Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

The mother boiled a kind of stew for herself in the iron pot, ate it to the last drop and wiped the inside of the pot with her fingers and then sucked them, the better to get her fill. Aidim watched Gulchatai carefully while she ate, how the food slipped down past the sinews in her thin throat, but she watched this without greed or envy, only with amazement and with pity for the old woman who was gulping the grass in hot water. After eating, Gulchatai fell asleep on her spread-out carpet of reeds, because night had fallen all around them.

Chagatayev’s first day in his native land had been lived through. At first the sun had been shining, and there was something to be hoped for, then the sky had grown dark, and already one indistinct, paltry star showed far away in the sky.

It had grown raw and dead quiet. The people in this country of reeds were silent, Chagatayev could not hear them at all. He gathered some grass and made a bed out of it in his mother’s hut and laid Aidim down in the warm place so that she might sleep.

Then he went out alone, walked as far as an empty channel of the Amu-Darya, and then returned. A powerful night now stood over this land, the small, young reeds were rustling at the base of the older plants, like children in their sleep. People might think there was nothing in this wilderness, only an uninteresting wild place where a melancholy herdsman drowses in the darkness, with the dirty valley of Sari-Kamish lying at his feet, where once upon a time a human disaster took place—it is over, and its martyrs vanished. But in very fact here, on the Amu-Darya and in Sari-Kamish, there was an entire hard world busy with its destiny.

Chagatayev was listening: someone was talking near him, humorously and quickly, but getting no answer. Nazar approached one of the reed huts. He could hear the breathing of sleeping people inside it, and their uneasy tossing.

“Pick up the wool on the ground, and put it inside my shirt,” the voice of a sleeping old man was saying. “Collect it quickly, while the camels are shedding…”

Chagatayev listened next to the wall of reeds. Now the old man was whispering in delirium, what he was saying couldn’t be heard. He was dreaming some kind of life in perpetual motion, and his murmuring grew lower and lower, as if he were moving away.

“Dudri, Dudri!” a woman’s voice began to call; she was stirring, and the reed mat which covered her was rustling. “Dudri! Don’t run away from me, I’m dead tired but I’ll catch up with you…. Stop, don’t torment me, I’ve got a sharp knife, I’ll slash you to pieces, so you’d better give up.”

But the old man and the woman soon grew silent and slept peacefully again.

“Dudri!” Chagatayev called quietly from outside the hut.

“What?” the voice of the muttering old man answered from inside.

“Are you asleep?” Chagatayev asked.

“I’m sleeping,” Dudri answered.

Chagatayev remembered this Dudri from his earliest childhood. Then he had been a skinny man from the Iomud tribe who roamed from place to place with his wife, and ate tortoises. He would come to Sari-Kamish when he started to be bored, and he would sit silently in a group of people listening to them talk, and smiling, and he was content with the secret happiness of meeting them; then he would go out again into the sands to catch tortoises and to think about something in solitude. A lonely woman (to Nazar, then, she too seemed old) walked behind her husband, carrying all their worldly belongings on her back. The little Nazar would go with them for a long time until they disappeared in the shining light, transformed into flowing heads without a body, into a boat, a bird, a mirage.

Another reed hut, built like a tent, was right next to him. A little dog was sitting by it. Chagatayev was amazed, because he had not yet seen a single domestic animal. The black dog looked at him, opened and closed its mouth in a threatening way, and barked, but made no sound. At the same time it lifted first its right, and then its left paw, trying to build up enough fury to lunge at the stranger, but it could not. Chagatayev leaned down to the dog and it took his hand in its mouth and pressed it between empty gums; the dog did not have a single tooth. He felt its body, and its cruel, pitiful heart was beating fast, and there were tears of despair in the dog’s eyes.

Occasionally someone laughed inside the tent in a silly voice. Chagatayev lifted the lattice hanging from the pole and walked into the dwelling. It was quiet and stifling in the tent, and nothing could be seen. Chagatayev knelt down and crawled around, trying to find out who was there. The hot, woolen air was suffocating him. Chagatayev was groping for the unknown man with his exhausted hands when he felt someone’s face. This face puckered up suddenly under Chagatayev’s fingers, and out of its mouth came a warm flow of words each one of which could be understood although what they said made no sense at all. Chagatayev listened in amazement, holding the face in his hands and trying to understand what it was saying, but he couldn’t. The inhabitant of the tent stopped talking for a moment, and laughed quite reasonably, then started to talk again. It seemed to Chagatayev that he was laughing at what he was saying, and at his own mind which was now thinking something, but what it thought had no meaning. Then Chagatayev guessed, and he smiled, too: the words could not be understood because they were only sounds—they held no interest, no feeling, no life, as if there were no heart inside the man.

“Take put go to Ust-Urt bring something and carry it to me put it in my breast,” the man was saying, and then he laughed again.

The mind was still alive and perhaps a man was laughing inside it, afraid and not understanding that his heart was beating, his soul was breathing, entirely without interest or desire. The complete solitude, the night darkness inside the tent, a strange man—all this made no impression on him, producing neither fear nor curiosity. Chagatayev touched this man on his face and arms, felt his body, he could even have killed him, but the man just went on babbling as he had before, without any concern, as if he were already a bystander in his own life.

Outside the night was just as it had been. Walking on, Chagatayev wanted to turn back, to take the muttering man along with him, but where could he take him, once he was so worn out that he needed not help, but oblivion? He looked around; the silent dog was walking behind him, people were sleeping and dreaming in the reed huts, the slight trembling of a weak breeze stirred sometimes along the tops of the reed thickets, blowing from here all the way to the Aral Sea. Someone was talking in a low voice inside the hut next to the one where his mother and Aidim were sleeping. The dog walked up to it and then turned back, hurrying off home as if afraid of forgetting where its master and its safety were.

Chagatayev also went back to his mother’s, and lay down, without undressing, next to Aidim. The girl breathed little and very quietly in her sleep; it was terrifying to think that she might forget to breathe, and then she would die. Lying on the clay, Chagatayev listened as he drowsed to the sleepy muttering of his people in this God-forsaken bottom of the earth, and to the tortured churning of the grasses in their stomachs. In the hut right next to him a husband was talking to his wife; he wanted them to have a child, maybe now was the time to begin it.

But the wife answered:

“No, you and I have nothing but weakness, for ten years we’ve been starting one but it never grows inside me, I’m always empty, like the dead…”

The husband was silent, then he said:

“Well, let’s do something together, the two of us, we’ve got little enough to be happy about together.”