The Fierce and Beautiful World

by Andrei Platonov

  “You’ve become the boss in this house,” the father said. “Well, it’s all the same now, you can live as master here…”

  Wiping his tears, Petrushka answered his father:

  “Well, what kind of a father are you? What do you think you’re saying? And you’re a grownup, and were in the war…. Look, tomorrow, you go to the wounded soldiers’ cooperative, that’s where Uncle Khariton works at the counter, he cuts the bread, and doesn’t cheat anybody. He was in the war, too, and then came back. Go and ask him, he tells everything, and laughs about it, I’ve heard him myself. He has a wife, Anyuta, she learned to drive a truck and she delivers the bread now, but she’s very good, she doesn’t steal any of it. She made friends, too, and went out with them, they used to stand her treats. And she made friends with a man with a medal, only he has no arms, and he was the head man in the store where they sell manufactured goods…”

  “What are you talking about? You’d better go back to sleep, it will be light soon,” the mother said.

  “But you two wouldn’t let me sleep…. It won’t be light yet for a long time. This man with no arms became friends with Anyuta and they started to live all right. And Khariton was off at the war. Then Khariton came back, and he started to swear at Anyuta. He cursed her all day, and at night he drank wine and stuffed himself with food while Anyuta just cried, and didn’t eat a thing. He swore and he swore, then he got tired of it, and he told her: ‘What if you did have one fellow, and without any arms, too, you’re just a stupid old woman, while I managed without you to have Glashka and Aproska and Maruska, and there was a namesake of yours, another Anyuta, and then there was a Magdalinka thrown in, too.’ And he laughed and laughed, and Aunt Anyuta laughed, too, and then she started to praise him: ‘Khariton’s still a good man, there’s no better anywhere, he killed the Fascists, and there was no way for him to get away from all those girls.’ Uncle Khariton still tells us all about it at the store while he’s handing out the bread, piece by piece. And now they’re living together peacefully, as fine as can be. But Uncle Khariton goes right on laughing, and he tells us: ‘I was fooling Anyuta. I didn’t have any of those girls. There wasn’t any Glashka, or any Anyuta, or any Aproska, and there wasn’t any Magdalinka thrown in, because a soldier is the son of his fatherland, he hasn’t got time to be fooling around, his heart works only against the enemy. I was just frightening Anyuta on purpose.’ Lie down and go to sleep, Father, and turn out the lamp, the flame’s smoking without a lampshade…”

  Ivanov had listened with amazement to the story Petrushka told. “What a son of a bitch!” the father thought. “I was afraid he was just about to tell about my Masha…”

  Petrushka was starting to snore; this time he had really fallen asleep.

  He woke up when it had already become fully light, and he was frightened that he had slept so long, with nothing done in the house since dawn.

  Nastya was alone in the house. She was sitting on the floor turning the pages of a picturebook her mother had bought her a long time ago. She looked at it every day, because she had no other real book, and she traced the letters with her finger, as if she were leading.

  “What are you messing with the book for all morning long? Put it back where it belongs!” Petrushka told his sister. “Where’s Mother? Has she gone to work?”

  “To work,” Nastya said in a low voice, and she closed the “book.

  “And where did Father go off to?” Petrushka looked around the house, in the kitchen and in the main room. “Did he take his bag with him?”

  “He took his bag,” Nastya said.

  “What did he say to you?”

  “He didn’t say anything, he just kissed my mouth and my eyes.”

  “So, so,” Petrushka said, and he pondered for a moment. “Get up off the floor,” he ordered his sister. “Let me wash you cleaner and get you dressed, you and I are going out together….”

  At this moment, their father was sitting in the station. He had already drunk two hundred grams of vodka and had eaten a morning meal with a coupon issued for travelers. During the night he had made up his mind definitely to go back to the town where h had left Masha, to see her again, and maybe never to go away from her. It was too bad that he was much older than the spaceman’s daughter, whose hair smelled of outdoors. But there it would become clear how things might work out, there was no good in guessing about it in advance. Still Ivanov hoped that Masha would be at least a little pleased when she saw him, and this would be enough: it would mean there was someone close to him again, and someone fine, cheerful, with a good heart. And there he’d see how things stood.

  Soon the train came which would take Ivanov back in the direction from which he had come just the day before. He took his bag and walked out on the platform. “Masha won’t be expecting me,” Ivanov thought. “She told me to forget her anyway, and that we’d never see each other again, but here I am going back to her for good.”

  He climbed on to the platform of the last car in the train, and stayed there so he could see for the last time, when the train pulled out, the little town where he had lived until the war, where his children had been born. He wanted to look once more at the house he was leaving; he would be able to see it from the train because the street on which he lived ran straight from a level crossing which the train would go through.

  The train started off, moving quietly past the station switch-points into the empty autumn fields. Ivanov held on to the railing of the car and watched from the platform the little houses, the buildings, the barns, the fire tower of what had been his native town. From a distance he could recognize two high chimneys: one was the soap factory and the other the brick factory. Lyuba was working there right now, at the press which shaped the bricks: let her live now as she liked, and he would live the way he wanted to. Maybe he could have forgiven her, but what would that have meant? Anyway, his heart had grown hard against her, and there was no forgiveness in it for a person who had kissed and lived with someone else just so the time of war and of separation from her husband would not go by so tediously, all by herself. And the fact that Lyuba had been close to her Semyon or her Yevseiev, just because her life had been hard, because need and grief had got her down, this was only proof of her real feelings. All love springs from need and grief; if a person didn’t need anything and didn’t grieve he would never love anyone.

  Ivanov was getting ready to leave the platform, to go into the car and lie down and sleep, no longer wanting to see for the last time the house he had lived in and where he had left his children: there was no reason to punish himself to no good end. He looked ahead to see how far away the level crossing was, and he saw it at once. Here the railroad tracks crossed a country dirt road leading into the town; wisps of hay and straw were lying on this dirt road where they had fallen from farm wagons, together with willow twigs and horse droppings. Usually, except for two market days each week, this road was empty; it was not often that a peasant drove into town with a load of hay or went back to his village. Today was no exception; the country road was deserted. But from the town, out of the street the country road ran into, two children were running. One was bigger, the other smaller, and the big one was pulling the other by the hand because the little one could not keep up no matter how great the effort, no matter how hard the little legs pumped up and down. Then the bigger one started to drag the other behind him. At the last house, they stopped and looked toward the station, probably deciding whether to go on or if it was already too late. Then they looked at the passenger train going through the level crossing, and started to run along the road straight toward the train, as if they were trying to catch up with it.

  The car on which Ivanov was standing was almost at the crossing. Ivanov had picked up his bag to go into the car and lie down to sleep on an upper seat where the other passengers would not disturb him, but would those two children manage to make it before the last car had gone by? Ivanov leaned out of the platform, and looked back.

  The two
children, still holding hands, were running along the road toward the crossing. Suddenly both fell, then stood up, and started running again. The bigger one raised his free hand and, with his face turned in the direction of the train, beckoned toward himself, as if he were summoning someone to come back to him. And then they both fell down again. Ivanov noticed that the bigger child had one foot in a boot and the other in an overshoe; this was why he was falling down so often.

  Ivanov closed his eyes, not wanting to see and feel the hurt of the falling, exhausted children, and he realized how hot his chest had grown, just as if the heart languishing inside it, after beating uselessly all his life, had suddenly broken out into a kind of freedom, filling his whole being with warmth and with trembling. He was now aware of all that he had known before, but much more precisely and more realistically. Before, he had felt life through a barrier of pride and self-interest, and now suddenly he had touched its naked heart.

  Once more he looked from the steps of his car at the children disappearing in the distance. Now he knew they were his children, Petrushka and Nastya. They must have seen him when his car went past the crossing, and Petrushka was calling him home, to his mother, yet he had looked at them indifferently, thinking about something else, and had not recognized his own children.

  Now Petrushka and Nastya were running far behind the train along the sandy path beside the rails. Petrushka was holding on to Nastya’s hand as he had before, and dragging her behind him when her running couldn’t keep up with his.

  Ivanov dropped his bag from the car onto the ground, and then lowered himself to the bottom step and dropped off on to the sandy little road along which his children were running toward him.

  THE THIRD SON

  AN OLD WOMAN DIED in a provincial town. Her husband, a seventy-year-old worker living on a pension, went to the telegraph office and sent off six telegrams to various districts of the country, all with the same wording: “Your mother has died come Father.”

  The elderly clerk in the telegraph office counted the money for a long time, figured it wrong, and wrote out the receipts and stamped them with shaking hands. The old man looked gently at her through the wooden window out of his reddened eyes, and thought absentmindedly about something, trying to distract his heart from its grief. It seemed to him the elderly clerk had a broken heart, too, and a soul that was permanently confused—maybe she was a widow, or a wife abandoned in ill will.

  So here she was, working slowly, getting the change mixed up, her memory and her attention wandering; even for ordinary, uncomplicated work a person needs to have happiness inside him.

  The old father went back home after the telegrams had been sent; he sat down on the bench next to the long table, at the cold feet of his dead wife, and he smoked, and whispered to himself a few melancholy words, looked after the lonely gray bird hopping on the little perch in its cage, sometimes quietly cried a little, and then calmed down, wound up his pocket watch, looked at the window beyond which the weather was changing back and forth— first leaves would fall with flakes of wet, tired snow, then it would rain, then the late sun would shine, as cold as a star—and the old man was waiting for his sons.

  The oldest son arrived by airplaine the next day. The other five sons had arrived by the end of two more days.

  One of them, the third in age, came with his daughter, a little girl of six who had never before seen her grandfather.

  On the fourth day their mother was still lying on the table, but her body did not smell of death, so neat and tidy was it from her illness and from her dry exhaustion; having given abundant, healthy life to her sons, the old woman had kept for herself only her small, spare body, and she had tried to save it for a long time, no matter how wretched it was, so she could love her children and be proud of them until she died.

  The big men—ranging in age from twenty to forty—stood around the coffin on the table without talking. There were six of them, and the seventh was the father, smaller than the youngest of his sons and weaker, too. He held his granddaughter in his arms, her eyes blinking in terror at the sight of this strange, dead old woman, who barely looked at her out of unblinking white eyes all but closed under their eyelids.

  The sons silently wept their occasional, controlled tears, twisting their faces to endure their grief in silence. The father was no longer crying, he had cried himself out before the others, and now he was looking at his half-dozen powerful sons with concealed emotion, and with inappropriate joy. Two of them were sailors—ship captains—one was a Moscow actor, another—the one with the daughter—was a physicist, and a Communist, while the youngest son was studying to be an agronomist, and the oldest was working as foreman of a department in an airplane factory and wore a ribbon on his chest awarded him for his achievement as a worker. All six of them and their father stood quietly around their dead mother and mourned her wordlessly, hiding from each other their despair, their memories of their childhood, of the vanished happiness of that love which had welled up without interruption and freely in their mother’s heart and which had always found them— across thousands of miles. They had felt this constantly and instinctively, and been made stronger for feeling it and bolder in achieving success in their lives. Now their mother had been transformed into a corpse, she could no longer love anyone, and she lay there like any indifferent, strange, old woman.

  Each of her sons felt lonely now, and frightened, as if a lamp had been burning somewhere on the windowsill of an old house in a dark field, and it had lit up the night and the flying beetles and the blue grass, the swarms of midges in the air—the whole world of childhood around that old house abandoned by those who had been born in it; the doors had never been locked in that house, so that anyone who left it could come back, but no one had returned. And now it was as if the light had suddenly gone out in that window in the night, and reality had been transformed into remembrance.

  When she was dying, the old woman had instructed her husband to have a priest celebrate a requiem for the dead over her while her body was still lying in the house, but then to take her out and bury her in her grave without a priest, so as not to offend her sons and so that they could walk behind her coffin. The old woman did not believe in God as much as she wanted her husband, whom she had loved all her life, to mourn her more deeply and to grieve for her to the sound of prayer-singing and in the light of the wax candles above her lifeless face; she didn’t want to part from life without a celebration and without leaving some memory of herself behind. After their children’s arrival, the old man looked for a long time for some kind of priest and finally in the evening brought back with him a man, also elderly, dressed in ordinary, nonclerical clothes, pink-faced with the flush of vegetarian, Lenten eating, and with lively eyes in which some sort of small thoughts, for some special purpose, were glistening. The priest arrived holding an army officer’s map case against his thigh; he carried his spiritual requirements in it: incense, thin candles, a book, the vestment to hang around his neck, and a small censer hanging on a chain. He set up the candles quickly around the coffin and lit them, blew on the incense burning in the censer, and without any warning started to mutter, as he walked, what he read from the book. The sons who were in the room stood up; they felt uncomfortable and somehow a little ashamed. They stood there in a file in front of the coffin without moving, their eyes cast down. The old priest sang and muttered there in front of them without hurrying, almost ironically, watching these sons of the dead woman out of small, understanding eyes. Partly he was a little afraid of them, partly he respected them, and it was clear that he was not far from starting up a conversation with them, even from expressing his own enthusiasm for the building of socialism. But the sons were silent, no one—not even the old husband—crossed himself; this was an honor guard around a coffin and not participation in any divine service.

  When the priest had finished his requiem, he quickly packed up his things, blew out the candles burning around the coffin, and put all his property back in the offic
er’s map case. The father put some money in his hand, and the priest, without delaying, made his way through the ranks of the six big men without looking at them, and meekly disappeared outside the door. Actually, he would have stayed in this house for the funeral repast with pleasure, he would have talked about the perspectives of war and revolution, and been comforted for a long time by this meeting with representatives of the new world which he secretly admired but which he couldn’t make his way into; when he was alone he used to dream of sometime accomplishing some kind of heroic feat so he could burst into the brilliant future together with this new generation—to this end he had even submitted a petition to the local airfield, asking that he be taken up to a great height and dropped by parachute without an oxygen mask, but they had given him no answer.

  In the evening the father fixed up six beds in the second room of the house, and he put his little granddaughter beside him in his own bed, where the dead old woman had slept for forty years. The bed was in the same big room where the coffin was, and the sons went off into the other room. The father stood in the door until his sons had undressed and lain down, and then he closed the door and lay down to sleep next to his granddaughter, after having put out all the lights. The granddaughter was already asleep, alone in the big bed, her head under the blanket.

  The old man stood over her in the dim nighttime light: the falling snow outside picked up the faint glow of the sky and with it lighted the darkness inside the room through the window. The old man walked up to the open coffin, kissed his wife’s hands, her forehead, and her lips, and told her: “Now you rest.” He lay down carefully next to his granddaughter and closed his eyes, so his heart might forget everything. He drowsed off, and suddenly woke up again. A light was shining underneath the door to the room where his sons were sleeping—they had turned on the electric light again, and laughter and noisy talking could be heard.