Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

After losing Aphrodite, Fomin realized that general blessedness and enjoyment of life, as he had expected them hitherto, were false dreams and that it was not in these that a man’s truth consisted and his real felicity. As he conquered his own suffering, endured what might have crushed him, and raised again what had been destroyed, Fomin unexpectedly felt a kind of free happiness which was independent both of scoundrels and of sheer chance. He understood his former naivete, all his nature started to grow harder, ripening in misery, and began to learn how to overcome the mountain of stone which blocked the road of his life; and then the world in front of him, which had seemed to him clear and attainable until now, spread itself out in a faraway mysterious haze, not because it was really dark there, or sad, or strange, but because it actually was enormously larger in all directions and could not be surveyed all at once, either inside a man’s heart or in simple space. And this new conception satisfied Fomin more than the miserable blessedness for whose sake alone, he used to think, people lived.

But at this time he found himself, together with the rest of his generation, just at the start of the new road to life of the whole Soviet Russian people. All that Nazar Fomin had lived through up to this time was only an introduction to his hard destiny, an initial testing of a young man and of his preparation for the urgent historical task his people had undertaken. In actuality, there is something base and insecure in striving for one’s own happiness; a man begins to be a man only with the paying of his debt to those who brought him to life in this world, and it is here that his highest satisfaction lies, the true, eternal happiness which no misery, no grief, no despair, can ever destroy. But at that moment Fomin could not hide his grief over his misfortune, and if there had not been people around him who loved him as someone who thought as they did, perhaps he might have lost his courage completely, and not survived. “Calm down,” one of his closest comrades told him with the sadness of understanding, “calm yourself! What else did you expect? Who has guaranteed us happiness and truth? We’ve got to make them ourselves, because our party is giving meaning to life for all the world. Our party—it’s humanity’s honor guard, and you’re a guardsman. The party is not bringing up happy cattle, but heroes for a great time of war and revolution…. Problems will keep right on growing in front of us, and we’ll be climbing up such high mountains—from their tops you’ll see all the horizon right up to the very ends of the earth. What are you whining and being bored about? Live with us—what’s wrong with you? You think all warmth comes from the stove at home, or from a wife, don’t you? You’re an intelligent man, you know we’ve got no need for weak creatures who take care of themselves. A different kind of times have started.”

It was the first time Fomin had heard that phrase “honor guard.” His life went on. Aphrodite, Nazar Fomin’s wife, hurt by the infidelities of her second husband, met Nazar one day and told him that life was sad for her, and that she missed him, that she had understood life wrongly when she had tried to find nothing but joy in it, without knowing either debts or obligations. Nazar Fomin listened to Aphrodite silently; jealousy and hurt pride were still inside him, held down and almost mute but still alive, like creatures that never die. But his joy at seeing Aphrodite’s face, the nearness of her heart, beating its way toward him, killed the wretched sadness in him, and after two and a half years of separation, he kissed Aphrodite’s hand which was being held out to him.

New years of life followed. Circumstances often made Fomin their victim, leading him to the very edge of destruction, but his spirit could no longer grow weak in hopelessness or in dejection. He lived, thought, and worked as if he constantly felt some great hand leading him gently and firmly forward, to the destiny of heroes. And the hand which led him strongly forward was the same big hand that warmed him, and its warmth penetrated inside him to his very heart.

“Good-bye, Aphrodite!” Nazar Fomin said out loud.

Wherever she was now, alive or dead, her footprints were still on the ground here in this deserted town, and the ashes held things she had at some time touched with her hands, printing the warmth of her fingers on them—everywhere around him there still existed unnoticed signs of her life, which are never completely destroyed, no matter how deeply the world is changed. Fomin’s feeling for Aphrodite was humble enough to be satisfied even by the fact that she had breathed here once upon a time, and the air of her birthplace still held the diffused warmth of her mouth and the weak fragrance of her body that had disappeared—for there is no destruction in the whole world that leaves no trace behind it.

“Good-bye, Aphrodite! I can feel you now only in my memories, but I still want to see you, alive and whole!”

Fomin stood up from the bench, looked at the town which had settled into its own ruins and could be easily seen from one end to the other, bowed to it, and walked back to his regiment. His heart, schooled now in patience, would be able to stand, perhaps, even eternal separation, and could preserve its faithfulness and its feeling of affection until the end of his existence. He kept quietly inside himself the pride of a soldier who can perform any labor or human deed; he rejoiced when he triumphed over an enemy, and whenever despair in his heart turned into hope, and hope into success and victory.

His orderly lit the candle in a saucer on the wooden kitchen table. Fomin took off his greatcoat and sat down to write a letter to Aphrodite: “Dear Natasha, trust me, and don’t forget me, just as I remember you. Trust me, that everything will work out as it ought to, and we’ll live again together. You and I will still have these wonderful children we’re sure to have. They wear my heart out in my yearning for you…”

ALEXANDER VASSILIEVICH MALTSEVwas considered to be the best locomotive engineer at the Tolubeyev station.

He was thirty years old, but he already had the rating of a first-class engineer and he had been driving express trains for a long time. When the first high-powered passenger locomotive of the “JS” (Joseph Stalin) series arrived at our station, it was Maltsev who was assigned to it, which was completely reasonable and right. His assistant was an elderly worker from the station repair shops named Fedor Petrovich Drabanov, but he soon passed his own examination as an engineer and went off to work on another locomotive and I was assigned to work in his place as an assistant on Maltsev’s crew. I had been an assistant before that, but only on older, less powerful engines.

I was pleased at the assignment. Just looking at that “JS” locomotive, the only one then in our division, filled me with enthusiasm: I could look at it for a long time and a specially moving kind of happiness welled up in me, just as wonderful as what I felt when I first read Pushkin when I was a child. Besides, I wanted to work under a first-class engineer in order to learn from him the art of driving heavy, high-speed trains.

Alexander Vassilievich was quiet and indifferent about my assignment to his crew; it was clearly all the same to him who worked as his assistant.

Before each trip I always checked every detail of the engine, testing all its maintenance and auxiliary mechanisms until I could relax, confident that the engine was ready for the trip. Alexander Vassilievich would watch me work, following each step, but then he would check the machinery after me with his own hands as if he didn’t trust me.