Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

“Wake up, quickly!” the old woman said, putting her arms around the sleeping Chagatayev.

He opened his eyes. The old woman started to kiss his neck and his chest, through his clothes; crawling with her face toward her son she tested and examined all his body very closely: were his members whole or not, had none of them sickened, or lost something, while he had been away?

“You don’t have to do that; you’re my mother,” Chagatayev said.

He got to his feet in front of her, but his mother was so hunched over that now she couldn’t see his face, and she pulled at his hand, so he stooped down and sat in front of her. Gulchatai was shaking with age, or with love for her son, and she could say nothing to him. She just passed her hands over his body, fearfully becoming aware of her happiness, and not believing in it, afraid that it would go away.

Chagatayev looked into his mother’s eyes, which had now become pale, unused to him, no longer lighted by their former dark and shining strength. Her thin, small face had grown rapacious and wicked, either from unceasing grief or from the effort of keeping herself alive when there was no reason to live, and no one to live for, when she even had to remember that her own heart was beating, and to force it to work. Otherwise she might die at any moment, forgetting or not noticing that she was alive, and that it is essential to try to want something and to keep on being aware of one’s own self.

Nazar embraced his mother. She was as light as air now, or as a little girl; she would have to start to live again from scratch, like a child, because all her strength had gone in the patient struggle against unending hardship. No part of her heart was any longer free of grief, able to feel the goodness of her own existence; she had never been able to understand who she was and to feel easy with herself before the time had come for her to be an old woman, and to die.

“Where are you living?” Nazar asked her.

“There,” Gulchatai pointed with her hand.

She led him through short grass and sparse reeds, and they quickly came to a little village set down in a clearing in the reeds. Chagatayev could see some reed huts and several tents, also fastened together with reeds. In all there were about twenty dwelling places, perhaps a few more. Chagatayev saw no dogs, no donkeys, no camels in this settlement, there were not even chickens walking around on the grass.

Beside the farthest hut a naked man was sitting, his skin hanging from him in folds like worn-out, tired clothing; he was sorting reed canes on his knees, weaving them into things for domestic use or for decorations. This man was not at all surprised by Chagatayev’s arrival, and did not even answer his greeting; he mumbled to himself, imagining something visible to no one else, giving his soul its own secret comfort.

“Do all our people live here, or are there others?” Chagatayev asked his mother.

“I’ve already forgotten, Nazar, I don’t know,” Gulchatai said, following him with a great effort, holding her head down low like a heavy burden. “There were some more people, about ten of them, they live in the reeds down toward the sea—that is to say, they used to live there, now it’s time for them to die, they must have died already, none of them comes back to us…”

The little huts and tents ended. Beyond them the reeds began again. Chagatayev stopped. Here it all was—his mother and his native land, his childhood and his future. Early daylight lit up the place: the green, pale reeds, the gray-brown ramshackle huts in the clearing with the sparse grass underfoot, and the air above filled with sunshine, the humid steam of the swamp, the loess dust of the oases which were drying up, stirred by some high, inaudible wind, a dull, exhausted sky, as if nature itself were nothing but a mournful, hopeless force.

Looking around him, Chagatayev smiled at all these shadowy, uninteresting elements, not knowing what there was for him to do.

Over the top of the dense reed thicket, on the silver horizon, he could see a kind of disappearing mirage—the sea, or a lake with moving ships, and the shining white columns of a faraway city on its shore.

The mother was standing silently next to her son, her body sagging down toward the ground. She lived in one of these huts, built on clay, without a husband, without relatives. Two reed mats lay on the ground inside her dwelling—with one she covered herself, while she slept on the other. She still had an iron pot for cooking and a clay jug, and on a crossbeam hung the little trousers of her girlhood and a single rag, in which she had wrapped Nazar when he was nursing at her breast. Kochmat had died six years before, nothing was left of him but one trouser leg (Gulchatai had used up the other in patches for her skirt) and a piece of bast which Kochmat had used to wipe the sweat and dirt off his body when he had gone out to work on the pumps in the oases.

Nazar’s mother lived here as a poor, landless peasant. She was amazed that Nazar was still alive but she was not surprised that he had come back. She did not know about any other life in the whole world except the one she lived herself; she thought everything on earth was all the same. Chagatayev went back for the little girl Aidim; he woke her and took her into his mother’s hut. Gulchatai went out to dig up some grass roots, to catch little fish with a reed net dipped into water holes, to look for birdsnests in the underbrush and to collect eggs or little nestlings. She did not come back until evening, when she began to prepare food from the grass, the roots of reeds and some little fish. She was no longer interested that her son was now there, near her, she did not look at him at all and she spoke no word, just as if her thinking and her feeling were weighted down in some deep, uninterrupted meditation which took all her strength. The brief, human feeling of gladness about her living, grown-up son had either gone, or it had never been at all, and there was only a wonder about this strange meeting.

Gulchatai did not even ask if Nazar would like to eat, or what he was thinking of doing in his native land, in this settlement in the reeds.

Nazar looked at her; he watched her stir about at her usual tasks and it seemed to him that she was in fact asleep, not really moving around but in a dream. Her eyes were so pale and helpless that there was no strength left in them for seeing, they held no expression of any kind, like the eyes of the blind and the deaf. Her big, crusted feet showed that Gulchatai lived barefoot all the time; her clothing consisted of a single dark skirt pulled up to her neck like a cowl, patched up with different bits and pieces of cloth including pieces of a felt shoe which were stitched around its hem. Chagatayev felt his mother’s dress; it had been put on over her naked body and she had on no undershirt—his mother had long grown used to freezing at night and in the winter and to suffering in the heat. She had got accustomed to everything.

Nazar called his mother. She answered him, and understood him. He began to help her make a fire on the hearth which was built like a little cave under the slanting wall of reeds. Aidim watched these strange people out of her clear black eyes which still held the shining strength of childhood and the shyness which was sorrow, because what a child really wants is to be happy, not to sit in the dark of a mud hut wondering if they would give her anything to eat. Chagatayev remembered where he had seen eyes like Aidim’s, but still more lively, happy and loving—no, not here, and that woman was not a Turkmen nor a Khirgiz, she had forgotten him a long time ago, and he too could not remember her name, and she could not even imagine where Chagatayev was now or what he was doing: Moscow was far away, he was almost alone here, around him a wilderness flooded with water and dilapidated dwellings made of dead grass. He began to long for Moscow, for many comrades, for Vera and Ksenya, and he wanted to go out that evening somewhere on a streetcar, to visit friends. But Chagatayev quickly recovered himself; “No, Moscow’s here, too!” he said out loud, and he smiled, looking into Aidim’s eyes. She became frightened, and stopped looking at him.