Part 1: https://zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5d80bbcdc05c7100ad037f34/ulduz-5d87829523bf4800ae33e76a
Part 2 : https://zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5d80bbcdc05c7100ad037f34/ulduz-part-2-5d8787c978125e00ad226013
Ulduz is fifteen years old.
She has a dark braid and a scarf embroidered with yellow beads. She puts it on when the whole large family, swaying slightly in monotonous prayer, sits down at a gala dinner.
Ulduz loves to tell tales.
She carries water in jugs and thoughts between the fifth and sixth ribs. She bears them, like an experienced mother, a new child, and at dawn she washes their faces with sour goat milk. Humay says that at this time her eyes look inward and her body does not cast a shadow.
Now the sun really lacks shadows at all - so they are short and stingy in coolness. On a blind hot afternoon, Ulduz and Khumai hide in their house, lie on the floor, covered with a damp scarf, and silently take turns counting the stars under closed eyelids. Humai always comes out to count six more, and Ulduz only nods to her in return.
She speaks less and listens more and more - Humai's twitter, a rustle of sand on a boardwalk, a sonorous voice of swallows above a window, patterns of her own thoughts on the rim of her heart. She knows that in her gut she wears a clay vessel - it is half full of tart wine on top and completely empty at the bottom. When the moon is especially pale and diagonal, Ulduz feels the taste of this wine under his tongue and cannot hide it even with tea from the leaves of the rosemary.
She sweeps the sand out of the house every evening, but by the next morning three times more in the corners. He hides even where you least expect him, crumbles with scum on braids, sneaks into the folds of the dress, clogs under his nails.
When she goes to the well, two-thirds of the bucket is filled with poisonous silt, because every day her jugs are getting lighter and the bags on her shoulders are heavier. She does not water her trees with muddy water - and now every time she waits until the remainder settles, she lowers herself with silent sparks at the bottom.
More and more often she meets relatives at the well, more and more often their voices are ringing with alarm around her like a gadfly - they should relentlessly, hit the skin fiercely, gnaw at the blood. Uncle Turan sends a third week for well masters, and the third week only hears that there aren’t so many hands in the district. The old men sort out the words after him, like small children - piercing in the beads of the mother, and repeat only:
- Sand goes everywhere, sand goes, sand ...
Ulduz listens to them halfheartedly, as they listen to the crack of cicadas or the rustle of their own steps, and is silent. She thinks: there’s nothing to repeat the name of that which already lies in stone in your tongue.
At sunrise, a young glassblower comes to them, with blue eyes like that of a shaitan. On his shoulders is a black spruce embroidered with red, behind his back there are seven winds, and a heap of onager blooms in his heart.
“I’m going to where there is even more sand, pure as a girl’s tear,” he says, barely lifting his head from the bow, and his teeth shine in the sun, as if covered with mother of pearl.
Uncle Turan just shakes his head at his words:
- Now there is a lot of sand everywhere, and our virgins cry over each.
The glassblower laughs at him in response, but since then for two weeks his shadow has not left their homes - he has been stealing other people's tracks, curling along the pink thickets of mallow, frightening buntings in dry herbs.
When the sun turns a fire in its brazier on a yellow morning and stuffs its belly with coal smoke, Ulduz steps out on the threshold and sees a glassblower sitting at the crossroads of mulberry trees and exhaling thoughts with a piercing whistle through long white pipes. His shoulders diverge on a breath, like a tight bow, and the sound of his ribs comes from a cry of zurna, wavering like reeds in the wind.
He himself sways, as if shaken by the wind.
Or not like that.
Ulduz looks at him through a soft veil of quince leaves, hides his eyes behind the heavy velvet fruits and sometimes spills water on his outstretched palm. The glassblower washes her face, sits between the spots of shadow and speaks to her, pouring her wine into her clasped hands, but does not know that they are already filled to the brim.
Ulduz does not tell him about it, because to drain them to the end, a thousand sips are not enough, but for him it is too much not to go deaf and go blind.
The glassblower says: his teachers create bottles so beautiful that the water poured into them instantly becomes incense, and the mirrors are so thin that the starlight caught in them remains there even after dawn. Ulduz does not know where the truth is behind his words, and where is the fiction, therefore he takes everything on faith at once, because when you truly believe, you create three new worlds in each of your bead-vertebrae, and when in doubt, look for water with a vine and eyes closed.
On the eleventh day, the alien gives her two vials - two hollow glass fish. They slide one after the tail of the other and, no matter how strong they are, they cannot catch up with each other. Ulduz twists delicate toys in his hands, watches white sunny gold play on their scales, and is afraid.
It seems to her that their delicate patterns crumble in their hands, stick their needles into their fingers, drink blood insatiable, like sand - water, little by little they turn from white to red, from red to black. But she brushes the lash of obsession and lays the violets aside.
- Why do I need such a gift? - Her voice is barely audible behind the chirping of swallows above her head, and the wind echoes to her in a whisper, shakes her heavy black braid from side to side.
“I like your stories,” the glassblower laughs, and his teeth are the sound of broken pieces of broken toys.
Ulduz smiles back at him and is silent, and her silence is the rustle of leaves of a young pomegranate.
He really always listens to her fairy tales - he crouches a little at a distance and intently pierces her with blue eyes, like a knitting needle. In the evenings, the glassblower comes to the common house as a guest, and always sits with his back to the west. He eats nothing but rice and other people's views, and sometimes breaks apples with his fingers, like a lush bread.
Every evening he brings her a handful of blue beads and one large bead, and she pays him with her fairy tales and sometimes gives half of the plum, throwing the second through the window behind her back. The beads that he gives her, she wears a long thread around her neck and fingers the azure grains with her fingers one after another when she thinks or says prayers. Ulduz knows - Uncle Turan counts each of them and thinks that the glassblower wants to cover the whole thread with shackles of glass pearls and the next day come to get married.
But she also knows that every night she takes a thread a full nail longer than the previous one.
She does not hold evil at all on Uncle Turan. She knows - Uncle Turan is sure that the groom can take her farther from the village, from the sand, but she also knows that it is impossible to run away from what you are carrying on your heels.
- What is your fairy tale about today? - the glassblower sits with his back to the west, and looks south, between the eyes of Ulduz, where the eyebrows meet - two squirrel brushes.
She does not answer him immediately - she calls on Humay and the children, closes her eyes and opens her lips.
Continued in the next article.