Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World

The next summer I passed my examination to qualify as a locomotive engineer, and started to go out on my own in an “SU” engine working on local passenger lines. Almost every time I hitched my engine to a train standing at the station platform, I saw Maltsev sitting there on a painted bench. With his arm leaning on a cane held between his legs he turned his passionate, sensitive face with its sunken, unseeing eyes in the direction of the locomotive and greedily breathed in the smell of burning and of lubricating oil while he listened carefully to the rhythmic working of the steam pump. I had no way of comforting him, and I went on, and he stayed there.

The summer went by. I worked on my engine, and I often saw Alexander Vassilievich, not only on the station platform but also on the street where he used to walk slowly, feeling his way with his cane. His cheeks were sunken, and he had aged a good deal; he had enough to live on—he was given a pension, his wife was working, and they had no children, but grief and his drab destiny were consuming Alexander Vassilievich, and his body was growing thin from his unceasing sorrow. I talked with him sometimes, but I could see that it was boring for him to chat about trifles and to try to satisfy himself with my polite comforting, and I could see that a blind man, too, is still a completely competent and full-fledged man.

“Go away!” he would say when he heard me saying well-intentioned things.

But I was an angry man, too, and once when he told me to leave him alone, as he usually did, I told him:

“Tomorrow I’m taking a train out at ten thirty. If you’ll sit there quietly, I’ll take you along in the engine.”

Maltsev agreed: “All right. I’ll behave. Let me hold something in my hand, though, give me the reverse lever. I won’t turn it.”

“You certainly won’t turn it,” I told him. “If you do, I’ll give you a piece of coal to hold instead, and I’ll never take you out in the engine again.”

The blind man said nothing more; he was so eager to climb into an engine again that he humbled himself in front of me.

The next day I invited him to exchange his painted bench for a seat in the cabin of my engine, and I went to meet him and to help him climb up into the train.

When we started to move, I put Alexander Vassilievich in my own driver’s seat, I placed one of his hands on the reverse lever and the other on the brake and then I put my own hands on top of his. I drove with my own hands, as I had to, but his hands were working too. Maltsev sat there silently, and he listened to me, enjoying the motion of the train, the wind in his face, and the work. He was concentrating so hard that he forgot his blind man’s sorrow, and a gentle kind of happiness lit up the helpless face of this man for whom just to feel an engine was pure bliss.

On the return trip we traveled the same way: Maltsev sat in the driver’s seat, while I stood up, leaning over him and holding my hands over his. Maltsev had already become so used to working in this way that I had only to exert the slightest pressure on his hand and he would sense exactly what I wanted. This man who had formerly been the complete master of his engine was trying to overcome his loss of sight and to feel the world around him by other means, so he could work, and justify his being alive.

On some of the quiet, straight runs, I walked away from Maltsev altogether, and looked out from the assistant’s place.

We were already on the approach to Tolubeyev, our regular run was finishing satisfactorily, and we were arriving on time. But on the very last section a yellow signal light flashed against us. I did not reduce speed ahead of time, and drove up to the signal under full steam. Maltsev was sitting there quietly, holding his left hand on the reverse lever: I was watching my teacher with a secret hope…

“Cut down the steam!” Maltsev said to me.

I said nothing, my heart was pounding inside me.

Then Maltsev stood up from his seat, put his hand on the steam valve, and closed it.

“I see a yellow light,” he said, and he pulled the brake lever toward him.

“But maybe you’re just imagining, again, that you see the light?” I said to Maltsev.

He turned his face toward me, and began to cry. I walked over to him, and kissed him.

“Go on, and drive the engine all the way now, Alexander Vassilievich: now you can see all the lights there are!”

He drove the train into Tolubeyev without my help. After work was over, I walked home with Maltsev, and we sat there together all evening and all night.

I was as frightened of leaving him alone as if he were my own son, without any protection against all the sudden, hostile forces loose in our fierce and beautiful world.

A dzhan is a soul looking for happiness, according to popular belief in Turkmenistan, a Soviet republic in Central Asia.