“First of all, let’s eat,” Lyuba said, and she took her hand away from Nikita.
She had already got something ready: on completing the academy she had been given a bigger stipend both in provisions and in cash.
Nikita shyly started to eat the different tasty dishes his wife had prepared. He could not remember that anyone had ever given him something for nothing, he had never visited people in his whole life just for his own satisfaction, and then been fed by them too.
When they had eaten, Lyuba got up from the table first. She opened her arms to Nikita, and said:
“Well!”
Nikita stood up and embraced her shyly, afraid of hurting something in this special, tender body. Lyuba herself squeezed him hard to help him, but Nikita asked her: “Wait a minute, my heart is hurting badly,” and Lyuba released her husband.
Dusk had fallen outside, and Nikita wanted to start the stove, to get some light, but Lyuba said: “We don’t have to, I’ve finished studying, and today’s our wedding day.” Then Nikita turned down the bed while Lyuba undressed in front of him, feeling no shame before her husband. Nikita walked over to his father’s wardrobe and took off his own clothing quickly and then lay down next to Lyuba for the night.
Nikita got up very early the next morning. He cleaned up the room, lit the stove to boil the teakettle, brought in water in a pail from the shed for washing, and ended up not knowing what else to do, while Lyuba went on sleeping. He sat down on a chair, and grieved: now Lyuba would probably tell him to go back to his father for good because, it appeared, one had to know how to take pleasure, and Nikita couldn’t torment Lyuba just for the sake of his own happiness, but all his strength was pounding inside his heart, rushing up into his throat, leaving nothing anywhere else.
Lyuba woke up and looked at her husband.
“Don’t be downhearted, it’s not worth it,” she said smiling. “You and I’ll fix everything together.”
“Let me wash the floor,” Nikita asked her, “else it will be dirty here.”
“Well, go on and wash it,” Lyuba agreed.
“How pitiful and weak he is from his love for me!” Lyuba thought in bed. “How good and dear he is to me! May I always be a girl to him! I can stand it. And maybe some time he’ll start loving me less, and then he’ll be a strong man.”
Nikita was fidgeting with a wet mop on the floor, scrubbing the dirt from the boards, and Lyuba laughed at him from the bed.
“Here I am a married woman!” she told herself with delight, and she stretched out in her nightgown on top of the blanket.
When he had scrubbed the room, Nikita wiped all the furniture with a wet cloth, then he added cold water to the pail of hot water and pulled a washbasin out from under the bed so that Lyuba could wash in it.
After they had drunk tea, Lyuba kissed her husband on the forehead and went off to work at the hospital, telling him that she would be back at three o’clock. Nikita touched the place on his forehead where his wife had kissed him, and stayed by himself. He didn’t know why he wasn’t going to work today—it seemed to him it was shameful now for him to be alive, and maybe he did not have to. Why did he need to earn money now? He decided somehow to live out the rest of his life, until he wasted away from shame and grief.
Having looked over all the family property in their new home, Nikita found the food he needed to fix a one-dish dinner—a thick beef soup. After this work, he lay face down on the bed and began to count how much time would have to go by before the rivers started to flow again, when he could drown himself in the Potudan.
“I’ll wait until the ice breaks up; it won’t be long now,” he said out loud, to calm himself, and he dozed off.
Lyuba brought a present back with her from work—two earthenware bowls with winter flowers in them: the doctors and the nurses had celebrated her wedding. And she had held herself important and mysterious in front of them, like a real married woman. The younger girls among the nurses and the nurses’ aides were envious of her, one earnest worker from the hospital pharmacy asked Lyuba confidentially: was it true or not that love was something fascinating but that getting married for love was truly an entrancing happiness? Lyuba answered her that this was the honest truth, and that this was why people go on living in this world.
The husband and wife talked with each other in the evening. Lyuba said that they might have children, and that they should think about this ahead of time. Nikita promised to begin making some children’s furniture in overtime at the workshop: a little table, a chair, and a cradle-bed.
“The revolution is here for good, now it’s all right to have children,” Nikita said. “There’ll never be unhappy children ever again.”
“It’s all right for you to talk, but I’m the one who’ll have to bear them,” Lyuba said, pouting.
“Will it hurt?” Nikita asked. “In that case, better not to have children, not to suffer…”
“No, I’ll survive it, thanks just the same,” Lyuba agreed.
At twilight she fixed the bed, and then, so it wouldn’t be too crowded for sleep she extended it with the two chairs for their feet and had them sleep across it. Nikita lay down as he was instructed, was silent, and late in the night he cried in his sleep. But Lyuba didn’t fall asleep for a long time, she was listening to his crying, and she carefully wiped Nikita’s sleeping face with the end of the sheet, and in the morning, when he woke up, he had no memory of his sadness in the night.
After that their life together went on at its own pace. Lyuba took care of people in the hospital, and Nikita made his furniture. In his free time and on Sundays he worked in the yard and in the house, although Lyuba didn’t ask him to do this—she herself no longer knew exactly whose house it was. Once it had belonged to her mother, then it had been taken over as government property but the government had forgotten about the house—no one had ever come to check on its condition or to ask any money as rent. It made no difference to Nikita. He managed to get some green paint, through acquaintances of his father, and he painted the roof and the shutters as soon as spring weather had set in. With the same diligence he gradually fixed up the decrepit old shed in the yard outside the house, repaired the gate and the fence, and prepared to dig a new cellar since the old one had caved in.
The ice was already breaking up in the Potudan River. Nikita walked down to the bank twice, looked at the flowing water, and made up his mind not to die as long as Lyuba could stand him, and whenever she couldn’t stand him any longer, he’d manage to end it all. The river wouldn’t freeze over quickly. Nikita usually did his work around the house slowly so as not to be sitting in the room, making Lyuba tired of him. And whenever he finished it completely, he would fill the hem of his shirt with clay from the old cellar and walk back into the room. There he would sit on the floor and shape little human figures and other objects out of the clay, with no meaning or likeness to anything—things like hills with animal heads growing out of them, or the root system of a tree in which the root seemed an ordinary root but so tangled and impassable, with each of its branches pierced by another, gnawing at and torturing itself, that looking long at this root made you want to go to sleep. Nikita smiled carelessly and blissfully while he worked with his clay, and Lyuba would sit there on the floor next to him, sewing linen or singing little songs that she had heard at some time, and along with what she was doing she would caress Nikita with one hand, sometimes stroking his head, sometimes tickling him under his arm. Nikita lived through these hours with his heart beating gently, and he did not know if he needed something higher and mightier, or if life in actual fact was nothing very big—just about what he already had. But Lyuba would look at him with her tired eyes full of patient goodness, just as if what was. good and happy had become heavy work for her. Then Nikita would knead his clay toys back into the clay from which he had made them, and he would ask his wife if she didn’t want him to stoke up the stove, to heat water for tea, or to go out somewhere on an errand…
“You don’t
have to,” Lyuba would say, smiling at him. “I’ll do it all myself….”
And Nikita understood that life was indeed something very big, and maybe beyond his strength, that it was not all concentrated in his pounding heart—it was still stronger, more interesting and dearer in another person he could not reach. He picked up the pail and went to get water at the town well where the water was cleaner than in the tanks on the street. Nikita could not drown his grief with anything, with any kind of work, and he was afraid of the approaching night as he had been in childhood. When he had got the water, Nikita went along with the full pail to call on his father.
“What’s the matter, didn’t you have a wedding?” his father asked. “Did you do it in the Soviet way, secretly… ?”
“We’ll have it yet,” his son promised. “Come on, help me make a little table, with a chair and a cradle-bed. You talk to the foreman tomorrow, so he’ll give me the material…. Because we’ll be having children, probably.”
“Well, why not? That’s possible,” the father agreed. “But you shouldn’t be having children soon: it’s not time yet…”
In a week Nikita had made for himself all the children’s furniture he needed; he stayed late every evening, and worked hard at it. His father sanded each piece neatly, and painted it.
Lyuba set up the child’s furniture in a special corner, decorated her unborn child’s table with two earthenware bowls of flowers, and hung a newly embroidered towel over the back of the chair. Lyuba hugged Nikita in thanks for his devotion to her and to her unknown children, she kissed his throat, pressed herself against his chest, and warmed herself next to her beloved, knowing that there was nothing else that could be done. And Nikita dropped the hands with which he had covered his heart and stood there silent in front of her because he did not want to look strong when he was really helpless.
Nikita went to sleep early that night and woke up a little after midnight. He lay there in the quiet for a long time and listened to the sounds of the clock striking in the town—half past twelve, one, half past one, a single peal for each of the three times. In the sky outside the window a vague kind of growing started—it was not yet dawn but only a movement of the darkness, a slow stripping away of empty space, and all the things in the room and the child’s furniture, too, began to be visible, but after the dark night they had lived through they looked miserable and exhausted, as if they were calling out for help. Lyuba stirred under the blanket, and she sighed; perhaps she too was not asleep. In any case Nikita kept quiet, and began to listen hard. But Lyuba didn’t stir any more, she was breathing evenly again, and it pleased Nikita that Lyuba was lying there next to him, alive, essential to his soul, and not even realizing in her sleep that he, her husband, even existed. As long as she was whole and happy, Nikita needed for his own life only his consciousness of her. He dozed off in peace, comforted by the sleep of someone close and dear to him, and then he opened his eyes again.
Lyuba was crying, carefully, almost inaudibly. She had covered over her head, and was tormenting herself there alone, squeezing her grief to keep it down without a sound. Nikita turned his face to Lyuba and saw how quickly she was breathing and how dispirited she was as she sadly hid under the covers. Nikita was silent. It’s not possible to comfort every grief, there is some grief that ends only after the exhaustion of the heart, in long oblivion or in the distraction of the cares of daily living.
By dawn Lyuba had grown quiet. Nikita waited for a while and then lifted the corner of the blanket and looked at his wife’s face. She was sleeping quietly, warm, at peace, with dry eyes…
Nikita got up, dressed quietly, and went outside. A pale morning was starting across the world, and a wandering beggar was walking down the street, carrying a full bag. Nikita started to follow this man, so as to have a feeling of going somewhere. The beggar walked out of the town and set off along the high road to the settlement of Kantemirovka where from time immemorial there had been a big bazaar and many prosperous people. It’s true, they gave little away to a poor man there, and the beggar could really feed himself only in the faraway villages where poor peasants lived, but still it was fun in Kantemirovka, interesting, one could live at the bazaar just by watching the crowds of people, distracting the spirit for a little while.
The beggar and Nikita got to Kantemirovka about noon. In the outskirts of the town the beggar sat down in a ditch, opened his bag, and he and Nikita ate together, and then inside the town they went off in different directions because the beggar had his own plans and Nikita had none. He came to the bazaar, sat down in the shade next to a merchant’s bin with a hinged cover, and stopped thinking about Lyuba, about the cares of life, and about himself.
The watchman at the bazaar had already lived there for twenty-five years and all this time he had lived a rich life with his fat, childless old lady. The merchants and the cooperative stores were always giving him leftovers of meat, they sold him sewing materials at cost and even household necessities like thread, soap, and such products. For a long time he had been a small trader himself, selling broken-up packing cases and hoarding the money in a savings account. His responsibility was to sweep up the trash all through the fair grounds, to wash the blood from the counters in the butchers’ row, to clean the public latrines, and at night to patrol the trading sheds and the stores. But he only strolled up and down the bazaar at night in a warm sheepskin coat while he turned the hard work over to beggars and vagabonds who passed the night at the bazaar; his wife almost always emptied the remains of yesterday’s meat and cabbage soup into a garbage pail, so the watchman could feed some poor wretch for cleaning the latrines for him.
His wife used to order him not to do the dirty work himself, seeing how gray his beard had grown—he was no longer to be a watchman, but a supervisor. But it was hard to get a beggar or a tramp to work forever in exchange for grub like that; he’d work for a day, eat what was given him, ask for more, then disappear back into the countryside.
Recently the watchman had driven the same man out of the bazaar for several nights in a row. When the watchman shoved him, as he slept, this man would get up and walk away, saying nothing, and then he would sit down or lie down somewhere else behind a bin which was farther away. Once the watchman hunted this homeless man all night long, his blood fairly sparkling with his passionate desire to torment and to subdue this strange, exhausted creature. Twice the watchman threw his stick at him and hit him in the head, but by dawn the vagabond was still hiding from him—probably he had quit the fair grounds completely. In the morning the watchman found him again—he was sleeping on the roof of a cesspool at the latrines, out in the open. The watchman called to the sleeping man, who opened his eyes but did not answer, looked at him and then dozed off again with complete indifference. The watchman thought—this must be a dumb man. He prodded the sleeper’s stomach with the end of his stick and gestured with his arm that he should follow him.
In his neat, official apartment—kitchen and one room—the watchman fed the dumb man from an earthenware pot of cold soup, and after he had eaten ordered him to take a broom, a shovel, a scraper and a pail of lime from the shed and to clean the latrines thoroughly. The dumb man looked at the watchman with dull eyes: probably he was deaf, too…. But no, he couldn’t be, because the dumb man picked up in the shed all the tools and things he needed, just as the watchman had told him. This proved that he could hear.
Nikita did the job accurately, and the watchman came back later to see how it looked; for a start, it was tolerable, so the watchman took Nikita to the place where horses were hitched and told him to pick up all the manure and take it away in a wheelbarrow.
At home the watchman-supervisor instructed his wife that now she was no longer to scrape the leavings from their supper and dinner into the garbage pail but to keep them in a separate crock: let the dumb man have his fill to eat.
“And I suppose you’re going to have him sleep in the room, too,” the wife asked him.
“That’s not the poin
t!” the man declared. “He’ll spend the nights outside: for he’s not deaf, let him lie there and listen for robbers, and when he hears one, he’ll ran and tell me. Give him a piece of sacking, he’ll find a place and make himself a bed.”
Nikita lived for a long time at the bazaar. Having first become unused to talking, he thought, remembered, and worried less and less. It was only rarely that a weight lay on his heart, and he endured this without reflecting about it, and the feeling of grief inside him gradually weakened and disappeared. He was already used to living at the bazaar, and the crowds of people, the noise of voices, all the daily happenings, kept him from remembering about himself and from his own concerns—food, rest, and the desire to see his father. Nikita worked all the time; even at night when he would fall asleep in an empty box somewhere in the empty bazaar, the watchman-supervisor would come up to him and order him just to nap and to listen, not to sleep like the dead. “You’ve got to,” the watchman told him, “only the other day the crooks ripped two boards off a shop and ate fifteen pounds of honey without any bread.” And by dawn Nikita was already working, hurrying to get the bazaar clean before the people came; in the daytime he couldn’t eat, there was the manure to be shoveled into the communal cart, a new pit to be dug for slops and sewage, or old boxes to be broken up which the watchman got free from the traders and then sold, board by board, to peasants from the country, and then there was still more work to do.
In the middle of the summer they took Nikita to jail on suspicion of having stolen some chandler’s goods from the government store at the bazaar, but the investigation cleared him because this dumb, desperately tired man was too indifferent about the charge against him. The investigator could find no evidence of any desire for life or enjoyment or satisfactions of any kind in Nikita’s character or in his modest work at the bazaar as the watchman’s helper. In jail he didn’t even eat up the food that was given to him. The investigator realized that this was a man who did not know the value of either personal or public property, and there was not even any circumstantial evidence against him in the case. “There’s no reason to dirty up a prison with a man like that!” the investigator decided.
The Fierce and Beautiful World Page 19