Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

“I’ll wait until the ice breaks up; it won’t be long now,” he said out loud, to calm himself, and he dozed off.

Lyuba brought a present back with her from work—two earthenware bowls with winter flowers in them: the doctors and the nurses had celebrated her wedding. And she had held herself important and mysterious in front of them, like a real married woman. The younger girls among the nurses and the nurses’ aides were envious of her, one earnest worker from the hospital pharmacy asked Lyuba confidentially: was it true or not that love was something fascinating but that getting married for love was truly an entrancing happiness? Lyuba answered her that this was the honest truth, and that this was why people go on living in this world.

The husband and wife talked with each other in the evening. Lyuba said that they might have children, and that they should think about this ahead of time. Nikita promised to begin making some children’s furniture in overtime at the workshop: a little table, a chair, and a cradle-bed.

“The revolution is here for good, now it’s all right to have children,” Nikita said. “There’ll never be unhappy children ever again.”

“It’s all right for you to talk, but I’m the one who’ll have to bear them,” Lyuba said, pouting.

“Will it hurt?” Nikita asked. “In that case, better not to have children, not to suffer…”

“No, I’ll survive it, thanks just the same,” Lyuba agreed.

At twilight she fixed the bed, and then, so it wouldn’t be too crowded for sleep she extended it with the two chairs for their feet and had them sleep across it. Nikita lay down as he was instructed, was silent, and late in the night he cried in his sleep. But Lyuba didn’t fall asleep for a long time, she was listening to his crying, and she carefully wiped Nikita’s sleeping face with the end of the sheet, and in the morning, when he woke up, he had no memory of his sadness in the night.

After that their life together went on at its own pace. Lyuba took care of people in the hospital, and Nikita made his furniture. In his free time and on Sundays he worked in the yard and in the house, although Lyuba didn’t ask him to do this—she herself no longer knew exactly whose house it was. Once it had belonged to her mother, then it had been taken over as government property but the government had forgotten about the house—no one had ever come to check on its condition or to ask any money as rent. It made no difference to Nikita. He managed to get some green paint, through acquaintances of his father, and he painted the roof and the shutters as soon as spring weather had set in. With the same diligence he gradually fixed up the decrepit old shed in the yard outside the house, repaired the gate and the fence, and prepared to dig a new cellar since the old one had caved in.

The ice was already breaking up in the Potudan River. Nikita walked down to the bank twice, looked at the flowing water, and made up his mind not to die as long as Lyuba could stand him, and whenever she couldn’t stand him any longer, he’d manage to end it all. The river wouldn’t freeze over quickly. Nikita usually did his work around the house slowly so as not to be sitting in the room, making Lyuba tired of him. And whenever he finished it completely, he would fill the hem of his shirt with clay from the old cellar and walk back into the room. There he would sit on the floor and shape little human figures and other objects out of the clay, with no meaning or likeness to anything—things like hills with animal heads growing out of them, or the root system of a tree in which the root seemed an ordinary root but so tangled and impassable, with each of its branches pierced by another, gnawing at and torturing itself, that looking long at this root made you want to go to sleep. Nikita smiled carelessly and blissfully while he worked with his clay, and Lyuba would sit there on the floor next to him, sewing linen or singing little songs that she had heard at some time, and along with what she was doing she would caress Nikita with one hand, sometimes stroking his head, sometimes tickling him under his arm. Nikita lived through these hours with his heart beating gently, and he did not know if he needed something higher and mightier, or if life in actual fact was nothing very big—just about what he already had. But Lyuba would look at him with her tired eyes full of patient goodness, just as if what was. good and happy had become heavy work for her. Then Nikita would knead his clay toys back into the clay from which he had made them, and he would ask his wife if she didn’t want him to stoke up the stove, to heat water for tea, or to go out somewhere on an errand…

“You don’t have to,” Lyuba would say, smiling at him. “I’ll do it all myself….”

And Nikita understood that life was indeed something very big, and maybe beyond his strength, that it was not all concentrated in his pounding heart—it was still stronger, more interesting and dearer in another person he could not reach. He picked up the pail and went to get water at the town well where the water was cleaner than in the tanks on the street. Nikita could not drown his grief with anything, with any kind of work, and he was afraid of the approaching night as he had been in childhood. When he had got the water, Nikita went along with the full pail to call on his father.

“What’s the matter, didn’t you have a wedding?” his father asked. “Did you do it in the Soviet way, secretly… ?”

“We’ll have it yet,” his son promised. “Come on, help me make a little table, with a chair and a cradle-bed. You talk to the foreman tomorrow, so he’ll give me the material…. Because we’ll be having children, probably.”

“Well, why not? That’s possible,” the father agreed. “But you shouldn’t be having children soon: it’s not time yet…”

In a week Nikita had made for himself all the children’s furniture he needed; he stayed late every evening, and worked hard at it. His father sanded each piece neatly, and painted it.

Lyuba set up the child’s furniture in a special corner, decorated her unborn child’s table with two earthenware bowls of flowers, and hung a newly embroidered towel over the back of the chair. Lyuba hugged Nikita in thanks for his devotion to her and to her unknown children, she kissed his throat, pressed herself against his chest, and warmed herself next to her beloved, knowing that there was nothing else that could be done. And Nikita dropped the hands with which he had covered his heart and stood there silent in front of her because he did not want to look strong when he was really helpless.

Nikita went to sleep early that night and woke up a little after midnight. He lay there in the quiet for a long time and listened to the sounds of the clock striking in the town—half past twelve, one, half past one, a single peal for each of the three times. In the sky outside the window a vague kind of growing started—it was not yet dawn but only a movement of the darkness, a slow stripping away of empty space, and all the things in the room and the child’s furniture, too, began to be visible, but after the dark night they had lived through they looked miserable and exhausted, as if they were calling out for help. Lyuba stirred under the blanket, and she sighed; perhaps she too was not asleep. In any case Nikita kept quiet, and began to listen hard. But Lyuba didn’t stir any more, she was breathing evenly again, and it pleased Nikita that Lyuba was lying there next to him, alive, essential to his soul, and not even realizing in her sleep that he, her husband, even existed. As long as she was whole and happy, Nikita needed for his own life only his consciousness of her. He dozed off in peace, comforted by the sleep of someone close and dear to him, and then he opened his eyes again.