When he did call on her, he was usually busy stoking the little stove and waiting for her to say something to him in the moments when she wasn’t reading in her book. Every time Nikita brought her some supper from the restaurant at the furniture workshop; she ate her dinners at her academy, but they served too little there and Lyuba was thinking a lot, studying, and still growing, too, so she didn’t get enough nourishment. The first time he was paid Nikita bought a cow’s horns in a neighboring village and boiled meat jelly on the little stove all night while Lyuba was busy at her books and her notebooks until midnight, when she mended her clothes, darned her stockings and washed the floor until the dawn came, and then took a bath in the courtyard in a tub filled with rainwater before people who might see her had even wakened from their sleep.
Nikita’s father was lonely every evening all alone, without his son, but Nikita never said where he was going. “He’s a man now, in his own right,” the old man thought. “He might have been killed or wounded in the war, so since he’s still alive, let him go!”
One day the old man noticed that his son had brought home two white rolls. But he wrapped them up right away in a piece of paper, and didn’t offer either of them to his father. Then Nikita put on his army cap, as was his habit, and walked out into the night, taking the two rolls with him.
“Nikita, take me along with you,” the father begged him. “I won’t say a thing, I’ll just look…. It must be interesting there, with something happening!”
“Another time, father,” Nikita said, embarrassed. “Besides, it’s time for you to sleep, you’ve got to go to work tomorrow.”
Nikita didn’t find Lyuba that night, she wasn’t home. He sat down on the bench by the gate, and began to wait for her. He put the white rolls inside his shirt so that they would keep warm until Lyuba arrived. He sat there patiently until late in the night, watching the stars in the sky and the few people passing by who were hurrying home to their children, listening to the sounds of the town clock striking in the tower, the barking of dogs in the courtyards, and various other quiet, unclear sounds which are not made in the daytime. He could probably have sat there, waiting, until he died.
Lyuba appeared, unheard, out of the darkness in front of Nikita. He stood up, but she told him: “You’d better go home,” and she was crying. She walked into her room, and Nikita waited a little longer outside, not understanding, and then walked after her.
“Zhenya’s dead,” Lyuba said to him in the room. “What will I do now?”
Nikita was silent. The warm rolls were lying against his chest— he didn’t have to take them out right then, right then there was nothing that had to be done. Lyuba was lying on the bed in her clothes, her face turned to the wall, and she was crying to herself, soundlessly and almost without stirring.
Nikita stood alone for a long time in the night-filled room, ashamed to disturb someone else’s deep sorrow. Lyuba paid him no attention, because the sadness of one’s own grief makes people indifferent to all other suffering. Nikita sat down without being asked on the bed at Lyuba’s feet, and took the rolls out of his shirt to put them down somewhere, but for the moment he couldn’t find anywhere to put them.
“Let me stay with you now!” Nikita said.
“But what will you do?” Lyuba asked, in tears.
Nikita pondered, afraid of making a mistake or of accidentally offending Lyuba.
“I won’t do anything,” he answered. “We’ll just live as usual, so you won’t be so worried.”
“Let’s wait, we’ve no reason to hurry,” Lyuba declared pensively and prudently. “But we’ve got to think what we can bury Zhenya in—they haven’t any coffin…”
“I’ll bring it tomorrow,” Nikita promised, and he put the rolls down on the bed.
The next day Nikita asked the foreman’s permission and started to make a coffin; they were always allowed to make coffins freely, without paying for the lumber. From lack of experience he took a long time making it but then he fashioned the place for the dead girl to lie inside it with special care and neatness; Nikita himself was upset just by thinking about the dead Zhenya and some of his tears fell among the shavings. His father, who was walking by, walked up to Nikita and noticed his trouble.
“What are you so sad about: has your girl died?” the father asked.
“No, her girl friend,” he answered.
“Her girl friend?” the father said. “Well, plague take her!… Here, let me even up the side of that coffin, you’ve made it look bad, it’s not right.”
When he finished work, Nikita carried the coffin to Lyuba; he didn’t know where her dead friend was.
A warm autumn lasted for a long time that year, and people were glad of it. “It’s been a bad harvest, so we’ll save on firewood,” thrifty persons said. Nikita Firsov had ordered ahead of time a woman’s coat to be made for Lyuba out of his Red Army overcoat, and it had been ready for quite a while without any need to wear it, thanks to the warm weather. Nikita kept right on going to Lyuba’s as he had before, to help her live and in return to get what he needed for the enjoyment of his own heart.
He asked her once how they should go on living—together or apart. And she answered that she would have no chance to feel happy before the spring, because she had to finish her medical academy as quickly as she could, and then they would see. Nikita listened to this long-term promise, he wasn’t asking for any greater happiness than what he already had, thanks to Lyuba, and he did not even know if there was anything better, but his heart was shivering from its long endurance and from uncertainty—what did Lyuba need of a poor, unschooled, demobilized man like him? Lyuba sometimes smiled when she looked at him with her bright eyes, which had large, incomprehensible spots in them, and the face around her eyes was filled with goodness.
Once Nikita started to cry, while he was covering Lyuba with a blanket for the night before he went home, but Lyuba only stroked his head and said: “Well, you’ll be all right, you musn’t worry so while I’m still alive.”
Nikita hurried home to his father, to take refuge there, to come to his senses, and to stay away from Lyuba for several days in a row. “I’ll read,” he decided, “and I’ll start to live the way I ought to, and I’ll forget Lyuba, I won’t remember her or even know her. What has she got that’s so special? There are millions of persons on this earth, and better than she is, too! She’s not good-looking!”
In the morning he couldn’t stand up from the bedding where he slept on the floor. His father, going out to work, felt his head, and said:
“You’re burning up. Lie down in bed! You’ll be sick for a while, and then you’ll get better…. You weren’t wounded anywhere in the war?”
“Nowhere,” Nikita answered.
Toward evening he lost his memory; at first he saw the ceiling all the time, with two late flies on it about to die, sheltering themselves there» for warmth with which to go on living, and then these same things began to fill him with melancholy and revulsion—it was as if the ceiling and the flies had penetrated into his brain, he couldn’t drive them out or stop thinking about them in one steadily swelling thought which had already eaten up all the bones in his head. Nikita closed his eyes, but the flies were seething in his brain, and he jumped up from the bed, to drive the flies from the ceiling, but fell back on the pillow; it seemed to him the pillow still smelled of his mother’s breath—his mother had slept right here next to his father—Nikita remembered her, and then he lost consciousness.
After four days, Lyuba found out where Nikita Firsov lived and showed up there for the first time. It was in the middle of the day, all the houses where workers lived were empty, the women had gone out to get food, and the children not yet old enough for school were scattered through the courtyards and the clearings.
Lyuba sat on Nikita’s bed, stroked his forehead, wiped his eyes with the end of her handkerchief, and asked him:
“Well, how about it, where do you hurt?”
“Nowhere,” Nikita sai
d.
His high fever had taken him far away from people and from things around him, and he barely saw and recognized Lyuba; afraid to lose her in the darkness of his flickering consciousness, he held on with his hand to the pocket of her coat, made over from his Red Army greatcoat, and he clung to it as an exhausted swimmer, between drowning and being saved, clutches at the shore. His illness was trying all the time to sweep him over the shining, empty horizon—into the open sea where he could rest at last on its slow, heavy waves.
“You have the grippe, probably, and I’ll cure you,” Lyuba said. “Or maybe it’s typhus. But never mind—it’s nothing to be frightened of.”
She lifted Nikita by the shoulders and leaned his back against the wall. Then quickly and insistently she dressed him in her coat, she found his father’s muffler and tied it around the sick man’s head, and she stuck his feet into a pair of felt boots which were waiting under the bed for winter to come. With her arms around Nikita, Lyuba told him to move his legs and she led him, shivering, out into the street. A horse cab was waiting there, Lyuba pushed the sick man into it, and they drove off.
“He’s not long for this world,” the driver said and he turned to his horses, urging them with his reins into a gentle trot.
In her own room Lyuba undressed Nikita, put him to bed, and covered him with the blanket, an old strip of carpet, a decrepit shawl of her mother’s—with everything she had that could keep him warm.
“Why stay there at your house?” Lyuba asked with satisfaction, tucking the blanket around Nikita’s burning body. “Just why? Your father’s off at work, you lie there all day alone, you get no care of any kind, and you just pine for me…”
For a long time Nikita thought and wondered where Lyuba had got the money for the cab. Maybe she had sold her Austrian boots, or her textbook (she would have learned it by heart first, so she wouldn’t need it) or else she had given the cabdriver her entire monthly stipend.
At night Nikita lay there in deep trouble: sometimes he understood where he was, and could see Lyuba who had lit the stove and was cooking food on it, and then he could see only the unknown phantoms of his mind, operating independently of his will in the compressed, feverish tightness of his head.
His fever chills grew steadily worse. From time to time Lyuba felt Nikita’s forehead with the palm of her hand, and counted the pulse in his wrist. Late in the night she poured out some warm water for him and then, taking off her outer clothing, lay down under the blanket with the sick man because he was shaking with chills and had to be warmed. Lyuba put her arms around Nikita and drew him to her while he rolled himself into a ball, away from the cold, and pushed his face against her breast in order to sense more closely this other, higher, better life and to forget his own torment, and his own shuddering, empty body. But now Nikita did not want to die—not because of himself, but in order to keep on touching Lyuba, this other life—and so he asked her in a whisper if he would get well or if he would die: for she had studied and must know the answer.
Lyuba hugged Nikita’s head in her arms, and answered:
“You’ll be well soon…. People die because they get sick all alone, and have nobody to love them, but you’re with me now…”
Nikita grew warm, and fell asleep.
After three weeks Nikita was well again. Snow had already fallen outside, everything had suddenly grown quiet, and Nikita went home to spend the winter with his father. He did not want to bother Lyuba until she had finished the academy. Let her mind grow to its full size, for she came from poor people, too. The father was glad at his son’s return, even though he had visited him at Lyuba’s two days out of three, each time taking some food for his son while for Lyuba he took no present of any kind.
In the daytime Nikita started to work again at the workshop, in the evenings he visited Lyuba, and the winter went well; he knew that she would be his wife in the spring and that a long and happy life would start then. Sometimes Lyuba would poke him, push at him, run away from him around the room, and then—after the playing—Nikita would kiss her carefully on the cheek. Usually Lyuba would not let him touch her without some reason.
“Or else you’ll get tired of me, and we’ve still got a whole life ahead of us!” she said. “I’m not that attractive, it just seems so to you.”
On their day off Lyuba and Nikita took walks along the winter roads outside the town, or they walked, half-frozen, along the ice of the sleeping Potudan River—far downstream as it ran in summertime. Nikita would lie on his stomach and look down through the ice to where the quiet flowing of the water could be seen. Lyuba too would settle down next to him and, touching each other, they would watch the flowing of the water and they would talk about how happy the Potudan River was because it was running out to the sea and because this water under the ice would flow past the shores of faraway lands where flowers were now blooming and birds singing. When she had thought a little about this, Lyuba made Nikita stand up from the ice at once; he was now going around in an old quilted coat of his father’s, it was too short for him and didn’t keep him very warm, so he might catch cold.
They patiently were friends with each other almost all winter long, tormented by anticipation of their imminent future happiness. The Potudan River was also hidden under the ice all winter long, and the winter grain was sleeping under the snow—these natural phenomena calmed Nikita Firsov and even comforted him: his heart was not the only thing lying buried until spring. In February, waking up in the mornings, he would listen—were there new flies buzzing yet? Outdoors he would look at the sky and at the trees in the garden next door: maybe the first birds were already flying in from faraway countries. But the trees, the grass and the eggs of the flies were all still asleep in the depth of their strength, in embryo.
In the middle of February, Lyuba told Nikita that final examinations would begin on the twentieth, because doctors were so badly needed and people could not wait long for them. And by March the examinations would be over, and then the snow could stay and the river could go on running under its ice until July if they wanted to! Happiness would start in their hearts before warmth began in nature around them.
During this time—just before March—Nikita wanted to get out of the town, to make the time go more quickly until he and Lyuba could live together. He volunteered at the furniture workshop to go out with a brigade of carpenters to repair furniture in village Soviets and village schools.
At the same time his father finished making, at his own pace, a big wardrobe as a present for the young people. It was like the one which had been in Lyuba’s room when her mother was about to become the bride of Nikita’s father. In the old carpenter’s eyes life was repeating itself for a second or third time. You could understand this but you couldn’t change it, and Nikita’s father, sighing deeply, loaded the wardrobe on to a sledge and hauled it to the home of his son’s intended bride. The snow was getting warm and melting under the sun, but the old man was still strong and he pulled the sledge with some effort even across the black stretches of bare earth. He was secretly thinking that he himself could easily marry this girl, Lyuba, although he had once been too shy for her mother, but he was somehow still ashamed, and he didn’t have enough at home to attract and pamper a young girl like her. And Nikita’s father concluded from this that life was far from normal. His son had only just come back from war, and here he was leaving home again, this time for good and all. The old man would have to pick up a beggar off the streets, not for the sake of family life but so that there might be some kind of second being in the house, if only a domesticated hedgehog or a rabbit: it might upset life and dirty everything up, but without it he’d cease to be a man.
When he gave Lyuba the wardrobe, Nikita’s father asked her when he would be coming to her wedding.
“Whenever Nikita comes back. I’m ready now,” Lyuba said.
That night the father walked fourteen miles to the village where Nikita was fixing desks in a school. Nikita was asleep on the floor in an empty
classroom, but the father woke him and told him it was time to go back to the town—he could get married.
“You get going, and I’ll finish the desks for you,” the father told him.
Nikita put on his cap and right away, without waiting for the: dawn, set out on foot for the town. He walked alone through the whole second half of the night through empty country: the wind off the fields was blowing fitfully around him, sometimes in his face, sometimes against his back, and sometimes disappearing entirely into the silence of the ravine next to the road. The ground lay dark along the slopes and in the high fields, the snow had run down into the bottom lands, there was the smell of young water and of rotting grass dead since the autumn. But the autumn was already a forgotten, long-past time—the earth was now poor and free, it would give birth to everything from scratch and only to new things which had never lived before. Nikita wasn’t even in a hurry to get to Lyuba; he liked being in that dim light of night on that unthinking, early ground which had forgotten all that had already died on it and knew nothing of what it would give birth to in the warmth of the new summer.
Toward morning Nikita got to Lyuba’s house. A light hoar frost covered the familiar roof and the brick foundations—Lyuba was probably sleeping sweetly now in her warm bed, and Nikita walked past her house so as not to wake his bride, not to let her body cool just because of him.
By evening of that day Nikita Firsov and Lyubov Kuznetsova had been registered in the district Soviet as married, and they went back to Lyuba’s room, and didn’t know what to do. Nikita now felt it on his conscience that complete happiness had arrived for him, that the person he needed most in all the world wanted to live together with him, as if there were some great and priceless goodness hidden inside him. He took Lyuba’s hand and held it for a long time; he delighted in the warm feeling of her palm, through it he could feel the distant beating of the heart he loved, and he thought about the mystery he could not understand: why Lyuba was smiling at him, and loved him for reasons he could not guess. He knew precisely, for himself, just why Lyuba was dear to him.
The Fierce and Beautiful World Page 18