The White Ship (19 page)

"Ha, ha, ha . . ."

"'I'll miss,' I said to him. The deer will get away and won't come back again. And we cannot return empty-handed, you know that. You'd better look out. Why do you think they sent us here?' He wouldn't say a word, and wouldn't touch the gun. 'Oh, well,' I say, `do as you wish.' I threw down the gun and started walking away. He came behind me. So I say to him, 'I don't care. If Orozkul kicks me out, I'll go to work in the Soviet farm. But what will you do, at your age?' He kept quiet. And then I started up, just to complete the picture, you know:

"'From the red-red mountains

I have come on a red stallion.

Hey, redheaded merchant, open the door. . .”

"Ha, laa, ha . . ."

"Then he believed that I was really drunk. He went back for the gun. I went back too. While we were arguing, the deer moved off a little. 'Well,' I say, 'look out now. If they escape, you'll never catch them. Shoot before they get scared.' The old man took the gun. We started stealing up. And he kept whispering like a crazy one: 'Forgive me, Horned Mother Deer, forgive me . . .' And I kept saying, 'Look out, now. If you botch it, you can take off after the deer, wherever your legs will carry you, but don't come back.'"

"Ha, ha, ha . . ."

Amid the drunken fumes and laughter the boy felt he was burning hot and suffocating. His head was splitting with a swelling pain too large for his skull. It seemed to him that somebody was kicking him in the head, that somebody was chopping his head with an ax. It seemed to him that somebody was aiming an ax at his eye, and he turned and twisted his head, trying to escape the blow. Fainting with heat, he suddenly found himself in the cold, cold river. He had turned into a fish. Tail, body, fins—everything was fishlike, except the head, which was his own and still ached. He swam through the muted, cool, underwater darkness and thought that now he would remain a fish forever and never go back to the mountains. "I won't return," he said to himself. "It's better to be a fish, it's better to be a fish . . ."

And no one noticed when the boy slipped out of the bed and left the house. He had barely reached the corner when he started vomiting. Grasping at the wall, the boy moaned and wept; suffocating with sobs, tears running down his face, he muttered:

"No, I'd rather be a fish. I'll swim away from here. I'll be a fish."

And in Orozkul's house drunken voices hooted and shouted with laughter. This wild laughter deafened the boy, causing him intolerable pain and anguish. It seemed to him that he was so sick because he was listening to that monstrous laughter. When he had caught his breath, he started to cross the yard. Now it was dark and empty. By the extinguished hearth, the boy stumbled on Grandpa Momun, dead drunk. The old man lay there next to the chopped-out horns of the Horned Mother Deer. The dog gnawed at a piece of the deer's head. No one else was there.

The boy wandered off. He went down to the river and stepped into the water. Hurrying, slipping and falling, he ran down the sloping bottom, shivering from the icy spray, and when he reached the main current, it knocked him off his feet. Floundering in the rushing stream, he began to swim, gagging and freezing.

The boy swam down the river, now on his back, now face down, now slowing up near rocky shoals, now sweeping down the rapids . . .

No one knew as yet that the boy had floated down the river as a fish. A drunken song rose in the yard:

"From the humpy, humpy mountains

I have come on a humpy camel.

Hey, humpbacked merchant, open the door, We shall drink bitter wine . . ."

But you no longer heard the song. You had gone away, my boy, into your tale. Did you know that you would never turn into a fish, that you would never reach Issyk-Kul, or see the white ship, or say to it: "Hello, white ship, it's I"?

You swam away.

There's only one thing I can say now: you rejected what your child's soul was unable to make peace with. And that is my consolation. Your life was like a flash of lightning that gleamed once and went out. And lightning is born of the sky. And the sky is eternal. And that is my consolation. And also, that the child's conscience in man is like the bud in a seed; without the bud the seed will not grow. And whatever awaits us in the world, truth shall abide forever, as long as men are born and die . . .

And so, in parting, I repeat your words, boy: "Hello, white ship, it's I!"