Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

Sufyan leaned down to Chagatayev’s ear, nudging the dog away. The dog looked at the people greedily and sadly. It had come all this way in pursuit of this tribe, separated from it, digging itself deep into the sand in the daytime so as not to be noticed by the eagles of the steppe and by other beasts of prey. Sufyan told Chagatayev:

“You figure this out the wrong way. The people must live, but they can’t. When they want to eat rice, drink wine, have robes, and tents to live in, strangers will always come up and say: take what you want, wine, rice, camels, whatever in life will make you happy…”

“Nobody gives things away,” Chagatayev said.

“They used to give a little,” Sufyan said. “A handful of rice, a flat loaf of bread, an old robe, songs in the evening, a few bribes, we had all these long ago, when we worked on the Bey’s water-wheels….”

“My mother ordered me to feed myself, when I was a little boy,” Chagatayev told him. “We had little, we were dying.”

“Very little,” Sufyan agreed. “But we always wanted a great deal: sheep, and a wife, and water from the irrigation ditches. There is always an empty place inside a man’s spirit where he can hide a little more of whatever he wants. And we worked for that little bit, for poor, infrequent food we worked until our bones dried out. We didn’t know any other life,” Sufyan went on. “I’m asking you: if we almost died from work and hunger, just for a little bit to eat, do you suppose even our death would be enough to earn real happiness for us on this earth?”

Chagatayev stood up.

“All you need is life! In the old days it was the slave’s spirit that died first, then he stopped even feeling alive. A tumbleweed plant was freer than one of us.”

“I’ve heard about that,” Sufyan said indifferently. “We know that the rich are all dead now. But you listen to me.” Sufyan was stroking Chagatayev’s old Moscow shoe. “Your people are afraid to live, they’ve lost the habit, and don’t believe in it. They’re pretending to be dead; otherwise happier and stronger ones will come to torture them again. They’ve left themselves the least bit possible, what’s not needed by anyone else, so no one will get greedy when he sees it.”

Sufyan walked off with the people who had been with him. Chagatayev went to Aidim and worked with her until evening. Then he put her to sleep in a dry cave and went on working himself, preparing adobe bricks out of clay mixed with old grass, for the building of the first house. There was no one near him or in the whole valley; everyone had gone off somewhere, perhaps to trap tortoises or to catch fish in the lake. Chagatayev worked more and more quickly and productively. It was not until late at night that he climbed up the slope to the plateau to see where all the people had gone. The clean, high moon made everything visible; moonlight stood over unpopulated Ust-Urt, covering the valley of Sari-Kamish with the shadow of the mountain, and then caught fire again far over the stinging deserts which stretched to the mountains of Iran. The three sheep and the ram were pastured in a nearby canyon, noisily turning over piles of tumbleweed as they looked for green grass that was still living. In the dark shadow of Ust-Urt, where Sari-Kamish began, a little bonfire was burning, and beyond the bonfire a thin cloud of mist hung over the lake. Chagatayev climbed down from the plateau and walked toward the bonfire. In a half hour he had come close enough to see that his whole people was sitting around the fire, on which desert underbrush was burning quietly. They were all singing a song, and did not notice Chagatayev. He listened to the song with delight; in his childhood he had heard a lot of songs from his mother, from various old men, and the songs were all beautiful but sad. This one had a meaning unfamiliar to him, there was a feeling in it which was not native to his tribe, but they all sang it as if carried away, still not noticing him. Chagatayev could make out even his mother’s feeble, shy voice. The song said: we do not cry when tears come to us, but neither will we smile with joy when good times begin, and those times are near at hand. The song ended. Stari Vanka stirred the fire with a stick and pushed out of it some baked fish, testing them to see if they were cooked, and those that weren’t ready he pushed back into the fire.

Chagatayev walked back, without having been seen by the people. He began to make bricks again, and he went on working until the moon went out in the sky and the sun began to shine. In the morning he noticed that the people were still sitting around the dead fire, while Stari Vanka was moving and shaking his whole body as if he were dancing. Chagatayev decided not to leave his work, since the night had gone by and there was no time to sleep. He shaped the bricks in the clay forms, putting all the strength of his heart into his labor. Aidim was still sleeping. Sometimes Chagatayev walked over to the hollow where she was lying, and covered her with grass to protect her from the flies and insects: let her refresh herself in sleep, for growing and for a long life. About midday Stari Vanka came up to Chagatayev; he took off the trousers which had been sewed for him out of various scraps by Aidim to replace those thrown away in the desert, climbed down into the trench where the clay was being mixed with water, and started to puddle it with his thin, hard feet.

Two months later, by autumn, four small houses had been built out of adobe bricks in the Ust-Urt valley. These houses, which had no windows because there was no glass, held all the Dzhan people who were finding real shelter for the first time from the wind, from cold, and from small flying, stinging creatures. For a long time some of the people could not get used to sleeping and living inside the blank walls—every once in a while they would go outside, breathe deeply, look at nature around them, and then walk back, sighing, inside the buildings.

At Chagatayev’s suggestion the people elected its own soviet of workers, which included everyone, with Aidim as social and political worker, and Sufyan, as the oldest, became president.

The entire Dzhan people were now living as the majority of human beings in this world live, not conscious of their own death from day to day, producing their own sustenance from the desert, the lake, and the hills of Ust-Urt. Chagatayev even managed for them all to have dinner every day; he knew this was very important since only a minority of the world’s people living on the land eat dinner, and most of them do not. Aidim took care of keeping them supplied, and made them all look for food and bring it back: grasses and fish, tortoises and small animals from the gullies in the hills around them. With Gulchatai she ground the roots of the edible plants, to make flour, and she reminded Sufyan in time to make the grass nets to catch the birds lighting on the shores of the lake to drink water. When someone forgot to do his job in helping feed them, Aidim would announce to him, in the presence of all the others, that the next day she and Nazar would dig a big trench for anyone to lie down in who didn’t like living any longer.

“We don’t need unhappy people,” Aidim said.

But Chagatayev was not satisfied with the ordinary, skimpy kind of life which his people had now begun to live. He wanted to help make happiness, which had been dwindling away inside each unhappy man since birth, shoot out into the open and become an act and a force of destiny. Both science and common sense are concerned with the same single, essential thing: to help bring out into the light that spirit which is racing and beating inside a man’s heart and which can be strangled there forever if it is not helped to free itself.