Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

“And just who’s this Uncle Semyon?” Ivanov asked his wife.

Lyuba Vassilievna did not know how to answer, and she said:

“I don’t know exactly who he is…. He comes to see the children, the Germans killed his wife and his children, he is used to our children now and he comes to play with them.”

“What kind of play?” Ivanov asked in surprise. “And why do they play here with you? How old is he?”

Petrushka looked quickly at his mother and father; the mother didn’t answer her husband’s question but just looked at Nastya with sad eyes, and the father smiled unpleasantly, got up from the table, and lit a cigarette.

“Where are the toys you and this Uncle Semyon play with?” the father asked Petrushka.

Nastya got up from the table, dragged a chair up to the chest of drawers, took out a little book, and brought it to her father.

“They’re book toys,” Nastya told him. “Uncle Semyon reads them out loud to me: look at Mishka here, he’s a toy but he’s in a book…”

Ivanov took in his hand the book toys his daughter gave him: about a bear named Mishka, about a toy cannon, about a little house where an old woman named Domna lived and spun flax with her granddaughter.

Petrushka remembered that it was time to close the damper in the stovepipe to keep the warmth inside the house. As he closed it, he told his father:

“He’s older than you are—Semyon Yevseyevich. He’s been good to us, let him be…”

Looking out of the window, Petrushka noticed that the clouds drifting across the sky were not the kind to be expected in September.

“Look at those clouds,” he said. “They’re like lead, it must be because they’re full of snow. Are we going to have winter by morning? Because if so, we’ve got things to do—the potatoes are all still in the ground, nothing is fixed up for storing them yet…. What a situation!”

Ivanov looked at his son, heard his words, and felt shy in front of him. He wanted to ask his wife in more detail just who was this Semyon Yevseyevich who had been coming to see his family for two years now, and just who it was he came to see—Nastya or his good-looking wife, but Petrushka was distracting Lyuba Vassi-lievna with household problems.

“Give me the bread cards for tomorrow, Mother, and the coupons to be clipped to them. And give me the kerosene coupons, too—tomorrow’s the last day, and we’ve got to get our charcoal, too, but you lost the sack for it. They’ll give it out only in our container, so look for the sack now, or sew up a new one out of old rags, we can’t get along without a sack! And Nastya shouldn’t let anyone cpme in our courtyard tomorrow to get water, or they’ll draw a lot out of the well. Winter will be here, the water level always drops lower then, and we won’t have enough rope to drop the bucket all the way down. You won’t have to eat snow but we’ll have to have firewood to melt it…”

While he was saying this, Petrushka was sweeping the floor beside the stove and at the same time straightening up the kitchen utensils. Then he took the pot of cabbage soup out of the oven.

“You’ve eaten the bread, now eat the cabbage soup,” he instructed them all. “And you, Father, tomorrow morning you’ve got to go to the District Council and the Military Commissary, to get on their lists right away, so we’ll get ration tickets for you sooner.”

“I’ll go,” the father agreed obediently.

“Don’t forget, be sure to go, or else you’ll oversleep in the morning and forget all about it.”

“No, I won’t forget,” the father promised.

The family ate its first dinner together after the war, cabbage soup with meat in it, in silence, and even Petrushka sat there quietly. It was as if the mother and the father and the children were all afraid of destroying by some accidental word the quiet happiness of the family sitting all together.

Then Ivanov asked his wife: “How are you off, Lyuba, for clothes? You’re probably short of them?”

“We’ve got along with our old ones, and now we’ll manage to get some new clothes,” Lyuba Vassilievna said smiling. “I made things over for the children, what they had, and your suit, two pairs of your trousers, and I altered all your linen for them. We didn’t have any extra money, you know, and the children had to have clothes.”

“You did just right,” Ivanov said, “to give the children everything we had.”

“I gave them everything, and I sold the overcoat you bought for me. I wear a quilted jacket now instead.”

“Her jacket’s too short; when she wears it, she can catch cold,"’ Petrushka spoke up. “I’m going to be a stoker in the public bath, and I’ll get paid, and then I’ll get her a good coat. They sell them at the market. I went and priced them, some of them look all right…”

“We’ll manage without you, without your wages,” the father said.

After dinner Nastya put on a big pair of glasses and sat at the window repairing her mother’s mittens which she wore over her gloves at work. It had already grown cold, autumn was in the courtyard. Petrushka looked at his sister and scolded her.

“What are you up to? Why are you in Uncle Semyon’s glasses?”

“I’m looking through the glasses, I’m not in them.”

“And so what? I can see! You’ll spoil your eyesight and go blind, and then you’ll be an invalid the rest of your life, on a pension. Take those glasses off right away, I’m telling you! And stop darning those mittens, Mother will do them herself, or I’ll do them as soon as I get time. Take your notebook and write out the alphabet, you’ve forgotten when you did it last!” •• “Is Nastya studying already, really?” the father asked.

“Not yet,” the mother answered, she was still too little, but Peter ordered his sister to keep busy every day, he had bought her a notebook, and she was writing out the letters. Peter was also teaching her arithmetic, making little piles of pumpkin seeds with her and then counting them, while Lyuba Vassilievna herself was teaching her the alphabet.

Nastya put the mittens down and took a notebook and a penholder with a pen in it out of a drawer in the chest. Content that everything was being done properly, Petrushka put on his mother’s jacket and went out to the courtyard to split wood for the next day; he usually brought the split wood into the house every night and piled it next to the stove so that it would dry out there, and burn both hotter and more economically.

That evening Lyuba Vassilievna got supper ready early. She wanted the children to get to sleep quickly so she could sit alone with her husband and talk with him. But the children were not sleepy after supper; Nastya, lying on the wooden couch, watched her father for a long time from under her blanket, while Petrushka, on top of the stove where he always slept in winter and in summer turned and tossed, coughed, whispered something, and didn’t settle down at all. It was already late in the night before Nastya closed her tired eyes and Petrushka started snoring on the stove.

Petrushka always slept lightly and on his guard: he was afraid something might happen in the night without his hearing it—a fire, or robbers breaking in, or his mother might forget to turn the key in the lock and the door would blow open and the house lose all its warmth. Tonight Petrushka was wakened by the troubled voices of his parents talking in the room next to the kitchen. What time it was—midnight or almost morning—he did not know, but his mother and father were not sleeping.

“Alyosha, don’t make so much noise, the children will wake up,” the mother was saying softly. “You mustn’t swear at him, he’s a good man, and he loved your children…”

“We don’t need his love,” the father said. “I love my own children…. Just think, he fell in love with somebody else’s children! I sent you an allotment from my pay, and you were working yourself—what did you need him for, this Semyon Yev-seyevich? Maybe your blood was still a little hot, no? Ah, Lyuba, Lyuba! I thought of you quite differently. It means, you’ve made a fool out of me…”