The Fierce and Beautiful World

by Andrei Platonov

  Many people recognized Frosya standing with a letter or a package in front of a stranger’s door. Sometimes they offered her a glass of wine, or snacks to eat, and they complained to her about their private fate. Life was nowhere empty or calm.

  When he went away, Fedor had promised Frosya to let her know the address of his new job right away, for he didn’t know exactly where he would find himself. But here fourteen days had gone by since his leaving, but there was no letter from him, and nowhere for her to write. Frosya endured the separation, she went on delivering the mail faster and faster, breathing all the time more quickly, in order to busy her heart with other work and to wear out its despair. But one day she suddenly started to scream in the middle of the street, during the second delivery of mail. Frosya had not noticed how the breathing had suddenly tightened in her chest, squeezing her heart, and she continued to scream in a high, shrill voice. People walking by noticed her. When she came to herself, Frosya ran into the field with her letter bag because it had become so hard for her to stand her wasting, empty breathing; she fell to the ground and went on screaming until her heart had got over it.

  Frosya then sat up, straightened her dress, and smiled; she felt all right again, with no more need to cry. After she had delivered the mail, Frosya went to the telegraph department where they handed her a telegram from Fedor with his address and kisses. At home, without eating, she began immediately to write a letter to her husband. She did not see the day end, outside the window, nor did she hear the little boy who always played his mouth organ before he went to sleep. Her father knocked on her door and brought his daughter a glass of tea with a buttered roll, and he turned on the electric light so Frosya would not ruin her eyes in the dusk.

  That night Nefed Stepanovich was dozing on his chest in the kitchen. For six days he had not been summoned by the railroad; he assumed they would need him this night and he was waiting for the footsteps of the messenger on the staircase.

  At one o’clock in the night, Frosya walked into the kitchen with a folded piece of paper in her hand.

  “Papa!”

  “What do you want, daughter?” The old man slept lightly.

  “Take this telegram to the post office for me, since I’m tired.”

  “But what if I go out, and then the messenger comes?” the father asked, frightened.

  “He’ll wait,” Frosya told him. “You won’t be gone long. But don’t read the telegram, just hand it in at the window.”

  “I won’t,” the old man promised. “But you wrote a letter, too. Give it to me, and I’ll mail it at the same time.”

  “It’s none of your business what I wrote…. Have you got money?”

  The father had money; he took the telegram and walked out. In the post and telegraph office, the old man read the telegram: why not, he decided, maybe his daughter was writing something wrong, he should look at it.

  The telegram was addressed to Fedor in the Far East: “Come back by first train your wife my daughter Frosya is dying of fatal complications in respiratory organs father Nefed Yevstafyev.”

  “What a pair they are!” the old man thought, and he handed the telegram in at the window.

  “But I saw Frosya today!” the telegraph clerk said. “Has she really got sick?”

  “It must be,” the engineer explained.

  The next morning Frosya sent her father back to the post office again to take a statement from her that she was voluntarily resigning from her job for reasons of bad health. The old man went, he had wanted to go to the station anyway.

  Frosya set about washing linen, darning socks, scrubbing floors and cleaning up the apartment, and she went nowhere outside the house.

  Two days later an answer came by telegraph: “Leaving am anxious terribly worried no burial without me Fedor.”

  Frosya figured precisely the time of her husband’s arrival and on the seventh day after the telegram came she went down to the station platform, quivering with happiness. The Trans-Siberian express pulled in from the east right on time. Frosya’s father was on the platform, too, but he stayed some distance away from his daughter in order not to destroy her mood.

  The engineer brought the train into the station with splendid speed, and softly, tenderly braked it to a stop. Nefed Stepanovich, watching this, shed a few tears, forgetting even why he had come to the station.

  Only one passenger got out of the train at this station. He wore a hat, and a long, blue raincoat, and his eyes were shining. The woman ran up to him.

  “Fro!” the passenger said, and he dropped his bag onto the platform. The father picked it up and carried it behind his daughter and his son-in-law.

  On the road, the daughter turned to her father.

  “Papa, go over to the depot, and ask them to give you an assignment somewhere, it must be boring for you to have to sit at home all the time…”

  “It’s boring,” the old man said, “I’ll go right away. You take the suitcase.”

  The son-in-law looked at the old engineer.

  “Hello, Nefed Stepanovich!”

  “Hello, Fedya. Welcome home.”

  “Thank you, Nefed Stepanovich…”

  The young man wanted to say something more, but the old man gave the bag to Frosya and was walking away, toward the depot.

  “Darling, I’ve cleaned the whole apartment,” Frosya said. “I wasn’t dying.”

  “I guessed it on the train, that you weren’t dying,” her husband answered. “I didn’t believe your telegram for long.”

  “Then why did you come back?” Frosya asked in surprise.

  “I love you, and I was lonely,” Fedor said sadly.

  Frosya was suddenly grieved.

  “I’m afraid you’ll stop loving me some time, and then I really will die…”

  Fedor kissed her cheek from the side.

  “If you die, then you’ll forget everything, including me,” he said.

  Frosya recovered from her grief.

  “No, to die isn’t interesting. It’s passivity.”

  “Of course, it’s passivity,” Fedor said, smiling. He liked her high-flown, intelligent words. Fro had once asked him specially to teach her intelligent phrases, and he had written out for her a whole notebook full of intelligent, empty words: “Whoever says a must also say b,” “If it’s so, it’s precisely so,” and other similar phrases. But Fro guessed the fraud for herself. She asked him: “But why is it necessary to say b after saying a, if I don’t have to and I don’t want to?”

  At home they lay down at once to rest and fell asleep. Three hours later the father knocked. Frosya opened the door for him and waited until the old man had put some food in his metal box and gone out again. They had probably sent him off somewhere on a job. Frosya closed the door, and went back to sleep again.

  When they woke, it was already night. They talked for a little, then Fedor made love to Fro, and they fell silent until morning.

  The next day Fro quickly fixed dinner, fed her husband and ate something herself. She was doing everything now any old way, messy, not tasty, but it was all the same to both of them what they ate and what they drank, just so long as they didn’t waste the time of their loving on any material, unimportant needs.

  Frosya told Fedor that she would now begin to study well and diligently, she would learn a lot, and she would work hard, so that life could become better for everybody in the country.

  Fedor listened to Fro, and then he explained to her in detail his own ideas and projects—about the transmission of electric energy without wires, by means of ionized air, about increasing the strength of all metals by processing their ultrasonic waves, about the stratosphere one hundred kilometers up in the sky where there exist special light, heat and electrical conditions capable of guaranteeing eternal life to a man—this is why the dreams of the ancient world about heaven may now actually come true—and Fedor promised to think out and to accomplish many other things for Frosya’s sake and at the same time for the sake of all the other pe
ople in the world.

  Frosya listened blissfully to her husband, half opening her already tired mouth. When they finished talking, they threw their arms around each other—they wanted to be happy right away, now, sooner than their future and zealous work would bring results in personal and in general happiness. The heart brooks no delay, it sickens, as if believing in nothing. Smothered with fatigue from thinking, from talking and from pleasure, they woke again fresh and ready for life to repeat itself. Frosya wanted to have children, she would bring them up, they would grow and share their father’s work, the work of communism and science. In the passion of his imagination, Fedor whispered to Frosya words about the mysterious forces of nature which can bring wealth to humanity, about the root-and-branch transformation of the sorry spirit of man. Then they kissed and caressed each other, and their noble dream turned into delight, as if it had been accomplished all at once.

  In the evening Frosya went out for a short while, to buy groceries for herself and her husband; all this time, their appetites were growing. They lived through four days and nights without leaving each other. The father had not come back from his trip: probably he had been sent again to take a cold locomotive a long way.

  After two more days Frosya told Fedor that they could go on together like this a little longer but then they should get down to business and pick up life again.

  “Tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, you and I will start to live life the way we ought to,” Fedor said, and he put his arms around her.

  “The day after tomorrow!” Fro agreed in a whisper.

  On the eighth day, Fedor woke up sad.

  “Fro! Let’s get to work, let’s start living the way we should…. You’ve got to start going to class again.”

  “Tomorrow,” Fro whispered and she took her husband’s head between her two hands.

  He smiled at her, and gave in.

  “When do we start, Fro?” Fedor asked his wife the next day.

  “Soon, soon,” a sleepy, gentle Fro answered him; her hands were holding his hand, and he kissed her forehead.

  One day Frosya woke up late, the day had been flaming a long time outside. She was alone in the room, it was probably the tenth or eleventh day of her inseparable reunion with her husband.

  Frosya jumped quickly out of bed, threw the window wide open, and heard the mouth organ which she had completely forgotten. It was not being played upstairs. Frosya looked out of the window. Next to the shed in the courtyard a plank was lying and a barefoot little boy with a big child’s head was sitting on it and playing music.

  It was strangely quiet all through the apartment. Fedor had absented himself somewhere. Frosya walked out to the kitchen. There was her father, sitting on the stool and dozing, his head with his hat on resting on the kitchen table. Frosya woke him.

  “When did you come?”

  “What?” the old man stammered. “Today, early in the morning.”

  “But who let you in? Fedor?”

  “Nobody,” her father said. “The door was open…. Fedor found me at the station, I was sleeping there on the counter.”

  “And why were you sleeping at the station? What’s the matter? Have you no home?” Frosya asked him angrily.

  “What of it! I’m used to it,” the old man said. “I thought—I’d be in your way,…”

  “Well, all right, you old hypocrite! But Where’s Fedor? When will he be back?”

  The father was embarrassed.

  “He won’t be back,” the old man said. “He’s gone away…”

  Fro was silent in front of her father. The old man was looking carefully at the kitchen dishrags, and he went on:

  “In the morning the express went through. He got on, and went back to the Far East. Maybe, he says, he’ll go on from there to China, he doesn’t know yet.”

  “And what else did he say?” Frosya asked.

  “Nothing,” her father answered. “He told me to come home and take care of you. It depends on how things work out, he says, either he’ll come back here, or he’ll send for you.”

  “What kind of things?” Frosya asked.

  “I don’t know,” the old man said. “He said that you’d know all about it: communism, I guess, or something else, too, whatever happens.”

  Fro left her father. She went back to her room, leaned on the windowsill and began to look at the little boy and how he was playing his mouth organ.

  “Little boy!” she called out. “Come and call on me.”

  “Right away,” the musician answered.

  He stood up from the plank, wiped his instrument on the edge of his shirt, and walked to the building to call on her.

  Fro stood alone in the middle of the big room, in her nightgown. She was smiling as she waited for her guest.

  “Good-bye, Fedor!”

  Maybe she was stupid, maybe her life was only worth two kopecks and there was no need to love her and take care of her, but still she alone understood how to change two kopecks into two rubles.

  “Good-bye, Fedor! You’ll come back to me, and I’ll wait for you.”

  Her little guest was knocking shyly on the outside door. Frosya let him in, sat down on the floor beside him, took the child’s hand in her hands and began to feast her eyes on the young musician: in this being, probably, was just that humanity about which Fedor had told her so lovingly.

  THE POTUDAN RIVER

  GRASS WAS GROWING again on the packed dirt roads of the civil war, for the fighting had stopped. With peace the countryside grew quiet again, and almost empty of people: some had died in the fighting, many were getting over their wounds, resting with their families, forgetting the heavy work of war in long sleep, while a few of the demobilized soldiers had not yet managed to get home and were still walking in their old overcoats, with packs on their backs and field helmets or sheepskin hats on their heads—walking through the thick, unfamiliar grass which they had not earlier had time to see, or maybe it had been trampled down before by their marching, and not growing. They walked with stunned, astonished hearts, seeing again the fields and villages spread out along the roads; their spirit had changed in the torment of war, in its sicknesses, and in the joy of victory. They were walking now as if to some new life, only vaguely remembering what they had been like three or four years before, for they had been transformed into different people. They had grown out of their age, and become wiser, they had grown more patient, and they felt inside themselves the great worldwide hope which had now become the central idea of their still-small lives which had had no clear goal or purpose before the civil war.

  The last of the demobilized Red Army soldiers returned to their homes late in the summer. They had been retained in labor armies where they were used at various unfamiliar jobs, and they were sad, and only now were they told to go home to their own lives and to living in general.

  A former Red Army soldier, Nikita Firsov, had been walking for two days along the hills which stretch out above the Potudan River toward his home in a little-known district town. He was a man of twenty-five, with a modest face which seemed always sorrowing but perhaps this expression came not from grief but from some controlled goodness of character or from the usual concentration of youth. Light-colored hair, uncut for a long time, stuck out around his ears from under his cap, and his big gray eyes looked with a kind of sullen tension at the quiet, ordinary, monotonous countryside, as if he were not a local man.

  About noon Nikita Firsov lay down next to a little stream which ran from a spring along the bottom of a gorge down to the Potudan. He dozed on the ground under the sun, in the September grass which had stopped growing here since spring. It was as if the warmth of life had grown dark in him, and Firsov fell asleep in the quiet of this deserted place. Insects flew over him, a spider web floated above him, a wandering beggar stepped across him and, without touching the sleeper, uninterested in him, went on about his business. The dust of summer and of the long drought stood high in the air, making the light in the sky weaker and more dif
fuse, but still the time of peace, as usual, moved far behind the sun. Suddenly Firsov awoke and sat up, heavily, panting in fright as if he had lost his wind in some invisible running and fighting. He had had a strange dream of being smothered by the hot fur of a small, well-fed beast, a kind of little animal of the fields fed on pure wheat. This animal, soaked in sweat from its efforts and from its greed, had squirmed through the sleeper’s mouth into his throat, trying to burrow with its paws into the center of his soul, trying to stop his breathing. Choking in his sleep, Firsov wanted to scream and to run away, but the little animal pulled itself out of him by its own effort and disappeared—blind, wretched, frightened, and trembling itself—into the darkness of its night.

  Firsov washed his face in the stream, and rinsed out his mouth, and then he went on quickly; his father’s house was not far away, and he could get there by evening.

  As soon as it started to get dark, Firsov saw his birthplace in the dim onset of night. It was a gradual sloping ridge which rose from the bank of the Potudan up to the high-lying fields of rye. On this ridge was the small town, almost invisible now in the darkness. Not a single light was burning.

  Nikita Firsov’s father was asleep: he went to bed as soon as he came home from work, before the sun had gone down. He lived alone, his wife had died a long time ago, two sons had been killed in the imperialist war and his last son, Nikita, was off at the civil war. Perhaps he would come back, the father thought, for the civil war was going on closer to where people lived and there was less shooting than in the imperialist war. The father slept a lot, from sunset right through until dawn; otherwise, if he didn’t sleep, he’d start to think, imagining what had been long forgotten, and his heart would be torn with sorrow over his wasted sons, and with regret for the lonely life behind him. In the mornings he would go off quickly to the workshop making peasant furniture where he worked; he could endure this, and forget about himself. But by evening, his spirits would be low again and he would go back to the room where he lived, and sleep almost in terror until morning came: he had no need for kerosene. At dawn the flies would begin to bite him on his bald spot, and the old man would wake up and take a long time dressing, putting on his shoes, washing, sighing, stamping around, fixing up his room, muttering to himself, stepping outside to look at the weather, then going back in—all this just to waste the time that had to be filled before his work began in the furniture workshop.