Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

“You were fighting, and here I was helpless without you, my hands were shaking with grief, but I had to go on working cheerfully, to feed the children, to help the government against the Fascist enemies.”

The mother was talking quietly, but she was sick at heart, and Petrushka felt sorry for her: he knew that she had learned how to repair shoes, for himself and Nastya, so as not to pay the shoemaker, and he knew that she had repaired electric stoves for their neighbors in return for potatoes.

“But I just couldn’t go on living, and missing you,” the mother said. “If I could have, I’d have died. I know I would have died, but I had the children…. I just had to feel something else, Al-yosha, some kind of gladness, just to relax. One man said he loved me, and he treated me just as tenderly as you did once…”

“Who was that, your Semyon again?” the father asked.

“No, another man. He was working as a teacher for the district committee of our union, he had been evacuated…”

“The hell with him, whoever he was! So it turned out that he comforted you too, did he?”

Petrushka had known nothing of this instructor, and he was surprised that he hadn’t known about him. “Well, our mother’s a pretty sharp one, too,” he whispered to himself.

The mother answered the father: “I didn’t get anything from him, no happiness at all, and afterward everything was still worse. My heart reached out toward him because it was dying, but when he was close to me, really close, I didn’t care at all. I was thinking at that moment about all my household problems, and I was sorry that I had let him be close to me. I realized that I could feel peaceful only with you, really happy, and that I’d be able to relax only when you’d be close to me again. There was just nowhere for me to go without you, I couldn’t save myself even for the children. Live with us, Alyosha, things will be good for us!”

Petrushka heard how his father got up from the bed without speaking, lit his pipe, and sat down at the table.

“How many times were you with him, when you were close to him?” the father asked.

“Only once,” the mother said. “It never happened again. How many times should I have been?”

“As many as you liked, it was your business,” the father declared. “Only why did you say that you were the mother of our children, and had been a woman only with me, and that a long time ago… ?”

“It’s the truth, Alyosha.”

“What do you mean? What’s the truth? You admit you were a woman with him?”

“No, I wasn’t a woman with him. I wanted to be, but I couldn’t… I felt I’d be lost without you. I needed someone to be with me, but I was just worn out, my heart had grown dark, I couldn’t love my own children any longer, and for them, you know it yourself, I’d endure anything, for them I’d give the bones out of my body!”

“Wait a minute!” the father said. “You say yourself that you made a mistake with this new Semyon of yours, you didn’t get any happiness from him, but just the same you say you didn’t fall and weren’t ruined, you stayed safe and whole? Is that it?”

“I wasn’t done for,” the mother whispered. “I go on living.”

“It just means you’re lying to me about this, too. Where is the truth, for you?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I don’t know anything very much.”

“All right. To make up for it, I know a lot. I’ve lived through more than you have,” the father declared. “You’re a bitch, and that’s all there is to it.”

The mother was silent. The father could be heard breathing fast and hard.

“Here I am home,” he said. “The war’s over, but you’ve wounded me, in the heart. Well, what of it? You can live now with both of them, your Semyon and your Yevseiev. You’ve had your fun, and you’ve made a fool out of me, but I’m a human being, too, and not just some toy…”

In the dark the father started to put on his clothes and his shoes. Then he lit the kerosene lamp, sat down at the table, and put his watch on his wrist.

“Four o’clock,” he said, talking to himself. “Still dark. It’s the truth, what they all say, there’s lots of women but not a single wife.”

Everything grew quiet in the house. Nastya was breathing evenly in her sleep on the wooden couch. Petrushka burrowed into his pillow on the warm stove and forgot that he was supposed to snore.

“Alyosha!” the mother said in a gentle voice. “Alyosha, forgive me!”

Petrushka heard his father start to groan, and then the sound of breaking glass. Through cracks in the curtain, he could see the room grow darker where his mother and father were sitting, but the lamp was still burning. “He’s broken the lampshade,” Petrushka guessed, “and there’s no glass to be had anywhere.”

“You’ve cut your hand,” the mother sard. “You’re bleeding. Take that towel from the cupboard.”

“Shut up!” the father yelled at her. “I don’t even want to hear your voice. Wake up the children, wake them up right away! Wake them up, I tell you! I’ll explain to them what kind of mother they have! Let them know about it.”

Nastya gave a little shriek of fright in her sleep, and woke up. “Mama!” she called. “Can I get in bed with you?”

Nastya loved to get into bed with her mother at night, and get warm under the blanket.

Petrushka sat up on the stove, swung his legs over the side, and said to them all:

“It’s time to sleep! Why did you wake me up? It’s not daylight yet, everything’s dark outside. Why are you making such a racket, and burning the lamp?”

“Sleep, Nastya, sleep, it’s still early, I’ll come to you in a minute,” the mother said. “And you, Petrushka, don’t get up, and don’t say anything more.”

“And what are you talking for? What does Father need?” Petrushka said.

“Just what business is it of yours what I need?” the father answered. “What a sergeant you are!”

“And why did you break the glass in the lamp? What are you frightening Mother for? She’s so thin because she eats her potatoes without any meat, and gives the meat to Nastya.”

“Do you know what your mother was doing here, what she was busy at?” the father screamed in a complaining voice, like a little boy’s.

“Alyosha!” Lyuba Vassilievna said sharply, and she turned toward her husband.

“I know, I know it all!” Petrushka said. “Mother was crying for you, waiting for you, and now you’ve come and she’s crying again. It’s you who don’t know!”

“You don’t understand anything about it!” the father said angrily. “What a sprout we’ve raised in you!”

“I do too understand it all, completely,” Petrushka answered from the stove. “It’s you who don’t understand. We’ve got things to do, we’ve got to live, and you’re cursing here like some kind of madman…”

Petrushka stopped talking, lay back on his pillow and unexpectedly, quietly, began to cry.

“You’ve become the boss in this house,” the father said. “Well, it’s all the same now, you can live as master here…”

Wiping his tears, Petrushka answered his father:

“Well, what kind of a father are you? What do you think you’re saying? And you’re a grownup, and were in the war…. Look, tomorrow, you go to the wounded soldiers’ cooperative, that’s where Uncle Khariton works at the counter, he cuts the bread, and doesn’t cheat anybody. He was in the war, too, and then came back. Go and ask him, he tells everything, and laughs about it, I’ve heard him myself. He has a wife, Anyuta, she learned to drive a truck and she delivers the bread now, but she’s very good, she doesn’t steal any of it. She made friends, too, and went out with them, they used to stand her treats. And she made friends with a man with a medal, only he has no arms, and he was the head man in the store where they sell manufactured goods…”