Nazar stoked up the stove for warmth, and went out for a walk with Aidim; this was the first time he had had a free hour for many months. The snowstorm had stopped during the night; now the last little flurries of snow were falling, and sunshine was already glittering on the highest slopes of Ust-Urt, happy, blinding, promising eternal triumph. Aidim laughed, and ran through the snow; she disappeared in the distance, diving into a gully, and then suddenly she threw her arms around his neck from behind him. Finally he caught her in his arms, and ran with her to the edge of the cliff on which they were standing. Aidim saw his intention.
“Throw me over, but I still won’t die!” Aidim said.
While they were returning home, Aidim walked alone, beside him, and she asked Chagatayev:
“Nazar, when will they wake up?”
“Soon, soon… Maybe they’re awake already.”
Aidim was thoughtful.
The stove in the house had not quite gone out. Aidim filled it up again, and then he and Aidim cooked dinner for the whole people, just in case.
By evening some of the people were beginning to wake up. Sufyan woke first, then Stari Vanka and Molla Cherkezov, and by midnight they were all up except Gulchatai. She had died.
Chagatayev carried her into an empty, cold house, and laid her on a bed of dried grass. When they had come to their senses after this long sleep, the people sat down to dinner in the warm mud building, while Chagatayev went to sit next to his dead mother, and fell asleep.
Aidim fed all the people, and scolded them because they had slept through two nights in a row but still couldn’t work out how to live. Stari Vanka burst out laughing at her:
“Now we can die!” he said. “Don’t worry about us, daughter…”
In the night Aidim went back to the house where Chagatayev was lying next to his dead mother. She lay down quietly in a corner and fell asleep at once. At dawn she got up, and went out to start the day’s work. The heated house, where the people had stayed for the night, was empty, and there was no one to be found in the other two houses. Aidim looked at all the things and belongings, all the goods held in common by them, and counted them roughly, then she went into the building where the food supplies brought from Khiva had been stored; worried, she examined even the walls of the houses, but she saw nothing new or changed. The supplies were intact. The canned goods were exactly as they had been the night before when she had taken some of them to make dinner. The sacks of rice and flour stood untouched. Maybe something had been taken, but very little, perhaps some tobacco and matches, which were always taken without any accounting.
Aidim woke up Nazar. Chagatayev went off alone some kilometers; he climbed up to the highest ridge of the mountain, from where he could see the whole world far away, almost to its very ends. From there he could see ten or a dozen people walking one by one to all the countries of the world. Some of them were walking to the Caspian Sea, others to Turkmenistan and Iran, two of them, far apart from each other, were going towards Chardzhoui, and the Amu-Darya. He could not see those who had gone over Ust-Urt to the north and the east, or those who had traveled far during the night…
Chagatayev sighed, and he smiled; he had wanted, out of his single, small heart, his compact mind, and his enthusiasm, to create for the first time a real life here, on the edge of Sari-Kamish, the hellhole of the ancient world. But the people could see better than he could how it was best for them to live. It was enough that he had helped them to stay alive, now let them find their own happiness beyond the horizon….
FRO
HE HAD GONE far away, and for a long time, probably never to return. The locomotive of the express train sang its farewell into the empty distance as it disappeared; those who had seen it off walked back from the station platform into their settled lives, and a porter showed up with a mop and started to clean the platform like the deck of a ship stuck on a sandbank.
“Stand aside, citizen!” the porter said to two plump legs standing there by themselves.
The woman walked over to a mailbox on the wall and read the schedule printed on it: the mail was picked up often, you could write a letter every day. She touched the metal of the mailbox with her finger—it was solid, nobody’s heart inside a letter would ever be lost out of it.
A new railroad town was just beyond the station; the shadows of leaves danced across the white walls of the houses, the evening sun of summer lit up the landscape and the buildings, as if through a clear emptiness where there was not enough air for breathing. On the edge of night everything in that world was seen too distinctly, blinding and unreal—this was why it seemed not to exist at all.
The young woman stood there in surprise at this strange light in front of her; in the twenty years of her life she could not remember such an emptied, shining, silent void, and she felt that her heart itself would grow weak inside her, from the lightness of the air and from hoping that the man she loved would come back again. She saw her reflection in the window of a barbershop: it was commonplace enough, the hair fluffed up and then arranged in loops (this was a hairdo that people wore some time in the nineteenth century), her deep, gray eyes looked out with a strained, almost artificial, tenderness—she had grown used to loving the man who had gone away, she wanted to be loved by him steadily, without any interruption, so that a second beloved life might begin to grow inside her body, together with her own ordinary, uninteresting spirit. But she herself couldn’t love as she wanted to—strongly and steadily; sometimes she grew tired, and then she cried from disappointment that her heart could not be indefatigable.
She lived in a new, three-room apartment; in one of the rooms her widowed father lived—a locomotive engineer, while the other two were occupied by her and her husband, who had now gone off to the Far East to build and to put in operation some kind of secret electrical devices. He was always busy with the secrets of machines, hoping by these mechanisms to transform the whole world for the good of mankind, or perhaps for something else: the wife did not know exactly.
The father did not go to work often, because of his age. He was classified as a reserve engineer, replacing men who were sick, breaking in machines that had been withdrawn for repairs, or driving lightweight trains on local runs. They had tried to retire him on a pension a year ago. The old man, who didn’t know what a pension was, agreed at first, but after four days of freedom he walked back on the fifth day to the signal station, sat down on a little mound along the right of way, and stayed there until late in the night, weeping as he watched the engines pounding in front of the trains they were pulling. From then on he started to go to that little mound every day, to look at the engines, to live on his memories and his imagination, and then to go home in the evening as tired as if he had just come back from a long trip. At the apartment he would wash his hands, sigh, report that one engine had dropped a brakeshoe on the 9,000th gradient or that some such thing had happened, then he would shyly ask his daughter for some vaseline to rub into the palm of his left hand as if it had been chafed by the tight governor handle, have his supper, mumble something, and quickly sink into blessed sleep. The next morning the retired engineer would go back again to the right of way and pass another day in watching, through his tears, in dreaming, in remembering, in all the fury of his lonely enthusiasm. If he thought there was something wrong with an engine going by him or if the engineer was not driving it as he should, he would scream his judgment and his instructions from his little hilclass="underline" “You’ve pumped too much water! Open the valve, you damn fool! Blow off!” “Tighten up your flanges, without losing steam: what do you think that is—a locomotive or a steam bath?” When a train was made up badly, with light, empty platform cars at the front or in the middle of the train where they could be damaged by heavy braking, from his little mound the engineer would shake his fist at the brakeman riding the last car. And when the engineer’s own favorite locomotive went by him, driven by his former assistant Benjamin, the old man would always find something flagrantly wrong with it—even when there was nothing wrong at all—and he would advise the engineer to take immediate steps against his careless helper. “Benjamin, Benjamin, my boy, smash him in the teeth!” the old engineer would scream from his little mound next to the right of way.