Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

“He had no reason,” I said.

The investigator had grown indifferent; he was already bored with me as a stupid fool.

“You know everything except what’s most important,” he said with deliberation. “You can go.”

I went straight from the police station to Maltsev’s house.

“Alexander Vassilievich,” I said to him, “why didn’t you ask me for help when you were blind?”

“But I saw,” he answered. “What did I need you for?”

“What did you see?”

“Everything: the tracks, the signals, the wheat growing in the steppe, the pulling of the right-hand driving wheels—I saw it all.”

I was puzzled.

“Then how did it happen to you the way it did? You went through all the warnings, you were driving straight into the rear end of another train…”

The man who had been a first-class engineer thought sadly for a moment, and then answered me as if he were talking to himself:

“I’m used to seeing light, and I thought that I was seeing it, but what I saw was only in my head, in my imagination. I really was blind, only I didn’t know it… I didn’t even believe the torpedoes, although I could hear them: I thought I was hearing wrong. And when you blew the stop whistle and yelled at me, I saw green lights in front of us. I didn’t guess what had happened right away.”

Now I understood Maltsev, but I couldn’t think why he had not told this to the investigator—about how he had gone on seeing the world in his imagination for a long time, and believing in its being real, after he was already blind. So I asked Alexander Vassilievich about this.

“But I did tell him,” Maltsev answered.

“And what did he say?”

“That, he said, was your imagination; maybe you’re imagining something right now, I just don’t know. I’ve got to establish the facts, he said, and not your imagination or the state of your nerves. Your imagination—whether it was that or not—I can’t check, it was only inside your own head, this is all your words, but the catastrophe, which almost happened—that’s something real.”

“He’s right,” I said.

“Right. I know it myself,” the engineer agreed. “But I’m right, too, and not guilty. What’s going to happen now?”

I did not know how to answer him.

They put Maltsev in prison. I went on working as an assistant but with another engineer, a careful old man who would start to brake a full kilometer before the yellow light so that when we got up to it the signal would have turned to green and the old man could start to drag the train along again. It wasn’t real work, and I was lonesome for Maltsev.

That winter I went to the district town to visit my brother who was a student, living in a university dormitory. He told me in one of our talks that in the physics laboratory at the university they had a Tesla induction coil with which to make artificial lightning. An idea came to me then that was not clear even to myself.

When I got home I thought out my guesses about the Tesla coil and decided that my idea was correct. I wrote a letter to the investigator who had been working on the Maltsev case with a request for an experiment on the prisoner Maltsev to test his susceptibility to the action of electrical charges. In the event that susceptibility of Maltsev’s psyche should be proved, or of his organs of sight to the action of sudden, close electrical charges, then his whole case should be reviewed. I told the investigator where the Tesla equipment could be found, and how the experiment could be carried out on a human being.

For a long time the investigator did not answer me, but then he notified me that the district prosecutor had agreed to carry out the experiment I suggested in the university physics laboratory.

Several days later the investigator served me with a subpoena. I went to see him in great excitement, convinced in advance that Maltsev’s case would have a happy ending.

The investigator greeted me but then was silent for a long time, reading some kind of paper with sad eyes. My hope disappeared.

“You’ve done your friend a bad turn,” the investigator told me.

“How? The sentence stays as it was?”

“No, we’ve released Maltsev. The order’s already been given, maybe he’s home by now.”

“I thank you.” I stood up in front of the investigator.

“But we won’t be thanking you. You gave very bad advice. Maltsev is blind again…”

I sat down again, exhausted. My heart felt as if it were burning. I wanted a drink badly.

“The experts tested Maltsev with the Tesla induction coil without any preparation by us, in the complete dark as to what it was all about,” the investigator told me. “The current was turned on, the lightning was produced, and a sharp blow was heard. Maltsev went through it calmly, but now he can’t see light—this has been proved objectively by experts in judicial medicine.”

The investigator drank a glass of water, and went on:

“Now he can see the world again only in his imagination… You’re his comrade, help him.”

“Maybe his sight will come back to him again,” I spoke my hope, “as it did before, after the locomotive…”

The investigator thought for a moment.

“Hardly. That was a first shock, this one is a second. He’s been hurt right at the spot where the wound was before.”

And no longer controlling himself, the investigator stood up and began to pace up and down the room in great agitation.

“I’m to blame in this…. Why did I listen to you, and insist on this experiment, like a fool? I put a man in great danger, and he lost.”

“You’re not to blame, you didn’t risk a thing,” I comforted the investigator. “Which is better—to be a free blind man or to see everything inside a prison when you’re innocent?”

“I didn’t realize that I would have to prove a man’s innocence by hurting him so badly,” the investigator said. “It’s too high a price.”

“You’re an investigator,” I explained to him. “You’ve got to know everything about a man, even what he doesn’t know about himself.”

“I understand that, you’re right,” the investigator said in a low voice.

“Don’t be disturbed about this, comrade investigator. Things inside a man were operating here, and you were only looking for things on the outside. But you were at least able to realize your own inadequacy, and you acted toward Maltsev like a good man. I respect you for this.”

“I respect you, too,” the investigator acknowledged. “You know something? We could make a good assistant investigator out of you.”

“Thanks, but I’m already busy. I’m assistant engineer on express train locomotives.”

I walked out. I wasn’t Maltsev’s friend, and he had always treated me without any care or attention. But I wanted to defend him against the misfortune he had suffered, and I was bitter at the fatal powers that can accidentally and indifferently destroy a man; I felt some secret, elusive calculation of these forces in the fact that they had destroyed Maltsev, and not—let’s say—me. I knew there was no such calculation in nature, in our human, mathematical sense, but I saw how facts do occur that prove the existence of hostile circumstances which are destructive of human life, and I saw how these terrible forces shatter the lives of selected, outstanding people. I decided not to surrender to them, because I could sense inside myself something which could not exist in the external forces of nature and in our destiny, I felt the special distinction of being a man. And I was in bitter despair, and I made up my mind to stand up against this, although I did not know how it would have to be dorie.