Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

When he woke up, Chagatayev drove the flock of sheep off toward his people, and he got there by nightfall. The people were drowsing as they had before, only Aidim was playing in the sand, making little streams and roads in it. Chagatayev woke the people and instructed them to collect firewood and some dead, dry grass, to light fires, and to cook the meat. Sufyan eagerly started to cut the throats of the sheep, and was the first to drink the blood from the neck veins but he then caught it in a basin and gave it to the others to drink.

Chagatayev ordered that not more than ten head should be butchered, with the rest kept for breeding and for eating later. The ram was left, he walked off and lay down in the distance, and all the sheep still living collected around him. Thin and hardened by their wild wandering life, from a distance they looked more like dogs.

The people started to cook the carcasses whole on the fire, without cutting them into pieces, and when they were browned they put them on the sand at one side. Then the eating started. The people ate the meat without greed or enjoyment, pulling the meat off in little pieces, and chewing it in weak, opened mouths. Only Nur-Mohammed ate a lot and quickly, he tore the meat off in layers and gulped it, then when he was full he gnawed the bones until they were clean and sucked the marrow out from inside them and at the end of eating licked his fingers and lay down on his left side to sleep. The married folk walked off to sleep at one side. Molla Cherkezov also led Nazar’s mother away into the distance, the single people and the orphans stayed around the dying fires— they had grown so weak and they slept so hard that it was as if the food they had eaten had broken their strength and they were conquered by it.

During the night Chagatayev walked around the stopping place, counting the living sheep with the one ram, collecting the sheepskins and the heads in one place, and he started to look into the darkness: what was Ksenya doing there now, far beyond this dark, under the electric lights of Moscow; and where was his dead Vera lying, what was there left on the earth of her big, shy body? Chagatayev walked among the sleeping people, they lay uncovered on the sand as if they had been slaughtered themselves and had left no gravediggers. But some of the husbands and wives were still stirring, making love to each other. Molla Cherkezov was lying with Gulchatai. Chagatayev saw this, and he wept. He did not know what to do here now, to teach this small people socialism. He could not leave them to die alone because he himself, abandoned by his mother in the wilderness, had been taken care of by a shepherd. Soviet power and an unknown man had fed him and nurtured him, for life and for growing.

The sick and the weak were dozing in their fever. Two of them had gone to sleep with sheep bones in their hands which they had been sucking before they slept, to build up strength. Chagatayev walked out to the wet hole dug in the sand, and fixed up a little well. When some water had collected in it, he went back to the sick, wakened them, gave each one a quinine powder, and then kept running back to the little well in the sand, bringing them water in which to drink the medicine.

It had already grown late. Chagatayev felt cold, he lay down next to one man who was feverishly ill, to get heat from his body, and fell asleep. By morning the ram and all the sheep had disappeared. Judging by their tracks, they had gone off into the open sands, abandoning their usual grazing path.

Sufyan figured it out in his head and then said that the sheep would inevitably come back to their grazing round or else wander over into another, larger circle which ran through Kara-Kum. But both these nomadic trails came out at the dirty Sari-Kamish lakes, not far from which was the native land of the Dzhan people, so that sooner or later the sheep would show up at Sari-Kamish in the valley of eternal shadow and they would see the dark Ust-Urt hills where many of the persons now here had lived their whole lives. Nur-Mohammed agreed with Sufyan.

“We’ll follow them,” he said. “We’ll drink their blood, and eat their meat. In seven or eight days, we’ll come out at Sari-Kamish…. Did somebody die last night?” Nur-Mohammed asked.

They told him that one old woman had died, a Karakalpach, and Nur-Mohammed conscientiously marked it down in his little notebook. Chagatayev could not remember this old woman and he had not seen her—she had spent the night alone, going far away from the general camp, and had died there quietly.

The people moved in a long file along the tracks of the fleeing sheep. The sick and the weak walked behind, and sat down often to rest, drinking water out of their homemade wineskins. Chagatayev walked behind all of them, so that no one could fall down and die without being noticed. The animals had probably been running fast; this was Sufyan’s guess from the tracks left by the sheep, and Chagatayev agreed with him. He walked up on a high sand hill and as far as the horizon stretched in front of him he . could not see the smallest cloud of dust from the moving herd— the sheep had already gone too far.

An old woman serf from Khiva gave Chagatayev a rag which she tore from the hem of her skirt and he tied it around his head, which was hurting from the sun. The people moved patiently along; Aidim had recovered completely and she was cheerful—for her, since she knew nothing, there were enough things around to spark all the feelings and impressions she was capable of. When she grew tired, Chagatayev took her in his arms so she could sleep on his shoulder, making a little scream sometimes, and muttering in her strange dreams. But what dreams could nourish the consciousness of this wandering people, once it could accept its own fate? It could not live with the truth; it would perish of sadness at once if it knew the truth about itself. But men live because they’re born, not by truth or by intelligence, and while the heart goes on beating it scatters and spreads their despair and finally destroys itself, losing its substance in patience and in work.

Late that night the people had not yet caught up with the sheep. By morning Nur-Mohammed was asking again: did someone die during the night, or were they all still living? Only one little boy had died, and Mohammed marked down the fallen soul with satisfaction in his little notebook. There were only two children left by now in the whole Dzhan people: Aidim and another little girl who had been born by accident three years before after some stranger had joined the people out of the sands and then, having lived with it for half a year, gone off again, leaving the child to be born to Guzel, who was the widow of a bandit from the Stari Urgench region.

On the second day the people found two sheep lying on the road; they had grown weak from running and from sickness and now they were dying. Their thinning wool was stuck together with fever sweat, their lean muzzles looked wild and wicked, they had begun to resemble jackals, there was no fat left in their tails. The people killed one sheep at once and ate him, without lighting a fire, and they divided up the bones and took them along for supper. In the next two days they found nothing edible at all except for a few stray blades of grass, and they found water twice in old holes.

The people moved now only in the evening and the morning; during the day they buried themselves in the sand from weakness and from the heat, and slept. Nur-Mohammed marked down the dead each day, and Chagatayev verified their deaths, listening carefully to the heart and examining the eyes because one time Sufyan and another old man, the slave Oraz Babayev from Ferg-han, had pretended to be dead. But Chagatayev heard the hollow, distant heartbeat through their bones, lifted them to their feet, and ordered them to go on farther.