The Fierce and Beautiful World

by Andrei Platonov

  “It’s hard for him,” the father agreed. “With just a bag it’s easier. Nobody at war had a trunk.”

  “And I thought they did have. I would have kept my good things in a trunk. They would all get broken or mussed up in a bag.”

  He took the duffel bag from his father and carried it home, and the father walked along right behind him.

  The mother met them on the porch of the house; she had taken time off from her job again, as if her heart had told her that this was the day her husband would arrive. She went straight home from the factory, so she could go to the station later. She was worried—maybe Semyon Yevseyevich would show up at their house: he liked to come sometimes in daytime, he had the habit of appearing in the middle of the day and sitting there with five-year-old Nastya and with Peter. It was true, Semyon Yevseyevich never showed up empty-handed, he always brought something for the children—candy, or sugar, or a white roll, or a ration coupon for goods in the store. Lyuba Vassilievna had never had any fault to find with Semyon Yevseyevich; during these two years that they had known each other Semyon Yevseyevich had been good to her, and he treated the children like their own father and even more thoughtfully than if he had been their father. But today Lyuba Vassilievna did not want her husband to see Semyon Yevseyevich. She cleaned up the kitchen and the living room, everything in the house must be tidy, with nothing strange left around. And later, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, she would tell her husband the whole truth herself, just how it had been. Luckily, Semyon Yevseyevich did not show up today.

  Ivanov went up to his wife, embraced her, and stood with his arms around her, not letting go, feeling the forgotten but still familiar warmth of a person who is loved.

  The little Nastya came out of the house and, seeing her father whom she did not remember, began to pull him away from her mother, tugging against his leg, and then she began to cry. Peter stood silently next to his father and his mother, with his father’s duffel bag still on his shoulder, and after waiting a little, he said:

  “That’s enough for you two, or else Nastya won’t stop crying, she doesn’t understand.”

  The father moved away from the mother, and picked Nastya up in his arms. She was crying in terror.

  “Nastya!” Peter called to her. “Pull yourself together, I’m talking to you. He’s our father, our own father!”

  Once inside the house, the father washed his hands and sat down at the table. He stretched out his legs, closed his eyes, and felt a quiet happiness in his heart, and a deep satisfaction. The war was over. His legs had covered thousands of miles during these years, lines of fatigue lay on his face, and pain stabbed his eyes behind their closed eyelids—now they wanted to rest in twilight or in darkness.

  While he sat there all his family bustled around the room and in the kitchen, preparing a feast to celebrate his return. Ivanov looked at all the things in his house in order: the clock, the china cupboard, the thermometer on the wall, the chairs, flowers on the windowsill, the Russian kitchen stove… they had all lived here a long time without him, and they had missed him. Now he had come back, and he looked at them, getting acquainted with each all over again as with relatives who had been living in grief and poverty during his absence. He breathed in the house’s own solid smell—decaying wood, warmth from the bodies of his children, a wisp of something burning in the stove. The smell was the same as it had been four years before, and it had not weakened nor changed while he had been gone. Ivanov had not found this smell anywhere else, although he had been in several countries and hundreds of dwelling places during the war; the air had smelled different there, it had none of the fragrance of his own house. Ivanov could still remember Masha’s smell, and how her hair had smelled; but that was of leaves in the woods, of some unfamiliar, overgrown road, not like a home at all but like all the troubles of life. What was she doing now, and how would she manage as a civilian, Masha, the spaceman’s daughter? God be with her…

  Ivanov saw that Peter ran the house. It was not just that he worked hard himself, but he gave orders to his mother and to Nastya, what to do and what not to do and how to do it right. Nastya listened obediently to Peter, and she was no longer frightened of her father as a stranger; she had the lively, concentrated face of a child who takes everything in life as true and serious, and a good heart, too, because she didn’t resent her brother, Peter.

  “Nastya, empty that pot of potato peelings, I need the dish Nastya dutifully emptied the pot and washed it. Meanwhile the mother was hurriedly fixing bread, made without yeast, to put in the oven where Petrushka had already made a fire.

  “Beat it, Mother, beat it quicker!” Petrushka ordered. “You can see I have the oven ready. You’ve got used to dawdling, you Stakhanovite!”

  “Right away, Petrushka, right away. I…” the mother said obediently. “I’ll put in raisins because your father probably hasn’t eaten raisins for quite a while. I’ve been saving them a long time.”

  “He’s eaten them,” Petrushka said. “They give raisins to our soldiers, too. Our soldiers—just look how fat they are when they walk around, they must really eat their rations…. Nastya, what are you sitting down for? Did you just stop in here to visit? Peel the potatoes, we’ll heat them for dinner in the frying pan. You can’t feed a family just on cake! ”

  While the mother was fixing the bread, Peter put a cast-iron pot of cabbage soup into the oven with a big oven tongs, so as not to waste the fire, and he gave orders even to the fire in the stove:

  “Why are you burning so unevenly, fidgeting every which way? Burn evenly. Get hot right under the food. Do you think trees grow in the woods for nothing? And you, Nastya, why did you put the kindling in the stove like this, you should have put it in the way I taught you. And you’ve peeled the potatoes too thick again, instead of thin peels. And why did you cut the meat up with the potatoes? That way some of the nourishment is lost. How many times do I have to tell you? Well, now is the last time, next time you’ll get it in the back of the neck!”

  “What’s the matter with you, Petrushka, picking on Nastya all the time?” the mother said meekly. “What has she done to you? How do you expect her to peel so many potatoes, and to get the peels as thin as a barber could make them, and the meat won’t be hurt anyway. Your father has come home, and all you do is lose your temper!”

  “I’m not losing my temper, I’m serious. Our father needs to be fed, he’s come home from the war, and you’re just wasting what we’ve got. How much food do you suppose we waste in a year just in potato peelings? If we had a pig, we could feed it for a whole year on potato peels alone, and if we sent it to a show, they’d give us a medal…. You see how it should be, but you just don’t understand!”

  Ivanov had not suspected that he was raising such a son. Now he sat there and marveled at his intelligence. But best of all he liked his little Nastya, whose small hands were busy with the housework, too, and they were used to it, and skillful. That meant, she must have learned to work around the house a long time ago.

  “Lyuba,” Ivanov asked his wife, “why don’t you tell me anything, about how you’ve lived all this time without me, how your health is, what you do at your job…”

  Lyuba Vassilievna felt as flustered by her husband now as a new bride: she had grown unused to him. She even blushed when her husband spoke to her, and her face took on the timid, frightened expression, as in her youth, which Ivanov had liked so much.

  “There’s not much to tell, Alyosha. We’ve got along all right. The children weren’t sick much, I’ve brought them up…. It’s bad that I’m home with them only at night. I work at the brick factory, on the press, it’s a long way to walk from here…”

  “Where do you work?” Ivanov did not understand.

  “At the brick factory, where they stamp out the bricks. I had no training, so at first I did general work around the place but then they taught me, and put me on the press. Work is fine, only the children are alone all the time…. You see how they’ve grown? They k
now how to do everything themselves, they’ve become grownups.” Lyuba Vassilievna was speaking quietly. “Whether this is good or not, Alyosha, I don’t know myself…”

  “We’ll find that out later, Lyuba. Now we’ll just all live together, and afterward we’ll work out what’s good and what’s bad…”

  “With you here everything will be better, but I just don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong all by myself, and I was frightened. Just think now, how to raise our children…”

  Ivanov stood up and started to walk around the room.

  “Well then, in general everything’s been all right, you say, and you feel good?”

  “All right, Alyosha, everything’s gone on, we’ve got through it. Only we missed you terribly, and it was awful to think you’d never come back to us, you could be killed there, like the others…”

  She cried as she leaned over the bread, which was already in its iron plate, and her tears dropped onto the dough. She had just brushed the top of one loaf with beaten egg and she rubbed the dough with the palm of her hand, continuing now to grease the holiday dish with her own tears.

  Nastya threw her arms around her mother’s leg, pressing her face into her skirt, and she looked up sideways at her father with a stern expression.

  Her father leaned down to her.

  “What’s the matter with you? Nastya darling, what’s wrong? Are you cross at me?”

  He lifted her in his arms, and stroked her head.

  “What’s wrong, daughter? You’ve just forgotten me entirely, you were very little when I went away to war…”

  Nastya put her head on her father’s shoulder and started to cry.

  “What’s the matter, my little Nastya?”

  “Mama’s crying, so I’m going to.”

  Peter, standing in bewilderment in front of the stove, was growing impatient.

  “What’s the matter with all of you? Your feelings are all upset while the fire’s going out in the stove. Shall we stoke it up again, is that it? And who’ll give us a ration ticket for more firewood? We’ve drawn all our ration and burned it, there’s hardly any left in the shed, about a dozen logs and one aspen. Come on, Mother, give me the dough, before the heat’s all gone.”

  Petrushka took the cast-iron pot of cabbage soup out of the oven and raked the fire across the hearthstone, while Lyuba Vassi-lievna, hurrying to please Petrushka, put the bread into the oven, forgetting to rub the second loaf with the beaten egg.

  There was something strange and not yet quite understandable to Ivanov about his own house. His wife was just as she had been before, with the same beloved, shy, but now deeply exhausted face, and the children were the same ones that had been born to him except that they had grown during the war years, just as they should have. But something kept Ivanov from feeling the happiness of his return with all his heart—probably he had become too unused to home life and couldn’t understand even his own folk, those closest to him, right away. He watched Peter, his grown-up firstborn, heard how he gave orders and directions to his mother and his little sister, observed his serious, worried face, and felt ashamed to realize that his father’s feeling for this little boy, his attraction to him as a son, was just inadequate. Ivanov felt even more ashamed of his indifference to Petrushka because he sensed that the boy needed love and care more than the others—he was pitiful just to look at now. Ivanov did not know in any detail the life his family had lived without him, and he could not clearly understand why Petrushka had developed as he had.

  Sitting with his family around the table, Ivanov realized what he had to do. He must get to work as quickly as he could, find a job in order to earn some money, and help his wife bring up the children properly—then gradually everything would get better, and Petrushka would be running around with other children, or sitting over his books, and not giving orders at the stove with the iron prong in his hand.

  At the table Petrushka ate less than any of the others, but he brushed up the crumbs and put them into his mouth.

  “What’s the matter with you, Petrushka?” his father said to him. “You eat up the crumbs, but you haven’t finished your piece…. Eat! Then Mother will cut you some more.”

  “It can all be eaten,” Petrushka said, frowning. “But I’ve had enough.”

  “He’s afraid that if he really begins to eat a lot, then Nastya will notice it and will eat a lot, too,” Lyuba Vassilievna said simply, “and he grudges it to her.”

  “And you don’t grudge anything,” Petrushka said calmly. “All I want is that there should be more left for you.”

  The father and mother glanced at each other and shivered at the words of their son.

  “And why aren’t you eating?” her father asked Nastya. “Looking at Petrushka, aren’t you?… Now eat the way you ought to, or you won’t get to be a big girl.”

  “I was born big,” Nastya said.

  She ate a small piece, but another, bigger piece she pushed aside, and she covered it with her napkin.

  “Why are you doing that?” her mother asked her. “Do you want me to put some butter on it?”

  “I don’t want any more, I’m already full.”

  “Come on, eat now. Why did you move that piece away?”

  “Because Uncle Semyon’s coming. I left this for him. It isn’t yours, it’s what I didn’t eat myself. I’ll put it under a pillow, or it will get cold.” Nastya got up from her chair, and took the bread, wrapped up in her napkin, over to the bed and placed it under a pillow.

  The mother remembered that when she had baked a loaf on the first of May she too had covered it with pillows so it would not get cold before Semyon Yevseyevich came.

  “And just who’s this Uncle Semyon?” Ivanov asked his wife.

  Lyuba Vassilievna did not know how to answer, and she said:

  “I don’t know exactly who he is…. He comes to see the children, the Germans killed his wife and his children, he is used to our children now and he comes to play with them.”

  “What kind of play?” Ivanov asked in surprise. “And why do they play here with you? How old is he?”

  Petrushka looked quickly at his mother and father; the mother didn’t answer her husband’s question but just looked at Nastya with sad eyes, and the father smiled unpleasantly, got up from the table, and lit a cigarette.

  “Where are the toys you and this Uncle Semyon play with?” the father asked Petrushka.

  Nastya got up from the table, dragged a chair up to the chest of drawers, took out a little book, and brought it to her father.

  “They’re book toys,” Nastya told him. “Uncle Semyon reads them out loud to me: look at Mishka here, he’s a toy but he’s in a book…”

  Ivanov took in his hand the book toys his daughter gave him: about a bear named Mishka, about a toy cannon, about a little house where an old woman named Domna lived and spun flax with her granddaughter.

  Petrushka remembered that it was time to close the damper in the stovepipe to keep the warmth inside the house. As he closed it, he told his father:

  “He’s older than you are—Semyon Yevseyevich. He’s been good to us, let him be…”

  Looking out of the window, Petrushka noticed that the clouds drifting across the sky were not the kind to be expected in September.

  “Look at those clouds,” he said. “They’re like lead, it must be because they’re full of snow. Are we going to have winter by morning? Because if so, we’ve got things to do—the potatoes are all still in the ground, nothing is fixed up for storing them yet…. What a situation!”

  Ivanov looked at his son, heard his words, and felt shy in front of him. He wanted to ask his wife in more detail just who was this Semyon Yevseyevich who had been coming to see his family for two years now, and just who it was he came to see—Nastya or his good-looking wife, but Petrushka was distracting Lyuba Vassi-lievna with household problems.

  “Give me the bread cards for tomorrow, Mother, and the coupons to be clipped to them. And give me the kerosene coupons
, too—tomorrow’s the last day, and we’ve got to get our charcoal, too, but you lost the sack for it. They’ll give it out only in our container, so look for the sack now, or sew up a new one out of old rags, we can’t get along without a sack! And Nastya shouldn’t let anyone cpme in our courtyard tomorrow to get water, or they’ll draw a lot out of the well. Winter will be here, the water level always drops lower then, and we won’t have enough rope to drop the bucket all the way down. You won’t have to eat snow but we’ll have to have firewood to melt it…”

  While he was saying this, Petrushka was sweeping the floor beside the stove and at the same time straightening up the kitchen utensils. Then he took the pot of cabbage soup out of the oven.

  “You’ve eaten the bread, now eat the cabbage soup,” he instructed them all. “And you, Father, tomorrow morning you’ve got to go to the District Council and the Military Commissary, to get on their lists right away, so we’ll get ration tickets for you sooner.”

  “I’ll go,” the father agreed obediently.

  “Don’t forget, be sure to go, or else you’ll oversleep in the morning and forget all about it.”

  “No, I won’t forget,” the father promised.

  The family ate its first dinner together after the war, cabbage soup with meat in it, in silence, and even Petrushka sat there quietly. It was as if the mother and the father and the children were all afraid of destroying by some accidental word the quiet happiness of the family sitting all together.

  Then Ivanov asked his wife: “How are you off, Lyuba, for clothes? You’re probably short of them?”

  “We’ve got along with our old ones, and now we’ll manage to get some new clothes,” Lyuba Vassilievna said smiling. “I made things over for the children, what they had, and your suit, two pairs of your trousers, and I altered all your linen for them. We didn’t have any extra money, you know, and the children had to have clothes.”

  “You did just right,” Ivanov said, “to give the children everything we had.”

  “I gave them everything, and I sold the overcoat you bought for me. I wear a quilted jacket now instead.”