Ulduz is fifteen years old.
She has bright eyes and two moles under her right eye. When she laughs, they seem to jump one by one.
Ulduz loves to tell tales.
She composes them while she works in a small field, while she picks weedy grass with tiny bronze palms, while she wears heavy cold jugs full of well water on her right shoulder. In the evenings, taking away the restless kids after a big family dinner, she sits down and tells her tales, and her eyes sparkle like two beads of rock crystal.
At least that's what Humay says. Humor seven winters, and she always walks behind Ulduz in the wake, only her foot is two little fingers shorter. They live together in a house under a thin roof, where the sunlight becomes flat, and apples are filled with a honey shadow.
They have two hearts, two hands and an infinite number of souls. They lodge their soft laugh one at a time in each blossoming flower and collect their wise silence in ripe fruits. There are so many baskets that each year Humai weaves eight new ones, and Ulduz wears part of the harvest to Uncle Turan and his family, and he gives them in return grain and several jugs of milk.
In their garden there are three times seven trees and nine vines of blue grapes, and every day Ulduz watered their shadows in turn: one large jug for each root - as many prayers as she says before bedtime for every soul that rests.
She knows for sure that there are two thousand steps and almost a thousand exhalations to the well. She never considers breaths, because she remembers that you do not take anything other than air while inhaling, while exhaling, you change one path from your dreams to two stones for the mound of your life.
Humay counts neither his breaths nor his exhalations, but Ulduz teaches her to do this every time she cleans the dishes or in the spring morning knocks out a faded striped carpet from sand that has crept between the threads.
When ten fragile flowers remain on a peach tree, swallows begin to build a new nest under their skinny roof. In the evenings, Ulduz and Khumai go to see them - they sit in a transparent tree shade and drink an infusion of willow leaves and tea rose. When Humai weaves baskets, he continuously watches their swift flight, and Ulduz only knows that Humai's eyes at this time turn blue, like the backs of spring birds.
Humai wears two braids, black as a dovetail. Only one Ulduz coils - and the only white bead is woven into it at the very base. She collects her hair strand to strand while the sun is still not in heaven, and the radiant eye of an angry god never sees her sleepy and simple-headed.
Every day, Ulduz sweeps sand from the house - three handfuls for every hour. In the summer, a hot wind from the east carries him to them, and he makes his way into all the cracks of their house, crawls under the covers, hides in his hair. She combes it out of the Khumai braids especially often - she sleeps with her head to the east, why the dawn clouds get confused in her thoughts and do not go out until sunset, and her eyelashes thicken from the twilight shadow.
Ulduz herself sleeps her head south, because one of her eyes sees worse than the other, but the one that sees more clearly sees the trees of other people's souls and birds that are hiding in their branches. Sometimes she can even guess the whole thousand of their names, but more often she dwells on the first of them, because only it can be pronounced in human language.
Ulduz dreams of a black-eyed potter sculpting pots that look like nests of swallows and dishes that look like two outstretched palms.
When the sun begins to cool and turn purple, like iron in the nimble hands of a blacksmith, Ulduz goes out on the threshold and she thinks: she sees a dark male profile under the blue branches of a fig tree. His palms are rushing about in black shadows, like the wings of a bird caught in a snare, and she can hear the sonorous rhythm of the tarbuque, as swift as summer rain and piercing as the beat of a heart.
Or just a heartbeat.
But she closes her eyes and begins to look forward clearer and sharper.
His black curls snakes curl under a red skid, like a golden tent, embroidered with blue and white - just like a wedding. Maybe it is - and only the narrowed one still does not go towards him. Ulduz just looks at him from under the kisei and tries to understand how many years and dreams she needs to give in one such step.
But she knows for sure - he is patient, he can wait.
He scoops up the earth, soft as the body of a loving woman, and red, like a newborn baby. Such a land is washed long and hard in the water, cleaned of rough stones and intolerable sand, such a land is noble, like purple on the walls of sea shells, and grateful, like an apple tree, from whose curved branches the heavy fruits are ripped off.
Ulduz knows: the first people are molded from red, like a kiss, clay and awaken on red, like pomegranate juice, sunset. Therefore, their bodies are no more than a jug, which must once be broken into shards, and the soul is no less than young wine that has not yet been shed on the ground.
Continued in the next article.