Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

At midnight, when the clock struck in the tower, Nikita asked Lyuba why her friend Zhenya had not come.

“She’s got typhus, for the second time, she’ll probably die of it,” Lyuba answered, and she went back to reading her medicine.

“That’s really too bad!” Nikita said, but Lyuba did not answer him.

Nikita pictured to himself a sick and fevered Zhenya, and it seemed to him he could have fallen really in love with her, if he had known her earlier and if she had encouraged him a little. For she was also pretty, it seemed: it was a shame he had not seen her clearly in the dark and could hardly remember what she looked like.

“Now I want to sleep,” Lyuba said, sighing.

“Did you understand everything you read?” Nikita asked her.

“Absolutely all! Do you want me to tell it to you?” Lyuba offered.

“You don’t have to,” Nikita said. “You’d better keep it for yourself, because I’d forget it anyway.”

He swept the floor around the stove with a broom, and went home to his father.

After that he called on Lyuba almost every day, except that sometimes he let a day or two go by so that Lyuba would miss him. Whether she missed him or not he didn’t know, but on these empty evenings Nikita had to walk for eight or ten miles, around and around the whole town, trying to control himself in solitude, to endure his longing for Lyuba and to keep himself from going to her.

When he did call on her, he was usually busy stoking the little stove and waiting for her to say something to him in the moments when she wasn’t reading in her book. Every time Nikita brought her some supper from the restaurant at the furniture workshop; she ate her dinners at her academy, but they served too little there and Lyuba was thinking a lot, studying, and still growing, too, so she didn’t get enough nourishment. The first time he was paid Nikita bought a cow’s horns in a neighboring village and boiled meat jelly on the little stove all night while Lyuba was busy at her books and her notebooks until midnight, when she mended her clothes, darned her stockings and washed the floor until the dawn came, and then took a bath in the courtyard in a tub filled with rainwater before people who might see her had even wakened from their sleep.

Nikita’s father was lonely every evening all alone, without his son, but Nikita never said where he was going. “He’s a man now, in his own right,” the old man thought. “He might have been killed or wounded in the war, so since he’s still alive, let him go!”

One day the old man noticed that his son had brought home two white rolls. But he wrapped them up right away in a piece of paper, and didn’t offer either of them to his father. Then Nikita put on his army cap, as was his habit, and walked out into the night, taking the two rolls with him.

“Nikita, take me along with you,” the father begged him. “I won’t say a thing, I’ll just look…. It must be interesting there, with something happening!”

“Another time, father,” Nikita said, embarrassed. “Besides, it’s time for you to sleep, you’ve got to go to work tomorrow.”

Nikita didn’t find Lyuba that night, she wasn’t home. He sat down on the bench by the gate, and began to wait for her. He put the white rolls inside his shirt so that they would keep warm until Lyuba arrived. He sat there patiently until late in the night, watching the stars in the sky and the few people passing by who were hurrying home to their children, listening to the sounds of the town clock striking in the tower, the barking of dogs in the courtyards, and various other quiet, unclear sounds which are not made in the daytime. He could probably have sat there, waiting, until he died.

Lyuba appeared, unheard, out of the darkness in front of Nikita. He stood up, but she told him: “You’d better go home,” and she was crying. She walked into her room, and Nikita waited a little longer outside, not understanding, and then walked after her.

“Zhenya’s dead,” Lyuba said to him in the room. “What will I do now?”

Nikita was silent. The warm rolls were lying against his chest— he didn’t have to take them out right then, right then there was nothing that had to be done. Lyuba was lying on the bed in her clothes, her face turned to the wall, and she was crying to herself, soundlessly and almost without stirring.

Nikita stood alone for a long time in the night-filled room, ashamed to disturb someone else’s deep sorrow. Lyuba paid him no attention, because the sadness of one’s own grief makes people indifferent to all other suffering. Nikita sat down without being asked on the bed at Lyuba’s feet, and took the rolls out of his shirt to put them down somewhere, but for the moment he couldn’t find anywhere to put them.

“Let me stay with you now!” Nikita said.

“But what will you do?” Lyuba asked, in tears.

Nikita pondered, afraid of making a mistake or of accidentally offending Lyuba.

“I won’t do anything,” he answered. “We’ll just live as usual, so you won’t be so worried.”

“Let’s wait, we’ve no reason to hurry,” Lyuba declared pensively and prudently. “But we’ve got to think what we can bury Zhenya in—they haven’t any coffin…”

“I’ll bring it tomorrow,” Nikita promised, and he put the rolls down on the bed.

The next day Nikita asked the foreman’s permission and started to make a coffin; they were always allowed to make coffins freely, without paying for the lumber. From lack of experience he took a long time making it but then he fashioned the place for the dead girl to lie inside it with special care and neatness; Nikita himself was upset just by thinking about the dead Zhenya and some of his tears fell among the shavings. His father, who was walking by, walked up to Nikita and noticed his trouble.

“What are you so sad about: has your girl died?” the father asked.

“No, her girl friend,” he answered.

“Her girl friend?” the father said. “Well, plague take her!… Here, let me even up the side of that coffin, you’ve made it look bad, it’s not right.”

When he finished work, Nikita carried the coffin to Lyuba; he didn’t know where her dead friend was.

A warm autumn lasted for a long time that year, and people were glad of it. “It’s been a bad harvest, so we’ll save on firewood,” thrifty persons said. Nikita Firsov had ordered ahead of time a woman’s coat to be made for Lyuba out of his Red Army overcoat, and it had been ready for quite a while without any need to wear it, thanks to the warm weather. Nikita kept right on going to Lyuba’s as he had before, to help her live and in return to get what he needed for the enjoyment of his own heart.

He asked her once how they should go on living—together or apart. And she answered that she would have no chance to feel happy before the spring, because she had to finish her medical academy as quickly as she could, and then they would see. Nikita listened to this long-term promise, he wasn’t asking for any greater happiness than what he already had, thanks to Lyuba, and he did not even know if there was anything better, but his heart was shivering from its long endurance and from uncertainty—what did Lyuba need of a poor, unschooled, demobilized man like him? Lyuba sometimes smiled when she looked at him with her bright eyes, which had large, incomprehensible spots in them, and the face around her eyes was filled with goodness.

Once Nikita started to cry, while he was covering Lyuba with a blanket for the night before he went home, but Lyuba only stroked his head and said: “Well, you’ll be all right, you musn’t worry so while I’m still alive.”

Nikita hurried home to his father, to take refuge there, to come to his senses, and to stay away from Lyuba for several days in a row. “I’ll read,” he decided, “and I’ll start to live the way I ought to, and I’ll forget Lyuba, I won’t remember her or even know her. What has she got that’s so special? There are millions of persons on this earth, and better than she is, too! She’s not good-looking!”