During his second life in the desert it had seemed to Chagatayev that he was always going somewhere, farther and farther away. He began to forget details about the city of Moscow; Ksenya’s face stayed in his memory only in a general way, not as something living—he regretted this and strained his imagination to see her sometimes in his mind’s eye as she really was; when he could fix her face in his memory, he always noticed that her lips were whispering something to him, but he didn’t understand and couldn’t hear her voice across the great distance. Her different-colored eyes watched him with surprise, and perhaps with sorrow that he was not coming back for a long time. But he felt this was only flattering himself. Actually, Ksenya had probably forgotten Chagatayev completely; she was still a child, and her heart was crowded with the fine life she was still creating for herself, and there was not room enough in it to keep all the impressions disappearing past her.
The day passed painfully, bringing no relief. Chagatayev knew that he couldn’t feed his people just by killing one or two more birds, but he was not a great man and he couldn’t think out what to do now that might be more realistic. Maybe his hunting the birds was an insignificant affair, but it was the only thing possible until his exhaustion had been overcome. With the strength he had had before, he would have scoured the desert for tens of kilometers around them, he would have found the wild sheep and driven them back here. With just one man in shape to walk fifty or a hundred kilometers to a telegraph station, he would have summoned help from Tashkent. Perhaps an airplane might appear in the sky above him! No, they didn’t fly here ever, because so far no treasures had been found in the ground on which to waste a valuable machine. And this wretched, almost useless task, requiring chiefly patience in pretending to be a corpse, still comforted Chagatayev, but he made up his mind to go on the next day with his people to their homeland, to Sari-Kamish, no matter what happened.
He drowsed off. The world again alternated in front of him—now lively, full of light and noise, now fading away into dark oblivion.
In the evening Chagatayev heard confusing sounds. He got ready, thrusting his right hand under his back, where his revolver was lying. He was wrong: this had not been the noise of eagles flying. His mother had come up to him, carrying her head low, touching his body with her hands and looking hard with her eyes at all the sand around him, at the ground where he was lying. She wasn’t checking to see if her son was alive or dead, she was searching with her all but blind eyes for more dead birds. Strange creaking sounds came from his mother’s body; the dry bones of her skeleton moved only with difficulty and with pain. Gulchatai went away slowly, helping herself to move by holding the ground with her hands and pulling at the sand.
Soon Chagatayev heard these same sounds of moving bones again. He fought down sleep and concentrated on them. Something was moving beyond the sandy crossing of the hill where he was lying. Old Vanka was looking at him from there, next to him stood Sufyan who had obviously climbed up the hill from the other side, then he saw someone else’s indistinguishable face, and there, too, were Aidim and even Molla Cherkezov although he could not see the light. The human faces gradually grew more numerous, and they were all looking at Chagatayev. Chagatayev looked at them, too. Only the thought of food had brought them here, but this thought was not clear or sharp, as with ordinary men, but something guileless, capable of remaining unsatisfied without becoming bitter.
What did these people expect from Chagatayev? Could they really eat their fill on one or even two more birds? No. But their grief might turn into gladness if each one could receive a shredded piece of the meat from a bird. It would serve not to fill them up, but to unite them in a common life and with each other, it would give them a feeling of reality, and they would remember their own existence. Eating could serve at the same time to nourish the human spirit and also to make sunken, quiet eyes shine again, and see the light of the sun spread out across the earth. It seemed to Chagatayev that all mankind, if it had been standing there in front of him, would have looked at him in the same way, ready and waiting to delude itself with false hopes, to carry on the delusion, once more to begin its various unavoidable ways of living.
Chagatayev smiled; he knew that grief and suffering are only ghosts and dreams, that even Aidim could destroy them with her child’s strength; an unreleased happiness, not yet tested, goes on beating in the heart and in the world, as in a cage, and every man feels its power, and its drawing near. Soon now he would change the destiny of his people. Chagatayev waved his hand to them. Aidim understood, and told them all to go away, so as not to bother Chagatayev in his hunting.
At the start of night, when all the people had dozed off, Aidim went out alone into the desert to look for the wild sheep. First she told Sufyan and Stari Vanka to dig with their hands in a small depression between two long sand dunes. There she had found clay under the sand, and this ought to hold water, and she had already drunk a little of it from the hole. She remembered, too, that when there is nothing to eat, water can also nourish.
[14]
The night moved across the sand. Chagatayev was sleeping on his right side, filled with dreams which drove out his thirst, his hunger, his weakness, and all his suffering. He was dancing in a garden, lighted by electric lights, with a grown-up Ksenya, on a summer night smelling of the earth and of childhood, just before the dawn already burning on the very tops of the poplar trees like a faraway voice which could not yet be heard. Ksenya was tired in his careful arms, her eyes closed as if she were asleep. With the dawn a wind came through the trees out of the east to rustle the dresses of the dancing women. The music played, and the early light and the wind moved across the faces of the quiet, happy people. Then the music stopped, it grew quite light around them, and Chagatayev was carrying Ksenya in his arms. Suddenly he saw darkness where there had been light, his head ached, and, falling, he turned onto his back as he fell, so as not to hurt Ksenya whom he was holding in front of him like a little child: let her fall on top of him and not be injured. He grabbed at her, but she was no longer there. He cried out and jumped up from the ground into the darkness, and two sharp blows, on his head and on his chest, knocked him back again.
The big birds, falling onto him and then rising into the air, struck him with their beaks and tore his clothing and his body with their claws. Chagatayev tried to get on his feet, but he couldn’t and he was losing strength from the pain and from new blows by the heavy birds falling onto him. He turned over and dug his hands hardened by despair into the sand surrounded by the desert night and soaked with his last blood. He wanted to scream, so as to pull up some desperate strength from what was left of his ebbing life deep inside him, but the stinging blows of the eagles’ beaks and their claws ripping his tendons choked his cry before he could fill his lungs. The beating of their wings made a wind, and he couldn’t breathe in this storm, and he was choking from the down and the feathers of the birds. Chagatayev realized that the first two blows of their beaks had hit him in the head near the back of his neck, where blood was now flowing down his neck, and one of the nipples on his chest, it seemed, had also been ripped and this wound hurt him with a tickling, aching pain.