Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

“What are you talking about? You’d better go back to sleep, it will be light soon,” the mother said.

“But you two wouldn’t let me sleep…. It won’t be light yet for a long time. This man with no arms became friends with Anyuta and they started to live all right. And Khariton was off at the war. Then Khariton came back, and he started to swear at Anyuta. He cursed her all day, and at night he drank wine and stuffed himself with food while Anyuta just cried, and didn’t eat a thing. He swore and he swore, then he got tired of it, and he told her: ‘What if you did have one fellow, and without any arms, too, you’re just a stupid old woman, while I managed without you to have Glashka and Aproska and Maruska, and there was a namesake of yours, another Anyuta, and then there was a Magdalinka thrown in, too.’ And he laughed and laughed, and Aunt Anyuta laughed, too, and then she started to praise him: ‘Khariton’s still a good man, there’s no better anywhere, he killed the Fascists, and there was no way for him to get away from all those girls.’ Uncle Khariton still tells us all about it at the store while he’s handing out the bread, piece by piece. And now they’re living together peacefully, as fine as can be. But Uncle Khariton goes right on laughing, and he tells us: ‘I was fooling Anyuta. I didn’t have any of those girls. There wasn’t any Glashka, or any Anyuta, or any Aproska, and there wasn’t any Magdalinka thrown in, because a soldier is the son of his fatherland, he hasn’t got time to be fooling around, his heart works only against the enemy. I was just frightening Anyuta on purpose.’ Lie down and go to sleep, Father, and turn out the lamp, the flame’s smoking without a lampshade…”

Ivanov had listened with amazement to the story Petrushka told. “What a son of a bitch!” the father thought. “I was afraid he was just about to tell about my Masha…”

Petrushka was starting to snore; this time he had really fallen asleep.

He woke up when it had already become fully light, and he was frightened that he had slept so long, with nothing done in the house since dawn.

Nastya was alone in the house. She was sitting on the floor turning the pages of a picturebook her mother had bought her a long time ago. She looked at it every day, because she had no other real book, and she traced the letters with her finger, as if she were leading.

“What are you messing with the book for all morning long? Put it back where it belongs!” Petrushka told his sister. “Where’s Mother? Has she gone to work?”

“To work,” Nastya said in a low voice, and she closed the “book.

“And where did Father go off to?” Petrushka looked around the house, in the kitchen and in the main room. “Did he take his bag with him?”

“He took his bag,” Nastya said.

“What did he say to you?”

“He didn’t say anything, he just kissed my mouth and my eyes.”

“So, so,” Petrushka said, and he pondered for a moment. “Get up off the floor,” he ordered his sister. “Let me wash you cleaner and get you dressed, you and I are going out together….”

At this moment, their father was sitting in the station. He had already drunk two hundred grams of vodka and had eaten a morning meal with a coupon issued for travelers. During the night he had made up his mind definitely to go back to the town where h had left Masha, to see her again, and maybe never to go away from her. It was too bad that he was much older than the spaceman’s daughter, whose hair smelled of outdoors. But there it would become clear how things might work out, there was no good in guessing about it in advance. Still Ivanov hoped that Masha would be at least a little pleased when she saw him, and this would be enough: it would mean there was someone close to him again, and someone fine, cheerful, with a good heart. And there he’d see how things stood.

Soon the train came which would take Ivanov back in the direction from which he had come just the day before. He took his bag and walked out on the platform. “Masha won’t be expecting me,” Ivanov thought. “She told me to forget her anyway, and that we’d never see each other again, but here I am going back to her for good.”

He climbed on to the platform of the last car in the train, and stayed there so he could see for the last time, when the train pulled out, the little town where he had lived until the war, where his children had been born. He wanted to look once more at the house he was leaving; he would be able to see it from the train because the street on which he lived ran straight from a level crossing which the train would go through.

The train started off, moving quietly past the station switch-points into the empty autumn fields. Ivanov held on to the railing of the car and watched from the platform the little houses, the buildings, the barns, the fire tower of what had been his native town. From a distance he could recognize two high chimneys: one was the soap factory and the other the brick factory. Lyuba was working there right now, at the press which shaped the bricks: let her live now as she liked, and he would live the way he wanted to. Maybe he could have forgiven her, but what would that have meant? Anyway, his heart had grown hard against her, and there was no forgiveness in it for a person who had kissed and lived with someone else just so the time of war and of separation from her husband would not go by so tediously, all by herself. And the fact that Lyuba had been close to her Semyon or her Yevseiev, just because her life had been hard, because need and grief had got her down, this was only proof of her real feelings. All love springs from need and grief; if a person didn’t need anything and didn’t grieve he would never love anyone.

Ivanov was getting ready to leave the platform, to go into the car and lie down and sleep, no longer wanting to see for the last time the house he had lived in and where he had left his children: there was no reason to punish himself to no good end. He looked ahead to see how far away the level crossing was, and he saw it at once. Here the railroad tracks crossed a country dirt road leading into the town; wisps of hay and straw were lying on this dirt road where they had fallen from farm wagons, together with willow twigs and horse droppings. Usually, except for two market days each week, this road was empty; it was not often that a peasant drove into town with a load of hay or went back to his village. Today was no exception; the country road was deserted. But from the town, out of the street the country road ran into, two children were running. One was bigger, the other smaller, and the big one was pulling the other by the hand because the little one could not keep up no matter how great the effort, no matter how hard the little legs pumped up and down. Then the bigger one started to drag the other behind him. At the last house, they stopped and looked toward the station, probably deciding whether to go on or if it was already too late. Then they looked at the passenger train going through the level crossing, and started to run along the road straight toward the train, as if they were trying to catch up with it.

The car on which Ivanov was standing was almost at the crossing. Ivanov had picked up his bag to go into the car and lie down to sleep on an upper seat where the other passengers would not disturb him, but would those two children manage to make it before the last car had gone by? Ivanov leaned out of the platform, and looked back.

The two children, still holding hands, were running along the road toward the crossing. Suddenly both fell, then stood up, and started running again. The bigger one raised his free hand and, with his face turned in the direction of the train, beckoned toward himself, as if he were summoning someone to come back to him. And then they both fell down again. Ivanov noticed that the bigger child had one foot in a boot and the other in an overshoe; this was why he was falling down so often.