Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

The next day Sufyan and Chagatayev went off together to try to find the missing people. The camel went with them, being afraid of solitude as any affectionate man fears it who is living separated from his own people.

At the very edge of Sari-Kamish, Chagatayev recognized a place he knew. Gray grass was growing here, but no higher than it had in Nazar’s childhood. It was here his mother had once told him: “Don’t be afraid, little boy, we’re going out to die,” and she had pulled him close to herself by the hand. All the people were gathered around, so that they made a crowd of perhaps a thousand men, together with women and children. The people were noisy and happy; they had decided to go to Khiva, to be killed there all together and at once… not to live any longer. The Khan of Khiva had tortured this shy, insignificant people with his power for a very long time. At first seldom, but then more and more frequently, he sent horsemen from his palace into Sari-Kamish, and each of them picked up several men from among this people, and these were either executed in Khiva or else thrown into darkness without hope of return. The Khan was looking for thieves, criminals, and godless men, but it was hard to sort these out. So he then ordered that all mysterious and obscure people be taken, so that the inhabitants of Khiva, watching their execution and their torture, should know terror, and the shivering of horror. At first the Dzhan people were afraid of Khiva, and many of them experienced nervous breakdowns in advance; they stopped worrying about themselves and their families and simply lay flat on their backs in uninterrupted weakness. Then all the people began to be afraid— they kept looking into the empty wilderness, waiting for their horsed enemies to appear. They stood stock-still with terror in any kind of breeze which blew the sand from the top of the dunes, thinking that the mounted men were tearing toward them. When one third or more of the people had been taken off to Khiva without any news of them, the rest became accustomed to waiting for their doom; they realized that life was not as dear as it had seemed in their hearts and in their hopes, and each one who stayed safe was a little bored because they had not taken him off to Khiva. But young Yakobdzhanov and his friend Oraz Babadzhan did not want to go to Khiva for no purpose, if it was possible to die in liberty. They threw themselves with knives on four of the Khan’s mounted guards and left them where they found them, stripped of their glory and their lives. The little Nazar, seeing strange, armed men, ran to his mother to get a sharp piece of iron which he had hidden away for playing, but when he had run back again it was already late: the guards had died without his sharpened iron. After this Oraz and Yakobdzhanov disappeared, riding the horses of the murdered soldiers, and the rest of their people walked to Khiva in a crowd, happy and peaceful; the people were equally ready then to destroy the Khan’s regime, or to give up their lives without regret, since to be alive seemed happy or good to none of them and to be dead not hard or painful. The melon growers walked in front, muttering their song, and Sufyan, then already an old man, was right beside them. Nazar looked at his mother; he was surprised that she was happy now although she was going to die, and all the other people walked along just as eagerly.

Ten or fifteen days later the Sari-Kamish people could see the Khan’s towers. The road to Khiva had been hard and long, but the difficulty and the demands of stationary life also required strong hearts, so that people felt no irritation at the extra fatigue. When they got to Khiva itself, the people were surrounded by a small mounted detachment of the Khan’s men, but then the people, seeing this, began to sing and to rejoice. Everybody sang, even the most silent and awkward; Uzbeks and Kazaks danced first of all, one unhappy old Russian played a mouth organ, Nazar’s mother held up one arm as if she were getting ready for a mysterious dance, and Nazar waited full of interest for the soldiers to kill them all, and him too, immediately. Heavy-set guards were standing around the Khan’s palace, to protect the Khan from everybody. They watched with amazement the approaching crowd which marched proudly past them and was not afraid of the power of bullets or of steel, as if it were both deserving and happy. These palace guards, together with the horsemen, were supposed gradually to surround the Sari-Kamish people and drive them into underground prisons, but it is hard to punish happy people because they do not understand what evil is.

One of the Khan’s assistants went up close to the old people from Sari-Kamish and asked them:

“What do you want, and why do you feel so happy?”

Someone answered him, maybe it was Sufyan or some other old man:

“You’ve been teaching us to die for a long time, now we’re used to it, and we’ve come all together and at the same time—give us our death quickly, before we’ve lost the idea, while the people are still rejoicing!”

The Khan’s assistant went back, and never returned. The horsemen and the foot soldiers stayed around the palace, never touching the people: they could have killed only those to whom death was frightening, and once the whole people was marching happily past them to its death, the Khan and his chief soldiers did not know what to make of this or what to do. They did nothing, and all the people who had come out of the valley walked on farther, and soon they saw the bazaar. Merchants were trading there, food was lying in piles around them, and the evening sun shining in the sky lit up green onions, melons, watermelons, grapes in baskets, yellow grain for baking bread, gray mules drowsy with tiredness and with indifference.

Then Nazar asked his mother:

“And when will it be death? I want it!”

But the mother herself did not know what would happen then; she could see that everyone was still alive, and she was afraid to go back to Sari-Kamish again and once more to live on there.

The people started to pick up various fruits at the Khiva bazaar and to eat them, having no money, and the merchants just stood there silent and did not beat these thieving people. Nazar ate slowly, he kept looking around, waiting for murder, and he managed to eat only one melon. When they had eaten, the people grew uneasy because their happiness had passed, and there was no death. Gulchatai led Nazar back into the wilderness. All the people also went away, back to the old place where they lived.

Nazar and his mother returned to Sari-Kamish. They had rested then, on this same gray, harsh grass where Chagatayev was standing now with Sufyan, and the mother had told her son:

“Let’s live again, we haven’t died!”

“We’re both alive,” Nazar had agreed. “You know what, Mama, we’ll live.”

“Lucky the one who dies inside his mother,” Gulchatai said.

Then she looked at her son; happiness and pity filled her face.

Now Nazar just patted the ancient grass which had stayed there unchanging up to the present time because it had really died before Nazar’s birth, but still held on, as if living, by its deep, dead roots. Sufyan understood that some kind of deep emotion was now working inside Chagatayev, but he was not interested in it: he knew that a man needs something to fill his soul, and that if there is nothing, then the heart will greedily squeeze out its own blood.

After four days, Sufyan and Chagatayev wanted to eat so badly that they began to see dreams even while their legs still moved and their eyes looked at the usual daylight. The camel did not leave them, but moved along some distance off, where it could find a little forage in the grass along the way. Sufyan watched his flowing dreams hopelessly, while Chagatayev smiled at them sometimes, and was sometimes tormented by them. When they got to the Daryalik channel at Mangirchardar, the two walkers stopped for the night, and Sufyan mixed some water on the shore so it would be muddy, thicker, and more nourishing, and then, having drunk it, both men lay down in a cave, so the body might forget it was alive, and the night be over sooner. When he woke up in the morning, Chagatayev saw the camel dead; it was lying nearby with its eyes turned to stone, on its neck the blood stood still in a deep cut, and Sufyan was digging deep into its interior, as into a sack filled with goods, taking raw pieces out with clean blood on them and stuffing himself with them. Chagatayev too crept to the camel, a smell of warmth and satiety came from the open body, the blood was still flowing in droplets down the creases of the dead body, life was taking a long time to die. When they had eaten, Chagatayev and Sufyan blissfully fell asleep again, and they didn’t wake up quickly.