“No!” Vera said sadly, covering her face with the end of her sleeve to dry her eyes and hide her crying. “No. I can’t do anything.”
Chagatayev released her. It was enough for him just to be near her, to hold her hand, and ask her why she was crying—from grief or from outrage.
“My husband has just died,” Vera said. “And it’s so hard, you know, to forget the dead. The child, when he’s born, will never see his father, and having only a mother will not be much for him…. Isn’t that true, not much at all?”
“Not much,” Chagatayev agreed. “Now I will be his father.”
He embraced her, and they went to sleep while it was light, and the noise of building Moscow, of drilling into its depths, of citizens quarreling as they rode along the streets—all of this died away in their ears; they held each other in their arms, and each of them heard through sleep the toneless, gentle breathing of the other.
Toward evening, not long before the end of the working day in government institutions, they registered their marriage in the nearest marriage bureau. They stood between two large bouquets of flowers; the clerk in charge of the bureau congratulated them in a short speech, suggested that they kiss each other as a pledge of lifelong fidelity, and advised them to have many children so that the revolutionary generation might be extended into times eternal. Chagatayev kissed Vera twice, and said good-bye to the clerk in a friendly way while he thought to himself that it would have been good if the clerk had kissed Vera, too, and not limited himself to his professional duties.
Every evening after that day Chagatayev went to visit Vera, and she waited for him and was glad when he arrived. First, they embraced each other, Chagatayev holding Vera very carefully, protecting the child of the dead father. Then they would go out for a walk, arm in arm, along the streets, looking attentively at the store windows as if they were preparing to buy a great deal, studying the sky, and not overlooking any of the little things which took place around them, as if things were so hard for the heart in a time of loving that it had to be diverted constantly with trifles so it would not feel its heavy work.
But Chagatayev was not yet Vera’s real husband; with tenderness and with terror she kept turning him away so as neither to offend him nor to surrender to him. It was as if she was afraid of destroying in passion her poor consolation, which had come so unexpectedly and strangely; or else she was simply being cunning, in a prudent, intelligent way, wanting to keep the heat from cooling in her husband so that she could warm herself from it for a long time and safely. But Chagatayev could not maintain his feeling for Vera on a spiritual attachment alone, and he sometimes wept over her when she was lying on the bed, appearing so helpless but smiling and unconquerable.
[2]
The summer ran on. The peat bogs around Moscow began to smolder in the heat, and in the evenings there was a smell of burning in the air mixed with the warm, steamy smell of distant collective farms and fields, as if everywhere in nature people were getting food ready for supper. Chagatayev passed his last days with Vera: he had received his work assignment; he was to go back to his birthplace, in the middle of the wilderness of Asia, where his mother was either living or long dead. Chagatayev had gone away as a small boy, fifteen years ago. His old mother, a Turkmen woman named Gulchatai, had placed a little hat on his head, put a piece of old, flat bread in his knapsack, added a biscuit baked of the ground-up roots of Asian reeds, and then put a thin reed cane in his hand so that a plant might walk along with him like his oldest friend, and ordered him to go.
“Be off, Nazar,” she said, not wanting to see him dead by her side. “If you recognize your father, don’t go near him. You’ll see bazaars and riches in Kunya-Urgench, in Tashaouz, in Khiva—but don’t you go there, keep going right on past, go far away to strangers. May your father be an unknown man.”
The little Nazar did not want to leave his mother. He told her he was used to the idea of dying and he was no longer afraid he would have little to eat. But his mother drove him away.
“No,” she said. “I’m already so weak that I can’t love you. You live by yourself now. I will forget you.”
Nazar, beside his mother, began to cry. He hugged her thin, cold leg, and stood there for a long time, clutching her weakened, familiar body; his small heart failed him then, it suddenly tired, and started to pound. The little boy sat down in the dust on the ground, and told his mother:
“I’ll forget you, too. I don’t love you either. You can’t feed a little boy, and when you die you won’t have anybody.”
He lay face down and fell asleep in the dampness of his tears and his breathing. Nazar woke up in an empty place. His mother had gone. An insignificant, strange breeze was blowing out of the wilderness, without any fragrance and without any living sound. The little boy sat there quietly for some time, he ate his mother’s piece of flat bread, looked around him, and thought some thought which now with age he had forgotten. In front of him was the land where he had been born, and where he wanted to live. That childhood country stood in the black shadow where the desert ended; there the desert drops away into a deep valley, as if preparing its own burial, and the flat hills, eroded by the dry wind, fence in the low place from the sky which covers Chagatayev’s fatherland with darkness and quiet. Only the last light of the day breaks in there and throws a sad twilight on the sparse grass growing in the pale, salty ground, as if tears had dried on it but its grief had not gone away.
Nazar stood on the edge of the dark ground falling away below him; behind him began the sandy desert which was happier and lighter, and among the quiet little sand dunes, even in the stillness of that vanished day of childhood, a little wind was huddling, whining and wandering, driven there from far away. The boy listened to this wind and followed it with his eyes, trying to see it and to be joined with it, but he couldn’t see anything, and then he started to yell. The wind fell away from him, and nothing answered. Night was falling in the distance; shadow had already dropped on the dark, low land which his mother had ordered him out of, and only a white smoke curled up from the nomad tents and the mud huts where the boy used to live. Nazar mistrustfully tried out his legs and his body: was he really still alive and on the earth, once no one remembered or loved him any longer? He had nothing even to think about now, as if he had been living on the strength and the desires of other people close to him, and now they no longer existed, they had driven him away… A rough wandering bush called tumbleweed was rolling along the sand which stretched away before him. The plant was dusty, tired, hardly stirring after the hard labor of its life and its movement; it had nothing at all—no relatives, no close friends, and it was always traveling along. Nazar touched it with the flat of his hand, and he told it: “I’ll go with you, I’m bored by myself. You think about me, and I’ll do the same for you. I don’t want to live with the others, they don’t want me, let them all die!” And he shook the reed which was his walking stick threateningly at someone, probably at his mother who had abandoned him.
Nazar followed the tumbleweed and walked into the darkness. He lay down in the dark and fell asleep from weakness, touching the plant with his hand, so that it would stay with him. When he woke in the morning, he was suddenly frightened that the bush was no longer there: it had gone off alone during the night. Nazar wanted to cry, but then he saw the weed balanced on the top of a nearby sand dune, and the little boy caught up with it.
His fatherland and his mother had long since disappeared—let his heart forget them while it was growing up. On that day the wandering tumbleweed led Nazar to a shepherd, and the shepherd gave the little boy something to eat and to drink, and he tied the tumbleweed to a stick so that it could rest, too. For a long time Nazar followed the shepherd and lived with him, until snow fell; then his master let the shepherd go on some errand to Chardzhoui, because the shepherd was going blind, and the shepherd set off with the little boy, and in the city he turned him over to the Soviet authorities as someone not needed by anybody.