Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

Aidim pulled the ram along in a hurry. Her memory for places was exact, but it was only at daybreak, with the moon extinguished in the sky, that she reached the deep depression where she had dug water for herself from the sand. She left the flock there, the sheep starting to paw the sand again with their front legs, and she went on to the sleeping place of her people. She was resentful that not a single water hole had been dug. Sufyan and Stari Vanka had either died or turned lazy, or perhaps they had drunk enough for themselves without worrying about the lives of the others.

At the stopping place Aidim felt all the sleeping, unconscious people: they were still used to living, they were breathing, not one of them had died. Aidim woke up Sufyan and Stari Vanka and told them to pasture and guard the sheep, and she went off herself to Chagatayev, to bring him back to the camp to eat.

For a long time Chagatayev did not waken when Aidim tried to rouse him; he was slowly dying because his blood had been trickling out of him while he slept and now it could be seen coming out of his wounds in infrequent little spurts and then drying in the sand. Aidim understood it all. She ran back to the place where her people had been sleeping, but they were all moving off to the flock of sheep in whatever way they could: some crawling, some barely getting to their feet, some managing only with the help of others. Aidim searched with her eyes to see which of them had a relatively whole or soft piece of clothing left, but she couldn’t find what she wanted. All their clothing was either thin and bad, or there was very little of it. Molla Cherkezov had a pair of soft wide trousers but because of his blindness they were not clean. Aidim took off her own shirt and looked at it: never mind, she was still a little girl, she hadn’t picked up the infections and the diseases of the older people, the shirt smelled only of sweat and of her body and there was no dirt on it—for the desert is a clean place. Aidim went back to Chagatayev, tore her shirt into strips, and bandaged all the wounds on his body and his head which were still bleeding.

Chagatayev had wakened by now, and turned over, so it was easier for the girl to work. He opened his eyes, and he saw Aidim, and the dead birds, and the sand, as if through a heavy twilight, although the usual sunny morning had begun. He looked at the eagles again, and he saw that the biggest bird was the female, and the other two eagles were much smaller: they were its children. The female had flown back here with its husband’s truest friends, its own children.

For four days the people ate, recovering from their grief and their misery. Aidim saw to it that no one ate too much, and she stopped those who were especially zealous over their food, or rapped them across the eyes: otherwise they would not have felt it. The wounds on Chagatayev’s body began to heal over; he gave Aidim his underclothes and she sewed herself a skirt and a blouse, without which she would have been naked. Sufyan, who carried around with him all his life his own inventory of what was needed for day-to-day living—matches, a needle, thread, an awl, an ancient document attesting his identity, a small knife, and a few other things—asked Aidim to mend his clothes. She sewed up the large rips in the old man’s robe, then at the same time she fixed up the decrepit clothing of all the people in those places where their bodies showed through; for many people she had to shorten their garments to save material which she could use for those who had too little. Out of such scraps she made a whole pair of trousers and a shirt for Tagan because he had thrown his clothes away somewhere in the sand when he had thought it was time for life to end, and since then he had gone naked.

This work took Aidim four more days—only Stari Vanka and Chagatayev helped her with the mending and the sewing. Besides this, she checked up on the general way of life of her people, on the distribution of food, on their sleep, and on the remaining sheep, seeing to it that they were pastured and watered and that they did not get thin, using up their bodies to no good purpose. At night Aidim tied each sheep to a person, while she placed the ram next to herself and tied a leash around his neck with its other end fastened with a strong knot around her stomach. Thanks to these precautions not a single sheep ran away, even though this meant that they stayed lying down all night without grazing and adding to their weight.

One morning nine days after Aidim had brought in the flock of sheep, the people took to the road again, walking toward their native land. By now there were only ten sheep left, plus the ram as the eleventh; the people had eaten thirteen sheep and three eagles. The people walked well now, and they felt that they really existed, without having to strain their memories for recollections of who they had once been.

There were only three full days of easy walking left between them and Sari-Kamish. On the second day they could already see the gray plateau of Ust-Urt and the darkness around its base, the valley of empty land with its few miserable streams. They were all glad and they hurried on, just as if this were a place where happiness was guaranteed, with tidy houses and doors standing open for them, waiting for their masters. Chagatayev led his mother by the hand, and he smiled, just as if he found himself once more, as in his childhood, face to face with a great future, ready for all its agonizing, patient labor, his heart filled with confused, shy feelings of inevitable triumph.

On the evening of the third day the people crossed the last shining sand—the frontier of the desert—and began to drop down into the shadows of the valley. Chagatayev looked at this land, its pale salt marshes, its loamy soil, the dark antiquity of its ground which still held, perhaps, the bones of that poor Ariman who had not been able to achieve the brilliant destiny of Ormuzd and had not conquered him. Why had he not been able to be happy? Maybe because the fate of Ormuzd and others who lived in distant countries filled with gardens was foreign and repulsive to him, their lot did not really appeal to him or attract his heart; otherwise he himself, patient and energetic, would have been able to create in Sari-Kamish all that there was in Khorosan, or to conquer Khoro-san….

Chagatayev liked to turn over in his mind this question of what people before him had not been able to accomplish, because this was precisely what it was now up to him to work on.

Two days later the tribe had passed through the valley and was approaching the foot of Ust-Urt. Chagatayev found a small reservoir of fresh water here, filled by the spring runoff from the high plateau, and the people stopped next to it, to rest and to pick their permanent dwelling places. There were only three sheep left, and the ram was a fourth. But this was not frightening for a people like the Dzhan, who knew how to use the good things of nature even in its most barren places. On the first day there, Aidim found some ravines filled with tumbleweed. This grass had been blown here from the desert by the southeasterly winds, and only those bushes of tumbleweed which bypassed these blind gullies were lifted over the slope to the higher tableland and blown farther on, into the steppes.

Sufyan went back to his cave, where he had been living before Chagatayev’s arrival, and he advised the whole tribe to settle around it. It was a broad, spacious valley covered with grass, and a little stream which ran through it from Ust-Urt did not dry up until the middle of each summer. The people walked into this valley and on the way they found traces of their former stopping places, dating from the days of the Khans. Nothing much was left, just the usual wasteland, some handfuls of coal, some lumps of clay, the stake of a tent abandoned by everybody, worn by the heat and the wind. A child’s skullcap was half-buried in the ground; Aidim cleaned it and put it on her head.