Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

“What’s the matter with you, Petrushka, picking on Nastya all the time?” the mother said meekly. “What has she done to you? How do you expect her to peel so many potatoes, and to get the peels as thin as a barber could make them, and the meat won’t be hurt anyway. Your father has come home, and all you do is lose your temper!”

“I’m not losing my temper, I’m serious. Our father needs to be fed, he’s come home from the war, and you’re just wasting what we’ve got. How much food do you suppose we waste in a year just in potato peelings? If we had a pig, we could feed it for a whole year on potato peels alone, and if we sent it to a show, they’d give us a medal…. You see how it should be, but you just don’t understand!”

Ivanov had not suspected that he was raising such a son. Now he sat there and marveled at his intelligence. But best of all he liked his little Nastya, whose small hands were busy with the housework, too, and they were used to it, and skillful. That meant, she must have learned to work around the house a long time ago.

“Lyuba,” Ivanov asked his wife, “why don’t you tell me anything, about how you’ve lived all this time without me, how your health is, what you do at your job…”

Lyuba Vassilievna felt as flustered by her husband now as a new bride: she had grown unused to him. She even blushed when her husband spoke to her, and her face took on the timid, frightened expression, as in her youth, which Ivanov had liked so much.

“There’s not much to tell, Alyosha. We’ve got along all right. The children weren’t sick much, I’ve brought them up…. It’s bad that I’m home with them only at night. I work at the brick factory, on the press, it’s a long way to walk from here…”

“Where do you work?” Ivanov did not understand.

“At the brick factory, where they stamp out the bricks. I had no training, so at first I did general work around the place but then they taught me, and put me on the press. Work is fine, only the children are alone all the time…. You see how they’ve grown? They know how to do everything themselves, they’ve become grownups.” Lyuba Vassilievna was speaking quietly. “Whether this is good or not, Alyosha, I don’t know myself…”

“We’ll find that out later, Lyuba. Now we’ll just all live together, and afterward we’ll work out what’s good and what’s bad…”

“With you here everything will be better, but I just don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong all by myself, and I was frightened. Just think now, how to raise our children…”

Ivanov stood up and started to walk around the room.

“Well then, in general everything’s been all right, you say, and you feel good?”

“All right, Alyosha, everything’s gone on, we’ve got through it. Only we missed you terribly, and it was awful to think you’d never come back to us, you could be killed there, like the others…”

She cried as she leaned over the bread, which was already in its iron plate, and her tears dropped onto the dough. She had just brushed the top of one loaf with beaten egg and she rubbed the dough with the palm of her hand, continuing now to grease the holiday dish with her own tears.

Nastya threw her arms around her mother’s leg, pressing her face into her skirt, and she looked up sideways at her father with a stern expression.

Her father leaned down to her.

“What’s the matter with you? Nastya darling, what’s wrong? Are you cross at me?”

He lifted her in his arms, and stroked her head.

“What’s wrong, daughter? You’ve just forgotten me entirely, you were very little when I went away to war…”

Nastya put her head on her father’s shoulder and started to cry.

“What’s the matter, my little Nastya?”

“Mama’s crying, so I’m going to.”

Peter, standing in bewilderment in front of the stove, was growing impatient.

“What’s the matter with all of you? Your feelings are all upset while the fire’s going out in the stove. Shall we stoke it up again, is that it? And who’ll give us a ration ticket for more firewood? We’ve drawn all our ration and burned it, there’s hardly any left in the shed, about a dozen logs and one aspen. Come on, Mother, give me the dough, before the heat’s all gone.”

Petrushka took the cast-iron pot of cabbage soup out of the oven and raked the fire across the hearthstone, while Lyuba Vassi-lievna, hurrying to please Petrushka, put the bread into the oven, forgetting to rub the second loaf with the beaten egg.

There was something strange and not yet quite understandable to Ivanov about his own house. His wife was just as she had been before, with the same beloved, shy, but now deeply exhausted face, and the children were the same ones that had been born to him except that they had grown during the war years, just as they should have. But something kept Ivanov from feeling the happiness of his return with all his heart—probably he had become too unused to home life and couldn’t understand even his own folk, those closest to him, right away. He watched Peter, his grown-up firstborn, heard how he gave orders and directions to his mother and his little sister, observed his serious, worried face, and felt ashamed to realize that his father’s feeling for this little boy, his attraction to him as a son, was just inadequate. Ivanov felt even more ashamed of his indifference to Petrushka because he sensed that the boy needed love and care more than the others—he was pitiful just to look at now. Ivanov did not know in any detail the life his family had lived without him, and he could not clearly understand why Petrushka had developed as he had.

Sitting with his family around the table, Ivanov realized what he had to do. He must get to work as quickly as he could, find a job in order to earn some money, and help his wife bring up the children properly—then gradually everything would get better, and Petrushka would be running around with other children, or sitting over his books, and not giving orders at the stove with the iron prong in his hand.

At the table Petrushka ate less than any of the others, but he brushed up the crumbs and put them into his mouth.

“What’s the matter with you, Petrushka?” his father said to him. “You eat up the crumbs, but you haven’t finished your piece…. Eat! Then Mother will cut you some more.”

“It can all be eaten,” Petrushka said, frowning. “But I’ve had enough.”

“He’s afraid that if he really begins to eat a lot, then Nastya will notice it and will eat a lot, too,” Lyuba Vassilievna said simply, “and he grudges it to her.”

“And you don’t grudge anything,” Petrushka said calmly. “All I want is that there should be more left for you.”

The father and mother glanced at each other and shivered at the words of their son.

“And why aren’t you eating?” her father asked Nastya. “Looking at Petrushka, aren’t you?… Now eat the way you ought to, or you won’t get to be a big girl.”

“I was born big,” Nastya said.

She ate a small piece, but another, bigger piece she pushed aside, and she covered it with her napkin.

“Why are you doing that?” her mother asked her. “Do you want me to put some butter on it?”

“I don’t want any more, I’m already full.”

“Come on, eat now. Why did you move that piece away?”

“Because Uncle Semyon’s coming. I left this for him. It isn’t yours, it’s what I didn’t eat myself. I’ll put it under a pillow, or it will get cold.” Nastya got up from her chair, and took the bread, wrapped up in her napkin, over to the bed and placed it under a pillow.

The mother remembered that when she had baked a loaf on the first of May she too had covered it with pillows so it would not get cold before Semyon Yevseyevich came.