Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

All evening long Frosya walked along the tracks at the station, out to the nearest woods, and through the fields where rye was growing. She stood next to the slag pits where she had worked the day before—they were almost full again, but nobody was working. Nobody knew where Natasha Bukova lived, Frosya had not asked her yesterday; she did not want to go and see any friends or acquaintances for she felt somehow ashamed in front of everyone: she couldn’t talk about her love with other people and all the rest of life had become uninteresting and dead for her. She walked past the cooperative warehouse where Natalya’s husband was walking with his rifle. Frosya would have liked to give him some rubles so that he could drink fruit juice with his wife the next day, but she was embarrassed.

“Move on, citizen! You can’t stand here—this is a warehouse, a government building,” the watchman said to her when Frosya stopped and groped for the money somewhere in the pleats of her skirt.

Beyond the warehouse lay desolate, empty land, on which some small, coarse, wild grass was growing. Frosya walked up to it and stood there languishing in that small world of thin grass from which, it seemed, the stars were only a couple of kilometers away.

“Ah, Fro, Fro, if only someone put his arms around you!” she said to herself.

When she got home, Frosya lay down at once to sleep because the little boy who played the mouth organ had been asleep for a long time and even the grasshoppers had stopped chirping. But something kept her from falling asleep. Frosya stared into the darkness and sniffed: it was the pillow on which Fedor used to sleep that was bothering her. It still gave out the moldering, earthy smell of a warm, familiar body, and this smell started the grief in Frosya’s heart all over again. She wrapped Fedor’s pillow up in a sheet and hid it in the closet, and then she fell asleep alone, like an orphan.

Frosya did not go back to her classes—science had become incomprehensible for her anyway. She lived at home and waited for a letter or a telegram from Fedor, afraid the postman would take the letter back if he did not find anyone at home. But four days went by, and then six, and Fedor sent no word except for his first telegram.

The father came back from his trip in charge of the cold locomotive; he was happy that he had gone and taken the trouble, that he had seen a great many people and distant stations and different happenings; now he had enough to remember, think about, and talk about for a long time. But Frosya didn’t ask him anything; so her father began to tell her on his own—how the cold locomotive had been moved and how he had not slept at night, to keep mechanics at stations along the way from stealing parts from the engine, where they were selling fruit cheap and where it had been ruined by late spring frost. Frosya made no comment, and even when Nefed Stepanovich told her about the voile and the artificial silk he had seen in Sverdlovsk, his words did not interest his daughter. “What is she, a Fascist?” her father thought. “How did I ever conceive her in my wife? I can’t think.”

Having received neither a letter nor a telegram from Fedor, Frosya went to work at the post office as a mail carrier. She thought that letters were probably being lost, and so she wanted to take them herself to all the addresses. And she wanted to get Fedor’s letters sooner than some strange, unknown letter carrier would bring them to her, and in her own hands they would be safe. She got to the post office ahead of all the other carriers—the little boy on the third floor would not yet be playing his mouth organ— and took part as a volunteer in the sorting and distributing of the mail. She read the addresses on all the envelopes coming into the little town—Fedor wrote her nothing. All the envelopes were addressed to other people, and inside the envelopes were uninteresting letters of one sort or another. But just the same twice each day Frosya distributed them to the proper addresses, hoping there was some comfort in them for the people who got them. In the early morning light she would walk quickly along the street of the town with a heavy bag on her stomach, looking as if she were pregnant, knocking at the doors and handing the letters and packages to people in their underwear, to naked women, or to little children who had got up before the grownups. The dark blue sky was standing above the neighboring land but Frosya would already be working, hurrying to tire out her legs so her anxious heart would also grow tired. Many of the people getting letters became interested in her and when they received their mail would ask her questions about her life: “Do you work for ninety-two rubles a month?” “Yes,” Frosya would answer, “but that’s before deductions.” “And do you work during your monthly periods, or do they give you time off?” “They give me time off,” Frosya told them, “and they give out a government girdle, but I haven’t received mine yet.” “They’ll give it to you,” the addressee told her, “it’s in the regulations.” One subscriber to the magazine Krasnaya Nov (Red Virgin Soil) made Frosya an offer of marriage, as an experiment: whatever happens, maybe it will produce happiness, he said, and that’s always useful. “What’s your reaction?” the subscriber asked her. “I’ll think about it,” Frosya answered. “Don’t think about it,” the addressee told her. “Come and stay with me as a guest, try me out first: I’m a tender man, well read, cultured—you can see for yourself what I subscribe to! This magazine is produced by an editorial board, there are clever people there—see for yourself—and not just one man, and we’ll be two! It’s all quite solid, and just like a married woman your authority will be greater. A girl—what’s she?—a single person, somehow an antisocial kind of person!”

Many people recognized Frosya standing with a letter or a package in front of a stranger’s door. Sometimes they offered her a glass of wine, or snacks to eat, and they complained to her about their private fate. Life was nowhere empty or calm.

When he went away, Fedor had promised Frosya to let her know the address of his new job right away, for he didn’t know exactly where he would find himself. But here fourteen days had gone by since his leaving, but there was no letter from him, and nowhere for her to write. Frosya endured the separation, she went on delivering the mail faster and faster, breathing all the time more quickly, in order to busy her heart with other work and to wear out its despair. But one day she suddenly started to scream in the middle of the street, during the second delivery of mail. Frosya had not noticed how the breathing had suddenly tightened in her chest, squeezing her heart, and she continued to scream in a high, shrill voice. People walking by noticed her. When she came to herself, Frosya ran into the field with her letter bag because it had become so hard for her to stand her wasting, empty breathing; she fell to the ground and went on screaming until her heart had got over it.

Frosya then sat up, straightened her dress, and smiled; she felt all right again, with no more need to cry. After she had delivered the mail, Frosya went to the telegraph department where they handed her a telegram from Fedor with his address and kisses. At home, without eating, she began immediately to write a letter to her husband. She did not see the day end, outside the window, nor did she hear the little boy who always played his mouth organ before he went to sleep. Her father knocked on her door and brought his daughter a glass of tea with a buttered roll, and he turned on the electric light so Frosya would not ruin her eyes in the dusk.

That night Nefed Stepanovich was dozing on his chest in the kitchen. For six days he had not been summoned by the railroad; he assumed they would need him this night and he was waiting for the footsteps of the messenger on the staircase.