On this particular night, Firsov’s father was sleeping as he always did, out of both habit and fatigue. A cricket had lived in the wall of the house for nobody knew how many summers—this might have been the same cricket as the summer before last, or its grandson. Nikita walked up to the wall and knocked on his father’s window; the cricket was silent for a little, as if he were listening— who was this strange man who came so late? The father got up from the old wooden bed on which he had slept with the mother of all his sons; Nikita himself had been born on this same bed. The old man was in his underwear, which had shrunk from long wearing and from laundering so that now it came only to his knees. The father leaned close to the windowpane and looked through it at his son. He had already seen and recognized him but he went on looking, wanting to look his fill. Then little and skinny, like a boy, he darted around through the hall and the courtyard to open the gate which had been locked for the night.
Nikita walked into the old room with its stove that could be slept on, its low ceiling, its one window onto the street. It had the same smell as in his childhood and as three years before when he had gone off to war; he could catch even the smell of his mother’s skirt there—the only place in the world where that smell was left. Nikita took off his pack and his cap, slowly slipped off his coat, and sat down on the bed. His father was standing in front of him all this time, barefoot and in his underwear, not daring yet to greet him properly, or to start talking.
“Well, how is it with the bourgeois and the Cadets?” he asked after a minute. “Did you kill them all, or are there some left?”
“We killed almost all of them, I guess,” his son said.
“They’re a flabby sort!” the old man said, talking about the bourgeois. “Whatever they might have done, they’d just got used to living free of charge.”
Nikita stood up in front of his father, and now he was the taller, by a head and a half. The old man stood quietly next to his son in the humble bewilderment of his love for him. Nikita put his hand on the father’s head and drew it to his chest. The old man leaned against his son and started to breathe deeply and fast, as if he had just reached his resting place.
On another street in this town, running straight out into the fields, stood a wooden house with green shutters. An elderly widow had once lived here, a teacher in the town school, with her two children, a boy of ten and a daughter of fifteen, a fair-haired girl named Lyuba.
Some years before, Nikita Firsov’s father had wanted to marry the widow teacher, but he soon gave up the idea. He took Nikita, twice, when he was still a little boy, to call on the teacher, and Nikita saw the thoughtful girl Lyuba there, sitting, reading a book, paying no attention to the strange guests.
The old teacher served tea with crackers to the cabinetmaker and made some remarks about enlightening the people’s minds and about repairing the stoves in the school. Nikita’s father sat there silently, he was embarrassed, he quacked and coughed and smoked his little cigar, and then shyly drank his tea out of the saucer, not touching the little crackers because—he explained—he was already full.
There were chairs in the teacher’s apartment, in both of its two rooms and in the kitchen, with curtains hung at the windows, and in the first room there were a little piano and a wardrobe, while the second, farther, room had beds, two armchairs upholstered in red velvet, and a great many books on shelves along the wall—probably a whole collected edition of some kind. This furniture seemed too luxurious to both the father and the son, and after having visited the widow twice, the father stopped going there. He never even managed to tell her that he had wanted to marry her. But Nikita would have liked to see the little piano again, and the pensive girl who had been reading, and he asked his father to marry the mother so they could call on her again.
“I can’t, Nikita,” the father told him then. “I’ve had too little education, so what would I talk to her about? And I’d be ashamed to invite them here; we haven’t any china, and our food’s not much good…. Did you see what armchairs they had? Antiques, from Moscow! And that wardrobe? With fretwork all over the front—I know what that is! And the daughter! She’s probably going to go to the university.”
And the father had not seen his old flame for several years, and had only occasionally missed her, perhaps, or thought about her at all.
The day after he came back from the civil war Nikita walked over to the military commissariat to register in the reserve. Then he walked around the whole familiar town where he had been born, and his heart ached at the sight of the rundown little houses, the broken walls and wattle fences, and the occasional apple trees in the courtyards, some of which had died and dried up for good. In his childhood these apple trees had still been green, and the one-storied houses had seemed big and rich, lived in by mysterious, intelligent people, and the streets then had been long, the burdocks high, and even the weeds growing in the empty lots and in the abandoned kitchen gardens had looked in the old times like sinister, dense forests. But now Nikita saw that the houses of the townspeople were miserable and tiny, they needed paint and repairs, even the weeds in the bare spots were poor things, lived on only by ancient, patient ants, and all the streets petered out in empty land or in the light-filled distance of the sky—the town had become a little one. Nikita realized this meant he had already lived a lot of his life, once large and mysterious objects had become small and boring to him.
He walked slowly by the house with green shutters where he had once gone to call with his father. He knew the paint on the shutters was green only from memory, for only traces of it were left now, it had been faded by the sun, and washed by storms and showers, right down to the wood itself, and the metal roof of the house had rusted badly, so that rain probably ran right through it now, and soaked the ceiling above the little piano. Nikita looked carefully into the window of this house; there were no curtains any longer, and a strange darkness could be seen on the other side of the window glass. Nikita sat down on a bench near the gate of this dilapidated but still familiar little house. He thought maybe someone would play the piano, and he would listen to the music. But everything inside was quiet, telling him nothing. After he had listened for a little, Nikita looked into the courtyard through a crack in the wall; old nettles were growing there, a little path wound through some bushes toward the shed, and three wooden steps led into the building. It must be that the old teacher and her daughter Lyuba had both died a long time ago, and the boy had probably gone off to the war as a volunteer…
Nikita walked back to his home. The day was moving toward its evening, his father would soon be coming back for the night, he would have to talk over with him how he was going to live from now on and where he would go to work.
There were a few persons walking along the main street in town, because people were beginning to perk up after the war. Now there were office workers and students on the street, demobilized soldiers and those convalescing from wounds, young people, men who worked at home or in handicraft trades, and others like them; factory workers would come out to walk later, after it had grown quite dark. People were dressed in old clothes, poorly, or else in outworn military uniforms dating from imperialist times.
Practically all the walkers, even those going arm in arm and about to be married, were carrying some kind of household goods. Women were carrying potatoes in kitchen bags, or sometimes fish, men held their bread rations under their arms, or a half a cow’s head, or they held tripe fixed for the kettle carefully in their hands. Almost no one seemed dejected except for an occasional tired old man. The younger ones were usually laughing, and looking closely at each other, in high spirits and confident, as if they were on the eve of eternal happiness.
“Hello!” a woman said shyly to Nikita from one side.
The voice both touched and warmed him at the same time, as if someone dear to him and in some trouble had called on him for help. But then it seemed to Nikita that it had been an error and that it was not he who was being greeted. Afraid of maki
ng a mistake, he looked slowly around at the people who were walking past him. There were only two of them, and both of these had gone by him. Nikita looked behind him—a big, grown-up Lyuba had stopped and was looking at him. She gave him a sad, embarrassed smile.
Nikita walked up to her and looked her over carefully, as if to see if she had kept herself in good shape, for even in his memory she was precious to him. Her Austrian boots, tied up with a string, were clearly worn-out, her pale muslin dress came only to her knees, probably because that was all the cloth there was; the dress filled Nikita with compassion for Lyuba right away, he had seen dresses like that on women in their coffins, while here the muslin was covering a living, grown-up, even if impoverished, body. She was wearing an old woman’s jacket on top of the dress—probably Lyuba’s mother had worn it when she was a girl, and there was nothing on Lyuba’s head—just her hair twisted below her neck into a light-colored, firm braid.
“You don’t remember me?” Lyuba asked him.
“No, I haven’t forgotten you,” Nikita answered.
“One should never forget,” Lyuba said with a smile.
Her clear eyes, filled with some secret emotion, were looking tenderly at Nikita as if they were feasting on him. Nikita was looking at her face, too, and his heart was both glad and sorry at the sight of her eyes, which were sunk deep from hardships she had lived through and lighted up with confidence and hope.
Nikita walked back with Lyuba to her home—she still lived in the same house. Her mother had died not long before, and her young brother had been fed during the famine by a Red Army field kitchen and had grown used to it and gone off to the south with the Red Army to fight the enemy.
“He got used to eating porridge, and there wasn’t any at home,” Lyuba said.
Lyuba was living now in just one room—she didn’t need any more. Nikita looked with a sinking feeling at this room where he had first seen Lyuba, the little piano, and the expensive furniture. Now there was no piano, and no wardrobe with fretwork on its front, there were just the two upholstered chairs, a table and a bed, and the whole room was no longer as interesting and as mysterious to him as it had been when he was younger—the paper on the walls was faded and torn, the floor was worn down, next to the big tiled stove stood a small iron one in which a handful of chips could be burned to make a little heat.
Lyuba pulled a notebook out of the top of her dress and took off her shoes, so that she was barefoot. She was studying medicine at the district academy; in those days there were universities and academies in all the districts because the people wanted to advance their knowledge as quickly as they could; like hunger and want, the senselessness of life had tormented the human heart too long, and it was high time to find out what the existence of men was all about, was it something serious, or a joke?
“They hurt my feet,” Lyuba said, pointing to her shoes. “You sit down for a while, and I’ll get into bed, because I’m terribly hungry, and I don’t want to think about it…”
Without undressing, Lyuba climbed under the blanket on the bed and placed her braid on top of her eyes.
Nikita sat there silently for two or three hours, waiting for Lyuba to go to sleep. Then night fell, and Lyuba stood up in the darkness.
“My friend, probably, won’t be coming today,” Lyuba said sadly.
“What of it? Do you need her?” Nikita asked.
“Very badly,” Lyuba said. “They have a big family, and the father is in the army, she brings me supper when there’s something left over…. I eat, and then we study together…”
“But do you have any kerosene?” Nikita asked.
“No, they gave me firewood…. We light the little stove, and then we sit on the floor and we can see by the flame.”
Lyuba smiled helplessly, and ashamed, as if some cruel, unhappy thought had occurred to her.
“Probably her older brother didn’t fall asleep,” she said. “He doesn’t like to have his sister feed me, he begrudges it… But I’m not to blame! I’m not so fond of eating: it isn’t me, but my head starts to ache, it starts to think about a piece of bread and keeps me from living and thinking about anything else…”
“Lyuba!” a young voice said outside the window.
“Zhenya!” Lyuba called out.
Lyuba’s friend walked in. She took four big baked potatoes out of the pocket of her jacket and put them on the iron stove.
“Did you get the histology book?” Lyuba asked her.
“And where would I get it?” Zhenya answered. “I signed up for it at the library…”
“Never mind, we’ll get along without it,” Lyuba declared. “I memorized the first two chapters in the department. I’ll recite it, and you take notes. Won’t that work?”
“Even better!” Zhenya answered, laughing.
Nikita stoked up the little stove so its flames would light the notebook, and then got ready to go back to his father’s for the night.
“You won’t forget me now?” Lyuba asked as she said good-bye to him.
“No,” Nikita said. “I have nobody else to remember.”
Firsov lay around the house for a couple of days and then went to work in the same furniture workshop where his father was employed. They listed him as a carpenter and assigned him to getting materials ready, and his pay was lower than his father’s, hardly more than half as much. But Nikita knew this was temporary, while he got used to the trade, and then they would give him a rating as a cabinetmaker, and his pay would be better.
Nikita had never lost his habits of work. In the Red Army people were busy not just making war—in their long halts and when they were being held in reserve Red Army soldiers dug wells, repaired the huts of poor peasants in the villages, and planted bushes on the tops of ravines to keep the earth from washing away. For the war would be over and life would go on, and it was necessary to think about this in advance.
After a week Nikita went to call on Lyuba again; he took her some boiled fish and some bread as a present—it was the second course of his dinner at the workers’ restaurant.
Lyuba was hurrying to finish a book by the window, profiting from the light still in the sky, so Nikita sat quietly for a while in her room, waiting for the darkness. But soon the twilight caught up with the quiet on the street outside, and Lyuba rubbed her eyes and closed her textbook.
“How are you?” Lyuba asked him in a low voice.
“My father and I get along, we’re all right,” Nikita said. “I brought you something to eat there, go on and eat it, please.”
“I’ll eat it, thank you,” Lyuba said.
“Then you won’t go to sleep?” Nikita asked.
“No, I won’t,” Lyuba answered. “I’ll eat my supper now, and I’ll be full!”
Nikita brought some kindling from the shed and lit the iron stove to make some light. He sat down on the floor, opened the door of the stove and fed chips and little twigs to the flames, trying to keep the heat at a minimum with as much light as possible. Lyuba sat down on the floor, too, when she had eaten the fish and the bread, facing Nikita and next to the light from the stove, and began to study her medical book.
She read silently, sometimes whispering something, smiling, and writing down some words on a pad in a small, quick handwriting, probably the more important points she read. Nikita just took care that the fire burned properly, and only from time to time—not often—looked at Lyuba’s face, and then stared at the fire again for a long time because he was afraid of bothering Lyuba with his looking at her. So the time went, and Nikita thought sadly that it would soon go by completely and it would be time for him to go home.
At midnight, when the clock struck in the tower, Nikita asked Lyuba why her friend Zhenya had not come.
“She’s got typhus, for the second time, she’ll probably die of it,” Lyuba answered, and she went back to reading her medicine.
“That’s really too bad!” Nikita said, but Lyuba did not answer him.
Nikita pictured to himself a sic
k and fevered Zhenya, and it seemed to him he could have fallen really in love with her, if he had known her earlier and if she had encouraged him a little. For she was also pretty, it seemed: it was a shame he had not seen her clearly in the dark and could hardly remember what she looked like.
“Now I want to sleep,” Lyuba said, sighing.
“Did you understand everything you read?” Nikita asked her.
“Absolutely all! Do you want me to tell it to you?” Lyuba offered.
“You don’t have to,” Nikita said. “You’d better keep it for yourself, because I’d forget it anyway.”
He swept the floor around the stove with a broom, and went home to his father.
After that he called on Lyuba almost every day, except that sometimes he let a day or two go by so that Lyuba would miss him. Whether she missed him or not he didn’t know, but on these empty evenings Nikita had to walk for eight or ten miles, around and around the whole town, trying to control himself in solitude, to endure his longing for Lyuba and to keep himself from going to her.
The Fierce and Beautiful World Page 17