, threw them into the wind, and buried himself naked in the sand so he could hardly be seen. Mohammed felt good, that the Soviet Union would now be diminished in numbers by an entire tribe. Even if nobody had known about this people, their potential usefulness to the government had now disappeared and these workers who once upon a time had dug whole rivers for the Beys and Khans would no longer be digging anything, even their own graves.
Nur-Mohammed not only felt satisfaction now, he even skipped a little in a kind of dance while he watched these people fall into their last sandy sleep. He held his own value dearer now: there would be more good things for him in the desert as on all the earth, because there were fewer people living. It’s uncertain if he would have enjoyed selling this people into slavery more than now that he had lost it, now that nature had become more spacious, now that the mouths of all these greedy poor people had been closed forever. Mohammed made up his mind to go to Afghanistan for good, and to take Aidim with him so that he could sell her there, and recoup at least some of his losses from working in the Soviet Union.
The wind suddenly let up, and it grew lighter all around. Nur-Mohammed clutched the girl so tightly to himself that Aidim opened her eyes. Then he took her into a comfortable cave in the sand to fondle her, lonely for the pleasure to be had from another’s body. Neither hunger nor long-felt grief could destroy in him the need for human love; it lived on imperishably in him, hungry and independent, breaking through all cruel misfortunes and not losing its strength in his weakness. He could have embraced a woman and made a child, in sickness, insane, a minute before his final death.
It was getting dark in the desert, night fell, and it went by in darkness. Some people who had fallen on the sand from the wind the night before stood up the next morning and began to look around them in the clean light and in the quiet of another day.
Not far away, from behind a desolate sand hill, a shot was heard. Sufyan, half asleep, sat up and began to listen. Aidim ran up to him, away from Mohammed who was sleeping some distance away and did not wake up.
The people were all alive although their lives were no longer supported by their own will and were almost beyond their strength. They looked straight in front of them although they had no clear idea of what they should now do with themselves; eyes that had been dark started to grow bright with indifférence, showing no attention to anything nor even that they still had vision, as if they were blinded or worn out. Aidim alone wanted to be alive, she had not yet used up her childhood nor her mother’s reserve of energy, she looked at the sand with eyes that were still full of life.
Two more shots were fired behind the dune. Aidim walked out to see what it was but at first she could not find where the shots had come from. None of the other people moved; they feared no enemy and they expected no friend or helper.
Aidim walked over the fourth row of dunes and saw below her a man lying either asleep or dead next to a dark bird. The girl slid down the bank of sand, and recognized Chagatayev. She felt his face with her hands; it was warm, and breath was coming out of his mouth.
“Sleep!” Aidim said in a whisper, and she put her fingers on Chagatayev’s eyelids which had started to open in his sleep.
Then Aidim untied the bird from the belt, took it by its leg and dragged it back across the sand to her people.
The whole tribe gathered around the bird and looked at it without greed, they had lost the habit of hoping for food. Then Aidim took a knife from the trousers Tagan had thrown away and started to pluck the bird and to cut it into little pieces. She gave each person who could still eat a little piece of the flesh of the bird, and she herself sucked the blood and the juice from each piece before giving it away. The people devoured their portions, sucked the bones and nibbled at the shredded feathers, but they were not satisfied and only wanted more.
Aidim went back to Chagatayev. The people, thinking there were more birds there, followed behind her. But the people walked too slowly now, some of them crawled, helping themselves with their hands. Chagatayev’s mother was one of these, helping Molla Cherkezov to crawl too. Others stayed where they were because they no longer had the strength to move their skeletons. Aidim, moving away a little, stopped and waited for the people struggling after her. It was evening before they all reached the sand hill behind which Chagatayev was lying. All the time the tribe was moving, Aidim could hear the rubbing and the scraping of the bones inside them; probably all the fat had dried up in their joints, she thought, and their bones were now torturing them.
Nur-Mohammed watched this movement of the tribe from a distance but it did not interest him. He wanted first to look for some water in the neighborhood, even if it were salty, for without it he would not get to the Khiva oasis. He decided to come back for Aidim later, after he had found water, so he could give her some to drink and then go away with her forever to Afghanistan.
[13]
Pain made Chagatayev cry in his sleep, and he woke up; he thought he had dreamed the pain and it would quickly go away. Two dark birds—one the female of before, the other a new male—were walking away from him. They had pecked his body three times with their sucking beaks and had torn his flesh to the bone on his chest, his knee and his shoulder. When they had walked away a little, the birds stopped, turned their necks, and looked at Chagatayev—each bird out of one eye. Nazar pulled out his revolver and started to fire at the birds quickly, before a lot of blood had flowed out of his wounds and he had lost the strength that had been gathered while he slept. The birds rose into the air. He managed to fire at them twice, and one bird dropped its wings and floated down, folding its legs under itself; then it laid its head down on the sand and stretched out its throat as if in unbearable fatigue. Blood started to flow out of the bird’s throat, soaking into its feathers and into the sand around it. Indifference showed in the bird’s eyes as gray films were drawn over them. The other bird flew up into the sky where it gave a short, hollow cry, sounding as if it came from an empty underground cave, and disappeared into the mist of the sun’s shining.
Aidim appeared from behind the sand hill. She walked up to the dead bird, and dragged it by its leg past Chagatayev.