Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

The young woman stood there in surprise at this strange light in front of her; in the twenty years of her life she could not remember such an emptied, shining, silent void, and she felt that her heart itself would grow weak inside her, from the lightness of the air and from hoping that the man she loved would come back again. She saw her reflection in the window of a barbershop: it was commonplace enough, the hair fluffed up and then arranged in loops (this was a hairdo that people wore some time in the nineteenth century), her deep, gray eyes looked out with a strained, almost artificial, tenderness—she had grown used to loving the man who had gone away, she wanted to be loved by him steadily, without any interruption, so that a second beloved life might begin to grow inside her body, together with her own ordinary, uninteresting spirit. But she herself couldn’t love as she wanted to—strongly and steadily; sometimes she grew tired, and then she cried from disappointment that her heart could not be indefatigable.

She lived in a new, three-room apartment; in one of the rooms her widowed father lived—a locomotive engineer, while the other two were occupied by her and her husband, who had now gone off to the Far East to build and to put in operation some kind of secret electrical devices. He was always busy with the secrets of machines, hoping by these mechanisms to transform the whole world for the good of mankind, or perhaps for something else: the wife did not know exactly.

The father did not go to work often, because of his age. He was classified as a reserve engineer, replacing men who were sick, breaking in machines that had been withdrawn for repairs, or driving lightweight trains on local runs. They had tried to retire him on a pension a year ago. The old man, who didn’t know what a pension was, agreed at first, but after four days of freedom he walked back on the fifth day to the signal station, sat down on a little mound along the right of way, and stayed there until late in the night, weeping as he watched the engines pounding in front of the trains they were pulling. From then on he started to go to that little mound every day, to look at the engines, to live on his memories and his imagination, and then to go home in the evening as tired as if he had just come back from a long trip. At the apartment he would wash his hands, sigh, report that one engine had dropped a brakeshoe on the 9,000th gradient or that some such thing had happened, then he would shyly ask his daughter for some vaseline to rub into the palm of his left hand as if it had been chafed by the tight governor handle, have his supper, mumble something, and quickly sink into blessed sleep. The next morning the retired engineer would go back again to the right of way and pass another day in watching, through his tears, in dreaming, in remembering, in all the fury of his lonely enthusiasm. If he thought there was something wrong with an engine going by him or if the engineer was not driving it as he should, he would scream his judgment and his instructions from his little hill: “You’ve pumped too much water! Open the valve, you damn fool! Blow off!” “Tighten up your flanges, without losing steam: what do you think that is—a locomotive or a steam bath?” When a train was made up badly, with light, empty platform cars at the front or in the middle of the train where they could be damaged by heavy braking, from his little mound the engineer would shake his fist at the brakeman riding the last car. And when the engineer’s own favorite locomotive went by him, driven by his former assistant Benjamin, the old man would always find something flagrantly wrong with it—even when there was nothing wrong at all—and he would advise the engineer to take immediate steps against his careless helper. “Benjamin, Benjamin, my boy, smash him in the teeth!” the old engineer would scream from his little mound next to the right of way.

He took an umbrella with him on bad days, and his only daughter brought his dinner out to him on his little hill, because she was sorry for her father when he came back in the evenings, thin, hungry and enraged by his unsatisfied longing for his work. But not long ago, when the old engineer was shouting and cursing as usual from his little elevation, the Communist party secretary of the station, Comrade Piskunov, walked out to him, took the old man by the arm, and led him back to the station. The office manager entered the old man’s name again on the engineers’ staff. The engineer climbed into the cabin of a cold engine, sat down at the controls, and began to dream, exhausted by his own happiness, holding the locomotive control with one hand as if it were the body of all laboring humanity to which he had once more been joined.

“Frosya,” he said to his daughter when she came back from the station where she had accompanied her husband as he left on his long trip, “Frosya, give me something to chew on, so that if they call me to take the engine out during the night…”

From minute to minute he expected to be summoned to make a trip, but they seldom called on him—once every three or four days when some combined, lightweight freight shifting was scheduled or when there was some other easy task to be done. Still the father was afraid of going out to work unfed, unprepared, morose because he was always worried about his health, his spirits, and his digestion, since he considered himself an outstanding specialist.

“Citizen engineer!” the old man said sometimes, articulately and with dignity, addressing himself personally, and in reply he kept a highly significant silence, as if he were listening to a distant ovation.

Frosya took a pot out of the warming oven, and gave her father something to eat. The evening sun was lighting the apartment slantingly, the light percolated right through to Frosya’s body where her heart was warm and where her blood and her feelings were moving in steady harmony. She walked into her own room. A photograph of her husband as a child stood on the table; he had never had his picture taken after he grew up, since he was not interested in himself and didn’t believe his face had any significance. A little boy stood in the yellowing picture, with a big child’s head, in a poor shirt, with cheap trousers, barefoot; behind him were growing some magical kind of trees and in the distance there was a fountain and a palace. The little boy was looking attentively at a world he still hardly knew, without even noticing the splendid life behind him in the rear of the picture. The splendid life was really in the little boy himself with his wide, enthusiastic shy face, holding a stalk of grass in his hands instead of a toy, and touching the earth with his trusting, naked feet.

Night was already falling. The settlement herdsman was driving the milk cows back from the fields for the night. The cows were mooing, asking the houses for rest, the women and houseworkers were leading them into the courtyards, the long day was cooling off into night. Frosya sat in the twilight, in the happiness of loving and remembering her man who had gone away. Pine trees were growing outside the window, marking a straight path into the heavenly, happy distance, the low voices of some kind of insignificant birds were singing their last, drowsy songs, and the grasshoppers, watchmen of the darkness, were making their gentle, peaceful noises—about how everything was all right and they would not sleep and would keep on watching.

The father asked Frosya if she was going to the club; there would be a new program there, with a tournament of flowers, and with the off-duty conductors as clowns.

“No,” Frosya said, “I’m not going. I’m going to stay here and miss my husband.”

“Fedka?” the engineer said. “He’ll come back; a year will go by and then he’ll be here…. What if you do miss him! I used to go away, for a day, or for two, and your mother used to miss me: she was an ordinary old woman!”