Inhabitant of the State

by Andrei Platonov

  Inhabitant of the State

  Andrei Platonov

  The story exposes the ways of thinking promulgated by the Communist propaganda in 1920s and 1930s and throws in quite a few realistic facts of everyday Soviet life in those times.

  Andrei Platonov

  Inhabitant of the State

  An aged man liked transportation to the same extent as co-operative enterprises and the perspectives of future construction. In the morning he would take a bite at yesterday's tidbits and would go out to observe and to enjoy. At first he would visit the railway station, mostly platforms for storage of incoming freights, and there he felt joy at the accumulation of goods. The steam locomotive snuffled with its thick, peaceful force and slowly pulled off carloads of public substances: bottles of sulphuric acid, mounds of ropes, institutional luggage, and unmarked bags with something useful. The aged man, by the name Pyotr Yevseyevich Veretennikov, was glad that his city was being supplied, and would go to the cargo delivery platform to see whether the trains were leaving for the far ends of the Republic, where people worked and waited for the cargo. The springs of the departing trains were tightly compressed: they were carrying so much of the required weight. This also was satisfying to Pyotr Yevseyevich — the people over there, for whom the goods were intended, will be provided for.

  Not far from the station a settlement of dwellings was being built. Pyotr Yevseyevich daily followed the growth of the constructions because thousands of working families will be sheltered under their warm roofs, and the world will become happier and more honest after their settlement. Pyotr Yevseyevich would leave the construction field deeply touched by the sight of labour and material. All this prepared substance would soon, through the diligence of comradely labour, become a sturdy coziness from the harm of the weather during fall and winter, for the very contents of the State, in the form of its population, to be whole and tranquil.

  Farther on Pyotr Yevseyevich's way was a smallish forest already used by the rural public. The wood was only marginally enriched by standing pines which were however a little worn down. In a dividing trough in that forest an earth surveyor was sleeping; he was not yet old but weary, perhaps from earth management. His mouth had opened itself in sleepy lassitude, and a live, disturbing smell of resinous pines entered the depth of the surveyor's body and made him healthier there, so that the body was again capable of managing the wheat ploughmen's earth. The man rested and was being filled with the happiness of shared repose; his tools, the theodolite and the measuring tape, lay on the ground and were being hurriedly examined by ants and a dry spider that always lived individually due to its stinginess. Pyotr Yevseyevich tore some grass out of its accumulation in the trough, shaped that grass into a soft pulp of sorts and put it underneath the sleeping head of the earth surveyor, bothering him gently to attain comfort. The surveyor did not awake; he only moaned something like a plaintive orphan and sunk again into sleep. However, it was already better for him to rest on a soft grass. He would sleep tighter and survey the earth more accurately — with this feeling of useful participation Pyotr Yevseyevich went on to his next activities.

  The forest ceased quickly, and the earth under the trees became trenchy furrows and yet undivided lots of rye ploughland. Ordinary villages lived behind the rye, and above them was air from the frightening space, — Pyotr Yevseyevich considered air a good thing also, since from it breathing was delivered to the entire area of the State. Windless days bothered him however; the peasants have nothing to grind with, and the infected air stays over the city, whereby the sanitary condition is worsened. But Pyotr Yevseyevich bore his anxiety not as a suffering but as a concerned necessity which occupies the entire soul by its meaning and thereby makes the burden of one's own life imperceptible. At the moment, Pyotr Yevseyevich was a little worried for a locomotive that was hauling up some rough freights with sharp, stifled wisps of steam which reached at Pyotr Yevseyevich's tense feelings. Pyotr Yevseyevich stopped and with a helpful compassion imagined the ordeal of a machine pushing the stagnation of sedimentary weight forward and uphill.

  «If only nothing bursts in the couplings,» Pyotr Yevseyevich whispered, grinding his teeth between the itching gums. «And if only there is enough fire, it has to burn the water! Let it be patient, it's not far until the end now…»

  The locomotive slithered up slope with screeching rims but did not give in to the cars that stuck to the rails. Suddenly the locomotive started giving out frequent and worried honking, asking for the way through. Apparently the semaphore was closed and the engine-driver was afraid that he would not be able to start the train up the slope after a stop.

  «Oh my God, and what is going on!» Pyotr Yevseyevich exclaimed and, smitten with sorrow, energetically set out to the station in order to examine the accident.

  The locomotive gave three whistles, meaning stop, while Pyotr Yevseyevich found a total calmness reign at the station. He sat down in the third class waiting hall and began to torment himself: «Where is the State?» he thought. «Where can its automatic order be found?»

  «Shchepotko!» the agent on duty shouted to the train marshall. «Let the fifty-first through to the eighth. Make a remark to the mechanic and to the head that we are full with transit. Did you dispose of the tanks there?»

  «Yes, sir!» answered Shchepotko. «Do not accept any more, I have no place to put it. We need to finish with the fifty-first.»

  «Now it's quite understandable,» Pyotr Yevseyevich calmed down. «The State is here because the concern is here. We only need to tell the population to exist quieter, or else the machines would burst under its demands.»

  With a satisfied distress, Pyotr Yevseyevich left the railroad juncture to visit a nearby village named Koz'ma.

  In that Koz'ma village there lived twenty-four homesteads. The huts were built on the slopes of a functional ravine and have suffered this condition for seventy years. Beside the ravine, the village suffered from thirst; due to thirst people ate poorly and did not procreate properly. There was no fresh and quenching water in Koz'ma: there was a small pond amidst the village, at the bottom of the ravine, but this pond was hedged by a dam made from manure, while the water flew there from under the dwellings and places of farming necessity. All manure and the dead remnants of human life were washed down to the hollow of the pond and were settled into a yellowish-brown viscous soup that could not serve as a quenching liquid. During the common epidemics among citizens, namely cholera, typhus or a poor wheat harvest due to the local soil containing few of the bountiful good, the people of Koz'ma would lie down on warm stoves and came to their end, gazing at flies and cockroaches with their eyes. In the old times, they say, Koz'ma had almost a hundred homesteads, but now there are no traces of the past thickness of population. Vegetative shrubbery covered the spots previously populated by the now desolate villas, and there were neither ashes nor brick or limestone spots under that shrubbery. Pyotr Yevseyevich had already dug through that place, for he did not believe that the State could shrink; he felt the multiplying strength of order and sociality, everywhere he observed the automatic growth of the State-born happiness.

  The peasants who lived in Koz'ma respected Pyotr Yevseyevich for giving them hope and correctly deemed that the whole Republic should know their need of drinking water, while Pyotr Yevseyevich would support them in that opinion:

  «You will be provided with drinking,» he would promise. «It's the State after all. The justice occurs automatically, not to mention drinking water! It is not any kind of dermal disease, is it? No, it is an internal affair: each citizen needs water as much as the mind!»

  «Of course!» the people of Koz'ma would confirm. «The Soviet authority has us in the watering aspect as first thing. Our tu
rn will come, and we shall drink our fill! Or did we not drink since old times? We just go downtown and drink.»

  «Absolutely right,» Pyotr Yevseyevich would determine. «And one also has to appreciate in addition that life goes drier and stingier with thirst, and one feels it more from the languish.»

  «One cannot escape it without water,» the peasants would agree. «One lives as if just swallowed a burning log from a fire.»

  «This is merely an imaginary impression,» explained Pyotr Yevseyevich. «One would imagine many things when one has a desire to drink. The sun also seems to you and to us a heat and a force, but one can hide and quench it with some steam from a kettle — at once there will be chill on the table-cloth. It only seems that way to you and to us in the middle of the mind…»

  Pyotr Yevseyevich always regarded himself and the State with more respect than the population, unaware of the sense of it, since the population constantly exists alongside with and is provided by the State with the necessary life.

  Usually Pyotr Yevseyevich was offered food in Koz'ma — not because of kindness and plenty, but out of a feeling of security. However, Pyotr Yevseyevich would never eat others' food: bread grows on a peasant's lot only for one, not for two — and so Pyotr Yevseyevich had nothing to eat out of. The sun, it also burns sparingly and socially: it does not warm up more bread than for one labouring eater, therefore, there should be no feeding of guests in the State.

  Amidst the summer the village of Koz'ma, as well as all rural places, suffered from diarrhea, because the berries on the shrubbery and the greens in the gardens ripened. These fruits would drive the stomachs to nervousness, to which the watery substance from the pond added. To prevent that public suffering, the young communists from Koz'ma would start to dig wells each year, but they would become worn down by the power of impassable sands and would lie on the ground in languish of fruitless labour.

  «How could you do all this without proper arrangement?» Pyotr Yevseyevich would upset himself and rebuke the young communists. «This is the soil of the State, the State will also give you a drinking well — wait automatically, and for now drink the rains! Your work is to plough the soil within the bounds of your lots of land.»

  Pyotr Yevseyevich would leave Koz'ma with a certain grief that citizens lack water, but also with a happiness of expectation that, therefore, the forces of the State must be coming there and he shall see them on the way. Moreover, Pyotr Yevseyevich liked to weaken his peace of mind, as a test, also by devising a small doubt. This small doubt in the State was on Pyotr Yevseyevich's mind after Koz'ma because of lack of water in the village. At home Pyotr Yevseyevich would take out an old map of Austro-Hungary and spend a long time examining it in quiet meditation; he cared not for Austro-Hungary but rather for a live State outlined by its borders, a hedged and protected meaning of civil life.

  Under a painting of the Battle of Sevastopol, which adorned the warm, stable dwelling of Pyotr Yevseyevich, there hung a popular map of the united Soviet Union. Here Pyotr Yevseyevich would observe with more concern: he troubled himself about the unshakeability of the border line. But what is a border line? It is a still frontier of a live and faithful army behind whose backs the bent-down labour peacefully sighs.

  In labour there is a meekness of squandered life, but this spent life is accumulated in the form of the State, and one must love it with an undivided love, because it is in the State that the life of the living and of the dead is untouchably preserved. Buildings, gardens and railways — what are they but a short life of labour captured for ages? Because of this, Pyotr Yevseyevich was right in feeling compassion not for the transitory citizens but for their work, petrified in the image of the State. All the more necessary was it to conserve all labour that was to become the common body of the State.

  «Are there not birds on the millet?» Pyotr Yevseyevich would suddenly remember with agitation. «They peck at the young seeds, and what would then feed the population?»

  Pyotr Yevseyevich would hurry to the millet field and, indeed, saw the feeding birds.

  «What is going on, oh my Lord God? What will remain whole, if nothing of good can rest peacefully? These wild elements have exhausted me — rain, thirst, sparrows, stopping trains! How can the State live against this? And yet there are people who are offended at the country: are they real citizens? They are descendants of the Horde!»

  Having driven the birds off the millet, Pyotr Yevseyevich would notice under his feet a weakened worm that did not manage to follow moisture into the depths of the earth.

  «Now this one exists also, gnawing at the soil!» Pyotr Yevseyevich would fume. «As if the State cannot do without it!» And Pyotr Yevseyevich would crush the worm to death: let it now live not in the history of humanity, which is already crowded enough, but in Eternity.

  At the beginning of the night Pyotr Yevseyevich would return to his flat. The sparrows also became quiet then and would not come to eat the millet; so the tiny seeds would become more ripened and firm through the night — it would be harder to peck at them tomorrow. With the consolation of this thought Pyotr Yevseyevich would finish eating the crumbs of the morning breakfast and would lay his head to slumber, but could not fall asleep. He would imagine things: he would listen and hear the stirring of mice in co-operative enterprises while the watchmen sat in tea-houses riveted to the function of the radio, not believing it for joy. Somewhere in a seldom visited steppe the kulaks are chasing a village correspondent, and the lonely worker of the State falls down powerless under the brunt of thick force, similarly to the bread of life falling down dead under an unbalanced storm.

  But the memory was merciful: Pyotr Yevseyevich remembered that near Urals or in Siberia, as the newspaper said, a powerful factory of complicated threshing machines was started by construction; and at that recollection, Pyotr Yevseyevich lost consciousness.

  In the next morning the old roofers would go to work past his windows; a glazier carried his material on his shoulder; and a co-operative cart was transporting beef. Pyotr Yevseyevich sat as if in distress, while he was in fact delighted by the quietness of the State and the manners of working people. There, the meek, silent old man Termorezov entered the consumer's bakery; he daily bought himself a roll for breakfast and left to labour at the barn of Communist Industrial Union, where the ropes were manufactured out of hemp for the needs of peasantry.

  A barefoot girl tugged a goat by a string to graze in the backyards. The goat's face with its beard and yellow eyes resembled the devil; it was however permitted to eat grass on the territory, therefore the goat was important too.

  «Let the goat be also,» Pyotr Yevseyevich would ponder. «One could reckon it a junior calf.»

  The door to the dwelling opened, and a known peasant, Leonid from the village Koz'ma, appeared.

  «How do you do, Pyotr Yevseyevich,» Leonid said. «You should have waited yesterday with us, but instead you hurried away to your flat…»

  Pyotr Yevseyevich became flustered and afraid.

  «But whatever has happened? Eh? Is not all well in the village there? I saw a beggar drop a burning cigarette — did he burn the estate?»

  «Well, the village is well and good out of that cigarette… But right after you left, there were two carts coming from the other end, and an old man in a carriage behind them. The old man says, 'Citizens, do you perhaps need deep water?' We say, 'We do, but we ain't got power to reach at it.' Then the old man says, 'All right, I am a professor from the State and I will get you the water from the mother layer.' The old man spent the night and went away, and two technicians remained with instrument and started to feel inside the soil. Now, Pyotr Yevseyevich, reckon us as we were with drinks. For this I brought you a jug of milk: were it not for you, we would have dug in vain, or sat there without drinking, but then you would walk around and say: wait for the motion of the State, it foresees everything. That has happened. So drink, Pyotr Yevseyevich, our milk for this…»

  Pyotr Yevseyevich sat in disappointment: he agai
n went right past the live State and missed its pure original action.

  «Here,» he told Leonid. «Here it came and went. From a dry place it will procure water for you, that is what it is worth!»

  «Who is it then?» Leonid asked quietly.

  «Who!» Pyotr Yevseyevich said abstractly. «I myself do not know who it is, I only adore it in my cogitation, since you and I are merely population. Now I see everything, Leonid, and I shall hold tight to my hope. Let the birds peck at the millet, let the watchmen in the co-operative stare at the radio while mice eat the goods — the State will suddenly catch up with that too, and we should live and have patience.»

  «That is right, Pyotr Yevseyevich: by just not touching anything, one shall see the good come.»

  «Exactly, Leonid!» Pyotr Yevseyevich agreed. «Without the State you would not drink cow's milk.»

  «But where would it go then?» worried Leonid.

  «Who knows where! Maybe grass would not grow either.»

  «But what would there be?»

  «The soil, Leonid, the soil is the main thing! And the soil is a territory of the State, so there would not be any territory! Where would your grass ripen then? It does not grow in an unknown place, it needs territory and earth management. The African Sahara, for one, has no State, and the Arctic Ocean neither, and that is why nothing grows there: only the sand, the heat and the dead ice!»

  «Shame on such places!» Leonid forcefully affirmed and immediately fell silent. Then he added in an ordinary human voice: «Come visit us, Pyotr Yevseyevich, we miss somebody's presence without you.»

  «Were you strict citizens, you would not have missed anything,» Pyotr Yevseyevich said.

  Leonid remembered that there was no water yet in Koz'ma, and drank from Pyotr Yevseyevich's water pail to stock up for the stomach.

  After the peasant's departure, Pyotr Yevseyevich tasted the presented milk and went to wander amid the town. He would touch the bricks of the houses on his way, stroke the hedges, and thankfully observe what was unreachable to sensation. Perhaps the people who created these bricks and hedges were already dead from old age and emaciation of labour, but from their bodies there remained bricks and boards — objects that comprised the sum and substance of the State. Pyotr Yevseyevich had long discovered for his joy that the State was the useful act of the dead, as well as of the living but labouring population; without production of the State the population would die meaninglessly.