Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

At one o’clock in the night, Frosya walked into the kitchen with a folded piece of paper in her hand.

“Papa!”

“What do you want, daughter?” The old man slept lightly.

“Take this telegram to the post office for me, since I’m tired.”

“But what if I go out, and then the messenger comes?” the father asked, frightened.

“He’ll wait,” Frosya told him. “You won’t be gone long. But don’t read the telegram, just hand it in at the window.”

“I won’t,” the old man promised. “But you wrote a letter, too. Give it to me, and I’ll mail it at the same time.”

“It’s none of your business what I wrote…. Have you got money?”

The father had money; he took the telegram and walked out. In the post and telegraph office, the old man read the telegram: why not, he decided, maybe his daughter was writing something wrong, he should look at it.

The telegram was addressed to Fedor in the Far East: “Come back by first train your wife my daughter Frosya is dying of fatal complications in respiratory organs father Nefed Yevstafyev.”

“What a pair they are!” the old man thought, and he handed the telegram in at the window.

“But I saw Frosya today!” the telegraph clerk said. “Has she really got sick?”

“It must be,” the engineer explained.

The next morning Frosya sent her father back to the post office again to take a statement from her that she was voluntarily resigning from her job for reasons of bad health. The old man went, he had wanted to go to the station anyway.

Frosya set about washing linen, darning socks, scrubbing floors and cleaning up the apartment, and she went nowhere outside the house.

Two days later an answer came by telegraph: “Leaving am anxious terribly worried no burial without me Fedor.”

Frosya figured precisely the time of her husband’s arrival and on the seventh day after the telegram came she went down to the station platform, quivering with happiness. The Trans-Siberian express pulled in from the east right on time. Frosya’s father was on the platform, too, but he stayed some distance away from his daughter in order not to destroy her mood.

The engineer brought the train into the station with splendid speed, and softly, tenderly braked it to a stop. Nefed Stepanovich, watching this, shed a few tears, forgetting even why he had come to the station.

Only one passenger got out of the train at this station. He wore a hat, and a long, blue raincoat, and his eyes were shining. The woman ran up to him.

“Fro!” the passenger said, and he dropped his bag onto the platform. The father picked it up and carried it behind his daughter and his son-in-law.

On the road, the daughter turned to her father.

“Papa, go over to the depot, and ask them to give you an assignment somewhere, it must be boring for you to have to sit at home all the time…”

“It’s boring,” the old man said, “I’ll go right away. You take the suitcase.”

The son-in-law looked at the old engineer.

“Hello, Nefed Stepanovich!”

“Hello, Fedya. Welcome home.”

“Thank you, Nefed Stepanovich…”

The young man wanted to say something more, but the old man gave the bag to Frosya and was walking away, toward the depot.

“Darling, I’ve cleaned the whole apartment,” Frosya said. “I wasn’t dying.”

“I guessed it on the train, that you weren’t dying,” her husband answered. “I didn’t believe your telegram for long.”

“Then why did you come back?” Frosya asked in surprise.

“I love you, and I was lonely,” Fedor said sadly.

Frosya was suddenly grieved.

“I’m afraid you’ll stop loving me some time, and then I really will die…”

Fedor kissed her cheek from the side.

“If you die, then you’ll forget everything, including me,” he said.

Frosya recovered from her grief.

“No, to die isn’t interesting. It’s passivity.”

“Of course, it’s passivity,” Fedor said, smiling. He liked her high-flown, intelligent words. Fro had once asked him specially to teach her intelligent phrases, and he had written out for her a whole notebook full of intelligent, empty words: “Whoever says a must also say b,” “If it’s so, it’s precisely so,” and other similar phrases. But Fro guessed the fraud for herself. She asked him: “But why is it necessary to say b after saying a, if I don’t have to and I don’t want to?”

At home they lay down at once to rest and fell asleep. Three hours later the father knocked. Frosya opened the door for him and waited until the old man had put some food in his metal box and gone out again. They had probably sent him off somewhere on a job. Frosya closed the door, and went back to sleep again.

When they woke, it was already night. They talked for a little, then Fedor made love to Fro, and they fell silent until morning.

The next day Fro quickly fixed dinner, fed her husband and ate something herself. She was doing everything now any old way, messy, not tasty, but it was all the same to both of them what they ate and what they drank, just so long as they didn’t waste the time of their loving on any material, unimportant needs.

Frosya told Fedor that she would now begin to study well and diligently, she would learn a lot, and she would work hard, so that life could become better for everybody in the country.

Fedor listened to Fro, and then he explained to her in detail his own ideas and projects—about the transmission of electric energy without wires, by means of ionized air, about increasing the strength of all metals by processing their ultrasonic waves, about the stratosphere one hundred kilometers up in the sky where there exist special light, heat and electrical conditions capable of guaranteeing eternal life to a man—this is why the dreams of the ancient world about heaven may now actually come true—and Fedor promised to think out and to accomplish many other things for Frosya’s sake and at the same time for the sake of all the other people in the world.

Frosya listened blissfully to her husband, half opening her already tired mouth. When they finished talking, they threw their arms around each other—they wanted to be happy right away, now, sooner than their future and zealous work would bring results in personal and in general happiness. The heart brooks no delay, it sickens, as if believing in nothing. Smothered with fatigue from thinking, from talking and from pleasure, they woke again fresh and ready for life to repeat itself. Frosya wanted to have children, she would bring them up, they would grow and share their father’s work, the work of communism and science. In the passion of his imagination, Fedor whispered to Frosya words about the mysterious forces of nature which can bring wealth to humanity, about the root-and-branch transformation of the sorry spirit of man. Then they kissed and caressed each other, and their noble dream turned into delight, as if it had been accomplished all at once.

In the evening Frosya went out for a short while, to buy groceries for herself and her husband; all this time, their appetites were growing. They lived through four days and nights without leaving each other. The father had not come back from his trip: probably he had been sent again to take a cold locomotive a long way.

After two more days Frosya told Fedor that they could go on together like this a little longer but then they should get down to business and pick up life again.

“Tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, you and I will start to live life the way we ought to,” Fedor said, and he put his arms around her.

“The day after tomorrow!” Fro agreed in a whisper.

On the eighth day, Fedor woke up sad.

“Fro! Let’s get to work, let’s start living the way we should…. You’ve got to start going to class again.”