Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

Little by little Vera began to come out of her grief.

“Ksenya loves you, too…. I’ll bring her up, I’ll nourish her memory of you, I’ll make a hero out of you. You can count on it, Nazar—the years will go by quickly, and I’m used to separation.”

“Why get used to what’s bad?” Chagatayev said; he couldn’t understand why happiness seemed so improbable to everybody, and why people tried to entice each other only with grief.

Grief had displeased Chagatayev since his childhood and now that he was educated, when people and books had taught him. about the struggle of people for happiness, grief seemed to him something vulgar, and he was determined to build a happy world in his fatherland because otherwise he couldn’t understand what to do with his life, or how to exist.

“Never mind,” Chagatayev said, and he stroked Vera’s big stomach where her child lived, the inhabitant of this future happiness. “Get him born quickly, he’ll be glad.”

“But maybe he won’t be,” Vera doubted. “Maybe he’ll be an eternal sufferer.”

“We’re not going to allow unhappiness any longer,” Chagatayev said.

“Who are we?”

“We,” Chagatayev repeated quietly and vaguely. For some reason he was afraid to speak clearly, and he blushed a little, as if his secret thought was not a good one.

Vera hugged him when he left; she had been watching the clock and their parting was drawing near.

“I know—you’ll be happy, you have a pure heart. So take my Ksenya for yourself.”

She cried because of her love and her uncertainty about the future; her face at first became even more homely, then her tears washed it, and it took on an unfamiliar look, as if Vera were looking at him from a distance and with a stranger’s eyes.

The train left Moscow far behind; several days of travel had already gone by. Chagatayev was standing by the window and he recognized the places where he had walked as a child, or maybe they were different places but they looked exactly the same. It was the same land, uninhabited and old, the same wind blew, stirring the ragged blades of grass, and the distance stretched out spacious and boring like a doleful, unknown soul. Sometimes Chagatayev wanted to get out and walk along on foot, like a child abandoned by everybody. But his childhood and the old times had long gone by. At the little stations in the steppes he saw portraits of the leaders; often they were made by hand and stuck up somewhere on a fence. The portraits were probably not like the persons they represented, but each had been drawn as if with a child’s hand and feeling for truth: Lenin looked like an old man, like the good father of all the people on earth without kith or kin, but the artist, without thinking, had tried to make the face like his own, so that people could see that he was not living alone on the earth and that he had paternity and kindred—this is why art is more important than technique. And now at any of these stations different people could be seen digging in the ground, planting, or building something, preparing a place for life and shelter for the homeless. Chagatayev saw no empty stations, without any people, or where only exiles could have lived; men were working everywhere, drawing back with all their hearts from centuries-old despair, from fatherlessness, and from poverty.

Chagatayev remembered his mother’s words: “Go far away, to strangers, may your father be an unknown man.” He had gone a long way, and now he was returning, he had found his father in a stranger who had brought him up and made his heart grow inside him and now, having taught him to understand people, was sending him home again to find and rescue his mother if she was still living, and to bury her if she was lying abandoned and dead on the face of the earth.

The train stopped one night in the dark steppe. Chagatayev walked out onto the platform of the car. It was quiet, the engine was puffing in the distance, the passengers were sleeping peacefully. Suddenly a single bird cried in the darkness of the plain, something had frightened it. Chagatayev remembered this sound across many years, it was as if his childhood had cried a complaint out of the silent darkness. He listened carefully; some other kind of bird repeated something very quickly, and then was silent, he could remember this sound, too, but he had now forgotten the bird’s name: maybe it was a desert sparrow, maybe a small hawk or a kestrel. Chagatayev got down from the car. He saw a bush not far away, and walking up to it, he took it by a branch and said to it: “Hello, bush!” The bush trembled a little at the man’s touch and then stayed again as it had been—indifferent and asleep.

Chagatayev walked still farther away. In the steppe something stirred and then hushed, it seemed noiseless only to ears which had lost the habit of listening. The land began to fall away in front of him, and high, blue grass began. Remembering this with interest, Chagatayev walked into the grass; it trembled around him, rippling up from below, for lots of unseen creatures were running away from his approach—some on their stomachs, some on their legs, some in low flight, however they could. They had probably been sitting there quietly until then, only a few of them asleep, by no means all. Each of them had so much to worry about that the daytime, it was clear, was not long enough, or else they were sorry to waste their short lives in sleep and were just barely dozing, letting a film fall halfway across their eyes so they could see a sort of half life, listening to the darkness and not remembering the worries of the daytime.

Chagatayev soon sensed the smell of wetness; somewhere near there was a pond or a pumping well. He moved in that direction, and quickly came to a small, humid sort of grass, not unlike a little grove in Russia. Chagatayev’s eyes were growing used to the darkness, and now he could see clearly. Here the marshland began; when Chagatayev walked into it all the creatures living in it started to cry, to fly, or to stir about where they were. It was warm in the marshland. Animals and birds had not all disappeared in terror of man; judging by their sounds, some of them had stayed where they were. Chagatayev knew these sounds from long ago, and now, listening to these agonized, weak voices coming out of the warm grass, he felt sympathy for all of this impoverished life.

The train went on unheard. Chagatayev could have caught up with it, but he did not hurry; only his bag with his clothes was going on with it, and he could get this back in Tashkent. But Chagatayev made up his mind not to try to get it back, so as not to be distracted by anything. He went to sleep in the grass, flattening himself against the ground as he had used to.

In seven days Chagatayev walked into Tashkent along a footpath which was not far away. He showed up at the Central Committee of the Communist party where he had been expected for some time. The secretary of the committee told Chagatayev that a fairly small nomad people made up of different nationalities was roaming around in extreme poverty somewhere in the district of Sari-Kamish, Ust-Urt and the delta of the Amu-Darya River. Among them there were Turkmen people, Kalpaks, some Uzbeks, Kazaks, Persians, Kurds, Beludzhis and others who had forgotten what they were. Before, these people had lived almost always in the Sari-Kamish valley, from which they had gone out to work on the irrigation canals and pumps of the Khiva oasis, in Tashaouz, in Khodzheim, Kunya-Urgench and other faraway places. The poverty and despair of this people had become so great that they thought of work in the ditches, which lasts for a few weeks in the year, as a blessing because for these days at least they were given flat loaves of bread and even rice to eat. On the pumps these people took the place of donkeys, using their bodies to turn the wooden wheel which lifts the water up to the sluices. A donkey has to be fed right through the year, but these people from Sari-Kamish ate only when they were working and then they went away. The tribe did not die out entirely, and always returned the next year, after languishing somewhere in the bottom of the wilderness.