Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

On this particular night, Firsov’s father was sleeping as he always did, out of both habit and fatigue. A cricket had lived in the wall of the house for nobody knew how many summers—this might have been the same cricket as the summer before last, or its grandson. Nikita walked up to the wall and knocked on his father’s window; the cricket was silent for a little, as if he were listening— who was this strange man who came so late? The father got up from the old wooden bed on which he had slept with the mother of all his sons; Nikita himself had been born on this same bed. The old man was in his underwear, which had shrunk from long wearing and from laundering so that now it came only to his knees. The father leaned close to the windowpane and looked through it at his son. He had already seen and recognized him but he went on looking, wanting to look his fill. Then little and skinny, like a boy, he darted around through the hall and the courtyard to open the gate which had been locked for the night.

Nikita walked into the old room with its stove that could be slept on, its low ceiling, its one window onto the street. It had the same smell as in his childhood and as three years before when he had gone off to war; he could catch even the smell of his mother’s skirt there—the only place in the world where that smell was left. Nikita took off his pack and his cap, slowly slipped off his coat, and sat down on the bed. His father was standing in front of him all this time, barefoot and in his underwear, not daring yet to greet him properly, or to start talking.

“Well, how is it with the bourgeois and the Cadets?” he asked after a minute. “Did you kill them all, or are there some left?”

“We killed almost all of them, I guess,” his son said.

“They’re a flabby sort!” the old man said, talking about the bourgeois. “Whatever they might have done, they’d just got used to living free of charge.”

Nikita stood up in front of his father, and now he was the taller, by a head and a half. The old man stood quietly next to his son in the humble bewilderment of his love for him. Nikita put his hand on the father’s head and drew it to his chest. The old man leaned against his son and started to breathe deeply and fast, as if he had just reached his resting place.

On another street in this town, running straight out into the fields, stood a wooden house with green shutters. An elderly widow had once lived here, a teacher in the town school, with her two children, a boy of ten and a daughter of fifteen, a fair-haired girl named Lyuba.

Some years before, Nikita Firsov’s father had wanted to marry the widow teacher, but he soon gave up the idea. He took Nikita, twice, when he was still a little boy, to call on the teacher, and Nikita saw the thoughtful girl Lyuba there, sitting, reading a book, paying no attention to the strange guests.

The old teacher served tea with crackers to the cabinetmaker and made some remarks about enlightening the people’s minds and about repairing the stoves in the school. Nikita’s father sat there silently, he was embarrassed, he quacked and coughed and smoked his little cigar, and then shyly drank his tea out of the saucer, not touching the little crackers because—he explained—he was already full.

There were chairs in the teacher’s apartment, in both of its two rooms and in the kitchen, with curtains hung at the windows, and in the first room there were a little piano and a wardrobe, while the second, farther, room had beds, two armchairs upholstered in red velvet, and a great many books on shelves along the wall—probably a whole collected edition of some kind. This furniture seemed too luxurious to both the father and the son, and after having visited the widow twice, the father stopped going there. He never even managed to tell her that he had wanted to marry her. But Nikita would have liked to see the little piano again, and the pensive girl who had been reading, and he asked his father to marry the mother so they could call on her again.

“I can’t, Nikita,” the father told him then. “I’ve had too little education, so what would I talk to her about? And I’d be ashamed to invite them here; we haven’t any china, and our food’s not much good…. Did you see what armchairs they had? Antiques, from Moscow! And that wardrobe? With fretwork all over the front—I know what that is! And the daughter! She’s probably going to go to the university.”

And the father had not seen his old flame for several years, and had only occasionally missed her, perhaps, or thought about her at all.

The day after he came back from the civil war Nikita walked over to the military commissariat to register in the reserve. Then he walked around the whole familiar town where he had been born, and his heart ached at the sight of the rundown little houses, the broken walls and wattle fences, and the occasional apple trees in the courtyards, some of which had died and dried up for good. In his childhood these apple trees had still been green, and the one-storied houses had seemed big and rich, lived in by mysterious, intelligent people, and the streets then had been long, the burdocks high, and even the weeds growing in the empty lots and in the abandoned kitchen gardens had looked in the old times like sinister, dense forests. But now Nikita saw that the houses of the townspeople were miserable and tiny, they needed paint and repairs, even the weeds in the bare spots were poor things, lived on only by ancient, patient ants, and all the streets petered out in empty land or in the light-filled distance of the sky—the town had become a little one. Nikita realized this meant he had already lived a lot of his life, once large and mysterious objects had become small and boring to him.

He walked slowly by the house with green shutters where he had once gone to call with his father. He knew the paint on the shutters was green only from memory, for only traces of it were left now, it had been faded by the sun, and washed by storms and showers, right down to the wood itself, and the metal roof of the house had rusted badly, so that rain probably ran right through it now, and soaked the ceiling above the little piano. Nikita looked carefully into the window of this house; there were no curtains any longer, and a strange darkness could be seen on the other side of the window glass. Nikita sat down on a bench near the gate of this dilapidated but still familiar little house. He thought maybe someone would play the piano, and he would listen to the music. But everything inside was quiet, telling him nothing. After he had listened for a little, Nikita looked into the courtyard through a crack in the wall; old nettles were growing there, a little path wound through some bushes toward the shed, and three wooden steps led into the building. It must be that the old teacher and her daughter Lyuba had both died a long time ago, and the boy had probably gone off to the war as a volunteer…

Nikita walked back to his home. The day was moving toward its evening, his father would soon be coming back for the night, he would have to talk over with him how he was going to live from now on and where he would go to work.

There were a few persons walking along the main street in town, because people were beginning to perk up after the war. Now there were office workers and students on the street, demobilized soldiers and those convalescing from wounds, young people, men who worked at home or in handicraft trades, and others like them; factory workers would come out to walk later, after it had grown quite dark. People were dressed in old clothes, poorly, or else in outworn military uniforms dating from imperialist times.

Practically all the walkers, even those going arm in arm and about to be married, were carrying some kind of household goods. Women were carrying potatoes in kitchen bags, or sometimes fish, men held their bread rations under their arms, or a half a cow’s head, or they held tripe fixed for the kettle carefully in their hands. Almost no one seemed dejected except for an occasional tired old man. The younger ones were usually laughing, and looking closely at each other, in high spirits and confident, as if they were on the eve of eternal happiness.