Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

It was six o’clock, but all the people were already lying down in the one room, close to each other, sleeping in the closeness as if in paradise. Chagatayev ate his dinner standing up, for there was no place to sit down. Aidim went off to sleep in another house, where she had put the sheep, and then Chagatayev went there to sleep, too.

By morning a snowstorm was blowing, but it had grown warmer. There was not a sound in the main house, although day was breaking. Aidim was sleeping warm between two sheep. Chagatayev did not want to wake her, so he went out himself to the house where all the people were sleeping. He lit a lamp, and looked around him.

The people were lying in the same positions as the night before, just as if no one had moved through the long night. Many faces were lying there now in steady smiles. The blind Molla Cherkezov was sleeping with his eyes open, having placed his left arm under Gulchatai’s back, so he could feel her constantly, and protect her. The old Persian who was nicknamed Allah was staring out of one half-closed eye, and Chagatayev couldn’t guess what this man was seeing and thinking, what desire of the spirit was hidden inside him, whether it was the same as Chagatayev’s or something different.

Chagatayev sat next to Aidim all the rest of the day, loving her face and her breathing, watching the flush of youth which more and more covered her cheeks. He let the sheep out into the snow; let them dig and roll in it as they pleased. Then Chagatayev took Aidim’s hand in his, quietly rejoicing that Bolsheviks would stand around this poor, gentle being in a steel wall of defense, for this was the only reason why he himself was there.

Aidim woke up toward evening. She swore at Chagatayev—why hadn’t he wakened her earlier? The whole day had been wasted. Chagatayev told her to go and wake the rest of the people—he would stay where he was, and not get up. Hearing this, Aidim gave a bitter little scream, and ran out to the neighboring house. She lifted the grass curtain hanging over the entrance, so the cold would pour over the people, and wake them up. But the sleepers only moved closer to each other, huddling together and sleeping like the dead.

A second night went by. In the morning Chagatayev looked at the sleepers again. Their faces had changed still more than the day before. Stari Vanka was pink with new life, and now he looked about forty years old. Even the ancient Sufyan had put on flesh, and Kara-Chorma, a sixty-year-old man, was lying there rose-colored and puffed up, gulping in air with the kind of deep feeling a man shows when he finds wetness at a time of great thirst. Leaning over his mother, Chagatayev could see no change in her face; Gulchatai, the mountain flower, might not have wakened at all, her eyes had fallen down and her cheeks had darkened, the print of the earth was on her. Molla Cherkezov’s eyes were open as before, and a distant glimmer showed in them, as if sparking in the depths of his brain, and it seemed to Chagatayev as if vision was coming back to this man.

Nazar stoked up the stove for warmth, and went out for a walk with Aidim; this was the first time he had had a free hour for many months. The snowstorm had stopped during the night; now the last little flurries of snow were falling, and sunshine was already glittering on the highest slopes of Ust-Urt, happy, blinding, promising eternal triumph. Aidim laughed, and ran through the snow; she disappeared in the distance, diving into a gully, and then suddenly she threw her arms around his neck from behind him. Finally he caught her in his arms, and ran with her to the edge of the cliff on which they were standing. Aidim saw his intention.

“Throw me over, but I still won’t die!” Aidim said.

While they were returning home, Aidim walked alone, beside him, and she asked Chagatayev:

“Nazar, when will they wake up?”

“Soon, soon… Maybe they’re awake already.”

Aidim was thoughtful.

The stove in the house had not quite gone out. Aidim filled it up again, and then he and Aidim cooked dinner for the whole people, just in case.

By evening some of the people were beginning to wake up. Sufyan woke first, then Stari Vanka and Molla Cherkezov, and by midnight they were all up except Gulchatai. She had died.

Chagatayev carried her into an empty, cold house, and laid her on a bed of dried grass. When they had come to their senses after this long sleep, the people sat down to dinner in the warm mud building, while Chagatayev went to sit next to his dead mother, and fell asleep.

Aidim fed all the people, and scolded them because they had slept through two nights in a row but still couldn’t work out how to live. Stari Vanka burst out laughing at her:

“Now we can die!” he said. “Don’t worry about us, daughter…”

In the night Aidim went back to the house where Chagatayev was lying next to his dead mother. She lay down quietly in a corner and fell asleep at once. At dawn she got up, and went out to start the day’s work. The heated house, where the people had stayed for the night, was empty, and there was no one to be found in the other two houses. Aidim looked at all the things and belongings, all the goods held in common by them, and counted them roughly, then she went into the building where the food supplies brought from Khiva had been stored; worried, she examined even the walls of the houses, but she saw nothing new or changed. The supplies were intact. The canned goods were exactly as they had been the night before when she had taken some of them to make dinner. The sacks of rice and flour stood untouched. Maybe something had been taken, but very little, perhaps some tobacco and matches, which were always taken without any accounting.

Aidim woke up Nazar. Chagatayev went off alone some kilometers; he climbed up to the highest ridge of the mountain, from where he could see the whole world far away, almost to its very ends. From there he could see ten or a dozen people walking one by one to all the countries of the world. Some of them were walking to the Caspian Sea, others to Turkmenistan and Iran, two of them, far apart from each other, were going towards Chardzhoui, and the Amu-Darya. He could not see those who had gone over Ust-Urt to the north and the east, or those who had traveled far during the night…

Chagatayev sighed, and he smiled; he had wanted, out of his single, small heart, his compact mind, and his enthusiasm, to create for the first time a real life here, on the edge of Sari-Kamish, the hellhole of the ancient world. But the people could see better than he could how it was best for them to live. It was enough that he had helped them to stay alive, now let them find their own happiness beyond the horizon….

HE HAD GONEfar away, and for a long time, probably never to return. The locomotive of the express train sang its farewell into the empty distance as it disappeared; those who had seen it off walked back from the station platform into their settled lives, and a porter showed up with a mop and started to clean the platform like the deck of a ship stuck on a sandbank.

“Stand aside, citizen!” the porter said to two plump legs standing there by themselves.

The woman walked over to a mailbox on the wall and read the schedule printed on it: the mail was picked up often, you could write a letter every day. She touched the metal of the mailbox with her finger—it was solid, nobody’s heart inside a letter would ever be lost out of it.

A new railroad town was just beyond the station; the shadows of leaves danced across the white walls of the houses, the evening sun of summer lit up the landscape and the buildings, as if through a clear emptiness where there was not enough air for breathing. On the edge of night everything in that world was seen too distinctly, blinding and unreal—this was why it seemed not to exist at all.