Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

The valley recommended by Sufyan was a good one to live in. Its grass cover stretched a long way, and even now, at the end of summer, not all the grass was dead; among the yellow stubble could be seen live, green blades of growing grass. The bed of the stream was empty, but in the heart of Sari-Kamish, a couple of kilometers away, you could see a mirror of water, a lake made by the mountain streams in spring and early summer; this was enough to exist on. When the people walked into the mouth of the valley a lot of tortoises had run out from under their feet and, at a safe distance, slowly stretched out their necks to look at the new arrivals, each tortoise with one black, vigilant, gentle eye. Chaga-tayev was delighted by it; now he could breathe deeply and collect himself; everything in life seemed possible to him now, as it had before, and the best part of it achievable right away.

He walked with Aidim far into the hills of Ust-Urt, up on to its high plains. He was looking for firewood, or at least the brushwood which grew sometimes in its ravines. Wood would be needed to make household tools and furniture. Along the way Chagatayev carried Aidim in his arms so that she would not get tired, and he kissed her cheeks, her eyes, her hair; this made him feel better in his heart. He loved to sense another’s life, it seemed to him that something more mysterious and beautiful, more meaningful, was there than in himself, and both his health and his feelings were often made better just by the chance to hold someone by the hand. Aidim hugged Chagatayev, too, around his head, and she stroked with her fingers the two bald patches on his scalp which had been made by the eagles’ wounds; she remembered that was the time when she had eaten an entire small eaglet all by herself.

Chagatayev had only a penknife, so it took him a long time to cut down and then cut up one not very big softwood tree growing all by itself in a stony gorge where nothing else was growing, as if some bird had once dropped the seed here from the air above.

For several days in the Ust-Urt valley which had been chosen to live in, only two people worked—Chagatayev and Aidim; the rest of the people drowsed in the caves which they dug out for night shelter along the slope of the valley, or they caught tortoises and fixed them for eating, but they ate little, and almost unwillingly, and they went once each day to the lake for drinking water. Chagatayev ordered that the three sheep and the ram were not to be touched, but kept in reserve against some extreme need. He counted the people, who was alive and who had died, and found one child missing, a three-year-old girl. No one could tell him, not her father nor her mother nor anyone else, where this little girl had disappeared or how she had died. No one could remember when she had slipped out of their arms and been blown away into the desert by the wind and the sand.

Chagatayev and Aidim started to collect the clay with which to make the first house, but no one helped them with the work. When Chagatayev ordered Sufyan and Stari Vanka, as the healthiest of them all, to help with the job, they carried clay twice, and then stopped. They sat down on the ground and thought, even though in all the years of their age they had long ago had time to think everything through and to arrive at truth.

Then Chagatayev summoned all the people, and he asked them: did they want to live? No one gave him any answer.

Many pale eyes were looking at Chagatayev with the strained attention needed to keep from closing, with fatigue and indifference. Chagatayev felt pain with his sadness; his people needed only oblivion, before the wind would first cool and then blow their bodies away into space. Chagatayev turned away from them all; his actions, his hopes now seemed to make no sense. He ought to take Aidim by the hand and go away from here forever. He walked off to one side and lay down with his face to the ground. He realized that no matter where he might go from here, he would come back again. For his people were the poorest in the whole world; they had squandered their bodies on the waterwheels and in the desert, they had been weaned from the goal of life and stripped of consciousness and of interest, because their desires had never been realized, in any degree, and the people had just lived mechanically. The skimpy daily food—of tortoises, and tortoise eggs and little fish caught in the same reservoir from which they drank their water—was not enough for them. Was there even a little spirit left in this people, enough for him, working with them, to create happiness for everybody? Or had it all been worn away long ago, with even imagination—which is the intelligence of poor people—now extinct? Chagatayev knew that any exploitation of a man starts with perverting him, adapting his spirit to death, to the master’s ends, otherwise the slave would not be a slave. And this forced deformity of the spirit continues and grows stronger until the slave’s intelligence has been transformed into insanity. The class struggle begins with the conquest of the “holy spirit” locked up inside the slave; then any insult to what the master himself believes in, his spirit or his god, is never forgiven, and the slave’s spirit is ground down by lies and by the ravaging of hard labor.

Chagatayev recalled Stari Vanka’s story about how once in Khiva, in the courtyard of a mosque, he had wanted to kill a peacock, so as to sell it later, as a stuffed bird to a Russian buyer. In a hurry, old Vanka had thrown a stone at the peacock, at the sacred bird itself, but had not hit it. In the distance, in the bushes, either the watchman or some other person had appeared. Stari Vanka picked up whatever was closest to his hand among the plants around him, and threw this object at the peacock. The bird immediately swallowed whatever it was that Vanka had thrown at it, and then uttered its mean, broken-throated cry, and Stari Vanka had run up to it to strangle it with his hands but had not managed to because some Moslems had appeared who grabbed Stari Vanka, carried him out to the street, and thrashed him until they thought he was dead, and then threw him into a disused irrigation ditch. While they were maiming him, Vanka held his face in his hands, and it was then that he realized, from the smell on his fingers, that the second missile he had thrown at the sacred peacock had been a piece of dried excrement. Vanka climbed out of the canal alive, but afterwards he loved to throw something unclean at all the flying or sitting birds he saw, especially if they were doves, until after many years he lost interest even in doing this.

Something alive was snuffling over Chagatayev’s head, and he thought it was a sheep. But the animal took Chagatayev’s ear in its mouth and began to rub it between its toothless jaws. This was the same ferocious but helpless dog Chagatayev had seen at the settlement where his people had lived on the Amu-Darya. It had not been with the people in the desert, it had fallen behind somehow, or perhaps it had stayed to be the solitary guardian of the abandoned settlement and then, having grown bored, come by a straight road to Sari-Kamish where it, too, had obviously lived in previous years. Chagatayev took the dog’s head and pushed it to the ground, to make the dog lie down. The dog lay down quietly, it was trembling with exhaustion—grown old and wild, without the strength either to end or to change its wretched life but still convinced of the felicity of its existence.

The dog fell asleep next to Chagatayev. Aidim went on puddling the clay by herself with her bare feet, carrying the water two kilometers in wineskins. When Chagatayev woke up, several people were sitting around him, waiting for him to regain consciousness. Sufyan, the oldest man, told Chagatayev that it was natural that the people now had no spirit, and did not know any goal in life, were not tempted by better food, and warmed themselves by the weakest sort of heat from their own hearts, getting this warmth from the grass, the tortoises, the fish, and from their own bones when they had nothing to eat.