Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

Chagatayev got up and went quickly back to his people’s village. Toward evening he was so exhausted that he fell asleep, without having taken refuge in a warm crevice in the ground. All night long he heard a confused murmuring, many kinds of agitation all around him, the uneasy stirrings of nature, believing in what it was doing and what it meant.

On the second night he was already inside the limits of the reed forest, close to all his relatives. He thought that the Dzhan people were asleep at that moment, and hoped the night might be a long one, a night when they were not hungry and not in torment, so that in the morning they would have, so as not to die, at least some weak sense of reality, something no bigger than a dream. This was why Chagatayev usually worried less at night; he realized that it was easier for sleeping people to live, and that right then his mother remembered neither him nor herself, while the little Aidim was lying alone, keeping herself warm, like a happy person who needs no one else.

He walked slowly, as if resting, past low, leafless desert trees, and he crossed a little channel; the late, yellow moon shone on the flowing water. A shimmering dust hung in the moonlight over the ancient caravan road running from Khiva to Afghanistan. Chagatayev could not understand this. The road had been abandoned for whole centuries; it ran on hard, packed sand; only in one place did it cross a crust of loess where just then, probably, it was dry, and a thick walker’s dust was rising. Camels and donkeys don’t make a dust like that, their dust rises higher and thickens over the rear end of the caravan. Chagatayev left his path, and walked diagonally across the wilderness in a southerly direction, to see what was moving there where there should have been nobody. For a long time he walked across the bowl of the reed forest, away from the marshes, parting the prickly, sweet-smelling bushes with his hands, before he came out on a dry, clean burial mound, swept by the winds, beneath which some forgotten prehistoric town was lying in its grave.

The old road bent itself around this mound at its base and then disappeared into the southeast, toward China and Afghanistan, into the darkness. The unknown walkers had not yet got this far, they were moving quietly, you couldn’t hear them at all—perhaps they had turned off the road, or gone back, or laid down to sleep on the ground. Chagatayev went out to meet them; he did not expect to find anything happy or joyful, and he knew the dust might be rising in the moonlight from wild beasts coming from deep in the delta of the Amu-Darya and headed for the distant oases, for the collective farms, where there were sheep to be eaten.

People were walking toward him. Chagatayev lay down by the side of the road and watched them. The district commissioner Nur-Mohammed was leading the blind man, Molla Cherkezov, by the hand; behind them Chagatayev’s mother was walking, and Aidim with her. Farther back were other people, among them the aged Sufyan, the muttering Nazar-Shakir, his wife whom he loved as the only gift in his life, then Durdi together with his wife, altogether fourteen persons, maybe eighteen. The rest of the people had probably not been able to wake up, or had lost all strength and desire to move.

Gulchatai was carrying some reed roots as a food reserve wrapped up in her son’s raincoat; Aidim was dragging a sheaf of grasses along the road at the end of a stalk; Nazar-Shakir had a big bundle of blankets on his head; Molla Cherkezov was holding on to Mohammed with his left hand while his right hand was groping for something in the air—all of them had their eyes closed, they were walking in their sleep, some of them whispering or muttering, accustomed to living in their imagination. Only Nur-Mohammed had his eyes open, seeing the whole world clearly. He was smoking herbs wrapped in the dried leaf of a swamp bullrush, and he was silent.

Chagatayev went up to Mohammed and asked him: where was, he taking the people?

Nur-Mohammed greeted Chagatayev, and answered him:

“What people? Their souls left them long ago, it’s all the same to them whether they live or not.”

He went on walking. Chagatayev walked beside him. Mohammed was smiling to himself and looking away; even in the darkness nature looked sorry and hateful to him, and behind him walked the almost nonexisting people.

The road wound around the little mound on which Chagatayev had just been. A new idea came to him as he looked at this hill of dirt mounded up over another small people which had mixed up its bones and lost its names and bodies in order no longer to attract the attention of those who would torment it. Slave labor, exhaustion, exploitation never take away just physical strength, just arms to work with—no, they take over the mind and the heart, too, and the soul is destroyed first of all, and next the body falls, and then man hides himself in death, sinks into the ground as if into a fortress and a refuge, not realizing that he has been already weaned from worldly interests, his brain already accustomed to just believing, seeing dreams, imagining what is not real. Was it possible that his Dzhan people would soon be lying somewhere nearby, the wind covering them with soil, and even the memory of his people vanishing simply because they had never succeeded in erecting something of stone or steel, had never dreamed up eternal beauty? They had dug the dirt out of irrigation canals, but the flowing of the water had filled them up again, and the people had dug out the silt and the extra soil, and then the muddy flow had brought new silt and covered up their labor, leaving no trace of it.

“Where are the others? Are they asleep?” Chagatayev asked Nur-Mohammed.

“No, they stayed behind, but they’ll come after us; they’ll catch up.”

Aidim, who had been close to them among the ones in front, fell fast asleep, and lay down. Chagatayev noticed this, and looked around: two more sleeping people were lying behind them.

“Let them be!” Mohammed told him. “They’ll recover in a while, and they’ll come along.”

But Chagatayev picked up Aidim in his arms and carried her. She was sleeping, no longer shivering with fever, her sickness had probably left her. In spite of the grass diet and her illness, her body was not thin, it had absorbed into itself all the goodness in even the dry stalks of the reeds, and she seemed now set to live for a long time and happily.

“Where are you taking them?” Chagatayev asked Nur-Mo-hammed.

“To Sari-Kamish, their birthplace and native land,” Nur answered, “where they used to live.”

“Why?”

“They’ve got to go somewhere…. I’m leading them by the long road, around the flooded areas. Anyone who walks always feels better for it.”

“And the sick?” Chagatayev asked.

“They can walk a little, too. The road will make them well. We’ve left the swamps, and there’ll be no more fever.”

Chagatayev did not believe in Nur-Mohammed’s good intentions. He didn’t know—would the sick be able even to feel good health once their minds had been distracted from their own interests for so long and their hearts had become so used to languishing? This was why they had stood disease and suffering so mute and unfeeling, as if it were none of their business. Chagatayev dropped back from Nur-Mohammed, in order to look at his mother. Aidim was sleeping quietly in his arms. Gulchatai opened her eyes when Nazar walked up to her but said nothing to him; the blind Molla Cherkezov, weak and childish, was holding on to her hand. The mother looked absentmindedly at her son, whom she recognized, but she could not remember if she had seen him up close. Nazar went on looking at his mother and she turned her eyes away from him because she was ashamed to be alive in front of him so weak and so unhappy; she would have liked to love him with all her earlier, forgotten strength, but now she couldn’t, now she had heart enough only for her breathing, and she was pleased by her son’s Red Army cap and she thought that she must get it from him as a present, to keep her head warm while she slept.