Andrei Platonov: The Fierce and Beautiful World

But Chagatayev was not yet Vera’s real husband; with tenderness and with terror she kept turning him away so as neither to offend him nor to surrender to him. It was as if she was afraid of destroying in passion her poor consolation, which had come so unexpectedly and strangely; or else she was simply being cunning, in a prudent, intelligent way, wanting to keep the heat from cooling in her husband so that she could warm herself from it for a long time and safely. But Chagatayev could not maintain his feeling for Vera on a spiritual attachment alone, and he sometimes wept over her when she was lying on the bed, appearing so helpless but smiling and unconquerable.

The summer ran on. The peat bogs around Moscow began to smolder in the heat, and in the evenings there was a smell of burning in the air mixed with the warm, steamy smell of distant collective farms and fields, as if everywhere in nature people were getting food ready for supper. Chagatayev passed his last days with Vera: he had received his work assignment; he was to go back to his birthplace, in the middle of the wilderness of Asia, where his mother was either living or long dead. Chagatayev had gone away as a small boy, fifteen years ago. His old mother, a Turkmen woman named Gulchatai, had placed a little hat on his head, put a piece of old, flat bread in his knapsack, added a biscuit baked of the ground-up roots of Asian reeds, and then put a thin reed cane in his hand so that a plant might walk along with him like his oldest friend, and ordered him to go.

“Be off, Nazar,” she said, not wanting to see him dead by her side. “If you recognize your father, don’t go near him. You’ll see bazaars and riches in Kunya-Urgench, in Tashaouz, in Khiva—but don’t you go there, keep going right on past, go far away to strangers. May your father be an unknown man.”

The little Nazar did not want to leave his mother. He told her he was used to the idea of dying and he was no longer afraid he would have little to eat. But his mother drove him away.

“No,” she said. “I’m already so weak that I can’t love you. You live by yourself now. I will forget you.”

Nazar, beside his mother, began to cry. He hugged her thin, cold leg, and stood there for a long time, clutching her weakened, familiar body; his small heart failed him then, it suddenly tired, and started to pound. The little boy sat down in the dust on the ground, and told his mother:

“I’ll forget you, too. I don’t love you either. You can’t feed a little boy, and when you die you won’t have anybody.”

He lay face down and fell asleep in the dampness of his tears and his breathing. Nazar woke up in an empty place. His mother had gone. An insignificant, strange breeze was blowing out of the wilderness, without any fragrance and without any living sound. The little boy sat there quietly for some time, he ate his mother’s piece of flat bread, looked around him, and thought some thought which now with age he had forgotten. In front of him was the land where he had been born, and where he wanted to live. That childhood country stood in the black shadow where the desert ended; there the desert drops away into a deep valley, as if preparing its own burial, and the flat hills, eroded by the dry wind, fence in the low place from the sky which covers Chagatayev’s fatherland with darkness and quiet. Only the last light of the day breaks in there and throws a sad twilight on the sparse grass growing in the pale, salty ground, as if tears had dried on it but its grief had not gone away.

Nazar stood on the edge of the dark ground falling away below him; behind him began the sandy desert which was happier and lighter, and among the quiet little sand dunes, even in the stillness of that vanished day of childhood, a little wind was huddling, whining and wandering, driven there from far away. The boy listened to this wind and followed it with his eyes, trying to see it and to be joined with it, but he couldn’t see anything, and then he started to yell. The wind fell away from him, and nothing answered. Night was falling in the distance; shadow had already dropped on the dark, low land which his mother had ordered him out of, and only a white smoke curled up from the nomad tents and the mud huts where the boy used to live. Nazar mistrustfully tried out his legs and his body: was he really still alive and on the earth, once no one remembered or loved him any longer? He had nothing even to think about now, as if he had been living on the strength and the desires of other people close to him, and now they no longer existed, they had driven him away… A rough wandering bush called tumbleweed was rolling along the sand which stretched away before him. The plant was dusty, tired, hardly stirring after the hard labor of its life and its movement; it had nothing at all—no relatives, no close friends, and it was always traveling along. Nazar touched it with the flat of his hand, and he told it: “I’ll go with you, I’m bored by myself. You think about me, and I’ll do the same for you. I don’t want to live with the others, they don’t want me, let them all die!” And he shook the reed which was his walking stick threateningly at someone, probably at his mother who had abandoned him.

Nazar followed the tumbleweed and walked into the darkness. He lay down in the dark and fell asleep from weakness, touching the plant with his hand, so that it would stay with him. When he woke in the morning, he was suddenly frightened that the bush was no longer there: it had gone off alone during the night. Nazar wanted to cry, but then he saw the weed balanced on the top of a nearby sand dune, and the little boy caught up with it.

His fatherland and his mother had long since disappeared—let his heart forget them while it was growing up. On that day the wandering tumbleweed led Nazar to a shepherd, and the shepherd gave the little boy something to eat and to drink, and he tied the tumbleweed to a stick so that it could rest, too. For a long time Nazar followed the shepherd and lived with him, until snow fell; then his master let the shepherd go on some errand to Chardzhoui, because the shepherd was going blind, and the shepherd set off with the little boy, and in the city he turned him over to the Soviet authorities as someone not needed by anybody.

Many years went by, but nothing was forgotten, and memories of his lost mother warmed his heart, as if childhood had never ended. Chagatayev had never known his father. A Russian soldier in the Khiva expeditionary force, Ivan Chagatayev was killed before Gulchatai had given birth to Nazar. She was then the young wife of Kochmat, by whom she had already had two children, but these children by Kochmat died while Nazar was still very young, and his mother told him about them only later, saying only that once upon a time they had been alive. Kochmat was poor, and much older than his wife. He lived by going to work on the Bey’s lands in Kunya-Urgench and in Tashaouz, working in the fields so that at least in summertime he could give his family bread. And in wintertime he slept almost all the time in his mud hut, dug into one of the foothills of the Ust-Urt. He was saving up his failing strength, and Gulchatai lay there with him under the same cover; she also slept and dreamed through the long winters in order to eat less, and their children lay between them while they were still alive. Gulchatai went out occasionally, to get some plants to eat or to work as a farm girl in Khiva. One time she couldn’t find any work in Khiva; it was winter and the rich people were drinking tea and eating mutton while the poor were waiting for the warmth to come, and for plants to start to grow. Gulchatai was huddling in a bazaar where she ate what she could find on the ground, left there by the traders, but she was ashamed to beg. It was at this Khiva bazaar that the soldier Ivan Chagatayev noticed her, and began to bring her every day a little of the soldiers’ food in a pot. Gulchatai ate the soldiers’ soup with beef in it in the evenings when the bazaar was deserted, and the soldier talked to her a little and then hugged her. It was against her woman’s conscience to reject the man after the food he had given her, so she was silent and did not protest. She had been thinking: with what could she thank the Russian, and she had nothing except what nature had given her.