Chagatayev walked back, without having been seen by the people. He began to make bricks again, and he went on working until the moon went out in the sky and the sun began to shine. In the morning he noticed that the people were still sitting around the dead fire, while Stari Vanka was moving and shaking his whole body as if he were dancing. Chagatayev decided not to leave his work, since the night had gone by and there was no time to sleep. He shaped the bricks in the clay forms, putting all the strength of his heart into his labor. Aidim was still sleeping. Sometimes Chagatayev walked over to the hollow where she was lying, and covered her with grass to protect her from the flies and insects: let her refresh herself in sleep, for growing and for a long life. About midday Stari Vanka came up to Chagatayev; he took off the trousers which had been sewed for him out of various scraps by Aidim to replace those thrown away in the desert, climbed down into the trench where the clay was being mixed with water, and started to puddle it with his thin, hard feet.
[16]
Two months later, by autumn, four small houses had been built out of adobe bricks in the Ust-Urt valley. These houses, which had no windows because there was no glass, held all the Dzhan people who were finding real shelter for the first time from the wind, from cold, and from small flying, stinging creatures. For a long time some of the people could not get used to sleeping and living inside the blank walls—every once in a while they would go outside, breathe deeply, look at nature around them, and then walk back, sighing, inside the buildings.
At Chagatayev’s suggestion the people elected its own soviet of workers, which included everyone, with Aidim as social and political worker, and Sufyan, as the oldest, became president.
The entire Dzhan people were now living as the majority of human beings in this world live, not conscious of their own death from day to day, producing their own sustenance from the desert, the lake, and the hills of Ust-Urt. Chagatayev even managed for them all to have dinner every day; he knew this was very important since only a minority of the world’s people living on the land eat dinner, and most of them do not. Aidim took care of keeping them supplied, and made them all look for food and bring it back: grasses and fish, tortoises and small animals from the gullies in the hills around them. With Gulchatai she ground the roots of the edible plants, to make flour, and she reminded Sufyan in time to make the grass nets to catch the birds lighting on the shores of the lake to drink water. When someone forgot to do his job in helping feed them, Aidim would announce to him, in the presence of all the others, that the next day she and Nazar would dig a big trench for anyone to lie down in who didn’t like living any longer.
“We don’t need unhappy people,” Aidim said.
But Chagatayev was not satisfied with the ordinary, skimpy kind of life which his people had now begun to live. He wanted to help make happiness, which had been dwindling away inside each unhappy man since birth, shoot out into the open and become an act and a force of destiny. Both science and common sense are concerned with the same single, essential thing: to help bring out into the light that spirit which is racing and beating inside a man’s heart and which can be strangled there forever if it is not helped to free itself.
Pretty soon snow came, and it was harder for Chagatayev and all the others to get their food. The tortoises went into hiding and fell asleep; large flocks of birds flew from north to south over Ust-Urt without lighting to drink water at the little lake and without noticing the small people living down below them. The roots of the edible grasses froze and lost their taste, the fish in the reservoirs swam down to the bottom, toward the dark silence. Chagatayev understood all this and made up his mind to go off alone to Khiva where food reserves were kept and to bring back a whole winter’s supplies for his people. Aidim mended his torn, old clothing, he fixed his own shoes with wooden nails he made himself and with narrow strips of leather cut from sheepskins. Then he said goodbye to each person, told them all to expect him back soon, and set off down the valley of Sari-Kamish. For the sake of speed he took no food with him, figuring that on an empty stomach he could make the trip in three days.
Chagatayev disappeared into the heavy fog covering the empty wilderness, and Aidim sat down on the slope of the hill and cried. Tears poured out of her shining black eyes, for she thought that Nazar would never come back again. But by the next day Aidim managed not to cry a single time over Chagatayev: she was absorbed in work, in her need and responsibility for people. She just sighed occasionally, like a poor old woman. The people were still working only weakly, they were not convinced that it was an advantage to be alive, the Beys had robbed them of this belief at their waterwheels, and they neither cherished their own existence nor understood what enjoyment was, even of food.
Most of the work now, after Chagatayev’s departure, fell on Aidim. But it didn’t hurt her, she had learned from Chagatayev that there are no rich people, and that she herself was poor but things would soon be all right for her, and then still better and better.
After three days of Chagatayev’s absence, Aidim remembered him and she creased her face into a frown so that she could start to miss him and to weep for him. But it was already evening, and she had to look for the sheep and the ram, which had climbed up in the ravines some distance off, so she decided to postpone her grieving for Chagatayev until she went to sleep, when she would be alone. By the time she had driven the sheep back to the common hut, a mysterious light blinded her. Brighter lights than any Aidim had ever seen were shining next to the mud houses. She stopped, and she felt like running back with the sheep, to hide in a cave or in some ravine a long way off, and then come back the next day to see what might be there. She seized the ram by the horns but she kept on watching the lights next to the little houses; interest and amazement overpowered the terror in her and she led her small flock back to its home. She was thinking: the lights are either wild beasts, or else they’re something good, from out there where the Bolsheviks live.