[15]
For four days the people ate, recovering from their grief and their misery. Aidim saw to it that no one ate too much, and she stopped those who were especially zealous over their food, or rapped them across the eyes: otherwise they would not have felt it. The wounds on Chagatayev’s body began to heal over; he gave Aidim his underclothes and she sewed herself a skirt and a blouse, without which she would have been naked. Sufyan, who carried around with him all his life his own inventory of what was needed for day-to-day living—matches, a needle, thread, an awl, an ancient document attesting his identity, a small knife, and a few other things—asked Aidim to mend his clothes. She sewed up the large rips in the old man’s robe, then at the same time she fixed up the decrepit clothing of all the people in those places where their bodies showed through; for many people she had to shorten their garments to save material which she could use for those who had too little. Out of such scraps she made a whole pair of trousers and a shirt for Tagan because he had thrown his clothes away somewhere in the sand when he had thought it was time for life to end, and since then he had gone naked.
This work took Aidim four more days—only Stari Vanka and Chagatayev helped her with the mending and the sewing. Besides this, she checked up on the general way of life of her people, on the distribution of food, on their sleep, and on the remaining sheep, seeing to it that they were pastured and watered and that they did not get thin, using up their bodies to no good purpose. At night Aidim tied each sheep to a person, while she placed the ram next to herself and tied a leash around his neck with its other end fastened with a strong knot around her stomach. Thanks to these precautions not a single sheep ran away, even though this meant that they stayed lying down all night without grazing and adding to their weight.
One morning nine days after Aidim had brought in the flock of sheep, the people took to the road again, walking toward their native land. By now there were only ten sheep left, plus the ram as the eleventh; the people had eaten thirteen sheep and three eagles. The people walked well now, and they felt that they really existed, without having to strain their memories for recollections of who they had once been.
There were only three full days of easy walking left between them and Sari-Kamish. On the second day they could already see the gray plateau of Ust-Urt and the darkness around its base, the valley of empty land with its few miserable streams. They were all glad and they hurried on, just as if this were a place where happiness was guaranteed, with tidy houses and doors standing open for them, waiting for their masters. Chagatayev led his mother by the hand, and he smiled, just as if he found himself once more, as in his childhood, face to face with a great future, ready for all its agonizing, patient labor, his heart filled with confused, shy feelings of inevitable triumph.
On the evening of the third day the people crossed the last shining sand—the frontier of the desert—and began to drop down into the shadows of the valley. Chagatayev looked at this land, its pale salt marshes, its loamy soil, the dark antiquity of its ground which still held, perhaps, the bones of that poor Ariman who had not been able to achieve the brilliant destiny of Ormuzd and had not conquered him. Why had he not been able to be happy? Maybe because the fate of Ormuzd and others who lived in distant countries filled with gardens was foreign and repulsive to him, their lot did not really appeal to him or attract his heart; otherwise he himself, patient and energetic, would have been able to create in Sari-Kamish all that there was in Khorosan, or to conquer Khoro-san….
Chagatayev liked to turn over in his mind this question of what people before him had not been able to accomplish, because this was precisely what it was now up to him to work on.
Two days later the tribe had passed through the valley and was approaching the foot of Ust-Urt. Chagatayev found a small reservoir of fresh water here, filled by the spring runoff from the high plateau, and the people stopped next to it, to rest and to pick their permanent dwelling places. There were only three sheep left, and the ram was a fourth. But this was not frightening for a people like the Dzhan, who knew how to use the good things of nature even in its most barren places. On the first day there, Aidim found some ravines filled with tumbleweed. This grass had been blown here from the desert by the southeasterly winds, and only those bushes of tumbleweed which bypassed these blind gullies were lifted over the slope to the higher tableland and blown farther on, into the steppes.
Sufyan went back to his cave, where he had been living before Chagatayev’s arrival, and he advised the whole tribe to settle around it. It was a broad, spacious valley covered with grass, and a little stream which ran through it from Ust-Urt did not dry up until the middle of each summer. The people walked into this valley and on the way they found traces of their former stopping places, dating from the days of the Khans. Nothing much was left, just the usual wasteland, some handfuls of coal, some lumps of clay, the stake of a tent abandoned by everybody, worn by the heat and the wind. A child’s skullcap was half-buried in the ground; Aidim cleaned it and put it on her head.
The valley recommended by Sufyan was a good one to live in. Its grass cover stretched a long way, and even now, at the end of summer, not all the grass was dead; among the yellow stubble could be seen live, green blades of growing grass. The bed of the stream was empty, but in the heart of Sari-Kamish, a couple of kilometers away, you could see a mirror of water, a lake made by the mountain streams in spring and early summer; this was enough to exist on. When the people walked into the mouth of the valley a lot of tortoises had run out from under their feet and, at a safe distance, slowly stretched out their necks to look at the new arrivals, each tortoise with one black, vigilant, gentle eye. Chaga-tayev was delighted by it; now he could breathe deeply and collect himself; everything in life seemed possible to him now, as it had before, and the best part of it achievable right away.
He walked with Aidim far into the hills of Ust-Urt, up on to its high plains. He was looking for firewood, or at least the brushwood which grew sometimes in its ravines. Wood would be needed to make household tools and furniture. Along the way Chagatayev carried Aidim in his arms so that she would not get tired, and he kissed her cheeks, her eyes, her hair; this made him feel better in his heart. He loved to sense another’s life, it seemed to him that something more mysterious and beautiful, more meaningful, was there than in himself, and both his health and his feelings were often made better just by the chance to hold someone by the hand. Aidim hugged Chagatayev, too, around his head, and she stroked with her fingers the two bald patches on his scalp which had been made by the eagles’ wounds; she remembered that was the time when she had eaten an entire small eaglet all by herself.
Chagatayev had only a penknife, so it took him a long time to cut down and then cut up one not very big softwood tree growing all by itself in a stony gorge where nothing else was growing, as if some bird had once dropped the seed here from the air above.
For several days in the Ust-Urt valley which had been chosen to live in, only two people worked—Chagatayev and Aidim; the rest of the people drowsed in the caves which they dug out for night shelter along the slope of the valley, or they caught tortoises and fixed them for eating, but they ate little, and almost unwillingly, and they went once each day to the lake for drinking water. Chagatayev ordered that the three sheep and the ram were not to be touched, but kept in reserve against some extreme need. He counted the people, who was alive and who had died, and found one child missing, a three-year-old girl. No one could tell him, not her father nor her mother nor anyone else, where this little girl had disappeared or how she had died. No one could remember when she had slipped out of their arms and been blown away into the desert by the wind and the sand.