The numbers were elusive, sometimes worse than foals who quickly learned to evade the lasso. But I went after them, stubbornly and tirelessly, until they eventually fell into line like a herd of trained, tamed, and tired animals. I looked into the future, pushed ahead like the planners of the Party, and discovered ever more resources—I noticed in all sorts of places little lambs I might lure into my flock.

You have already heard of Grandma’s gray mare; I imagined her to have offspring, too, even though she was, relatively speaking, as old as Grandma.

I raced ahead of time and was determined to have no less than forty animals in my flock by early summer of the year when my second wether was still alive.

Spring came, and the ewes lambed. But there were no twin lambs and no yearlings. Instead, I got four gift lambs, which was more than I had counted on. But they all came from the same hürde.

That same spring something incredible happened: The gray mare, who was no longer gray but white, foaled and had a foal as colorful as a magpie! A few days later, though, it got eaten by wolves. Neither Grandma nor I ever got to see the pretty foal. The first joyful and then sad news remained for us but a rumor, a dream with a rude awakening. Grandma calculated that the mare must have been twenty-one years old by that time. For a horse, that was a very old age indeed. And yet she would live for another two years. Which means I waited two more times, to no avail, but she never foaled again. I would have preferred to keep waiting, but Father and Mother gave me no peace. They thought the animal might die and end up unclean and useless, so I let them talk me into giving her up for slaughter. It was called something else, though: “to fill the kettle.”

By the way, I gave up my mare for free, without exchanging her for some other animal, as I would when one of my sheep had become too old and had to be slaughtered or sold. During one such trade of one sheep for another, Mother said to Father: “He’ll follow in Stalin’s footsteps. You’ll see!” Note that Mother was not talking about the Georgian Dzhugashvili’s son, who had made it into the Kremlin. She meant a diffe ent one, namely the Tuvan Lobtschaa’s son, who stayed in the Altai Mountains all his seventy-seven years and now rests in the Altai soil. He was the oldest and the most powerful of my six daajs and had many distinctive traits, good ones and bad, and when Mother made that remark, I think she meant his greed. Why was I now suddenly so generous, and with a mare at that? Maybe because I had rarely seen the mare. She had not found her way into my heart like the sheep, whom I saw and counted each morning, and with whom I lived day in and day out. Or maybe I was related to the nitwit who trains his eye on so many crumbs that he can’t see the lump. Or maybe this mare was something like the scaffold of my dream since she had promised me a foal—a mount-to-be for the man-to-be—and now that the scaffold was to be cut down and my dream bound to fade, my pain was too great for me to think of such trifles as a replacement?