Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

Then they walked farther—into the flooded places at the estuary of the Amu-Darya. They took with them a reserve of camel meat, but Chagatayev ate it without appetite: it was hard for him to nourish himself with the sorrowful animal; it too had seemed to him a member of humanity.

The residents of the Sari-Kamish valley were scattered among the reeds and bushes along the estuary of the Amu-Darya River. About ten years had gone by since the Dzhan people had come here and settled in this wet-loving vegetation. At first the mosquitoes ate the people so badly that they tore the skin off their bones, but after a little time their blood became used to the mosquitoes’ poison and began to develop an antidote from which the mosquitoes became helpless and fell to the ground. Because of this the mosquitoes were now afraid of people, and would not come near them at all.

Some of the people had settled apart from each other, in order not to suffer for others when there was nothing to eat, and in order not to have to weep when people close to them died. But some of the people lived in families; in these cases they had nothing but their love one for another, because they had neither good food, nor hope for the future, nor any other happiness to distract them, and their hearts grew so weak that they could hold only love for a wife or for a husband, which is the most helpless, poor and everlasting of all feelings.

At first Sufyan and Chagatayev wandered for a couple of days through the gloomy reeds on the sodden ground before they saw a single grass hut. A blind man, Molla Cherkezov, lived in it, fed and taken care of by his daughter Aidim, a girl of twelve. Molla recognized Sufyan by his voice, but he had nothing to say to him.

They sat facing each other on the litter of reeds, and drank tea made out of the dried, ground-up roots of those same reeds, and then they said good-bye to each other.

“Do you have any news?” Sufyan asked as he took his leave.

“No. Life goes on just the same way,” Cherkezov answered. “My wife, my dear Gyun, fell into the water and died.”

“Why did your worthy Gyun fall in the water?”

“She couldn’t stand living. Take my daughter Aidim, and bring me instead a young she-ass. I’ll live with her at night, to avoid thinking, and sleeplessness.”

“I’m a poor man,” Sufyan said, “I haven’t any she-asses. You should trade your daughter for an old woman. Live with an old woman; it’s all the same to you.”

“It’s all the same,” Molla Cherkezov agreed. “But old women die off quickly, and there aren’t enough of them.”

“You’ve heard, Nazar has come to us from Moscow. They’ve ordered him to help us live a good life.”

“Four men have come before Nazar,” Cherkezov reported. “The mosquitoes bit them, and they went away. I’m a blind man, my business is the dark, nothing will do me any good. But if I had a wife, life would go by without my knowing it.”

The girl Aidim sat on the ground, with her legs apart, and rubbed a small stone against a large reed rhizome; she was the cook here and she was preparing food. Beside the girl, in addition to the reeds, were several bunches of marsh and desert grass and one clean bone of a donkey or a camel, picked up in the sand somewhere faraway, for cooking. A scrubbed kettle stood next to her and she threw into it from time to time what her hands were getting ready, for she was fixing a soup for dinner. The girl was not interested in her guests; her eyes were engrossed with her own thoughts—probably she was living some secret, independent dream and doing the housework almost unconsciously, distracted from all the world around her by her concentrated heart.

“Let your daughter come with me,” Chagatayev asked the master of the hut.

“She’s not yet grown up, what will you do with her?” Molla Cherkezov said.

“I’ll bring you another one, an old one.”

“Bring her quickly,” Cherkezov agreed.

Chagatayev took Aidim by the hand; she looked at him out of black eyes, which had the shine of blind, unseeing eyes, and she was frightened and did not understand.

“Come with me,” Chagatayev said to her.

Aidim rubbed her hands in the dirt, to clean them, stood up and walked away, leaving all her things where they were, not looking at anything, just as if she had only lived here for a moment and as if she were not now leaving her own father.

“Sufyan, it’s all the same with you, whether you go on with me or not, isn’t it?”

“All the same,” Sufyan answered.

Chagatayev told him to stay with the blind man and to help Cherkezov eat and live until he came back.

Nazar walked off with the young girl along the narrow track of people who had moved before him through the forest of reeds. He wanted to see all the inhabitants of this overgrown land, the people hiding here from poverty. He had not asked Sufyan about his mother; he hoped that unexpectedly he might run into her, alive and remembering him, but if she was dead, he could always find out later where her bones were lying.

Aidim walked humbly behind Chagatayev the whole long way. In places the reeds ended. There Nazar and the girl would walk out into empty, sandy dunes, covered with silt, next to little ponds; they would walk around stiff bushes, and plunge again into the thicket of reeds where the little path ran. Aidim was silent; when she was dead tired, Chagatayev took her over his shoulder and carried her, holding on to her knees while she held on to his head. Then they would rest, and drink water from the clean sandy pools. The girl kept watching Chagatayev with a strange look which he tried to understand.

“Why is everything bad here,” he thought, “when what I need is what is good?”

Chagatayev put Aidim down against his arm, and ran his fingers through her hair. She fell asleep right away in his arms, trusting, and pitiful, born only to be happy and to be taken care of.

The evening came. It was too dark to go farther. Chagatayev gathered grass, made a warm bed of it to guard against the cold at night, placed the girl in this grassy softness, and lay down himself beside it, sheltering and warming the little person.

Chagatayev lay there sleepless; if he had gone to sleep, Aidim would have been uncovered and numb with cold. Huge black night filled the sky and the earth, from the foot of the grass to the edge of the world. The sun alone disappeared, but in return all the stars began to shine, and the vast, unquiet Milky Way, looking as if some march with no return had just taken place along it.

The first dawn light picked out the figures lying on the grass. One of Chagatayev’s arms was under Aidim’s head, to protect her sleep from the hard, damp ground, and the other was across his eyes, to guard them from the morning. A strange old woman was sitting next to the sleeping pair, looking at them with absorption. Barely touching him, she felt Chagatayev’s hair, his mouth, and his hands, then she smelled his clothing, looking around her, afraid someone might stop her. Then she carefully took Nazar’s hand out from under the girl’s head, so that he would feel no one, and love no one, and be only with her. Her back had long since become permanently bent, and when the old woman looked at something her face almost crawled along the ground, as if she were shortsighted and looking for something she had lost. She examined all Nazar’s clothes, tried with her hands the little straps and tapes of his trousers and shoes, rumpled the cloth of his jacket between her palms, and traced Chagatayev’s black, dusty eyebrows with her finger, moistened in her mouth. Then she relaxed, and lay down with her head at Nazar’s feet, happy and exhausted, as if she had now lived through to the end of life and there was nothing more for her to do, as if in these shoes, rotting inside from sweat and covered with the dust of the desert and with swamp mud, she had found her final consolation. The old woman either dozed or fell asleep, but then quickly got up again. Chagatayev and Aidim were sleeping as they had before: children sleep a long time, and even the sun, butterflies, and birds do not wake them.