Aidim saw Chagatayev, walking past the lights. She ran up to him and, shuddering and screwing up her eyes, grabbed his leg. Chagatayev lifted her up in his arms and took her into one of the houses, laying her down to sleep on a bed made of grass, and then he went back outside to unload the trucks. He had met them on the second day of his trip, at the exit from Sari-Kamish into the desert. On orders from Tashkent the two trucks had left Khiva four days before. On one of them there was canned meat, rice, hardtack, flour, medicine, kerosene, lamps, shovels and axes, clothing, books and other goods, while on the other were two men, cans of gasoline, oil, and spare parts.
The Tashkent orders had been to search the Sari-Kamish district and between Ust-Urt and the Aral Sea for the nomadic Dzhan people, and to help it in all possible ways, and not to return until the people had been found, or traces of it which might prove that the entire tribe had perished.
By midnight the goods had been unloaded, and Chagatayev sat down to write a report to Tashkent about the condition of the Dzhan people while the drivers and the leader of the expedition were preparing the trucks for the return trip. Chagatayev wrote until dawn; he proposed at the end of his letter that his people be given the opportunity to recover from its poverty of many years (this chance had now been given, and the people could live through the winter with all it needed, thanks to the help sent by the government) and most important of all, that every person here needed to renew his exhausted body, lived out to its very bones, in which feeling and conscious thought were now too weak to function.
Chagatayev handed his letter to the expedition leader, and the trucks drove off toward the Khiva oasis. All the people were still asleep, it was early morning, snow was lying on Sari-Kamish. Chagatayev took an axe and a shovel, woke up Stari Vanka and Tagan, and went off with them to root out some desert trees. By midday they came back with firewood. Aidim lit the stove with dry grass and began to cook dinner out of the new food which almost no one had ever tasted before in all his life.
The people were so overwhelmed by the new food that they all fell asleep right after dinner. In the evening Chagatayev ordered that another dinner be prepared, and he began to make flat cakes himself out of the white flour, and then he prepared both tea and coffee. He knew that this kind of eating could be a little harmful, but he was in a hurry to feed the people so as to strengthen the bones inside them, so they might recover even a little bit of those feelings in which all other peoples except themselves were rich— feelings of egoism and of self-defense.
Chagatayev watched with pleasure as his people ate—without greed, chewing the food carefully in the mouth, with a consciousness of necessity, and with a brief thoughtfulness, as if they were conjuring up in their imaginations the faces and the spirits of the people who had worked so hard to make this food, and to give it to them.
Chagatayev went on living patiently, getting ready for the day when they could begin to achieve the real happiness of living together, without which there is nothing to work for and the heart is filled with shame. Occasionally he talked to his mother, who now asked him for nothing but only stroked his legs and his body on top of his clothes; he held her bowed head and wondered what he had to do to comfort and to recompense this almost completely destroyed creature inside whom he had begun his life. He did not know that his mother only remembered him at all because of Aidim’s reproaches to her, and that she wiped her eyes in secret when she realized that she must love her son although she no longer knew him or remembered him in her own feelings; this was why she touched him as she would anything strange and good.
After a few days it grew very cold, and they had to heat the stove and cook their big dinner in one building, because the stove was used both for warmth and for cooking. No stoves had been built in the other houses. A strong wind was blowing from the top of Ust-Urt, carrying small, frozen snowflakes with it. Aidim took the sheep into the main room of the house where she slept, and left them there for the night. Chagatayev managed with difficulty to bring water from the lake in five wineskins loaded on a wheelbarrow he had made himself; he climbed up onto the plateau against the wind driving straight at him, and he pushed the wheelbarrow in front of him with great effort. And that wind, and the early winter fog lying over all the land around him, and the empty black valley of Sari-Kamish where the wind was trying to knock Chagatayev down and carry him away—all of this convinced him of the need for some different way of living.
People were stirring inside one of the houses, the light inside shone through its open door. There they had finished eating and were dozing off: Aidim was clattering the new dishes, washing away all the leftovers and the dirt, telling the people that they had better stay there for the night where the room had been heated: it would be crowded, but warm.
It was six o’clock, but all the people were already lying down in the one room, close to each other, sleeping in the closeness as if in paradise. Chagatayev ate his dinner standing up, for there was no place to sit down. Aidim went off to sleep in another house, where she had put the sheep, and then Chagatayev went there to sleep, too.
By morning a snowstorm was blowing, but it had grown warmer. There was not a sound in the main house, although day was breaking. Aidim was sleeping warm between two sheep. Chagatayev did not want to wake her, so he went out himself to the house where all the people were sleeping. He lit a lamp, and looked around him.
The people were lying in the same positions as the night before, just as if no one had moved through the long night. Many faces were lying there now in steady smiles. The blind Molla Cherkezov was sleeping with his eyes open, having placed his left arm under Gulchatai’s back, so he could feel her constantly, and protect her. The old Persian who was nicknamed Allah was staring out of one half-closed eye, and Chagatayev couldn’t guess what this man was seeing and thinking, what desire of the spirit was hidden inside him, whether it was the same as Chagatayev’s or something different.
Chagatayev sat next to Aidim all the rest of the day, loving her face and her breathing, watching the flush of youth which more and more covered her cheeks. He let the sheep out into the snow; let them dig and roll in it as they pleased. Then Chagatayev took Aidim’s hand in his, quietly rejoicing that Bolsheviks would stand around this poor, gentle being in a steel wall of defense, for this was the only reason why he himself was there.
Aidim woke up toward evening. She swore at Chagatayev—why hadn’t he wakened her earlier? The whole day had been wasted. Chagatayev told her to go and wake the rest of the people—he would stay where he was, and not get up. Hearing this, Aidim gave a bitter little scream, and ran out to the neighboring house. She lifted the grass curtain hanging over the entrance, so the cold would pour over the people, and wake them up. But the sleepers only moved closer to each other, huddling together and sleeping like the dead.
A second night went by. In the morning Chagatayev looked at the sleepers again. Their faces had changed still more than the day before. Stari Vanka was pink with new life, and now he looked about forty years old. Even the ancient Sufyan had put on flesh, and Kara-Chorma, a sixty-year-old man, was lying there rose-colored and puffed up, gulping in air with the kind of deep feeling a man shows when he finds wetness at a time of great thirst. Leaning over his mother, Chagatayev could see no change in her face; Gulchatai, the mountain flower, might not have wakened at all, her eyes had fallen down and her cheeks had darkened, the print of the earth was on her. Molla Cherkezov’s eyes were open as before, and a distant glimmer showed in them, as if sparking in the depths of his brain, and it seemed to Chagatayev as if vision was coming back to this man.