The little girl began to toss and turn from the noise; maybe she wasn’t sleeping but only afraid to take her head out from under the blanket, afraid of the night and of the dead old woman.
The oldest son was talking about hollow metal propellers with enthusiasm and with the pleasure of deep conviction; his voice had a satisfied and powerful sound, and one could imagine his healthy teeth, which had been taken care of in good time, and his full red throat. The sailors were telling stories of foreign ports, and giggling because their father had given them old blankets they had used to cover themselves in childhood and adolescence. White pieces of coarse calico had been sewed on to the tops and bottoms of these blankets with the words “head” and “feet,” so the blankets could be spread correctly, without covering your face with the dirty, sweaty part where your feet had been. Then one of the sailors started to wrestle with the actor, and they rolled on the floor as they had when they were boys and all lived together. The youngest son egged them on, promising to take them both on with just his left hand. It was clear that the brothers all liked each other and were glad at this meeting. They had not been together for many years now, and no one knew when they might meet again in the future. Perhaps only at their father’s funeral? While they were wrestling, the two brothers tipped over a chair, and for a minute they were all still, but then, apparently remembering that their mother was dead and could hear nothing, they continued what they had been doing. Soon the oldest son asked the actor to sing something in a low voice: he must know the good new Moscow songs. But the actor said it was hard for him to start cold like that.
“Cover me up with something,” the actor insisted. They covered his head with something, and he started to sing from under the covering, so he wouldn’t feel embarassed. While he was singing, the youngest son did something which made another brother fall off the bed onto still a third who was lying on the floor. They all laughed, and they told the youngest one to lift his brother up again with just his left hand. The youngest son answered his brothers in a low voice and two of them burst out laughing—so loudly that the little girl stuck her head out from under the blanket in the dark room and called out.
“Grandfather! Oh, grandfather! Are you asleep? ”
“No, I’m not asleep, I’m all right,” the old man said, and he coughed shyly.
The little girl gave way, and sobbed. The old man patted her face: it was all wet.
“What are you crying for?” the old man whispered.
“I’m sorry for grandmother,” the little girl answered. “All the rest of us are alive, and laughing, and she’s the only one who died.”
The old man said nothing. First he puffed a little through his nose, then he coughed a little. The little girl grew frightened, and she raised herself up to see her grandfather better and to find out why he wasn’t sleeping. She looked at his face, and she asked him:
“And why are you crying, too? I’ve stopped.”
The grandfather patted her head, and answered in a whisper:
“It’s nothing… I’m not crying, it’s just sweat.”
The little girl sat down near the head of the bed.
“Do you miss the old woman?” she said. “Better don’t cry: you’re old, and you’ll die soon, then you won’t cry anyhow.”
“I won’t,” the old man answered quietly.
Silence suddenly fell in the other, noisy room. One of the sons had said something just before this. Then they all were quiet. One son said something again in a low voice. The old man recognized his third son by his voice, the physics scholar, the father of the little girl. His voice had not been heard before this; he had said nothing and had not been laughing. He quieted all his brothers somehow, and they even stopped talking to each other.
Soon the door opened, and the third son appeared, dressed for daytime. He walked up to his mother’s coffin and leaned over her dim face in which there was no more feeling left for anybody.
Everything was quiet in the late night. No one was walking or driving on the street outside. The five brothers did not stir in the other room. The old man and his granddaughter kept watching his son and her father, so attentively that they didn’t breathe.
The third son suddenly straightened up, put out his arm in the darkness and reached for the edge of the coffin, but he could not hold on to it and only shoved it a little to one side on the table, as he fell to the floor. His head hit the floorboards, but the son did not make a sound—only his daughter screamed.
The five brothers in their underclothes ran in to him and carried him back to their room, to bring him around and to calm him. After a little while, when the third son had recovered consciousness, all the others were dressed in their suits or their uniforms, even though it was only two o’clock in the morning. One by one they covertly scattered through the rooms and the yard outside, through the night around the house where they had lived their childhood, and they wept there, whispering words and sorrowing, just as if their mother was standing over each of them, listening to him, and grieving that she had died and forced her children to mourn for her; if she could have, she would have gone on living forever, so that nobody should suffer on her account, or waste because of her the heart and the body to which she had given birth…. But the mother had not been able to stand living for very long.
In the morning the six sons lifted the coffin on to their shoulders and carried it off to bury it, while the old man took his granddaughter by the hand and followed after them; now he had already grown used to sorrowing for the old lady and he was satisfied and proud that he, too, would be buried by these six powerful men, no worse than this.
APHRODITE
WAS HIS APHRODITE still alive? Nazar Fomin was no longer asking this question, with doubt and with hope, of people and of institutions—they had already answered him that there was no trace of his Aphrodite anywhere—but of nature, of the sky, the stars and the horizon, and of lifeless things. He believed some kind of oblique sign or cryptic signal would show him if his Aphrodite was still breathing, or if the breath within her had grown cold. He walked out of the dugout into the field, stopped in front of a small blue flower, looked at it for a long time, and finally asked it: “Well? You can see more down there, you’re connected to the whole earth, while I walk around up here all by myself—is Aphrodite alive or not?” The little flower was moved neither by his grief nor by his question, it stayed silent and went on living in its own way, the wind went on blowing indifferently over the grass just as it had already blown, perhaps, over Aphrodite’s grave or across her living, smiling face. Fomin looked into the distance, at the clear shining light of a cloud floating above the horizon, and he thought that maybe up there, from that height, it might be possible to see where Aphrodite was. He believed in a general bookkeeping in nature, in which could be measured the sadness of loss as well as the satisfaction of saving what one values, and through the general connectedness of all the living and dead things in this world, he wanted to find some faint, secret news of the fate of his wife Aphrodite, of her life or of her death.
At the start of the war Aphrodite had disappeared among the people fleeing toward the east from the Germans. Nazar Ivanovich Fomin himself was already in the army at that time and could not help his beloved in any way to save herself. Aphrodite was a young woman, easy to live with, not one to get lost without trace or to die of hunger or need among her own people. Some misfortune, of course, was possible along the roads so far away, or death by accident. But neither in nature nor among people could a word be heard or a trembling felt which answered a man’s open, expectant heart with sad news, so Aphrodite should still be living on this earth.
Fomin gave himself up to memories, reliving his past at the slow pace of happiness which has been lived through and fixed in the mind for good. In his memory he could see a little town, its lime-chalked walls blinding white in the sunshine, the tiled roofs of its houses, its orchards growing in gladness under a blue sky. Toward midday Fomin used to walk for lunch to
a cafe not far from the fireproofing construction enterprise where he was works superintendent. A gramophone played in the cafe. Fomin would go up to the counter, ask for sausages and cabbage, a so-called “flier” (salted peas to be thrown into the mouth), and also take a mug of beer. The woman serving the beer poured it into the mug, and Fomin would watch the stream of beer, interested chiefly in seeing that it was poured accurately, without filling the mug with empty foam; in this daily struggle with the foam on his beer he never looked carefully at the face of the woman serving him, and did not remember her when he walked out of the cafe. But one time the woman sighed deeply and desperately at the wrong moment, and Fomin stared at her as she stood behind the counter. She looked at him, too; the foam overflowed the mug, and she forgot what she was doing, paying no attention to the beer. “Stop!” Fomin said to her and for the first time he noticed that she was young, with a clear face, and dark, shining eyes, strangely combining thoughtfulness with laughter in their expression, and with thick black hair growing with a wild sort of strength on her head. Fomin turned his glance away from her, but his feeling had already been attracted by this woman, and the feeling was quite independent of his intelligence and of his peace of spirit, cutting right across them both, leading the man toward his own happiness. He looked at the foam, and did not mind its spilling uselessly across the marble surface of the counter. Later on, he called Natalya Vladimirovna his Aphrodite, because her image had appeared rising above the foam, although not of ocean waters but of another liquid.
And so Nazar Ivanovich lived with his Aphrodite for twenty years, as man and wife, not counting one interruption of two and a half years, and then the war had separated them; and now here he was hopelessly asking the plants and all the good creatures of the earth about her fate, and even looking at the movement of clouds and of stars in the sky with the same question. The information bureau concerned with evacuees had been searching for Natalya Vladimirovna Fomin zealously and for a long time, but so far they had not found her. There was no one closer to Nazar Fomin than Aphrodite; all his life he had grown used to talking with her, because this helped him to think and built up his confidence in whatever task he was carrying out. And now, at war, separated from Aphrodite for four years, Nazar Ivanovich Fomin used up all his free time in writing her long letters, which he mailed to the information bureau for evacuees in Buguruslan, with a request that they be forwarded to her as soon as she was found. During the war a great many such letters had probably piled up at the information bureau—some of them would be delivered some day, others never and would turn to dust unread. Nazar Ivanovich wrote his wife calmly and in detail, still believing in her existence and in his future reunion with her, but so far he had never received an answer from Aphrodite. The Red Army soldiers and officers under Fomin’s command checked the mail with great care, so that no letter might be lost which was addressed to their commander because he was practically the only man in the regiment who never received a letter either from his wife or from his relatives.
Now the happy years of peace had long gone by. They could not have lasted forever, for even happiness must change if it is to be preserved. In war Nazar Ivanovich Fomin had found another happiness for himself, different from what his peacetime work had given him but related to it; after the war he hoped to find a higher kind of life than anything he had yet experienced, either as a worker or as a soldier.
Our front-line units recaptured the southern city in which Fomin had lived and worked before the war. Fomin’s regiment was withdrawn into the reserve, held out of action because it was not needed. It made itself comfortable around the city, in the rear, so it could advance later on the long march to the west. Nazar Ivanovich wrote a letter to Aphrodite on his first day of rest, and then went on leave in what was the city he loved best in all the Russian land. The town had been shattered by artillery shelling, consumed by the flames of big fires, and its solid buildings had been reduced to dust by the enemy. Fomin was already used to seeing wheat fields trampled down by big machines, the earth cut with trenches, settlements where people lived torn apart by high explosives: this was the ploughing of war, in which the land is planted with what should never grow again upon it—the corpses of scoundrels, and with what was born for good and active living but preserved only in everlasting memories—the flesh of our soldiers, watching in death over our enemies in the earth.
Fomin walked through a fruit orchard to the place where Aphrodite’s cafe had once been. It was December. The naked fruit trees had grown cold for the winter and quiet in sorrowful sleep, and their spreading branches which had held fruit in the autumn had now been ripped by bullets and hung down helplessly in the ribbons of wood that survived, with only an occasional twig left whole and healthy. Many of the trees had been chopped down by the Germans for material with which to build defenses.
The building where the cafe had been more than twenty years before, and which had later become a dwelling house, now lay shattered into broken bricks and rubbish, murdered and dead, blown into space by the wind. Fomin could still remember the look of the building, but soon, after a little time, this would be effaced in him, and he would forget it too. Wasn’t it the same somewhere in the faraway, wild fields where Aphrodite’s big, beloved body was lying cold, gnawed at by carrion-eating animals, melting into water and air, the wind drying and blowing it away, so that all the substance of Aphrodite’s life might be spread evenly across the world, without trace, so that she herself would be forgotten as a person?
He walked on to the outskirts of the city where he had lived as a child. The desertedness cooled his spirit. A late wind was fluttering through the ruins of the silenced homes. He saw the place where he had lived and played as a youth. The old wooden building had burned down to its foundation, tiles crumbled by great heat lay on the scorched earth on top of his childhood home. A poplar in the courtyard, under which the little Nazar had slept in summertime, had been cut down, and it lay there next to its stump, dead, its bark rotting.
Fomin stood for a long time next to this tree of his childhood. His numbed heart suddenly seemed to lose all feeling, so as not to take any more grief into itself. But Fomin picked up some of the tiles which were still whole and put them in a neat little pile, as if he were getting material ready for future building, or collecting seed with which to plant all of Russia once again. This tile and all the others around it had been made in the kiln which Fomin had established here in the old days of peace and which he had managed for years.
Fomin walked out into the steppe; there, about a mile from the city, he had once upon a time built his first dam. He had been a happy builder then, but now the meadow of his youth was sad and empty, ripped up by the war and barren; unfamiliar little blades of grass could be seen in places through the thin, melting snow, indifferent to man, bowing humbly under the wind…. The earth dam had been shattered in the middle, the reservoir had dried up, and the fish in it had died.
Fomin went back to the city. He found Shevchenko Street and the house where he had lived after his return from Rostov, when he had finished the polytechnic institute. The house was no longer there, but a bench remained. It had formerly stood under the windows of his apartment; he used to sit on this bench in the evenings, at first alone and then with Aphrodite, and in this house that was now destroyed they had lived together in one room, with windows facing on the street. His father, a foundry worker, had suddenly died while Fomin was still studying in Rostov, and his mother had married again and gone away to settle in Kazan. The young Nazar Fomin had been left then to live by himself, but the whole sunlit world, filled with attractive people, that seductive world of youth and eternal unsolved mysteries, a world not yet constructed, poor, but filled with the hope and with the will of the Bolshevik workers, this world was waiting for young people, and their familiar, native land, made hungry and naked by the miseries of the first world war, lay there in front of them.
Fomin sat down on the bench where he had passed so many quiet summer evening
s talking and making love with Aphrodite. Now there was an empty, shattered world in front of him, and his best friend, perhaps, was no longer on this earth. Everything had now to be done from scratch, in order to go on with what had been planned a quarter of a century ago.
Probably Nazar Fomin’s life would have worked out quite differently if belief in the idea of the working class had not inspired him in those bygone days of his youth. It is possible he might have lived more quietly, but cheerlessly and fruitlessly; he might have worked out his own individual destiny, but he would not have known that invincible necessity which came when, trusting his people with nothing but his heart, he felt and understood the meaning and sense of his own existence. But when he presses close to the people who gave him birth, and through them to nature and to the world, to past time and to future hope—then there is opened to his spirit that secret spring where a man must drink to win strength without limit for what he does, and the power of really believing that his own life is important.
Soviet Russia was then only starting to work out its own fate. The people had set off on a great road with no returning, into that historical future where no one had marched before: it wanted to find the fulfillment of all its hopes, to achieve through work both deeds of lasting value and the dignity of human life, and to share these with other peoples…. Fomin had once seen a simple vision on the Sea of Azov when he was a boy. He was on the shore, and the single sail of a fishing boat was moving in the distance on a blue sea under a shining light-gold cloud; the boat moved farther and farther away, its white sail reflecting the sun with its gentle light, and the boat was still visible for a long time to the people on the shore; then it disappeared entirely over the enchanted horizon. Nazar had felt a melancholy happiness then, just as if someone he loved had called to him from the shining distance of sky and water when he could not follow him. And Soviet Russia seemed to him just like that boat disappearing into the distance, sailing off into the world and into time. He also remembered a midday hour of a forgotten day. Nazar had been walking through fields, moving down into a ravine where wonderful wild grass was growing; the sun called out to everyone from high in the sky, and plants and beasts moved up to answer it from the darkness of the earth—they were all of different colors, each of them different, not resembling each other: each took shape and came to life on the earth as best it could, just so it could come for this, take breath and celebrate, and play its part in the general assembly of all existence, succeed in loving all living things and then once more part forever from them. The young Nazar Fomin felt at that moment the great, dumb, and universal grief which only man can understand, express, and overcome, and this is precisely what man is for. Nazar was happy then about what he owed to mankind; he knew in advance that he would pay it because the working class and the Bolsheviks had taken on themselves all the obligations and all the burdens of humanity, and by heroic labor and by the power of an accurate understanding of their meaning on this earth the working people would carry out their assignment, and the dark destiny of mankind would have the truth break over it. This was how Nazar Fomin thought in his youth. He felt things then more than he knew them, he could not yet express the idea of all the people in clear language, but he was content with just the happy certainty that the dusk which had covered the world and shadowed the hearts of men was not an eternal darkness but only the dark which comes before the dawn.
The Fierce and Beautiful World Page 24