“Her jacket’s too short; when she wears it, she can catch cold,"’ Petrushka spoke up. “I’m going to be a stoker in the public bath, and I’ll get paid, and then I’ll get her a good coat. They sell them at the market. I went and priced them, some of them look all right…”
“We’ll manage without you, without your wages,” the father said.
After dinner Nastya put on a big pair of glasses and sat at the window repairing her mother’s mittens which she wore over her gloves at work. It had already grown cold, autumn was in the courtyard. Petrushka looked at his sister and scolded her.
“What are you up to? Why are you in Uncle Semyon’s glasses?”
“I’m looking through the glasses, I’m not in them.”
“And so what? I can see! You’ll spoil your eyesight and go blind, and then you’ll be an invalid the rest of your life, on a pension. Take those glasses off right away, I’m telling you! And stop darning those mittens, Mother will do them herself, or I’ll do them as soon as I get time. Take your notebook and write out the alphabet, you’ve forgotten when you did it last!” •• “Is Nastya studying already, really?” the father asked.
“Not yet,” the mother answered, she was still too little, but Peter ordered his sister to keep busy every day, he had bought her a notebook, and she was writing out the letters. Peter was also teaching her arithmetic, making little piles of pumpkin seeds with her and then counting them, while Lyuba Vassilievna herself was teaching her the alphabet.
Nastya put the mittens down and took a notebook and a penholder with a pen in it out of a drawer in the chest. Content that everything was being done properly, Petrushka put on his mother’s jacket and went out to the courtyard to split wood for the next day; he usually brought the split wood into the house every night and piled it next to the stove so that it would dry out there, and burn both hotter and more economically.
That evening Lyuba Vassilievna got supper ready early. She wanted the children to get to sleep quickly so she could sit alone with her husband and talk with him. But the children were not sleepy after supper; Nastya, lying on the wooden couch, watched her father for a long time from under her blanket, while Petrushka, on top of the stove where he always slept in winter and in summer turned and tossed, coughed, whispered something, and didn’t settle down at all. It was already late in the night before Nastya closed her tired eyes and Petrushka started snoring on the stove.
Petrushka always slept lightly and on his guard: he was afraid something might happen in the night without his hearing it—a fire, or robbers breaking in, or his mother might forget to turn the key in the lock and the door would blow open and the house lose all its warmth. Tonight Petrushka was wakened by the troubled voices of his parents talking in the room next to the kitchen. What time it was—midnight or almost morning—he did not know, but his mother and father were not sleeping.
“Alyosha, don’t make so much noise, the children will wake up,” the mother was saying softly. “You mustn’t swear at him, he’s a good man, and he loved your children…”
“We don’t need his love,” the father said. “I love my own children…. Just think, he fell in love with somebody else’s children! I sent you an allotment from my pay, and you were working yourself—what did you need him for, this Semyon Yev-seyevich? Maybe your blood was still a little hot, no? Ah, Lyuba, Lyuba! I thought of you quite differently. It means, you’ve made a fool out of me…”
The father was silent, and then he struck a match, to light his pipe.
“What are you saying, Alyosha, what are you saying!” the mother said loudly. “I’ve brought the children up, they were hardly sick at all, and I’ve fed them…”
“Well, and what of it!” the father said. “Others left as many as four children behind, and they didn’t live badly, and the children grew up no worse than ours. But look at what kind of man you’ve let Petrushka grow into—he makes decisions like a grandfather but he’s probably forgotten how to read.”
Petrushka sighed on top of the stove, and he went on snoring carefully so he could go on listening. “All right,” he thought, “so I’m a grandfather, but it was all right for you with your meals all fixed for you…”
“But he’s been learning what’s hard and what’s important in life,” the mother said. “And he’s not behind in reading and writing.”
“Just who is he, anyway, this Semyon of yours? You could at least try to fool me by talking about him,” the father said angrily.
“He’s a good man.”
“You love him, don’t you?”
“Alyosha, I’m the mother of two children…”
“Well, go on, give me a straight answer!”
“I love you, Alyosha. I’m a mother, and it was a long time ago that I was a woman, and only with you, I’ve already forgotten when that was.”
The father was silent, smoking his pipe in the darkness.
“I missed you, Alyosha…. It’s true, the children were here, but they were no substitute for you, and I kept on waiting for you through those long, terrible years. I didn’t want to wake up in the mornings.”
“What does he do for a trade? Where does he work?”
“He works in the materials supply division at our factory.”
“Of course. A swindler.”
“He’s not a swindler. I don’t know… His whole family was Trilled in Mogilyev, he had three children and his daughter was already married.”
“That didn’t matter, he just took another family instead, one already prepared… and the old lady not so old, pretty good-looking too, so life was nice and cosy for him again.”
The mother made no answer. It was quiet, but soon Petrushka . heard his mother crying.
“He used to talk to the children about you, Alyosha,” the mother said, and Petrushka could tell from the voice that her eyes were full of big tears. “He used to tell them how you were fighting there for us, and suffering…. They would ask him: but why? and he would tell them: because you are a good man…”
The father laughed, and knocked the embers out of his pipe.
“So that’s the kind he is, your Semyon! Never saw me in his life, but gives me his blessing. That’s a character for you!”
“He never saw you. He made it all up on purpose, so the children wouldn’t forget you, so they’d love their father.”
“But just why, why did he need to do that? So that he could get you quicker? Just tell me, why did he do it?”
“Maybe he just had a good heart, Alyosha, that’s why. Why not?”
“You’re stupid, Lyuba. Forgive me, please. Everything has to be paid for.”
“But Semyon Yevseyevich always brought something to the children, every time he’d bring them candy, or white flour, or sugar, and just the other day he brought Nastya some felt boots but they didn’t fit—they were too small. And he didn’t ask anything from us for himself. We didn’t need anything either, Alyosha, and we’d have got along without it, we’re used to it, but he’d say he felt better inside himself when he was worrying about other people, then he didn’t grieve so much for his own family, all murdered. You’ll see him—this isn’t the way you think it is…”
“This is all some kind of nonsense,” the father said. “Don’t try to fool me… I’m tired of it, Lyuba, but I still want to» live…”
“Live with us, Alyosha.”
“I’m to live with you, and you’d live with Semyon?”
“No, I won’t, Alyosha. He won’t come here ever again, I’ll tell, him not to come any more.”
“So. That means there really was something between you, since: you now say there won’t be any longer. Ah, what a woman you. are, Lyuba! All you women are the same.”
“And just what are you?” the mother asked, offended. “What: does that mean—we’re all the same? I’m not…. I’ve worked day and night, we’ve been making fire-resistant bricks for the lining of locomotive fireboxes. I’ve got so thin in the face people don’t recognize me, even begg
ars don’t ask me for alms…. It’s been hard for me, too, with the children home alone. I’d come; home with the house not heated, nothing cooked, all dark, with the children unhappy, they couldn’t learn right off to take care of the. house themselves, the way they do now. Petrushka was little, too. And that’s when Semyon Yevseyevich started to come to see us.. He’d come, and sit with the children, because he lived all alone… ‘May I come and visit you,’ he asks me, ‘and get warm in your house?’ I tell him that it’s cold here, too, and our firewood is green and he answers me: ‘Never mind, it’s my spirit that’s chilled, just let me sit next to your children and you won’t have to light a fire for me.’ I said: ‘All right, come in for a while. With you here, it won’t be so frightening for the children.’ Then I got used to him, too, and we all felt better when he showed up. I’d look at him, and. remember you, that we had you…. It was so evil and sad here without you, let somebody come by, then it won’t be so lonely, and the time will go quicker. What good was time to us, when you weren’t here?”
“And then, then what happened?” the father asked hurriedly.
“Then nothing happened. And now you’ve come, Alyosha.”
“Well then, it’s all right, if that’s the way it was,” the father said. “It’s time to sleep.”
But the mother interrupted the father: “Let’s wait before we sleep. Let’s talk a little, I’m so happy with you back.”
“They can’t settle down any which way,” Petrushka thought on top of the stove. “They’ve made up, and that’s good; Mother has to get up early to go to work, but she’s still up. She hasn’t cheered up yet, but at least she’s stopped crying.”
“Did this Semyon love you?” the father asked.
“Wait. I’m going to tuck in Nastya, or she’ll throw the blanket off in her sleep, and freeze.”
The mother put a blanket on Nastya, and then walked into the kitchen and stood next to the stove to hear if Petrushka was sleeping. Petrushka understood this, and went on carefully snoring. Then his mother went back again, and he heard her voice:
“He probably loved me. He looked at me tenderly, I noticed that, but what was I—am I any good even now? Things weren’t easy for him, Alyosha, and he had to have somebody to love.”
“You might as well have kissed him, once your problem got so complicated,” the father said good-naturedly.
“Well, what do you think! He did kiss me twice, although I didn’t want to.”
“Why did he do it then, if you didn’t want to?”
“I don’t know. He said he just forgot, and then he remembered his wife, and I look a little like his wife.”
“And does he look like me?”
“No, he’s not like you. Nobody’s like you, you’re the only one, Alyosha.”
“I’m the one, you say. But that’s where counting starts—one, then comes two…”
“And he only kissed me on the cheek, not on the lips.”
“It doesn’t make any difference—where.”
“Yes, it does make a difference, Alyosha. What can you understand about how we lived?”
“What do you mean? I’ve fought all through the war, I’ve seen death a lot closer than you have…”
“You were fighting, and here I was helpless without you, my hands were shaking with grief, but I had to go on working cheerfully, to feed the children, to help the government against the Fascist enemies.”
The mother was talking quietly, but she was sick at heart, and Petrushka felt sorry for her: he knew that she had learned how to repair shoes, for himself and Nastya, so as not to pay the shoemaker, and he knew that she had repaired electric stoves for their neighbors in return for potatoes.
“But I just couldn’t go on living, and missing you,” the mother said. “If I could have, I’d have died. I know I would have died, but I had the children…. I just had to feel something else, Al-yosha, some kind of gladness, just to relax. One man said he loved me, and he treated me just as tenderly as you did once…”
“Who was that, your Semyon again?” the father asked.
“No, another man. He was working as a teacher for the district committee of our union, he had been evacuated…”
“The hell with him, whoever he was! So it turned out that he comforted you too, did he?”
Petrushka had known nothing of this instructor, and he was surprised that he hadn’t known about him. “Well, our mother’s a pretty sharp one, too,” he whispered to himself.
The mother answered the father: “I didn’t get anything from him, no happiness at all, and afterward everything was still worse. My heart reached out toward him because it was dying, but when he was close to me, really close, I didn’t care at all. I was thinking at that moment about all my household problems, and I was sorry that I had let him be close to me. I realized that I could feel peaceful only with you, really happy, and that I’d be able to relax only when you’d be close to me again. There was just nowhere for me to go without you, I couldn’t save myself even for the children. Live with us, Alyosha, things will be good for us!”
Petrushka heard how his father got up from the bed without speaking, lit his pipe, and sat down at the table.
“How many times were you with him, when you were close to him?” the father asked.
“Only once,” the mother said. “It never happened again. How many times should I have been?”
“As many as you liked, it was your business,” the father declared. “Only why did you say that you were the mother of our children, and had been a woman only with me, and that a long time ago… ?”
“It’s the truth, Alyosha.”
“What do you mean? What’s the truth? You admit you were a woman with him?”
“No, I wasn’t a woman with him. I wanted to be, but I couldn’t… I felt I’d be lost without you. I needed someone to be with me, but I was just worn out, my heart had grown dark, I couldn’t love my own children any longer, and for them, you know it yourself, I’d endure anything, for them I’d give the bones out of my body!”
“Wait a minute!” the father said. “You say yourself that you made a mistake with this new Semyon of yours, you didn’t get any happiness from him, but just the same you say you didn’t fall and weren’t ruined, you stayed safe and whole? Is that it?”
“I wasn’t done for,” the mother whispered. “I go on living.”
“It just means you’re lying to me about this, too. Where is the truth, for you?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I don’t know anything very much.”
“All right. To make up for it, I know a lot. I’ve lived through more than you have,” the father declared. “You’re a bitch, and that’s all there is to it.”
The mother was silent. The father could be heard breathing fast and hard.
“Here I am home,” he said. “The war’s over, but you’ve wounded me, in the heart. Well, what of it? You can live now with both of them, your Semyon and your Yevseiev. You’ve had your fun, and you’ve made a fool out of me, but I’m a human being, too, and not just some toy…”
In the dark the father started to put on his clothes and his shoes. Then he lit the kerosene lamp, sat down at the table, and put his watch on his wrist.
“Four o’clock,” he said, talking to himself. “Still dark. It’s the truth, what they all say, there’s lots of women but not a single wife.”
Everything grew quiet in the house. Nastya was breathing evenly in her sleep on the wooden couch. Petrushka burrowed into his pillow on the warm stove and forgot that he was supposed to snore.
“Alyosha!” the mother said in a gentle voice. “Alyosha, forgive me!”
Petrushka heard his father start to groan, and then the sound of breaking glass. Through cracks in the curtain, he could see the room grow darker where his mother and father were sitting, but the lamp was still burning. “He’s broken the lampshade,” Petrushka guessed, “and there’s no glass to be had anywhere.”
“You’ve cut your han
d,” the mother sard. “You’re bleeding. Take that towel from the cupboard.”
“Shut up!” the father yelled at her. “I don’t even want to hear your voice. Wake up the children, wake them up right away! Wake them up, I tell you! I’ll explain to them what kind of mother they have! Let them know about it.”
Nastya gave a little shriek of fright in her sleep, and woke up. “Mama!” she called. “Can I get in bed with you?”
Nastya loved to get into bed with her mother at night, and get warm under the blanket.
Petrushka sat up on the stove, swung his legs over the side, and said to them all:
“It’s time to sleep! Why did you wake me up? It’s not daylight yet, everything’s dark outside. Why are you making such a racket, and burning the lamp?”
“Sleep, Nastya, sleep, it’s still early, I’ll come to you in a minute,” the mother said. “And you, Petrushka, don’t get up, and don’t say anything more.”
“And what are you talking for? What does Father need?” Petrushka said.
“Just what business is it of yours what I need?” the father answered. “What a sergeant you are!”
“And why did you break the glass in the lamp? What are you frightening Mother for? She’s so thin because she eats her potatoes without any meat, and gives the meat to Nastya.”
“Do you know what your mother was doing here, what she was busy at?” the father screamed in a complaining voice, like a little boy’s.
“Alyosha!” Lyuba Vassilievna said sharply, and she turned toward her husband.
“I know, I know it all!” Petrushka said. “Mother was crying for you, waiting for you, and now you’ve come and she’s crying again. It’s you who don’t know!”
“You don’t understand anything about it!” the father said angrily. “What a sprout we’ve raised in you!”
“I do too understand it all, completely,” Petrushka answered from the stove. “It’s you who don’t understand. We’ve got things to do, we’ve got to live, and you’re cursing here like some kind of madman…”
Petrushka stopped talking, lay back on his pillow and unexpectedly, quietly, began to cry.
The Fierce and Beautiful World Page 22