Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

“Tomorrow,” Fro whispered and she took her husband’s head between her two hands.

He smiled at her, and gave in.

“When do we start, Fro?” Fedor asked his wife the next day.

“Soon, soon,” a sleepy, gentle Fro answered him; her hands were holding his hand, and he kissed her forehead.

One day Frosya woke up late, the day had been flaming a long time outside. She was alone in the room, it was probably the tenth or eleventh day of her inseparable reunion with her husband.

Frosya jumped quickly out of bed, threw the window wide open, and heard the mouth organ which she had completely forgotten. It was not being played upstairs. Frosya looked out of the window. Next to the shed in the courtyard a plank was lying and a barefoot little boy with a big child’s head was sitting on it and playing music.

It was strangely quiet all through the apartment. Fedor had absented himself somewhere. Frosya walked out to the kitchen. There was her father, sitting on the stool and dozing, his head with his hat on resting on the kitchen table. Frosya woke him.

“When did you come?”

“What?” the old man stammered. “Today, early in the morning.”

“But who let you in? Fedor?”

“Nobody,” her father said. “The door was open…. Fedor found me at the station, I was sleeping there on the counter.”

“And why were you sleeping at the station? What’s the matter? Have you no home?” Frosya asked him angrily.

“What of it! I’m used to it,” the old man said. “I thought—I’d be in your way,…”

“Well, all right, you old hypocrite! But Where’s Fedor? When will he be back?”

The father was embarrassed.

“He won’t be back,” the old man said. “He’s gone away…”

Fro was silent in front of her father. The old man was looking carefully at the kitchen dishrags, and he went on:

“In the morning the express went through. He got on, and went back to the Far East. Maybe, he says, he’ll go on from there to China, he doesn’t know yet.”

“And what else did he say?” Frosya asked.

“Nothing,” her father answered. “He told me to come home and take care of you. It depends on how things work out, he says, either he’ll come back here, or he’ll send for you.”

“What kind of things?” Frosya asked.

“I don’t know,” the old man said. “He said that you’d know all about it: communism, I guess, or something else, too, whatever happens.”

Fro left her father. She went back to her room, leaned on the windowsill and began to look at the little boy and how he was playing his mouth organ.

“Little boy!” she called out. “Come and call on me.”

“Right away,” the musician answered.

He stood up from the plank, wiped his instrument on the edge of his shirt, and walked to the building to call on her.

Fro stood alone in the middle of the big room, in her nightgown. She was smiling as she waited for her guest.

“Good-bye, Fedor!”

Maybe she was stupid, maybe her life was only worth two kopecks and there was no need to love her and take care of her, but still she alone understood how to change two kopecks into two rubles.

“Good-bye, Fedor! You’ll come back to me, and I’ll wait for you.”

Her little guest was knocking shyly on the outside door. Frosya let him in, sat down on the floor beside him, took the child’s hand in her hands and began to feast her eyes on the young musician: in this being, probably, was just that humanity about which Fedor had told her so lovingly.

GRASS WAS GROWINGagain on the packed dirt roads of the civil war, for the fighting had stopped. With peace the countryside grew quiet again, and almost empty of people: some had died in the fighting, many were getting over their wounds, resting with their families, forgetting the heavy work of war in long sleep, while a few of the demobilized soldiers had not yet managed to get home and were still walking in their old overcoats, with packs on their backs and field helmets or sheepskin hats on their heads—walking through the thick, unfamiliar grass which they had not earlier had time to see, or maybe it had been trampled down before by their marching, and not growing. They walked with stunned, astonished hearts, seeing again the fields and villages spread out along the roads; their spirit had changed in the torment of war, in its sicknesses, and in the joy of victory. They were walking now as if to some new life, only vaguely remembering what they had been like three or four years before, for they had been transformed into different people. They had grown out of their age, and become wiser, they had grown more patient, and they felt inside themselves the great worldwide hope which had now become the central idea of their still-small lives which had had no clear goal or purpose before the civil war.

The last of the demobilized Red Army soldiers returned to their homes late in the summer. They had been retained in labor armies where they were used at various unfamiliar jobs, and they were sad, and only now were they told to go home to their own lives and to living in general.

A former Red Army soldier, Nikita Firsov, had been walking for two days along the hills which stretch out above the Potudan River toward his home in a little-known district town. He was a man of twenty-five, with a modest face which seemed always sorrowing but perhaps this expression came not from grief but from some controlled goodness of character or from the usual concentration of youth. Light-colored hair, uncut for a long time, stuck out around his ears from under his cap, and his big gray eyes looked with a kind of sullen tension at the quiet, ordinary, monotonous countryside, as if he were not a local man.

About noon Nikita Firsov lay down next to a little stream which ran from a spring along the bottom of a gorge down to the Potudan. He dozed on the ground under the sun, in the September grass which had stopped growing here since spring. It was as if the warmth of life had grown dark in him, and Firsov fell asleep in the quiet of this deserted place. Insects flew over him, a spider web floated above him, a wandering beggar stepped across him and, without touching the sleeper, uninterested in him, went on about his business. The dust of summer and of the long drought stood high in the air, making the light in the sky weaker and more diffuse, but still the time of peace, as usual, moved far behind the sun. Suddenly Firsov awoke and sat up, heavily, panting in fright as if he had lost his wind in some invisible running and fighting. He had had a strange dream of being smothered by the hot fur of a small, well-fed beast, a kind of little animal of the fields fed on pure wheat. This animal, soaked in sweat from its efforts and from its greed, had squirmed through the sleeper’s mouth into his throat, trying to burrow with its paws into the center of his soul, trying to stop his breathing. Choking in his sleep, Firsov wanted to scream and to run away, but the little animal pulled itself out of him by its own effort and disappeared—blind, wretched, frightened, and trembling itself—into the darkness of its night.

Firsov washed his face in the stream, and rinsed out his mouth, and then he went on quickly; his father’s house was not far away, and he could get there by evening.

As soon as it started to get dark, Firsov saw his birthplace in the dim onset of night. It was a gradual sloping ridge which rose from the bank of the Potudan up to the high-lying fields of rye. On this ridge was the small town, almost invisible now in the darkness. Not a single light was burning.

Nikita Firsov’s father was asleep: he went to bed as soon as he came home from work, before the sun had gone down. He lived alone, his wife had died a long time ago, two sons had been killed in the imperialist war and his last son, Nikita, was off at the civil war. Perhaps he would come back, the father thought, for the civil war was going on closer to where people lived and there was less shooting than in the imperialist war. The father slept a lot, from sunset right through until dawn; otherwise, if he didn’t sleep, he’d start to think, imagining what had been long forgotten, and his heart would be torn with sorrow over his wasted sons, and with regret for the lonely life behind him. In the mornings he would go off quickly to the workshop making peasant furniture where he worked; he could endure this, and forget about himself. But by evening, his spirits would be low again and he would go back to the room where he lived, and sleep almost in terror until morning came: he had no need for kerosene. At dawn the flies would begin to bite him on his bald spot, and the old man would wake up and take a long time dressing, putting on his shoes, washing, sighing, stamping around, fixing up his room, muttering to himself, stepping outside to look at the weather, then going back in—all this just to waste the time that had to be filled before his work began in the furniture workshop.