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
Part 6: https://zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5d80bbcdc05c7100ad037f34/ulduz-part-6-5d87a2fa3f548700ad0b4fc8
Ulduz does not remember how old she is.
She walks between humpback dunes from one dying village to another. The sand behind her eagerly swallows three pairs of her worn shoes and her three memories of the black, damp earth.
Ulduz tells tales.
She marks each of them with henna on her wrist and tells them in turn when there is at least someone next to her who wants to listen to her. When no one hears her, she repeats them to herself with dry lips, as they sort out the black mulberries in huge baskets. She has not known their juice in her mouth for a long time, but she remembers the taste of their words, and strung it on the beads of her fairy tales when necessary.
She comes to other people's houses when the night looks like an overturned flask of ink, listens to the memory of these houses, pulls from them unfamiliar threads of stories and fables. Ulduz knits new tales from them when he sets off again, but while he sits on old rugs that are corroded by sand, he listens and speaks.
She is paid for this by the few that are - water or wine, bread or dried apricots, and she takes it with quiet joy and loud silence, and leaves, taking her eyes from the room corners, but leaving her words in return. The worn-out legs leave a heavy brown trail behind them, and the sand for a long time relishes it, pulls it deep into the drops.
She walks along the loose slopes and never turns around to meet her shadow with her eyes.
When Ulduz finishes his last sip of wine from the jug of his life, he lies on his side, shrinking like a child in his mother’s womb, and looks at the sky. The horned moon-boat is not visible in it, but the sandy hills shine with the trembling reflected silver already. This blue vault is embroidered with stars, like a scarf - with beads, and when you look at it, you don’t understand where the gaze ends and the heavens begin.
Her legs lie next to her with a clay load and buzz from the wind, which penetrates under the skin between the bones. Ulduz more than ever feels that her heart is stitched, like a rag doll, and is covered with a tight copper ring. She does not consider his blows and her own breaths, but she remembers all her exhalations and steps taken, because she always gives twice as much as she can take.
She knows that thousands of fairy tales follow in her footsteps - to those who are still able to listen, about those who are no longer able to speak. She does not add up fairy tales only about herself. Ulduz recalls this only now, but looks at this awareness without pain and anxiety, twists it in his hands like glass toys, and puts it aside, like last year’s dream. She does not want to think about him - she does not think.
In her head there is only a shining sea, where she counts every pearl, and knows that there are thousands more of them than she remembers under her centuries.
But when the sand crumbles in front of her eyes, the stars become more than a thousand and one.
End of story.