Nikita stayed in jail for five days, and then went back to the bazaar. The watchman-supervisor was already tired out from having to work without him, so he was overjoyed when the dumb man showed up again. The old man summoned him to his apartment and gave him hot, fresh cabbage soup to eat, breaking all the rules of thrift in his own household. “Let him eat for once—it won’t ruin him!” the old watchman-supervisor reassured himself. “And then back to yesterday’s cold leftovers, when there are any.”
“Go over and clean up the rubbish along the grocers’ row,” the watchman instructed Nikita when he had eaten up the soup.
Nikita went back to his usual place. By now he was only dimly aware of himself at all, and he thought very little, about anything that happened to come into his mind. By autumn, probably, he would have forgotten entirely what he was. Looking around at the activity of the world he would have ceased to have any understanding of it. Other people might think this man was living but actually he would be there and exist only in forgetfulness, in the poverty of his mind, in his loss of consciousness, as if in some warmth of his own, taking shelter from mortal grief….
Soon after his stay in jail, at the end of summer when the nights were growing longer, Nikita started once to lock the door to the latrines, as required by the rules, when he heard a voice from inside:
“Wait a little, before you lock up! Are you afraid someone’s going to steal something out of here?”
Nikita waited for the man. His father walked out of the building, holding an empty sack under his arm.
“Hello, Nikita!” the father said, and he suddenly began to cry, sadly, ashamed of his tears and not wiping them away so as not to admit that he was crying. “We thought you were a dead man long ago. This means you’re all right?”
Nikita embraced his thin, drooping father; his heart, which had grown unused to feeling, had now been touched.
Then they walked through the empty bazaar and settled down in the passageway between two big merchants’ bins.
“I just came for some barley, it’s cheaper here,” his father explained. “But I was late, you see, the bazaar is closed. Well, I’ll spend the night now, and tomorrow I’ll buy it and go back home. And what are you doing here?”
Nikita wanted to answer his father, but his throat dried up and he had forgotten how to talk. He coughed, and whispered:
“I’m all right. Is Lyuba alive?”
“She threw herself in the river,” his father said. “But some fishermen saw her right away and pulled her out—she was in the hospital for a while, she got better.”
“And she’s alive now?” Nikita asked in a low voice.
“So far she hasn’t died,” his father declared. “Blood runs often from her throat; she probably caught cold when she tried to drown herself. She picked a bad time—the weather had just turned bad and the water was cold…”
The father pulled some bread out of his pocket, gave half of it to his son, and they sat there for a little, chewing their supper. Nikita was silent, and the father spread his sack out on the ground, and got ready to lie down on it.
“Have you got any place to sleep?” the father asked. “If not, you lie on the sack, and I’ll lie on the ground. I won’t catch cold, I’m too old…”
“But why did Lyuba drown herself?” Nikita whispered.
“What’s the matter? Does your throat hurt you?” the father asked. “You’ll get over it…. She missed you badly, and just wasted away from grief, that’s why… For a whole month she just walked up and down the Potudan River, back and forth, along the bank for sixty miles. She thought you’d drowned and would come to the surface, and she wanted to see you. While, it turns out, you were right here all the time. That’s bad…”
Nikita thought about Lyuba, and once more his heart filled with grief and with strength.
“You spend the night here alone, father,” Nikita said. “I’m going to have a look at Lyuba.”
“Go on then,” the father agreed. “It’s good going now, cooler. And I’ll come back tomorrow, then we’ll talk things over…”
Going out of the settlement Nikita started to run along the deserted high road. When he got tired, he walked again for a while, then he ran again in the free, light air spread over the dark fields.
It was late at night when Nikita knocked at Lyuba’s window and touched the shutters he had painted once with green paint. Now the dark night made them look blue. He pressed his face against the window glass. A pale light was filtered through the room, from the white sheets dropping off the bed, and Nikita could see the child’s furniture he had made with his father—it was all there. Then Nikita knocked loudly on the window frame. But Lyuba still did not answer, and she didn’t come to the window to see who he was.
Nikita climbed over the gate, went through the shed and then into the room—the doors were not locked; whoever lived here was not worried about protecting his property from thieves.
Lyuba was lying under the blanket on the bed, her head covered.
“Lyuba!” Nikita called to her in a low voice.
“What?” Lyuba asked from under the blanket.
She wasn’t asleep. Maybe she was lying there all alone in terror, or sick, or thought the knock on the window and Nikita’s voice were a dream.
Nikita sat on the edge of the bed.
“Lyuba, I’ve come, it’s me,” Nikita said.
Lyuba lifted the blanket away from her face.
“Come here to me, quickly,” she begged in her old, tender voice, and she held out her arms to Nikita.
Lyuba was afraid this would all go away; she grabbed Nikita by the arms and pulled him to her.
Nikita hugged Lyuba with the force that tries to pull another, beloved person right inside a hungering soul; but he quickly recovered his senses, and he felt ashamed.
“I didn’t hurt you?” Nikita asked.
“No, I don’t feel anything,” Lyuba answered.
He wanted her badly, so she might be comforted, and a savage, miserable strength came to him. But Nikita did not find from loving Lyuba intimately any higher happiness than he had usually known—he felt only that his heart was now in charge of his whole body and could divide his blood with his poor but necessary pleasure.
Lyuba asked Nikita—maybe he could light the little stove for it would still be dark outside for a long time. Let there be a fire inside the room, she wouldn’t be sleeping anyway, she wanted to wait for the dawn and look at Nikita.
But there was no more firewood in the shed. So Nikita ripped two boards off the side of the shed, split them into pieces and some kindling, and stoked up the little stove. When the fire was burning well, Nikita opened the little door so the light could shine outside the stove. Lyuba climbed out of bed and sat on the floor, facing Nikita, where there was some light.
“Is it all right with you now, you won’t be sorry to live with me?” she asked.
“No, I’m all right,” Nikita answered. “I’m already used to being happy with you.”
“Build up the fire, I’m chilled to the bone,” Lyuba asked him.
She was wearing only her worn-out nightgown, and her thin body was freezing in the cool half-light of early morning at the end of summer.
HOMECOMING
ALEXEI ALEXEIEVICH IVANOV, a Guards sergeant, left the army on demobilization. In the unit where he had served all through the war they saw him off with regret, with affection and respect, and with music and with wine. His close friends and comrades drove to the railroad station with Ivanov, and after the last farewells left him by himself. But the train was reported to be hours late and then, when those hours had run out, it was still delayed. Finally the cold autumn night began; the station had been destroyed in the war, there was no place to spend the night, and Ivanov hitched a ride back to his unit in a passing car. The next day his colleagues saw him off again. They sang their songs again and hugged him with words of eternal friendship, but this time they poured out their feelings more briefly and the aff
air involved only a small circle of his friends.
The second time Ivanov went to the station he learned that yesterday’s train had not yet arrived and that he might just as well go back to his unit again to spend the night. But it would have been awkward to be seen off a third time and to trouble his comrades, so Ivanov settled down for the tedious wait on the empty asphalt of the station platform.
An undamaged switchman’s cabin stood next to the main switch of the station. A woman in a quilted jacket, with a warm shawl around her head, was sitting on a bench by the cabin; she had been sitting there the day before, surrounded by her things, and here she still was, waiting for the train. When he had gone back the day before to sleep at his unit, Ivanov had wondered if he should not invite this lonely woman to go too, she could have spent the night with one of the nurses in a warm cottage, why should she freeze all night, for it was uncertain if she could get warm in the switchman’s cabin. But while he was wondering, the automobile had started, and Ivanov forgot all about the woman.
Now she was where she had been the day before, and just as motionless. This constancy and patience showed the fidelity and the immutability of the female heart, at any rate in relation to her baggage and to her home to which this woman was probably returning. Ivanov walked over to her: maybe she too would find it less boring with him than all alone.
The woman turned her face toward Ivanov, and he recognized her. This was a girl everyone called “Masha, the spaceman’s daughter” because she had once called herself this, although she was really the daughter of an employee in a public bath. Ivanov had run into her from time to time during the war when he visited an airfield service battalion (BAO) where this Masha, the spaceman’s daughter, worked in the restaurant as assistant cook.
At this time of day there was something cheerless and sad about the autumn landscape around them. The train which was supposed to take Ivanov and Masha to their homes was lost somewhere in the gray distance. The only thing that could possibly distract and comfort a human heart was the heart of another human being.
Ivanov started to talk with Masha, and he felt better. Masha was pretty, simplehearted, with goodness in her big worker’s hands and in her healthy young body. She was also going home, and wondering how she would manage with a new, civilian life; she had become used to her army friends, used to the fliers who loved her like an older sister, gave her presents of chocolate, and called her “Spacious Masha” because of her size and her big heart which embraced all brothers in one love, as real sisters do, and no one of them separately. And now it was unusual, strange, and a little frightening to Masha to be going home to relatives whom she was no longer used to.
Ivanov and Masha both felt themselves orphaned without the army, but Ivanov could not stay long in any sad or despondent mood. At times like this it seemed to him that someone far away must be making a fool of him, being happy in his place while he went on scowling like a simpleton. So Ivanov always turned back quickly to the business of living, that is, he would turn up some occupation or relaxation, some simple, improvised happiness as he himself called it, and this would pull him out of his depression. He turned to Masha and asked her, like a good comrade, to let him kiss her on the cheek.
“Just a little kiss,” Ivanov said, “because the train’s so late, and it’s so tiresome waiting for it.”
“Only because the train is late?” Masha asked, and she looked carefully at Ivanov’s face.
The former sergeant looked about thirty-five, the skin on his face had been blown by the wind and burned by the sun until it was dark brown, and his gray eyes looked modestly at Masha, even shyly, and although he spoke directly to her, he talked delicately, and politely. Masha liked his toneless, hoarse voice, like that of an elderly man, and his dark rough face with its look of strength and defenselessness. Ivanov tamped down the fire in his pipe with his thumb, not feeling the burn, and sighed as he waited for permission. Masha drew back a little from Ivanov. He had a strong smell of tobacco, of dry toasted bread, a little bit of wine, and of the clean things which come from fire or can make fire. It was as if Ivanov lived on just tobacco, rusks, beer and wine. He repeated his request.
“I’ll be careful, I’ll just kiss you lightly, Masha… Just imagine that I’m your uncle.”
“I already imagined… I imagined that you were my father, not my uncle.”
“That’s the way…. So you’ll let me?”
“Fathers don’t ask their daughters,” Masha said, laughing.
Later Ivanov told himself that Masha’s hair smelled like leaves falling in the woods in autumn, and he would never be able to forget this…
Going a little away from the tracks, Ivanov lit a small fire so he could make an omelet for Masha and himself for supper.
During the night the train came and took Ivanov and Masha on their way to their homes. They traveled together for two days and nights, and on the third day they came to the city where Masha had been born twenty years before. Masha collected her things in the compartment, and asked Ivanov to adjust the duffel bag more comfortably on her back, but Ivanov took the sack on his own shoulder and climbed down from the train with Masha although he was still more than a day’s travel from his own home.
Masha was surprised and touched by Ivanov’s attention. She felt suddenly scared of being left alone in the town where she had been born and had grown up but which had now become almost a foreign country to her. Masha’s mother and father had been driven out by the Germans and had perished no one knew where or how, and now in her home town Masha had only a cousin and two aunts, and she felt no strong attachment to them.
Ivanov fixed up a stopover in the city with the station commandant, and stayed with Masha. He really needed to go on as quickly as he could to his own home where his wife and two children, whom he had not seen for four years, were waiting for him. But Ivanov was putting off the happy, frightening moment of reunion with his family. He didn’t know just why he was doing this, perhaps it was simply because he felt like strolling around in freedom for a little while longer.
Masha did not know about Ivanov’s family situation and out of some girlish shyness did not ask him about it. She trusted Ivanov out of the goodness of her heart, with no thought of anything else.
Two days later, Ivanov traveled on, to his own home town. Masha went to the railroad station with him. Ivanov kissed her conventionally and promised with affection to remember her forever.
Masha smiled in reply, and said:
“Why remember me forever? It’s not necessary, and you’ll forget anyway…. I’m not asking anything from you, so forget me…”
“Masha, my dear one… where were you before? And why didn’t I meet you a long, long time ago?”
“Well, before the war I was in school, and a long, long time ago I didn’t even exist.”
The train pulled in, and they said good-bye. Ivanov went away, and he did not see that Masha cried when she was alone, because she could never forget anyone, neither her girl friends nor her comrades, with whom fate had ever linked her. Ivanov looked out of the train window at the houses in the little town which he would probably never see again in his life, and thought that it was in just such a little house, only in a different town, that his wife Lyuba lived with their children Peter and Nastya and they were expecting him. He had sent his wife a telegram from his unit, saying that he was coming home without delay and that he wanted to hug her and the children as soon as he could.
Lyuba Vassilievna, Ivanov’s wife, met all the trains coming from the west for three days in a row. She took leave from her job, did not fulfill her production quota, and did not sleep at night for happiness, listening to how slowly and uncaringly the pendulum swung in the clock on the wall. On the fourth day, Lyuba Vassilievna sent the children Peter and Nastya to the station to meet their father in case he came in the daytime, but she herself went to meet the night train.
Ivanov arrived on the sixth day. His son met him. Peter was now in his twelfth year, and at
first the father did not recognize his own child in this serious young fellow who seemed older than his age. The father saw that Peter was an undersized and skinny little boy, but still he had a big head and a broad forehead and his face had a kind of calm, as if he were already used to the worries of the world, and his small brown eyes looked out gloomily and unhappily, as if they could see nothing but disorder anywhere around him. Peter was carefully dressed; his shoes looked worn but still serviceable, his trousers and jacket were old, made over from his father’s civilian clothes, but without any rips or tears—they had been darned where this was needed and patched where that was necessary and all of Peter added up to a little man who was not rich but in good working order. The father was surprised, and he sighed.
“You’re my father, aren’t you?” Peter asked when Ivanov had thrown his arms around him and kissed him, holding him close. “You must be my father.”
“Your father…. How do you do, Peter Alexeievich?”
“How do you do? Why were you so long getting here? We’ve waited and waited.”
“The train, Petrushka, went slowly…. How are your mother and Nastya—alive and well?”
“As usual,” Peter said. “How many decorations do you have?”
“Two, Peter, and three medals.”
“But Mother and I expected—there wouldn’t be any empty space on your uniform at all. Mother has two medals, too, they gave them to her for her services to the war effort…. Why do you have so little baggage, just one duffel bag?”
“I don’t need any more.”
“Someone with a trunk, is it hard for him to fight?” the son asked.
The Fierce and Beautiful World Page 20