Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

At first, Frosya had been a bad student. Her heart was not attracted by Pupin’s induction coils, relay gears, or figuring the resistance of metal wires. But her husband’s lips had once pronounced these words and, what’s more, he had showed her the vital functioning of these objects which were dead for her, and the mysterious quality of the delicate calculations thanks to which machines live. Frosya’s husband had the capacity to feel the strength of an electric current like a personal passion. He could animate everything that engaged his hands or his mind, and so he had a real sense of the direction of forces in any mechanical construction, and he could feel directly the patient, suffering resistance of the metal structure of a machine.

Since then induction coils, Wheatstone bridges, contractors, and illumination units had become sacred objects for Frosya, as if they were spiritual parts of the man she loved; she began to understand them, and to cherish them in her mind as in her heart. In difficult times Frosya would come home and say humbly: “Fedor, that microfarad and those wandering currents, they bore me!” But embracing his wife after their daytime separation, Fedor would transform himself temporarily into a microfarad and a wandering current. Frosya almost saw with her own eyes what, until then, she had wanted to understand but could not. These were just the same simple, natural, attractive things as different-colored grasses growing in the fields. Frosya often grieved at night because she was only a woman and could not feel herself to be a microfarad or a locomotive, or electricity, while Fedor could—and she would carefully move her finger along his hot back; he slept, and didn’t wake. Somehow he was always hot, strange, and he could sleep through loud noise, eat any kind of food—good or bad, he was never sick, he loved to spend money on trifles, he was getting ready to go to Soviet China and become a soldier there…

Fro sat in class now with weak, wandering thoughts, mastering nothing of the assigned lesson. She despondently copied from the blackboard into her notebook a vector diagram of the resonance of electric currents and listened sorrowfully to the teacher’s lecture on the influence of the saturation of steel on the appearance of higher harmonics. Fedor wasn’t there, now communications and signals no longer attracted her, electricity had become something alien to her. Pupin’s induction coils, Wheatstone bridges, microfarads, iron cores had all dried up in her heart, and she could not understand a thing of the higher harmonics of electric current; in her memory there sounded all the time the monotonous little song of a child’s mouth organ: “The mother is washing clothes, the father’s off at work, he won’t come back soon, it’s lonely and boring all alone.”

Frosya’s attention left the lesson altogether, and she wrote in her notebook: “I am a stupid, wretched girl, Fedya, come back quickly and I’ll learn communications and signals, and then I’ll die, you’ll bury me, and go off to China.”

At home her father was sitting with his boots on, his coat, and his engineer’s cap. He was sure that he’d be summoned to take a trip today.

“You’ve come home?” he asked his daughter. He was always glad when someone came into the apartment; he listened to all the steps on the staircase, as if he were constantly expecting some extraordinary guest who would be bringing him happiness, carrying it in his hat.

“Can I warm some kasha with butter for you?” her father asked. “I’ll do it right away.”

The daughter refused.

“Well then, let me fry you some sausage.”

“No,” Frosya said.

The father was quiet for a minute, but then he asked again, but more timidly:

“Maybe you’d like some tea and crackers? I’ll heat the water…”

The daughter remained silent.

“Or how about the macaroni from yesterday. It’s still there, I left it all for you…”

“Will you please drop it?” Frosya said. “They should have sent you off to the Far East….”

“I volunteered, but they wouldn’t take me—too old, they said, eyesight not good enough,” the father explained.

He knew that children are our enemies, and he did not get angry at his enemies. But he was afraid, instead, that Frosya would go off into her own room, while he wanted her to stay with him and talk, and the old man was hunting for some reason to keep Frosya from going away.

“Why haven’t you put any lipstick on your lips today?” he asked her. “Or have you run out of it? I’ll be glad to buy you some, I can run down to the drugstore…”

Tears started to well up in Frosya’s gray eyes, and she walked into her room. The father stayed alone; he began to clean up the kitchen and to fuss with housework, then he squatted down on his heels, opened the door of the warming oven, put his head in it, and started to cry on top of the pan holding the macaroni.

Someone knocked on the door. Frosya did not come out to open it. The old man pulled his head out of the oven, wiped his face, and went to open the door.

A messenger had come from the station.

“Sign here, Nefed Stepanovich: you’re to show up today at eight o’clock—you’re to go with a cold locomotive being sent off for major repairs. They’ll hitch it on to 309, take your grub and clothes with you, you’ll be gone at least a week.”

Nefed Stepanovich signed in the book and the messenger left. The old man opened his metal lunchbox: yesterday’s bread and onion were still there, with a lump of sugar. The engineer added some millet porridge, two apples, thought for a minute, and then closed the box with its enormous padlock.

Then he knocked carefully on the door of Frosya’s room.

“Daughter! Lock up after me, I’m going out on a job… for twoweeks…. They’ve given me a ‘Shcha’ engine—it’s cold, but never mind.”

Frosya came out a little after her father had left, and closed the door to the apartment.

“Play! Why aren’t you playing?” Frosya whispered at the floor above, where the little boy with the mouth organ lived. But he had probably gone out for a walk—it was summertime, the days were long, the breeze fluttered in the evening among the sleepy, happy pine trees. The musician was still a little boy, he had not yet chosen some single thing out of the whole world for eternal loving, his heart beat empty and free, stealing nothing just for itself out of the goodness of life.

Frosya opened the window, lay down on the big bed, and dozed off. She could hear the trunks of the pine trees moving slightly in the air blowing at their tops, and one far-off grasshopper sounded, not waiting for the time of darkness.

Frosya awoke; it was still light, she should get up and live. She looked at the sky, full of a ripening warmth, covered with the lively traces of the disappearing sun, as if happiness were to be found there, happiness made by nature out of all its pure strength, so that this happiness might flow from nature into a man.

Frosya found a short hair between two pillows, it could have belonged only to Fedor. She examined the hair in the light, it was gray: Fedor was already twenty-nine and he had some gray hairs, about twenty of them. Her father was also gray, but he never came even close to their bed. Frosya was used to the smell of the pillow on which Fedor slept—it still smelled of his body and his head, they had not washed the pillowcase since the last time her husband had put his head on it. Frosya buried her face in Fedor’s pillow and grew calmer.

Upstairs on the third floor the little boy came back and started to play his mouth organ, the same tune he had been playing in the dark morning of that day. Frosya got up and hid her husband’s hair in an empty box on her table. Then the little boy stopped playing—it was time for him to go to sleep because he had to get up early, or else he was playing with his father, who had come home from work, and sitting on his knees. The mother was breaking up sugar with a pair of sugar tongs, and saying they must buy some more linen, what they had was worn out, and tore when it was washed. The father was silent, he was thinking: we’ll manage somehow.