The Fierce and Beautiful World

by Andrei Platonov

  After losing Aphrodite, Fomin realized that general blessedness and enjoyment of life, as he had expected them hitherto, were false dreams and that it was not in these that a man’s truth consisted and his real felicity. As he conquered his own suffering, endured what might have crushed him, and raised again what had been destroyed, Fomin unexpectedly felt a kind of free happiness which was independent both of scoundrels and of sheer chance. He understood his former naivete, all his nature started to grow harder, ripening in misery, and began to learn how to overcome the mountain of stone which blocked the road of his life; and then the world in front of him, which had seemed to him clear and attainable until now, spread itself out in a faraway mysterious haze, not because it was really dark there, or sad, or strange, but because it actually was enormously larger in all directions and could not be surveyed all at once, either inside a man’s heart or in simple space. And this new conception satisfied Fomin more than the miserable blessedness for whose sake alone, he used to think, people lived.

  But at this time he found himself, together with the rest of his generation, just at the start of the new road to life of the whole Soviet Russian people. All that Nazar Fomin had lived through up to this time was only an introduction to his hard destiny, an initial testing of a young man and of his preparation for the urgent historical task his people had undertaken. In actuality, there is something base and insecure in striving for one’s own happiness; a man begins to be a man only with the paying of his debt to those who brought him to life in this world, and it is here that his highest satisfaction lies, the true, eternal happiness which no misery, no grief, no despair, can ever destroy. But at that moment Fomin could not hide his grief over his misfortune, and if there had not been people around him who loved him as someone who thought as they did, perhaps he might have lost his courage completely, and not survived. “Calm down,” one of his closest comrades told him with the sadness of understanding, “calm yourself! What else did you expect? Who has guaranteed us happiness and truth? We’ve got to make them ourselves, because our party is giving meaning to life for all the world. Our party—it’s humanity’s honor guard, and you’re a guardsman. The party is not bringing up happy cattle, but heroes for a great time of war and revolution…. Problems will keep right on growing in front of us, and we’ll be climbing up such high mountains—from their tops you’ll see all the horizon right up to the very ends of the earth. What are you whining and being bored about? Live with us—what’s wrong with you? You think all warmth comes from the stove at home, or from a wife, don’t you? You’re an intelligent man, you know we’ve got no need for weak creatures who take care of themselves. A different kind of times have started.”

  It was the first time Fomin had heard that phrase “honor guard.” His life went on. Aphrodite, Nazar Fomin’s wife, hurt by the infidelities of her second husband, met Nazar one day and told him that life was sad for her, and that she missed him, that she had understood life wrongly when she had tried to find nothing but joy in it, without knowing either debts or obligations. Nazar Fomin listened to Aphrodite silently; jealousy and hurt pride were still inside him, held down and almost mute but still alive, like creatures that never die. But his joy at seeing Aphrodite’s face, the nearness of her heart, beating its way toward him, killed the wretched sadness in him, and after two and a half years of separation, he kissed Aphrodite’s hand which was being held out to him.

  New years of life followed. Circumstances often made Fomin their victim, leading him to the very edge of destruction, but his spirit could no longer grow weak in hopelessness or in dejection. He lived, thought, and worked as if he constantly felt some great hand leading him gently and firmly forward, to the destiny of heroes. And the hand which led him strongly forward was the same big hand that warmed him, and its warmth penetrated inside him to his very heart.

  “Good-bye, Aphrodite!” Nazar Fomin said out loud.

  Wherever she was now, alive or dead, her footprints were still on the ground here in this deserted town, and the ashes held things she had at some time touched with her hands, printing the warmth of her fingers on them—everywhere around him there still existed unnoticed signs of her life, which are never completely destroyed, no matter how deeply the world is changed. Fomin’s feeling for Aphrodite was humble enough to be satisfied even by the fact that she had breathed here once upon a time, and the air of her birthplace still held the diffused warmth of her mouth and the weak fragrance of her body that had disappeared—for there is no destruction in the whole world that leaves no trace behind it.

  “Good-bye, Aphrodite! I can feel you now only in my memories, but I still want to see you, alive and whole!”

  Fomin stood up from the bench, looked at the town which had settled into its own ruins and could be easily seen from one end to the other, bowed to it, and walked back to his regiment. His heart, schooled now in patience, would be able to stand, perhaps, even eternal separation, and could preserve its faithfulness and its feeling of affection until the end of his existence. He kept quietly inside himself the pride of a soldier who can perform any labor or human deed; he rejoiced when he triumphed over an enemy, and whenever despair in his heart turned into hope, and hope into success and victory.

  His orderly lit the candle in a saucer on the wooden kitchen table. Fomin took off his greatcoat and sat down to write a letter to Aphrodite: “Dear Natasha, trust me, and don’t forget me, just as I remember you. Trust me, that everything will work out as it ought to, and we’ll live again together. You and I will still have these wonderful children we’re sure to have. They wear my heart out in my yearning for you…”

  THE FIERCE AND BEAUTIFUL WORLD

  [I]

  ALEXANDER VASSILIEVICH MALTSEV was considered to be the best locomotive engineer at the Tolubeyev station.

  He was thirty years old, but he already had the rating of a first-class engineer and he had been driving express trains for a long time. When the first high-powered passenger locomotive of the “JS” (Joseph Stalin) series arrived at our station, it was Maltsev who was assigned to it, which was completely reasonable and right. His assistant was an elderly worker from the station repair shops named Fedor Petrovich Drabanov, but he soon passed his own examination as an engineer and went off to work on another locomotive and I was assigned to work in his place as an assistant on Maltsev’s crew. I had been an assistant before that, but only on older, less powerful engines.

  I was pleased at the assignment. Just looking at that “JS” locomotive, the only one then in our division, filled me with enthusiasm: I could look at it for a long time and a specially moving kind of happiness welled up in me, just as wonderful as what I felt when I first read Pushkin when I was a child. Besides, I wanted to work under a first-class engineer in order to learn from him the art of driving heavy, high-speed trains.

  Alexander Vassilievich was quiet and indifferent about my assignment to his crew; it was clearly all the same to him who worked as his assistant.

  Before each trip I always checked every detail of the engine, testing all its maintenance and auxiliary mechanisms until I could relax, confident that the engine was ready for the trip. Alexander Vassilievich would watch me work, following each step, but then he would check the machinery after me with his own hands as if he didn’t trust me.

  This happened repeatedly and I was already getting used to-having him mix into my responsibilities all the time, even though it disappointed me. But usually I forgot about my disappointment as soon as we started off. Turning away from the instruments which recorded the condition of the locomotive and from watching the left side of the train and the tracks ahead of us, I would watch Maltsev. He drove the train with the bold self-confidence of a great expert, with the concentration of an inspired artist, absorbing everything around him and thus achieving mastery over it. Alexander Vassilievich’s eyes looked straight in front of him, empty and abstracted, but I knew that through them he was watching the tracks in front and all of nature rushing toward us
—even a swallow, swept upward by the edge of the wind made by the train, would catch his glance for an instant, and in that instant his head would turn after the swallow: what happened to him behind us, where had he flown?

  We were never late through our own fault; on the contrary, they held us up often at way stations which were not scheduled stops, because we were ahead of the timetable and they could get us back into the schedule only by delaying us.

  Usually we worked without talking. Occasionally Alexander Vassilievich would rap the boiler with his wrench, without even turning toward me, wanting to direct my attention to something that wasn’t quite right in the way the engine was working, or preparing me for some sudden change, so I would be ready for it. I always understood these unspoken instructions of my senior comrade and I carried them out diligently, but he still treated me as impersonally as if I had been a fireman or an oiler, and at all our stops he always tested the pressure gauges and the tightness of the bolts in the connecting rods, and he would check the axle-boxes on the driving wheels, and everything else. If I had just examined and oiled some moving part, Maltsev would examine and oil it again, right after me, as if he didn’t consider my work efficient.

  “I just checked that crosshead, Alexander Vassilievich,” I told him once when he started to examine the block between a piston rod and a connecting rod just after I had done the same thing.

  “And I want to do it myself,” Maltsev answered, smiling, and there was a kind of sadness in his smile which startled me.

  I later understood the meaning of this sadness and the reason for his always holding himself aloof from us. He felt a superiority over us because he understood the locomotive better than we did and because he didn’t believe that I or anybody else could learn the secret of his skill, the secret of seeing at the same time the swallow flying by and the signal ahead, being aware at the same moment in time of the track, the whole train, and the power of the locomotive. Maltsev realized of course that we could outdo even him in our zeal, but he couldn’t imagine that we could love the engine more than he did or drive the train better—anything better, he thought, would be impossible. And this was why Maltsev was sad with us; he was lonesome with his talent, as if he lived all by himself, not knowing how to express it to us so we could understand.

  And it’s true, we couldn’t have understood his skill. I asked him once to let me drive the engine by myself; Alexander Vassilievich let me have his place for forty kilometers, and sat in the assistant’s place. I drove the train, and after twenty kilometers I was already four minutes late, and at the end of the longer climbs we were doing no better than thirty kilometers an hour. Maltsev took the engine back again from me; he took the grades at a speed of fifty kilometers an hour, and the engine didn’t sway on the curves as it did with me, and he quickly made up the time that I had lost.

  [II]

  I worked as Maltsev’s assistant for about a year, from August to July, and on July 5 Maltsev made his last trip as the engineer of an express train…

  We had picked up a train of forty passenger cars which was four hours late when we took it on. The train dispatcher came out to the engine and especially asked Alexander Vassilievich to make up as much of this time as he could, cutting it down to three hours if possible, for otherwise it would be hard for him to send a train of empty cars out on the next track. Maltsev promised him to make up the time, and we started off.

  It was eight o’clock in the evening, but the summer day was still hanging on and the sun was shining with a kind of triumphal, morning-time power. Alexander Vassilievich asked me to keep the steam pressure in the boiler constant at only half an atmosphere below maximum.

  In a half hour we pulled out into the steppe, on a quiet, soft stretch of land. Maltsev raised the speed to ninety kilometers and didn’t let it fall below this; on the contrary, he raised it to a hundred on the level and on small grades. On the grades I forced the firebox up to its maximum and made the fireman shovel coal by hand to help out the stoking machine, because my steam pressure was falling.

  Maltsev drove the locomotive on, throttle wide open. We were now headed straight for a big stormcloud which had appeared above the horizon. From our side the cloud was lighted up by the sun, but its interior was being ripped by severe, angry bolts of lightning, and we could see how the shafts of lightning plunged vertically down onto the quiet distant earth and we were racing madly toward that distant ground as if hurrying to its defense. It was clear that the sight appealed to Alexander Vassilievich; he leaned far out of his window as he stared ahead, and his eyes which were used to smoke and flame and distance were glittering now with excitement. He realized that the work and the power of our locomotive were comparable with the might of the storm, and perhaps this idea made him feel proud.

  Soon we saw a whirlwind of dust moving toward us across the steppe. This meant the storm was carrying the thundercloud straight at us. The air grew dark around us: the dry earth and the sand of the steppes whistled and crackled against the steel body of the locomotive, there was no visibility at all, and I started the generator to give us light and switched on the headlight on the front of the locomotive. Breathing was made hard by the burning whirlwind of dust forcing its way into the cabin and doubled in strength by the motion of the train toward it, and also by the gases from the firebox and by the early twilight surrounding us. The locomotive plunged on with a howl into the confused, stifling darkness, along the crack of light made by the front headlight. Our speed went down to sixty kilometers an hour; we were working and staring in front of us as if in a dream.

  Suddenly a big drop of water hit the windshield and dried up at once, consumed by the hot wind. Then an instantaneous flash of blue light blazed past my eyelashes and seemed to move through me to my shuddering heart itself. I grabbed at the injector stopcock, but the pain in my heart had already stopped, and I looked at once toward Maltsev—he was looking in front and driving the engine, with nothing changed in his face.

  “What was that?” I asked the fireman.

  “Lightning,” he said. “It wanted to get us, and it didn’t miss by much.”

  Maltsev heard what we were saying.

  “What lightning?” he asked, quite loud.

  “What we had just now,” the fireman said.

  “I didn’t see it,” Maltsev said, and he turned his face again toward the tracks in front of us.

  I was also wondering if this had really been lightning.

  “But where’s the thunder?” I asked.

  “We’ve gone right through it,” the fireman explained. “Thunder always comes afterwards. While it was striking, while the air was shaking loose, we’d already run past it. Probably the passengers heard it, they’re behind us.”

  We went on through the downpour but were soon past it, and we came out onto the hushed and darkened steppe over which peaceful clouds were now resting motionless, their work done.

  It had grown quite dark all around us, the quiet night had begun. We could sense the smell of the wet earth, the fragrance of the grass and the grain refreshed by the rain and the storm, and we plunged on, making up time.

  I noticed that Maltsev was driving the engine worse than usual; it swayed on the curves, and the speed went up to a hundred and more kilometers an hour, and then would drop to forty. I decided that Alexander Vassilievich was probably dead tired, and so I said nothing to him even though it was very hard for me to keep the firebox and the boiler running properly when the engineer was driving as he was. But we were supposed to stop in half an hour, to take on water, and Alexander Vassilievich could get something to eat there, and rest a little. We had already made up forty minutes, and by the end of our run we’d make up at least an hour.

  But still I was worried by Maltsev’s tiredness and I started to stare forward myself, at the tracks and the signals. On my side, on the left, an electric light was hanging on a cord, lighting up the driving shaft machinery. I could see quite clearly the heavy, accurate working of the left-hand driv
ing shaft, but then the light above it flickered and began to burn dimly, like a single candle. I turned around in the cabin. There, too, the lights were now burning at quarter strength, hardly illuminating the instruments. It was curious that Alexander Vassilievich had not signaled to me with his wrench, to point out what was wrong. It was obvious that the generator was not producing the required number of revolutions, and the tension had fallen. I started to adjust the generator, beyond the steam pipeline, and I was busy at this for quite a while, but the tension did not increase.

  At this moment a foggy cloud of reddish light moved across the dials of the instruments and the ceiling of the cabin. I looked outside.

  Ahead of us in the darkness—it was impossible to tell whether near or far away—a red beam of light was oscillating across our tracks. I didn’t understand what this was, but I knew what had to be done.

  “Alexander Vassilievich!” I shouted and I gave three whistles to stop the train.