I don't even know when he came back

A day of a peasant
Muyassar wakes up in the morning and lies down quietly, listening to Alijon take a deep breath. "I don't even know when he came back," she thought, raising her head from the satin blanket. The clock on the wall rings five times. Its trembling echoes hit the ceiling of the house, the walls hung with jewels, bricks, and soaked. The house is quiet again. The clock ticked in silence, sometimes louder and louder. The moon peers thoughtfully out the window.
Muyassar wants to hug her husband but thinks, "Tired, let him rest ..."
Muyassar wakes up in the morning and lies down quietly, listening to Alijon take a deep breath. "I don't even know when he came back," he thought, raising his head from the satin blanket. The clock on the wall rings five times. His trembling voices hit the ceiling of the house, the walls hung with jewels, bricks, and soaked. The house is quiet again. The clock ticked in silence, sometimes louder and louder. The moon peers thoughtfully out the window.
Muyassar wanted to hug her husband's shoulder and thought. "Tired, let him rest ..." She slipped out of her seat. She puts on her skirt, which is lying on top of the box, where things can be kept, and again comes to the top of her husband, staring at him for a long time. A small sweat ran down Alijon's broad, tight forehead. "Poor thing," thought Muyassar, without taking her eyes off him, "my brother is so tired that he hasn't taken off his duppi¹."
She gently wipes her husband's forehead with her palm. Then she goes out on the porch.
At the head of the gultojixo’rozs², which touch the porch, dew glistens on the cotton stalks piled up at the foot of the courtyard. The round full moon wraps the village in its radiant blanket, inviting it to sleep, to a sweet morning's sleep, and here and there the stars fall asleep. But the village is already awake. In the corner of each yard, the velvet curtain of the night is shattered by fire: people light fires in their ovens.
Muyassar also jumped down from the porch and set fire to the samovar³. Then he brings a supra⁴ from the oven and kneads the dough while sitting on it. He wraps the tablecloth around the table and goes to the piles of cotton in the corner of the yard. As she takes a bundle of cotton, she stops, her hands hanging in the air. The fallen leaves of an apricot tree in the backyard, behind the wall, flutters softly in the morning breeze. It whispers as if remembering Muyassar's recent past. Once upon a time there was a rope hanging on this apricot branch. She was the first to eat this apricot cave.
She is no longer a jolly girl, but a bride. She got married to the nearest neighbor to their house. His father also blessed them: Muyassar and Alijon, with his own hands. "Alijon is a good guy, tested boy. He grew up as an orphan. They cared for each other, that's all! ”
On the day of the wedding, Muyassar smiled, remembering how long his father had prayed, and often went for a walk with the bride. The dry cotton stalks glowed and a fireball hit her face. The calf begins moaning as he walks home. The cow growls as slowly as it wakes up to Muyassar's footsteps.
Muyassar carries a large enamelled bucket on the porch and enters the barn, which smells of hay. The cow, lying in a dark corner, squeaks and gets up.
"It's wet, it needs to be cleaned," she thought. Then she wiped the cow's udder with an old wet towel and began to milk a cow as she crouched down. Drops of warm milk fall into a bucket, foam up and splash on her wrists.
When the bucket is full, she goes around the pile and unties the rope of the calf that is trying to reach its mother. The calf happily goes under the cow.
Muyassar makes bread with the agility she has been accustomed to since childhood. She carries a basket to the oven and starts to make into separate pastries in order to bake them one by one. She bakes the last bread and breathes lightly.
- Muyas! ..
She hears her husband's voice and turns around quickly. Alijon, who was wearing his Beqasam, a national striped cloak over his shoulder, is looking at her on the lips of the awning.
- Come!, - says Muyassar, pouring water into the well.
Alijon hurries down the porch to the flowerbed. He looks at Muyassar and smiles.
"It's bad to wait in a queue at the checkpoint, Muyas ... Hundreds of cars line up every night." "If you let them go, you'll stay up until dawn," he says quietly. Muyassar realizes that he apologized for not returning home early last night.
She holds her husband's strong shoulder and smiles...
-Bow.
Alijon also notices that she was not upset and lowers his head.
"Look, my head is yours," he says with a smile.
Muyassar starts pouring water. Alijon shudders at the icy water and snorts.
"You always look like a horse when you wash ... Look, you soaked my dress in water," says Muyassar, pointing to his wet dress.
Alijon raises his head and begs earnestly:
"At least say a foal, Muyas."
Muyassar laughs as he throws his head to one side like a child.
At that moment she remembers the bread in the oven and runs. Her hands get burned while taking bread into a basket full of bread. The morning dawns, the night bird gathers its black wings and flies over the village, and the surroundings are filled with the usual noise.
They both drink milk made with tea hastily. Alijon takes his lunch into his belt and goes to his car. From the side of the gate comes the roar of the engine. The cabin doors slam shut.
Muyassar cleans the house slightly and walks along the rocky road to the field, where there are rows of poplar on both sides. In the distance, the sun rises behind the mountain. The village is as silent as water. The cotton field attracts everyone, young and old, even school children.
Muyassar dives into the beds while tying the apron⁵ around her waist. The frost on the cheeks of the cotton gradually turns into dew. She starts the work again that she has learnt since she regained consciousness. The apron fills up in no time. Gradually, her back begins to ache. She turns the apron into a damn and soft egat and ties it again. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of cotton seeds pass before her eyes one by one. Sometimes it is so dizzy that when she closes her eyes, she sees nothing but white cotton seeds. But she does not stop. Leaning forward, she continues her work.
It's getting hot around noon. Muyassar takes off her apron and dives into the cotton field again. At that moment, the warm air melts in the gentle autumn sun, and the familiar voice of the tableman Shoqosim sounds.
"Hey, hey, girls, eat!" His voice echoed faintly over the cotton field.
Muyassar piles up the cotton she has picked and puts it on her apron. Either the heaviness of cotton or getting into thought she approaches to a barn bending her head.
Shoqosim puts the apron on the iron scales, dragged the stone, blinked his cool lids and looked at Muyassar. His wrinkled face turns pale: "Forty-eight kilos ... You are tired, bride!" Muyassar is annoyed to know what he is implying. “He means, as if I’m busy with entertainment! thought Muyassar.
She wants to turn away with a word, but she respects his age and restrains herself. 'All right,' she thinks, turning the cotton over to the barn. "It's a man's habit." Even if you feed him with honey for a hundred years, he will not speak sweetly. ”
The girls sit in the shade of a large elm tree, by the pool, and have lunch. Hundreds of sparrows chirp on the branches. Somewhere the wind comes and rides on the shoulders of the tiny shards on the surface of the pool.
The car beeps in the back.
"Chairman is coming!" said a girl in a bell-like voice.
In the prescribed manner, a thin man with a gentle face shouts:
"Don't worry, girls!"
The girls greet cheerfully.
"Bless you, girls!" Good job! On the day when we complete the plan - I will take all of you to the show to Tashkent.
- Is it Tashkent itself? says one of the girls in the back, unconvinced.
- To Tashkent itself!
"Shall we go down to the panorama, too?" The chairman laughs impartially:
"Let's get to that panorama!"
The chairman is a good man. Indeed, once or twice a year the girls are taken to the city - to the theater.
"Oh," he says, looking at everyone one by one. "I will marry my son to the one who works best." If you want, I'll send you to the mechanics course.
The dark-haired girl that washing the dishes in the pool turns her attention over her shoulder and says:
- You have only one son, whom one of us will you marry to him. He studies in the city. Who knows, maybe he comes with a baby.
Everyone laughs, and so is the chairman...
... The same pails, seeds, cotton ... Muyassar goes to work again ... Her hands play on the cotton seeds again.
When the evening dawn turns to ashes, they come out of the field. Before Muyassar returns home, she comes to a little channel: the cow needs to be feed with grass. The locust begins to sing near Muyassar. It deepens the quiet silence and squeaks incessantly for a long time. A fish jumps on the surface of the water. There is a sound of water, and then silence falls again. A gull from afar dives into the water. It immediately screams and rises into the air. Muyassar stars to pluck grass growing on the shore. Some kind of close and maddening smell of grass makes her feel dizzy. The surface of the water turns black. A hasty star which awoke very early dives into the channel. Sometimes it is buried in the glare, sometimes it comes back again.
The roar of a motorcycle can be heard from backside. The motorcycle breaks the silence and comes to a halt next to it. "Are you weeding of the village again?" Muyassar recognizes without looking back. That is Shoqosim . He slowly raises his head. The scorer does not want to get off the saddle of the motorcycle, but stands on one foot on the ground. Although he could not see his face clearly in the pitch darkness, he noticed that his eyelids were fluttering.
This man is like this: even if he gets off the horse, he does not want to get off the saddle. He was once chairman. At that time Muyassar was a little girl. One day, he beat a nine-year-old son of Karavoy taqachi to death for his cow falling into a cotton field.
Shoqosim still misses those days. He says that he needs cotton, not people's dimoq-firog’i. Muyassar does not fight again and returns to the village.
Now, when he lit a fire in the furnace, a cow came in through the door. Muyassar immediately ties the ropes so that he would not throw the flowers away. A large enameled bucket is filled with warm, frothy milk.
Muyassar takes off the calf.
Only after the meal is ready Muyassar feels completely tired. She puts three or four jazz⁶ in her mouth and closes the plate. "If Alijon comes, we will eat together."
But she knows that he will not return soon. On harvest days, drivers don’t notice the difference between night and day.
A loud music is heard from the yard . "There's a movie on in the club," Muyassar reads quietly. "What movie?" »
She enters the house and turns on the electricity. She puts herself in the mirror in the corner. A little girl with black eyebrows, black eyes smiles at her. Suddenly her joy is captured and she can make fun of her own reflection. She shows the tip of her tongue, shaking her head. Then, with a soft smile, she takes the powder from the glass shelf. She stops as she brings the cotton soaked in the powder closer to her face.
"My hand is cracked again," she says, looking at her cotton-scratched hands. She smiles again. It never occurred to her that with these delicate, resinous fingers, with her stick-like hands, she had made a statue of herself before, and that she was still polishing it.
Then, afraid of falling asleep, she stretches out without undressing and waits. There was the sound of a car on the street. Muyassar quickly straightens up and sits down. The sound of the engine grows louder and louder, but then slowly drifts away again. "No, it's not Alijon, it has gone to the office."
She lies for a long time staring at the ceiling. But now the engine no longer comes. Dogs don't bark. A quail doesn't sing either. The village is engulfed in the waves of sleep.
Only somewhere - in the distance, a lullaby is heard. A mother is singing a lullaby on her baby's head. Muyassar smiles sweetly. Here, in a year or two, she will be a mother herself. Then she would pray to such quiet nights. Once upon a time, when her mother sang a lullaby to her little brother, she learned it by listening to it.
Sleep tricks her lashes pairing them. As Muyassar stretching her tired playful hands, falls into a hard sleep.
She has a dream. She is a little girl in her dreams. She was throwing a rope on an apricot branch and flying. The apricots are in full bloom. Every time the swing was shaken, a world of flowers bloomed on her head. The rope became more and more rigid. As she went higher and higher, she ascended to heaven. The earth, the sky, and the rope are all flowers. They were in a white- pink. She laughs and screams and laughs. Tears well up in her eyes ...
She has a dream. But the lunar background begins to diminish.
On the east side, the sky is milky white. A new day begins.

1^ An Uzbek national skullcap

2^ A type of red flower which looks like a crown of a rooster

3^ An old type of a big pot which is used for making tea

4^ A tablecloth which has flour inside

5^ An apron which is used for picking cotton

6^ A fried part of ram tail of a sheep