Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

Pretty soon snow came, and it was harder for Chagatayev and all the others to get their food. The tortoises went into hiding and fell asleep; large flocks of birds flew from north to south over Ust-Urt without lighting to drink water at the little lake and without noticing the small people living down below them. The roots of the edible grasses froze and lost their taste, the fish in the reservoirs swam down to the bottom, toward the dark silence. Chagatayev understood all this and made up his mind to go off alone to Khiva where food reserves were kept and to bring back a whole winter’s supplies for his people. Aidim mended his torn, old clothing, he fixed his own shoes with wooden nails he made himself and with narrow strips of leather cut from sheepskins. Then he said goodbye to each person, told them all to expect him back soon, and set off down the valley of Sari-Kamish. For the sake of speed he took no food with him, figuring that on an empty stomach he could make the trip in three days.

Chagatayev disappeared into the heavy fog covering the empty wilderness, and Aidim sat down on the slope of the hill and cried. Tears poured out of her shining black eyes, for she thought that Nazar would never come back again. But by the next day Aidim managed not to cry a single time over Chagatayev: she was absorbed in work, in her need and responsibility for people. She just sighed occasionally, like a poor old woman. The people were still working only weakly, they were not convinced that it was an advantage to be alive, the Beys had robbed them of this belief at their waterwheels, and they neither cherished their own existence nor understood what enjoyment was, even of food.

Most of the work now, after Chagatayev’s departure, fell on Aidim. But it didn’t hurt her, she had learned from Chagatayev that there are no rich people, and that she herself was poor but things would soon be all right for her, and then still better and better.

After three days of Chagatayev’s absence, Aidim remembered him and she creased her face into a frown so that she could start to miss him and to weep for him. But it was already evening, and she had to look for the sheep and the ram, which had climbed up in the ravines some distance off, so she decided to postpone her grieving for Chagatayev until she went to sleep, when she would be alone. By the time she had driven the sheep back to the common hut, a mysterious light blinded her. Brighter lights than any Aidim had ever seen were shining next to the mud houses. She stopped, and she felt like running back with the sheep, to hide in a cave or in some ravine a long way off, and then come back the next day to see what might be there. She seized the ram by the horns but she kept on watching the lights next to the little houses; interest and amazement overpowered the terror in her and she led her small flock back to its home. She was thinking: the lights are either wild beasts, or else they’re something good, from out there where the Bolsheviks live.

Aidim saw Chagatayev, walking past the lights. She ran up to him and, shuddering and screwing up her eyes, grabbed his leg. Chagatayev lifted her up in his arms and took her into one of the houses, laying her down to sleep on a bed made of grass, and then he went back outside to unload the trucks. He had met them on the second day of his trip, at the exit from Sari-Kamish into the desert. On orders from Tashkent the two trucks had left Khiva four days before. On one of them there was canned meat, rice, hardtack, flour, medicine, kerosene, lamps, shovels and axes, clothing, books and other goods, while on the other were two men, cans of gasoline, oil, and spare parts.

The Tashkent orders had been to search the Sari-Kamish district and between Ust-Urt and the Aral Sea for the nomadic Dzhan people, and to help it in all possible ways, and not to return until the people had been found, or traces of it which might prove that the entire tribe had perished.

By midnight the goods had been unloaded, and Chagatayev sat down to write a report to Tashkent about the condition of the Dzhan people while the drivers and the leader of the expedition were preparing the trucks for the return trip. Chagatayev wrote until dawn; he proposed at the end of his letter that his people be given the opportunity to recover from its poverty of many years (this chance had now been given, and the people could live through the winter with all it needed, thanks to the help sent by the government) and most important of all, that every person here needed to renew his exhausted body, lived out to its very bones, in which feeling and conscious thought were now too weak to function.

Chagatayev handed his letter to the expedition leader, and the trucks drove off toward the Khiva oasis. All the people were still asleep, it was early morning, snow was lying on Sari-Kamish. Chagatayev took an axe and a shovel, woke up Stari Vanka and Tagan, and went off with them to root out some desert trees. By midday they came back with firewood. Aidim lit the stove with dry grass and began to cook dinner out of the new food which almost no one had ever tasted before in all his life.

The people were so overwhelmed by the new food that they all fell asleep right after dinner. In the evening Chagatayev ordered that another dinner be prepared, and he began to make flat cakes himself out of the white flour, and then he prepared both tea and coffee. He knew that this kind of eating could be a little harmful, but he was in a hurry to feed the people so as to strengthen the bones inside them, so they might recover even a little bit of those feelings in which all other peoples except themselves were rich— feelings of egoism and of self-defense.

Chagatayev watched with pleasure as his people ate—without greed, chewing the food carefully in the mouth, with a consciousness of necessity, and with a brief thoughtfulness, as if they were conjuring up in their imaginations the faces and the spirits of the people who had worked so hard to make this food, and to give it to them.

Chagatayev went on living patiently, getting ready for the day when they could begin to achieve the real happiness of living together, without which there is nothing to work for and the heart is filled with shame. Occasionally he talked to his mother, who now asked him for nothing but only stroked his legs and his body on top of his clothes; he held her bowed head and wondered what he had to do to comfort and to recompense this almost completely destroyed creature inside whom he had begun his life. He did not know that his mother only remembered him at all because of Aidim’s reproaches to her, and that she wiped her eyes in secret when she realized that she must love her son although she no longer knew him or remembered him in her own feelings; this was why she touched him as she would anything strange and good.

After a few days it grew very cold, and they had to heat the stove and cook their big dinner in one building, because the stove was used both for warmth and for cooking. No stoves had been built in the other houses. A strong wind was blowing from the top of Ust-Urt, carrying small, frozen snowflakes with it. Aidim took the sheep into the main room of the house where she slept, and left them there for the night. Chagatayev managed with difficulty to bring water from the lake in five wineskins loaded on a wheelbarrow he had made himself; he climbed up onto the plateau against the wind driving straight at him, and he pushed the wheelbarrow in front of him with great effort. And that wind, and the early winter fog lying over all the land around him, and the empty black valley of Sari-Kamish where the wind was trying to knock Chagatayev down and carry him away—all of this convinced him of the need for some different way of living.

People were stirring inside one of the houses, the light inside shone through its open door. There they had finished eating and were dozing off: Aidim was clattering the new dishes, washing away all the leftovers and the dirt, telling the people that they had better stay there for the night where the room had been heated: it would be crowded, but warm.