Twelve
They carried Lieutenant Ivanchuk down out of the gorge on a litter of two rifles and a blanket, with the two privates at the poles and Sergeant Zhakupov walking beside him, holding his hand when he thought nobody was looking.
He was fevered by then, and very pale, and talked a good deal. He talked about Poltava, and his mother’s cherry trees, and the Revolution, and how in ten years there would be electricity in every village in the Chatkal. At the mouth of the gorge, where the path went down toward the valley and Namangan and the surgeon, he made them stop, and put the litter down, and he lay looking up at Bayish, who was sitting the grey beside him with the carbine across his saddle.
“Give me that,” he said, and held out his hand.
Bayish gave him the carbine.
Ivanchuk held it on his chest for a moment, looking at it. Then he held it out again, butt first.
“It’s registered,” he said. “As of now. Weapon of the OGPU, Talas district detachment, on loan to Comrade Kenje uulu, B., for the recovery of state property.” He shut his eyes. “Sergeant, write that down.”
“Written, Comrade Lieutenant,” said Zhakupov, who was not writing anything.
“Good.” The lieutenant opened his eyes again. “I’ll put you up for a decoration. They’ll refuse it, because of the four offences. But I’ll put you up.”
Then the young man from Poltava smiled for the first time since the ford, a tired lopsided boy’s smile, and lifted his hand an inch off the blanket, and let it fall.
The privates picked up the poles. Zhakupov came over and stood at the grey’s shoulder for a moment, and put his hand flat on her neck, and then went after his lieutenant down the path toward the valley without a word.
They went home the way they had come, Bayish and the boy and thirty-four mares, north through the dry hills and up into the walnut forest. It took them nine days to reach the Chatkal.
It was slow going. The mares were tired, and heavy, and some of them lame, and they could not be pushed. Bayish did not push them. He let them graze where there was grass and drink where there was water, and in the evenings he walked among them with the boy and looked at their legs and their eyes and their bellies, and spoke to them in the morning voice, the nonsense voice, and they came to know it and to come to it. The boy learned it too. By the fourth day he could bring the herd in off a hillside on his own, one-handed, on a borrowed Kurbashi pony, calling to them low.
His arm was healing. Aimkan’s salt water and the priest’s mutton fat between them had done what they could, and the rest the boy’s own young body had done. He could move the fingers now, and on the sixth day he took the strap off and rode with the arm free and did not say anything about it, and Bayish did not either.
At the walnut-gatherers’ camp the old woman with the dried-apple face came out among the sacks to watch them pass, and nodded once, firmly, as if something had been settled, and went back to her fire.
At the hollow among the birches where the priest’s yurt had stood, there was nothing. A ring of flattened grass, and a circle of ash, and the snow melting off it. Father Mattai had gone down to his winter quarters, wherever they were, with his felts and his wooden book and his walnut pot.
Bayish sat the grey at the edge of the hollow for a while and looked at the ring in the grass.
He put his hand into his coat, to the inside pocket, where the priest’s pinch of bread was, wrapped in its scrap of white felt and tied with white thread. He had kept it there for eleven days against his chest, and it was still soft and still warm. He did not know if it was still alive. He did not know how you would tell.
He took his hand out of his coat, and rode on.
Aimkan was standing in the door of her stone house when they came up the side valley, with the ladle in her hand, as if she had been standing there for a fortnight.
She looked at her son on the Kurbashi’s pony, with his arm free and a boot knife in his belt and his face burned brown by the hills. She looked at the thirty-four mares spreading out to graze on the slope below the house, and at the man on the grey.
She did not hit him this time. She put the ladle down on the step, and went out across the yellow leaves under the poplars, and took her son down off the pony with her own hands, as if he were five years old, and held him.
Bayish sat on the grey and looked at the poplars.
That night, in the house, after the boy was asleep, he gave her two things.
The first was the strip of white felt off the grey’s brow. He untied it himself, with some trouble, because his knot was a bad one, and held it out to her across the stove.
“You said you’d take it off yourself,” he said. “If I brought him back.”
Aimkan took the felt and looked at it. She folded it, carefully, into a small square, and put it into the front of her dress.
The second was the priest’s pinch of bread.
He took it out of his coat and put it into her hand, the little warm bundle in its white felt and white thread. She knew what it was before she had untied it. He saw it in her face. She held it in her open palm and looked at it, and Bayish looked away.
“Father Mattai gave it to me,” he said. “In the hills. He said to keep it warm. He said it’s given to brides, and new priests, and to the head of a family when the herd divides.” He looked at the stove. “Your family’s herd divided, I think. In the summer of the Flight. And nobody gave you any.”
Aimkan closed her hand over the bread.
“My mother had it,” she said, very low. “Before. We had it from her mother. I lost it on the ice above the Kökjal. I put the pot down to carry his sister and I never picked it up again.”
She got up then, and went to the chest by the wall, and took out a small wooden bowl, and put the bread into it, and a little flour from a sack, and a little water from the jug, and began to work it with her fingers, slowly, in the lamplight, with her back to him.
Bayish lay down on the felt by the stove and pulled his coat over himself and watched the lamp until he slept.
They went over the Kenkol three days later, in clear weather, on new snow.
The boy came with him as far as the pass. Aimkan had said he could. She had said it at the door of the house in the morning, with her arms folded, looking at Bayish and not at her son: As far as the pass, and then he comes home. And if he goes one step past the pass, I will come over the mountain and fetch him myself, and you after him. And the boy had grinned, for the first time Bayish had ever seen, a wide sudden grin that made him look about twelve.
They brought the herd up the long south side in the morning, slowly, with the mares strung out along the trail in the snow and the sun very bright, and came to the notch at noon.
Bayish stopped the grey below it, as he had stopped there in the dark nearly three weeks before, and looked up.
The notch was white. New snow lay across it, smooth and deep and blazing in the sun, blown into long soft ridges by the wind. Nothing had crossed it since the snow came. Nothing at all.
Except, across the very top of the notch, from one side to the other, a single line of tracks.
A horse’s tracks. Unshod. A tall horse, long in the stride, light on its feet, the prints clean-edged and sharp, as if they had been made a minute ago. They came out of the unbroken snow on the eastern shoulder of the pass, where no horse could have come from, and went across the gap, and into the unbroken snow on the western shoulder, where no horse could have gone.
They did not come up from the south. They did not go down to the north. They went across.
The boy, beside him, on the Kurbashi’s pony, had gone very still.
Bayish sat and looked at the tracks for a long time. The mares came up behind him one by one and stopped, and stood, and steamed in the sun, and did not cross the tracks until he did.
Then he touched the grey with his heel, and she stepped forward, across the line, carefully, so as not to tread on any of the prints. The mares came after her, one by one, all thirty-four, and not one of them trod on them either.
At the north side of the notch the boy turned back. He did not say goodbye. He sat on his pony at the top of the pass and watched Bayish and the herd start down the long scree toward the Kenkol valley, and when Bayish looked back from the first switchback he lifted his good hand.
Bayish raised his. Then the switchback took him round, and the boy was gone.
The scree was loose under the new snow, as it had been three weeks before, and the light was beginning to go. Far below, the Kenkol ran away north in the dusk toward the Talas, and Chong-Talas, and a corral with its cut rails mended and its gate standing open. Bayish got down and took the grey’s rein, and started down ahead of her, with thirty-four mares coming after them one by one in the snow.
He went at her head, the way he always did. He did not walk behind horses.
[Translator’s note: the 1964 edition also omits the bread. There, Bayish gives Aimkan only the strip of white felt, and the scene ends as she puts it away. In the same edition the paragraphs from “Except, across the very top of the notch” to “not one of them trod on them either” are replaced by a single sentence: “The pass was clear.” They are restored here from the typescript. The censor’s note in the margin reads, in full: “No.”]