Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

WAS HIS APHRODITEstill alive? Nazar Fomin was no longer asking this question, with doubt and with hope, of people and of institutions—they had already answered him that there was no trace of his Aphrodite anywhere—but of nature, of the sky, the stars and the horizon, and of lifeless things. He believed some kind of oblique sign or cryptic signal would show him if his Aphrodite was still breathing, or if the breath within her had grown cold. He walked out of the dugout into the field, stopped in front of a small blue flower, looked at it for a long time, and finally asked it: “Well? You can see more down there, you’re connected to the whole earth, while I walk around up here all by myself—is Aphrodite alive or not?” The little flower was moved neither by his grief nor by his question, it stayed silent and went on living in its own way, the wind went on blowing indifferently over the grass just as it had already blown, perhaps, over Aphrodite’s grave or across her living, smiling face. Fomin looked into the distance, at the clear shining light of a cloud floating above the horizon, and he thought that maybe up there, from that height, it might be possible to see where Aphrodite was. He believed in a general bookkeeping in nature, in which could be measured the sadness of loss as well as the satisfaction of saving what one values, and through the general connectedness of all the living and dead things in this world, he wanted to find some faint, secret news of the fate of his wife Aphrodite, of her life or of her death.

At the start of the war Aphrodite had disappeared among the people fleeing toward the east from the Germans. Nazar Ivanovich Fomin himself was already in the army at that time and could not help his beloved in any way to save herself. Aphrodite was a young woman, easy to live with, not one to get lost without trace or to die of hunger or need among her own people. Some misfortune, of course, was possible along the roads so far away, or death by accident. But neither in nature nor among people could a word be heard or a trembling felt which answered a man’s open, expectant heart with sad news, so Aphrodite should still be living on this earth.

Fomin gave himself up to memories, reliving his past at the slow pace of happiness which has been lived through and fixed in the mind for good. In his memory he could see a little town, its lime-chalked walls blinding white in the sunshine, the tiled roofs of its houses, its orchards growing in gladness under a blue sky. Toward midday Fomin used to walk for lunch to a cafe not far from the fireproofing construction enterprise where he was works superintendent. A gramophone played in the cafe. Fomin would go up to the counter, ask for sausages and cabbage, a so-called “flier” (salted peas to be thrown into the mouth), and also take a mug of beer. The woman serving the beer poured it into the mug, and Fomin would watch the stream of beer, interested chiefly in seeing that it was poured accurately, without filling the mug with empty foam; in this daily struggle with the foam on his beer he never looked carefully at the face of the woman serving him, and did not remember her when he walked out of the cafe. But one time the woman sighed deeply and desperately at the wrong moment, and Fomin stared at her as she stood behind the counter. She looked at him, too; the foam overflowed the mug, and she forgot what she was doing, paying no attention to the beer. “Stop!” Fomin said to her and for the first time he noticed that she was young, with a clear face, and dark, shining eyes, strangely combining thoughtfulness with laughter in their expression, and with thick black hair growing with a wild sort of strength on her head. Fomin turned his glance away from her, but his feeling had already been attracted by this woman, and the feeling was quite independent of his intelligence and of his peace of spirit, cutting right across them both, leading the man toward his own happiness. He looked at the foam, and did not mind its spilling uselessly across the marble surface of the counter. Later on, he called Natalya Vladimirovna his Aphrodite, because her image had appeared rising above the foam, although not of ocean waters but of another liquid.

And so Nazar Ivanovich lived with his Aphrodite for twenty years, as man and wife, not counting one interruption of two and a half years, and then the war had separated them; and now here he was hopelessly asking the plants and all the good creatures of the earth about her fate, and even looking at the movement of clouds and of stars in the sky with the same question. The information bureau concerned with evacuees had been searching for Natalya Vladimirovna Fomin zealously and for a long time, but so far they had not found her. There was no one closer to Nazar Fomin than Aphrodite; all his life he had grown used to talking with her, because this helped him to think and built up his confidence in whatever task he was carrying out. And now, at war, separated from Aphrodite for four years, Nazar Ivanovich Fomin used up all his free time in writing her long letters, which he mailed to the information bureau for evacuees in Buguruslan, with a request that they be forwarded to her as soon as she was found. During the war a great many such letters had probably piled up at the information bureau—some of them would be delivered some day, others never and would turn to dust unread. Nazar Ivanovich wrote his wife calmly and in detail, still believing in her existence and in his future reunion with her, but so far he had never received an answer from Aphrodite. The Red Army soldiers and officers under Fomin’s command checked the mail with great care, so that no letter might be lost which was addressed to their commander because he was practically the only man in the regiment who never received a letter either from his wife or from his relatives.

Now the happy years of peace had long gone by. They could not have lasted forever, for even happiness must change if it is to be preserved. In war Nazar Ivanovich Fomin had found another happiness for himself, different from what his peacetime work had given him but related to it; after the war he hoped to find a higher kind of life than anything he had yet experienced, either as a worker or as a soldier.

Our front-line units recaptured the southern city in which Fomin had lived and worked before the war. Fomin’s regiment was withdrawn into the reserve, held out of action because it was not needed. It made itself comfortable around the city, in the rear, so it could advance later on the long march to the west. Nazar Ivanovich wrote a letter to Aphrodite on his first day of rest, and then went on leave in what was the city he loved best in all the Russian land. The town had been shattered by artillery shelling, consumed by the flames of big fires, and its solid buildings had been reduced to dust by the enemy. Fomin was already used to seeing wheat fields trampled down by big machines, the earth cut with trenches, settlements where people lived torn apart by high explosives: this was the ploughing of war, in which the land is planted with what should never grow again upon it—the corpses of scoundrels, and with what was born for good and active living but preserved only in everlasting memories—the flesh of our soldiers, watching in death over our enemies in the earth.

Fomin walked through a fruit orchard to the place where Aphrodite’s cafe had once been. It was December. The naked fruit trees had grown cold for the winter and quiet in sorrowful sleep, and their spreading branches which had held fruit in the autumn had now been ripped by bullets and hung down helplessly in the ribbons of wood that survived, with only an occasional twig left whole and healthy. Many of the trees had been chopped down by the Germans for material with which to build defenses.