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
Part 5: https://zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5d80bbcdc05c7100ad037f34/ulduz-part-5-5d87a184d5bbc300add0ae68
In the predawn night, the girl brings two heavy jugs, but Khumai does not get up to meet her - she only smiles and rattles with only her eyes that have long forgotten their color. Ulduz does not reproach her because she knows that taking care of the color of her eyes is the same as lighting oil lamps in the light of day.
They have not been alone in this house for a long time - dumb sandy eyes look at them from the windows, tiny stone teeth grin around the corners and wait only for the moment to dig into the body. They are accustomed to this - they only drive them away, as they drive annoying flies, knowing that they invariably return. They cherish only their voices and eyes, because only they truly lead to hearts.
Humay has not eaten anything for a long time. Ulduz breaks a peach softened by the heat of the day and puts both halves on her lips. The bone disintegrates in her hands - Ulduz takes soft bitter grain from it, eats it herself - and tiny grains of sand crunch on her teeth.
- Listen, Humay. Listen. I want to tell you a story.
She puts her sister's head on her lap, scratches her black braids with an old wooden comb and sighs.
Once in a distant country where the sky kissed the earth with warm rains, and the earth gave the sky high pomegranate groves, there lived one girl. She was still small, but she already had a big, kind heart, and her mother and father called her Humai - a heavenly bird of happiness. So they hoped that her name would one day give her a happy and joyful life.
Every day, Humai went to her garden, where she collected sweet fruits and sang funny songs. Once she saw there blue birds, with wings as light as the wind, and her voice clear, like silver bells. These were swallows, affectionate birds that were once happy souls who never committed evil. Humay knew that because she bowed to the birds and said:
- Come live under my roof, never know you here human malice and resentment.
The birds saw how kind the girl was, and remained. They made a nest right above the window of little Humay, composed new iridescent songs for her in the mornings, and in the evening they caught midges over the porch of her house.
In the first summer, as the swallows settled there, an evil drought was found. All the bugs and worms fled from it underground, and the sun drank lakes to the bottom and bent all crops to the ground. No animals, no birds, no people became food, and all that Humay had for dinner was a couple of dates and a piece of a flat, dry flat cake. Every day she ate two of her dates, and she crumbled a cake on the window and threw swallows into the air, watching them cut in two by dark arrows. Ishudala Humay, became like a willow branch, - thin, fragile and with long braids.
In the second summer, terrible hawks flew into their garden, with wings so large that they could cover the sun, and if their flock were to cover the whole sky with themselves. They flew into the trees, cut off all the fruits of the ground, broke the swallow's nests. The swallows cried for a long time, circling over the roof, long mourned both in their homes and in the garden that covered them in their shade. Humai saw their grief, and cut off her dark braids, and made new nests of birds stronger than the former from them.
In the third summer, a terrible hurricane flew in, it whipped with the wind like whips, stinged with hail, like a swarm of fierce horseflies. He uprooted all the trees in the garden, tore off the roof of the house, began to break thin blue wings with swallows. Then I jumped out onto Humay Street, took the birds in my hands, pressed them to my chest and covered my body with wind and hail. No matter how hard the storm hurts, no matter howl or howl, teeth, he could not defeat the good little girl, he did not reach the swallows.
When the wind died down, and the sun again looked affectionately to the ground, the birds flew into its light and saw that the hurricane and the Khumai house had swept away, and its garden, cut its back and hands, so much so that not a single living place on it left. Then the swallows cried over Humai’s head, felt sorry for her and said:
“You have done a lot of good to us, you have endowed with affection and protection, which no one has ever given. We want to thank you for your concern: give you two wings so that you are our sister, and invite with us, to look for a happy land where there is no heat, no hunger, no misfortune.
I thought Humay, looked at my exhausted, tormented house, from which there was no whole wall, and agreed. And she became a black swallow with a thin double tail and flew away with the rest of the birds, and lived among them for a long time, cutting the wind in two and singing funny songs, not knowing any more pain or misfortune. And when her body finally got tired, and death came for her, whose face was like the look of a loving sister, the swallows took her soul to the ends of their wings, lifted her above the sun and settled in a small star in the very north of the heavenly monastery. Now she lives there forever, inconspicuous to the human eye, but, setting off in search of her happy land, the swallows always look at her and never lose their way.
When Ulduz stops hearing the chatter of his own voice in his throat, silently shakes off the sand from his soft black eyelashes and slowly goes out into the garden. She opens her eyes and looks into the night velvet sky through the broken bottom of an old swallow's nest. In a dark wet veil, she does not distinguish a single spark, but she does not need it. She remembers them by heart - all the tales and all the stars.
She does not see, but she knows - there are already one more of them. This tiny spark is silent and almost lost in the light of its brighter neighbors, but Ulduz already feels her name with the bitterness of prunes between her lips. She exhales him in the folded hands for prayer, thinks and almost does not cry.
Continued in the next article.