Part 1: https://zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5d80bbcdc05c7100ad037f34/ulduz-5d87829523bf4800ae33e76a
Part 2 : https://zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5d80bbcdc05c7100ad037f34/ulduz-part-2-5d8787c978125e00ad226013
Part 3: https://zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5d80bbcdc05c7100ad037f34/ulduz-part-3-5d879e5623bf4800ae33e83c
Part 4: https://zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5d80bbcdc05c7100ad037f34/ulduz-part-4-5d879fe7fc69ab00ae0873b7
Ulduz is fifteen years old.
She has cinnamon-colored wrists and shoulders, like a side of a heavy jug, with a small crack on the collarbone. She likes to stroke this thin crinkle at night, as if trying to put the fallen pomegranate seeds back in, to beg forgiveness from her own body.
Ulduz loves to tell tales.
She keeps them in silence and never utters in vain, but on each exhale a new word appears in the corner of her lips. She removes them with her fingertips, like picking bread crumbs or poppy seeds, and feeds them birds on the tree of her soul. When they are frightened by a sharp thought, they circle for a long time between her temples, barely touching the wings of the curls of her ears.
Every morning, the eyes of Ulduz are red, as if after a night of tears, although all the sleepy moisture from them is consumed by sand. At dawn, she works alone in a faded garden, drives away unsteady grainy yellow paws from tree roots, loosens the ground, but feels a new sheet inevitably fall and rubbed with a painful whisper another thread on the motley carpet of their shadows.
Traces of a glassblower leave dents the size of a single breath - they disappear as quickly as one exhale breaks up in the chest. Ulduz is standing at the gate and looking at them without joy and without grief, because you can not grieve over the sand that woke up between your fingers.
She does not dream of anyone and does not expect anyone.
The sun every day is so deafeningly heavy that it nails and dries, and young peaches turn into a sweet dark sear in a day. The well is filled with earth and dust, wheezing dryly with a rough emptiness. Every night, Uncle Turan travels west and brings water at dawn - two jugs for each house. One Ulduz and Khumai are divided among themselves, the second - they give to their garden, equally for each living root.
They have only seven trees and not a single vine.
Humay helps her in the dark when she is gaining strength a little, but her hands are fragile, like branches of young apricots. In the afternoon, she hardly goes beyond the threshold - she lies under a window tightly tightened with blue chintz and listens to the bird's ringing under the roof.
Humai does not know that swallow nests are empty for a long time.
Every night, Ulduz carefully rinses her sore sores on mustard skin, drinks sour milk and feeds dried sugar honey, but more often she simply reads prayers when she knows that Humay does not see her. When the sister is sleeping, Ulduz sometimes looks at her and sees how the shadow laces her narrow shoulders - blue, like a saffron flower, and sharp, like a bird's tail.
In the throat of Ulduz there is dry land, broken by the sun into a dead honeycomb, and the girl swallows her short noon dreams, although she knows that they are not juicier than a grape meal that has not become young wine. When she walks, she catches the balance with only one toe of her foot, as if dancing, and hears a thin silver string that goes inside her from the crown of her head to her toes. When she touches her, as they touch the beloved neck with her breath, she sees a aching tearful ringing that passes between her palms and gathers under her eyelids. She brushes it away like dry petals from a window - but each time it still finds him clasped in her fist.
At night, Ulduz especially clearly distinguishes how sand is sneaking along thin wooden walls, how it gnaws and devours old pear beams and everything threatens to bring down the roof on their careless, helpless heads. She knows that this is inevitable, does not know only the term.
They remain in his house, and he still covers them with thin walls, like a motherly whisper. Ulduz does not remember his mother’s voice, and Khumai does not know him, but they think he sounds like the stars in the gray shade of a twilight shadow, and tastes like the berries of barberry. They like to imagine him one by one, and they never share it with each other, because when he leaves their lips, he only becomes their own voice.
In the mornings, Ulduz picks up brittle branches and holds them on his shoulders, until the eye of an ardent god hangs on a thin vein at its zenith. Then the heat covers her head, circles the world around, like a spinning top, where a person is in the center of gravity, sways on his heels, trying to resist, to keep everything around in a frantic circular motion at one tiny point. And above - the sun, dense, like a cap of a dancing dervish, sonorous like a gold coin.
Ulduz, swinging, goes into the shadow of the house.
Small gray lizards scatter under her feet, and the sand disperses in peony flowers - they disappear like morning fog, you just have to touch them. Ulduz does not reach for them with his fingers - at this hour they are red-hot, like coals in the hearth, and sting the thin skin more sharply than the sand viper.
In the distance, she hears a thin, pure moan of kemanchi - the white singing of strings, trembling, like small ripples in the water. It curls under someone’s dark fingers, like a thin stream between stones, and offers a prayer more piercing than any righteous man, with dumb and so sincere words that only the deepest fishes and the fastest birds can pronounce them — and only pleas are heard in heaven, like her.
Or just her one.
Ulduz stands against the wall with his head thrown back and his eyes closed, and allows this song to fill itself, like drops of spilled milk filling warm bread, round and round. She remembers her, leaves her thoughts embossed on the linen, because she knows that there is not a single musician with a kemancha in their deserted district.
She looks at the infinitely mobile, scaly, crushing world through narrow slits of her eyes and tries not to breathe. It seems to her - once everything becomes sand. Stone idols crumble, wooden columns of temples crumble into dust, old yellow bones are crushed. Small transparent grains fill all the cracks with themselves, wipe all the hollows, leaving only a dazzling yellow surface.
Ulduz herself does not know what is now her whole garden, all her thoughts and swallows. She sees how they fall out of her hands, beat into chips, disperse into colorless and indifferent. Under the blows of golden loose tails, they are all powerless. Even the gods whose hands are two golden hibiscus flowers and their eyes are two cut red wounds.
All that is on earth is sand one day comes after him. It corrodes the skin, penetrates the blood, captures the heart. Under his rustling, quiet laugh, they only beat in agony, wriggling like snakes in a mating ball - and their breath becomes fog over the desert.
All that is on earth ...
The sun goes over their heads without touching the ground. In sand, it is the only ally, the same golden, ruthless and ferocious. It is not afraid of him, greedy, and the jaws of dusty storms do not reach its heights. They cannot get only the heavenly vault and those patterns that leave bird flocks on them.
Ulduz closes her eyes - and under her eyes is the starry sky, where there are always six stars fewer than Humay, but still as many as she remembers above her head every night. She remembers them precisely because she knows the story of each.
Ulduz knows that the gods once exalt each hero with stars, and they, with their strength and kindness, preserve the abode of the Eternal Sky.
She knows that a story is written about each hero once.
She knows them all.
Ulduz painfully squeezes his salty awareness in his lips and goes into the house.
Continued in the next article.