“It just finished a little while ago. Why were you so late?” the assistant engineer asked her meaningfully, just as if he had loved Frosya forever, and pined for her all the time.
“Ah, what a shame!” Frosya said.
“Do you like it here?” her partner asked her.
“Well, yes, of course,” Frosya answered. “It’s so lovely.”
Natalya Bukova did not know how to dance, and she stood next to the wall, holding her friend’s hat in her hands.
In the intermission, while the orchestra was resting, Frosya and Natalya drank lemonade, and they finished two bottles. Natalya had been in this club only once, a long time ago. She looked at the clean, decorated dance floor with a shy happiness.
“Fros, Fros!” she whispered. “When we have socialism, will all rooms look like this, or not?”
“How else? Of course, they’ll look like this,” Frosya said. “Well, maybe they’ll be a little better!”
“That would be something!” Natalya Bukova agreed.
After the intermission, Frosya danced again. The dispatcher in charge of shunting asked her. They were playing a fox-trot, “My Baby.” The dispatcher held his partner tightly, trying to press his cheek against her hair, but this hidden caress didn’t affect Frosya, she loved a man who was far away, and her poor body was all tight and hollow.
“Tell me, what’s your name?” her partner said into her ear while they were dancing. “I know your face, but I’ve forgotten who’s your father.”
“Fro!” Frosya answered.
“Fro?… You’re not Russian?”
“Well, of course not.”
The dispatcher thought about this.
“Why aren’t you?… After all, your father’s Russian: Yevstafyev.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Frosya whispered. “My name’s Fro.”
They danced on in silence. People stood along the walls and watched the dancers. Only three couples were dancing, the others were shy or didn’t know how. Frosya leaned her head closer to the dispatcher’s chest, he could see her fluffy hair in its old-fashioned hair-do right under his eyes, and this relaxed trustingness was dear and pleasant to him. He preened himself before those who were watching. He even wanted stealthily to stroke her head, but he was afraid people might notice it. Besides, his fiancée was there, who might pay him back later for his closeness to this Fro. So the dispatcher moved a little away from her, for appearance’s sake, but Fro leaned on to his chest again, onto his necktie, and the tie shifted to one side under the weight of her head, showing a strip of his naked body in the middle of his shirt. The dispatcher continued to dance, in terror and awkwardness, waiting for the music to stop. But the music grew more agitated and energetic, and the woman did not move away from his arms. He could feel little drops of dampness on his chest, which was bare under his necktie, right where the hair grew on his man’s chest.
“Are you crying?” the dispatcher asked, frightened.
“A little,” Fro whispered. “Take me over toward the door. I don’t want to dance any more.”
Without stopping his dancing, her partner steered Frosya to the exit, and she went out into the corridor quickly, where there were few people and she could recover herself.
Natalya brought her friend’s hat to her. Frosya went home, while Natalya went off to the cooperative warehouse where her husband was the watchman. Right next to the warehouse was a building materials yard, and a pleasant-looking woman was the watchman there. Natalya wanted to find out if her husband did not have a certain affection for this woman guard.
The next morning Frosya received a telegram from a station in Siberia, beyond the Urals. Her husband telegraphed her: “Dear Fro I love you and I see you in my dreams.”
Her father wasn’t home. He had gone to the station, to sit and talk in the Red Corner, to read the railroadmen’s paper, to find out how the night had gone in the traction department, and then to go into the buffet where he could drink a beer with some friend he might find there and talk briefly about their spiritual concerns.
Frosya didn’t even start to brush her teeth; she hardly washed, just throwing a little water on her face, and paid no more attention to what she looked like. She didn’t want to waste time on anything except her feeling of love, and this now had no connection with her body. Through the ceiling of Frosya’s room, on the third floor, the short notes of a mouth organ could be heard, then the music would stop, and start again. Frosya had wakened in the dark early morning and had then gone back to sleep, and this was when she had heard this modest melody above her, like the singing of some gray bird working in the fields without enough breath for real singing because all its strength was spent in work. A little boy lived above her, the son of a lathe operator at the depot. The father had probably gone out to work, and the mother was doing the laundry —it was pretty boring for him. Without eating her breakfast, Frosya went off to her classes—she was taking courses in railroad communication and signals.
Frosya had not been to class for four days, and her friends had probably missed her, but she was going off to join them now without any real desire. Frosya was excused a great deal in class because of her capacity to learn and her deep understanding of the subjects of technical science; but she herself never understood how this could be—in many things she lived only in imitation of her husband, a man who had finished two technical institutes and who felt the mechanisms of an engine as if they were part of his flesh.
At first, Frosya had been a bad student. Her heart was not attracted by Pupin’s induction coils, relay gears, or figuring the resistance of metal wires. But her husband’s lips had once pronounced these words and, what’s more, he had showed her the vital functioning of these objects which were dead for her, and the mysterious quality of the delicate calculations thanks to which machines live. Frosya’s husband had the capacity to feel the strength of an electric current like a personal passion. He could animate everything that engaged his hands or his mind, and so he had a real sense of the direction of forces in any mechanical construction, and he could feel directly the patient, suffering resistance of the metal structure of a machine.
Since then induction coils, Wheatstone bridges, contractors, and illumination units had become sacred objects for Frosya, as if they were spiritual parts of the man she loved; she began to understand them, and to cherish them in her mind as in her heart. In difficult times Frosya would come home and say humbly: “Fedor, that microfarad and those wandering currents, they bore me!” But embracing his wife after their daytime separation, Fedor would transform himself temporarily into a microfarad and a wandering current. Frosya almost saw with her own eyes what, until then, she had wanted to understand but could not. These were just the same simple, natural, attractive things as different-colored grasses growing in the fields. Frosya often grieved at night because she was only a woman and could not feel herself to be a microfarad or a locomotive, or electricity, while Fedor could—and she would carefully move her finger along his hot back; he slept, and didn’t wake. Somehow he was always hot, strange, and he could sleep through loud noise, eat any kind of food—good or bad, he was never sick, he loved to spend money on trifles, he was getting ready to go to Soviet China and become a soldier there…
Fro sat in class now with weak, wandering thoughts, mastering nothing of the assigned lesson. She despondently copied from the blackboard into her notebook a vector diagram of the resonance of electric currents and listened sorrowfully to the teacher’s lecture on the influence of the saturation of steel on the appearance of higher harmonics. Fedor wasn’t there, now communications and signals no longer attracted her, electricity had become something alien to her. Pupin’s induction coils, Wheatstone bridges, microfarads, iron cores had all dried up in her heart, and she could not understand a thing of the higher harmonics of electric current; in her memory there sounded all the time the monotonous little song of a child’s mouth organ: “The mother is washing clothes, the father’s off at work, he won’t co
me back soon, it’s lonely and boring all alone.”
Frosya’s attention left the lesson altogether, and she wrote in her notebook: “I am a stupid, wretched girl, Fedya, come back quickly and I’ll learn communications and signals, and then I’ll die, you’ll bury me, and go off to China.”
At home her father was sitting with his boots on, his coat, and his engineer’s cap. He was sure that he’d be summoned to take a trip today.
“You’ve come home?” he asked his daughter. He was always glad when someone came into the apartment; he listened to all the steps on the staircase, as if he were constantly expecting some extraordinary guest who would be bringing him happiness, carrying it in his hat.
“Can I warm some kasha with butter for you?” her father asked. “I’ll do it right away.”
The daughter refused.
“Well then, let me fry you some sausage.”
“No,” Frosya said.
The father was quiet for a minute, but then he asked again, but more timidly:
“Maybe you’d like some tea and crackers? I’ll heat the water…”
The daughter remained silent.
“Or how about the macaroni from yesterday. It’s still there, I left it all for you…”
“Will you please drop it?” Frosya said. “They should have sent you off to the Far East….”
“I volunteered, but they wouldn’t take me—too old, they said, eyesight not good enough,” the father explained.
He knew that children are our enemies, and he did not get angry at his enemies. But he was afraid, instead, that Frosya would go off into her own room, while he wanted her to stay with him and talk, and the old man was hunting for some reason to keep Frosya from going away.
“Why haven’t you put any lipstick on your lips today?” he asked her. “Or have you run out of it? I’ll be glad to buy you some, I can run down to the drugstore…”
Tears started to well up in Frosya’s gray eyes, and she walked into her room. The father stayed alone; he began to clean up the kitchen and to fuss with housework, then he squatted down on his heels, opened the door of the warming oven, put his head in it, and started to cry on top of the pan holding the macaroni.
Someone knocked on the door. Frosya did not come out to open it. The old man pulled his head out of the oven, wiped his face, and went to open the door.
A messenger had come from the station.
“Sign here, Nefed Stepanovich: you’re to show up today at eight o’clock—you’re to go with a cold locomotive being sent off for major repairs. They’ll hitch it on to 309, take your grub and clothes with you, you’ll be gone at least a week.”
Nefed Stepanovich signed in the book and the messenger left. The old man opened his metal lunchbox: yesterday’s bread and onion were still there, with a lump of sugar. The engineer added some millet porridge, two apples, thought for a minute, and then closed the box with its enormous padlock.
Then he knocked carefully on the door of Frosya’s room.
“Daughter! Lock up after me, I’m going out on a job… for two weeks…. They’ve given me a ‘Shcha’ engine—it’s cold, but never mind.”
Frosya came out a little after her father had left, and closed the door to the apartment.
“Play! Why aren’t you playing?” Frosya whispered at the floor above, where the little boy with the mouth organ lived. But he had probably gone out for a walk—it was summertime, the days were long, the breeze fluttered in the evening among the sleepy, happy pine trees. The musician was still a little boy, he had not yet chosen some single thing out of the whole world for eternal loving, his heart beat empty and free, stealing nothing just for itself out of the goodness of life.
Frosya opened the window, lay down on the big bed, and dozed off. She could hear the trunks of the pine trees moving slightly in the air blowing at their tops, and one far-off grasshopper sounded, not waiting for the time of darkness.
Frosya awoke; it was still light, she should get up and live. She looked at the sky, full of a ripening warmth, covered with the lively traces of the disappearing sun, as if happiness were to be found there, happiness made by nature out of all its pure strength, so that this happiness might flow from nature into a man.
Frosya found a short hair between two pillows, it could have belonged only to Fedor. She examined the hair in the light, it was gray: Fedor was already twenty-nine and he had some gray hairs, about twenty of them. Her father was also gray, but he never came even close to their bed. Frosya was used to the smell of the pillow on which Fedor slept—it still smelled of his body and his head, they had not washed the pillowcase since the last time her husband had put his head on it. Frosya buried her face in Fedor’s pillow and grew calmer.
Upstairs on the third floor the little boy came back and started to play his mouth organ, the same tune he had been playing in the dark morning of that day. Frosya got up and hid her husband’s hair in an empty box on her table. Then the little boy stopped playing—it was time for him to go to sleep because he had to get up early, or else he was playing with his father, who had come home from work, and sitting on his knees. The mother was breaking up sugar with a pair of sugar tongs, and saying they must buy some more linen, what they had was worn out, and tore when it was washed. The father was silent, he was thinking: we’ll manage somehow.
All evening long Frosya walked along the tracks at the station, out to the nearest woods, and through the fields where rye was growing. She stood next to the slag pits where she had worked the day before—they were almost full again, but nobody was working. Nobody knew where Natasha Bukova lived, Frosya had not asked her yesterday; she did not want to go and see any friends or acquaintances for she felt somehow ashamed in front of everyone: she couldn’t talk about her love with other people and all the rest of life had become uninteresting and dead for her. She walked past the cooperative warehouse where Natalya’s husband was walking with his rifle. Frosya would have liked to give him some rubles so that he could drink fruit juice with his wife the next day, but she was embarrassed.
“Move on, citizen! You can’t stand here—this is a warehouse, a government building,” the watchman said to her when Frosya stopped and groped for the money somewhere in the pleats of her skirt.
Beyond the warehouse lay desolate, empty land, on which some small, coarse, wild grass was growing. Frosya walked up to it and stood there languishing in that small world of thin grass from which, it seemed, the stars were only a couple of kilometers away.
“Ah, Fro, Fro, if only someone put his arms around you!” she said to herself.
When she got home, Frosya lay down at once to sleep because the little boy who played the mouth organ had been asleep for a long time and even the grasshoppers had stopped chirping. But something kept her from falling asleep. Frosya stared into the darkness and sniffed: it was the pillow on which Fedor used to sleep that was bothering her. It still gave out the moldering, earthy smell of a warm, familiar body, and this smell started the grief in Frosya’s heart all over again. She wrapped Fedor’s pillow up in a sheet and hid it in the closet, and then she fell asleep alone, like an orphan.
Frosya did not go back to her classes—science had become incomprehensible for her anyway. She lived at home and waited for a letter or a telegram from Fedor, afraid the postman would take the letter back if he did not find anyone at home. But four days went by, and then six, and Fedor sent no word except for his first telegram.
The father came back from his trip in charge of the cold locomotive; he was happy that he had gone and taken the trouble, that he had seen a great many people and distant stations and different happenings; now he had enough to remember, think about, and talk about for a long time. But Frosya didn’t ask him anything; so her father began to tell her on his own—how the cold locomotive had been moved and how he had not slept at night, to keep mechanics at stations along the way from stealing parts from the engine, where they were selling fruit cheap and where it had been ruined by late spring frost. Fros
ya made no comment, and even when Nefed Stepanovich told her about the voile and the artificial silk he had seen in Sverdlovsk, his words did not interest his daughter. “What is she, a Fascist?” her father thought. “How did I ever conceive her in my wife? I can’t think.”
Having received neither a letter nor a telegram from Fedor, Frosya went to work at the post office as a mail carrier. She thought that letters were probably being lost, and so she wanted to take them herself to all the addresses. And she wanted to get Fedor’s letters sooner than some strange, unknown letter carrier would bring them to her, and in her own hands they would be safe. She got to the post office ahead of all the other carriers—the little boy on the third floor would not yet be playing his mouth organ— and took part as a volunteer in the sorting and distributing of the mail. She read the addresses on all the envelopes coming into the little town—Fedor wrote her nothing. All the envelopes were addressed to other people, and inside the envelopes were uninteresting letters of one sort or another. But just the same twice each day Frosya distributed them to the proper addresses, hoping there was some comfort in them for the people who got them. In the early morning light she would walk quickly along the street of the town with a heavy bag on her stomach, looking as if she were pregnant, knocking at the doors and handing the letters and packages to people in their underwear, to naked women, or to little children who had got up before the grownups. The dark blue sky was standing above the neighboring land but Frosya would already be working, hurrying to tire out her legs so her anxious heart would also grow tired. Many of the people getting letters became interested in her and when they received their mail would ask her questions about her life: “Do you work for ninety-two rubles a month?” “Yes,” Frosya would answer, “but that’s before deductions.” “And do you work during your monthly periods, or do they give you time off?” “They give me time off,” Frosya told them, “and they give out a government girdle, but I haven’t received mine yet.” “They’ll give it to you,” the addressee told her, “it’s in the regulations.” One subscriber to the magazine Krasnaya Nov (Red Virgin Soil) made Frosya an offer of marriage, as an experiment: whatever happens, maybe it will produce happiness, he said, and that’s always useful. “What’s your reaction?” the subscriber asked her. “I’ll think about it,” Frosya answered. “Don’t think about it,” the addressee told her. “Come and stay with me as a guest, try me out first: I’m a tender man, well read, cultured—you can see for yourself what I subscribe to! This magazine is produced by an editorial board, there are clever people there—see for yourself—and not just one man, and we’ll be two! It’s all quite solid, and just like a married woman your authority will be greater. A girl—what’s she?—a single person, somehow an antisocial kind of person!”
The Fierce and Beautiful World Page 15