Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

“Not a thing,” Nur-Mohammed answered. “It’s impossible to torment a man too long, but the Khiva khans thought it was possible. You do it a long time, and the man dies; you must do it a little bit, and then give him a rest, so you can begin it again…”

“I’m not going to dig their graves,” Chagatayev said. “I don’t know who you are; you’re a stranger, you’d better go away from here and leave us alone.”

Nur-Mohammed stroked the sleeping Aidim’s forehead, and then stood up.

“My business is in my head, and yours in yours. I’ll be putting this girl in the ground soon. Good-bye.”

He walked back to his own dirt hut. Chagatayev wrapped Aidim up in grass and then in the reed mat and carried her quickly to his mother and Molla Cherkezov: he told them to give her liquids to drink from time to time, and to protect her from the night cold. And Chagatayev himself set off for Chimgai, a hundred or a hundred and fifty kilometers away. He walked through dry stream beds, and channels of the river, through reeds and thickets of mixed growth for the rest of that day, all night, and still another day, getting scratched and hungry on the way, losing his path and carrying all the weight of his impatience, his mind darkening, until he lay down somewhere with his face to the ground. Then he woke up, and he saw a large ruin not far away, and he walked up to its walls of clay. The sun, already high, was pouring intense heat down on the old walls; sleep and oblivion, the unconsciousness of sweltering air, seeped out from under the wall, where the dry clay was aging. Chagatayev walked inside the fort, through a broken place where freshets had torn a gap in the wall. Inside, it was even stuffier with quiet; the heat of the sky was all collected in one pocket, overgrown by enormous grasses with thick, greasy stalks because there was no one here to eat them. Chagatayev looked at these fatty plants with disgust, searching under them for some kind of smaller, edible grass. He found some small, broken bones; they had been chopped up, to produce a thicker fat, or cut several times with a sabre, if this had been a man. Farther on he found some more bones and a whole half of a human skeleton, with the skull; this man had died with his face down, and his rib cage had fallen apart, as if to ease his breathing after his death, and the point of one rib had punctured a rumpled Red Army cap, already rotting now and with pale grass growing through it. Chagatayev pulled it out from under the rib; the cap still held the shadow of its five-pointed star, and inside it, on the cloth protecting the forehead, there had been written with a chemical pencil: “Oraz Golomanov” —the name of the Red Army soldier who had fallen here. Chagatayev cleaned the cap and put it on his head, and he placed his own cap on Golomanov’s skull. On the clay wall inside the fortress, Golomanov or some other soldier had cut, probably with a bayonet, the words: “Long live the soldier of the revolution!” and the bayonet had cut too deep into the clay for time, wind and rain to smooth out the words and wash away the trace of this hope of the dead and of the living. It must have been that in 1930 or 1931 a Red Army unit had found itself here, fighting against the basmachi bandits and against the troops of the Khiva and Turkmen slaveowners, and Golomanov with his comrades had just stayed here to rot in peace, as if convinced that his unlived life could be lived out by others just as well as by himself. Chagatayev scattered some flowers and earth on Golomanov’s skeleton, so eagles or wandering animals should not pilfer his bones, and he walked on to Chimgai.

In Chimgai he bought a box of medical supplies packaged for collective farms, and through the district government office he procured several dozen quinine powders, although he knew that none of these would really help his people which stood in need most of all of another kind of life, which could be endured without dying of it. On the off chance, he went to the post office, to ask if there were not, perhaps, a letter for him from Moscow. Placards hung inside it with descriptions of distant air routes, and signs pasted onto columns in the building gave examples of correct postal addresses, in Moscow, Leningrad, and Tifiis, as if all the local people were writing letters only to those places, and were homesick only for those splendid cities.

Chagatayev walked up to the General Delivery window, and they handed him a plain letter from Moscow which had been sent on here from Tashkent by thoughtful workers in the office of the Communist party central committee of Uzbekistan. Ksenya wrote: “Nazar Ivanovich Chagatayev! Your wife, my mama Vera, died in the second clinical hospital in the city of Moscow from the birth of a daughter who when she was born was also dead and I saw her body. They put the daughter in the hospital in one coffin with my mama, Vera, your wife, and they buried it in the earth at Vagan-kovsky Cemetery, not far from the writer Batyushkov. I’ve gone to the grave twice, stood there, and gone away. When you come, I’ll show you where the grave is. Mama told me to remember you and love you, and I remember you. With Pioneer’s greetings, Ksenya.”

A Turkmen girl looked out of the window, and said:

“Wait a minute, there’s a telegram for you, too. It’s been here for six days.”

And she handed Chagatayev a telegram from Tashkent: “Letter about wifes death read here because of difficulty communication with you excuse us you have permission go moscow for one month then return greetings organization department isfendiarov in case of nondelivery after twenty days return to tashkent sender.”

Chagatayev put away the letter and the telegram, picked up his box of collective farm medicine, and walked out of the post office. Chimgai was nothing much—a few mud huts almost unnoticeable in the middle of the open space of the empty world around it. Chagatayev bought himself a loaf of barley bread and in five minutes was out of the town with his face into the breeze. The sun was shining high and hot, but all its light was not enough to warm a human heart. Chagatayev stopped thinking; he looked at some of the things along the road—at the blades of dead grass which had fallen from some wagon, at the clumps of digested food dropped by donkeys, at a decrepit Russian bast sandal left by some unknown wanderer; these remains and leftovers from strangers’ lives or activities distracted Chagatayev from his own thoughts. Finally he saw a little tortoise: it was lying with its swollen neck stuck out, its feet helplessly extended, no longer defending itself inside its shell; it had died here, on the road. Chagatayev picked it up and looked at it. Then he took it to one side and buried it in the sand. This tortoise was now closer to his dead wife Vera than he was himself, and Chagatayev stood there in wonderment. He sat down on the ground, confused but still understanding that he was alive and acting with an established goal; the usual phenomena of nature in front of him were foreign to him and boring; he felt no need any longer for something to look at or to enjoy. He threw away with revulsion the barley loaf which was getting hot in his hand. Then he started to cry out as he had in childhood when his mother took him out of Sari-Kamish, and he began to look around in this unfamiliar place trying to see if someone were not listening to him—as if behind every man there walked his tireless helper just waiting until the final moment of despair before coming forward…. In the distance, in the silence, as if behind a dead curtain, in some close-by but different world, a noise kept on repeating itself. The sound had no meaning or precision. Chagatayev listened; he remembered that he had known these sounds before but he had never understood them and he let them slip through his attention. The sounds were repeated again, they came slowly, with dead pauses, as if wetness were falling in enormous, congealing drops, as if a small horn were being carried deeper and deeper into a blue forest and was being blown briefly from time to time. Or maybe these sounds came from much closer, inside Chagatayev’s own body, coming from the slow throbbing of his own soul, reminding him of that other life which was now forgotten by him, smothered by the sorrow in his contracting heart.