The Fierce and Beautiful World

THE POTUDAN RIVER

GRASS WAS GROWING again on the packed dirt roads of the civil war, for the fighting had stopped. With peace the countryside grew quiet again, and almost empty of people: some had died in the fighting, many were getting over their wounds, resting with their families, forgetting the heavy work of war in long sleep, while a few of the demobilized soldiers had not yet managed to get home and were still walking in their old overcoats, with packs on their backs and field helmets or sheepskin hats on their heads—walking through the thick, unfamiliar grass which they had not earlier had time to see, or maybe it had been trampled down before by their marching, and not growing. They walked with stunned, astonished hearts, seeing again the fields and villages spread out along the roads; their spirit had changed in the torment of war, in its sicknesses, and in the joy of victory. They were walking now as if to some new life, only vaguely remembering what they had been like three or four years before, for they had been transformed into different people. They had grown out of their age, and become wiser, they had grown more patient, and they felt inside themselves the great worldwide hope which had now become the central idea of their still-small lives which had had no clear goal or purpose before the civil war.

The last of the demobilized Red Army soldiers returned to their homes late in the summer. They had been retained in labor armies where they were used at various unfamiliar jobs, and they were sad, and only now were they told to go home to their own lives and to living in general.

A former Red Army soldier, Nikita Firsov, had been walking for two days along the hills which stretch out above the Potudan River toward his home in a little-known district town. He was a man of twenty-five, with a modest face which seemed always sorrowing but perhaps this expression came not from grief but from some controlled goodness of character or from the usual concentration of youth. Light-colored hair, uncut for a long time, stuck out around his ears from under his cap, and his big gray eyes looked with a kind of sullen tension at the quiet, ordinary, monotonous countryside, as if he were not a local man.

About noon Nikita Firsov lay down next to a little stream which ran from a spring along the bottom of a gorge down to the Potudan. He dozed on the ground under the sun, in the September grass which had stopped growing here since spring. It was as if the warmth of life had grown dark in him, and Firsov fell asleep in the quiet of this deserted place. Insects flew over him, a spider web floated above him, a wandering beggar stepped across him and, without touching the sleeper, uninterested in him, went on about his business. The dust of summer and of the long drought stood high in the air, making the light in the sky weaker and more diffuse, but still the time of peace, as usual, moved far behind the sun. Suddenly Firsov awoke and sat up, heavily, panting in fright as if he had lost his wind in some invisible running and fighting. He had had a strange dream of being smothered by the hot fur of a small, well-fed beast, a kind of little animal of the fields fed on pure wheat. This animal, soaked in sweat from its efforts and from its greed, had squirmed through the sleeper’s mouth into his throat, trying to burrow with its paws into the center of his soul, trying to stop his breathing. Choking in his sleep, Firsov wanted to scream and to run away, but the little animal pulled itself out of him by its own effort and disappeared—blind, wretched, frightened, and trembling itself—into the darkness of its night.

Firsov washed his face in the stream, and rinsed out his mouth, and then he went on quickly; his father’s house was not far away, and he could get there by evening.

As soon as it started to get dark, Firsov saw his birthplace in the dim onset of night. It was a gradual sloping ridge which rose from the bank of the Potudan up to the high-lying fields of rye. On this ridge was the small town, almost invisible now in the darkness. Not a single light was burning.

Nikita Firsov’s father was asleep: he went to bed as soon as he came home from work, before the sun had gone down. He lived alone, his wife had died a long time ago, two sons had been killed in the imperialist war and his last son, Nikita, was off at the civil war. Perhaps he would come back, the father thought, for the civil war was going on closer to where people lived and there was less shooting than in the imperialist war. The father slept a lot, from sunset right through until dawn; otherwise, if he didn’t sleep, he’d start to think, imagining what had been long forgotten, and his heart would be torn with sorrow over his wasted sons, and with regret for the lonely life behind him. In the mornings he would go off quickly to the workshop making peasant furniture where he worked; he could endure this, and forget about himself. But by evening, his spirits would be low again and he would go back to the room where he lived, and sleep almost in terror until morning came: he had no need for kerosene. At dawn the flies would begin to bite him on his bald spot, and the old man would wake up and take a long time dressing, putting on his shoes, washing, sighing, stamping around, fixing up his room, muttering to himself, stepping outside to look at the weather, then going back in—all this just to waste the time that had to be filled before his work began in the furniture workshop.

On this particular night, Firsov’s father was sleeping as he always did, out of both habit and fatigue. A cricket had lived in the wall of the house for nobody knew how many summers—this might have been the same cricket as the summer before last, or its grandson. Nikita walked up to the wall and knocked on his father’s window; the cricket was silent for a little, as if he were listening— who was this strange man who came so late? The father got up from the old wooden bed on which he had slept with the mother of all his sons; Nikita himself had been born on this same bed. The old man was in his underwear, which had shrunk from long wearing and from laundering so that now it came only to his knees. The father leaned close to the windowpane and looked through it at his son. He had already seen and recognized him but he went on looking, wanting to look his fill. Then little and skinny, like a boy, he darted around through the hall and the courtyard to open the gate which had been locked for the night.

Nikita walked into the old room with its stove that could be slept on, its low ceiling, its one window onto the street. It had the same smell as in his childhood and as three years before when he had gone off to war; he could catch even the smell of his mother’s skirt there—the only place in the world where that smell was left. Nikita took off his pack and his cap, slowly slipped off his coat, and sat down on the bed. His father was standing in front of him all this time, barefoot and in his underwear, not daring yet to greet him properly, or to start talking.

“Well, how is it with the bourgeois and the Cadets?” he asked after a minute. “Did you kill them all, or are there some left?”

“We killed almost all of them, I guess,” his son said.

“They’re a flabby sort!” the old man said, talking about the bourgeois. “Whatever they might have done, they’d just got used to living free of charge.”

Nikita stood up in front of his father, and now he was the taller, by a head and a half. The old man stood quietly next to his son in the humble bewilderment of his love for him. Nikita put his hand on the father’s head and drew it to his chest. The old man leaned against his son and started to breathe deeply and fast, as if he had just reached his resting place.

On another street in this town, running straight out into the fields, stood a wooden house with green shutters. An elderly widow had once lived here, a teacher in the town school, with her two children, a boy of ten and a daughter of fifteen, a fair-haired girl named Lyuba.

Some years before, Nikita Firsov’s father had wanted to marry the widow teacher, but he soon gave up the idea. He took Nikita, twice, when he was still a little boy, to call on the teacher, and Nikita saw the thoughtful girl Lyuba there, sitting, reading a book, paying no attention to the strange guests.

The old teacher served tea with crackers to the cabinetmaker and made some remarks about enlightening the people’s minds and about repairing the stoves in the school. Nikita’s father sat there silently, he was embarrassed, he quacked and coughed and smoked his little cigar, and then shyly drank his tea out of the saucer, not touching the little crackers because—he explained—he was already full.

There were chairs in the teacher’s apartment, in both of its two rooms and in the kitchen, with curtains hung at the windows, and in the first room there were a little piano and a wardrobe, while the second, farther, room had beds, two armchairs upholstered in red velvet, and a great many books on shelves along the wall—probably a whole collected edition of some kind. This furniture seemed too luxurious to both the father and the son, and after having visited the widow twice, the father stopped going there. He never even managed to tell her that he had wanted to marry her. But Nikita would have liked to see the little piano again, and the pensive girl who had been reading, and he asked his father to marry the mother so they could call on her again.

“I can’t, Nikita,” the father told him then. “I’ve had too little education, so what would I talk to her about? And I’d be ashamed to invite them here; we haven’t any china, and our food’s not much good…. Did you see what armchairs they had? Antiques, from Moscow! And that wardrobe? With fretwork all over the front—I know what that is! And the daughter! She’s probably going to go to the university.”

And the father had not seen his old flame for several years, and had only occasionally missed her, perhaps, or thought about her at all.

The day after he came back from the civil war Nikita walked over to the military commissariat to register in the reserve. Then he walked around the whole familiar town where he had been born, and his heart ached at the sight of the rundown little houses, the broken walls and wattle fences, and the occasional apple trees in the courtyards, some of which had died and dried up for good. In his childhood these apple trees had still been green, and the one-storied houses had seemed big and rich, lived in by mysterious, intelligent people, and the streets then had been long, the burdocks high, and even the weeds growing in the empty lots and in the abandoned kitchen gardens had looked in the old times like sinister, dense forests. But now Nikita saw that the houses of the townspeople were miserable and tiny, they needed paint and repairs, even the weeds in the bare spots were poor things, lived on only by ancient, patient ants, and all the streets petered out in empty land or in the light-filled distance of the sky—the town had become a little one. Nikita realized this meant he had already lived a lot of his life, once large and mysterious objects had become small and boring to him.

He walked slowly by the house with green shutters where he had once gone to call with his father. He knew the paint on the shutters was green only from memory, for only traces of it were left now, it had been faded by the sun, and washed by storms and showers, right down to the wood itself, and the metal roof of the house had rusted badly, so that rain probably ran right through it now, and soaked the ceiling above the little piano. Nikita looked carefully into the window of this house; there were no curtains any longer, and a strange darkness could be seen on the other side of the window glass. Nikita sat down on a bench near the gate of this dilapidated but still familiar little house. He thought maybe someone would play the piano, and he would listen to the music. But everything inside was quiet, telling him nothing. After he had listened for a little, Nikita looked into the courtyard through a crack in the wall; old nettles were growing there, a little path wound through some bushes toward the shed, and three wooden steps led into the building. It must be that the old teacher and her daughter Lyuba had both died a long time ago, and the boy had probably gone off to the war as a volunteer…

Nikita walked back to his home. The day was moving toward its evening, his father would soon be coming back for the night, he would have to talk over with him how he was going to live from now on and where he would go to work.

There were a few persons walking along the main street in town, because people were beginning to perk up after the war. Now there were office workers and students on the street, demobilized soldiers and those convalescing from wounds, young people, men who worked at home or in handicraft trades, and others like them; factory workers would come out to walk later, after it had grown quite dark. People were dressed in old clothes, poorly, or else in outworn military uniforms dating from imperialist times.

Practically all the walkers, even those going arm in arm and about to be married, were carrying some kind of household goods. Women were carrying potatoes in kitchen bags, or sometimes fish, men held their bread rations under their arms, or a half a cow’s head, or they held tripe fixed for the kettle carefully in their hands. Almost no one seemed dejected except for an occasional tired old man. The younger ones were usually laughing, and looking closely at each other, in high spirits and confident, as if they were on the eve of eternal happiness.

“Hello!” a woman said shyly to Nikita from one side.

The voice both touched and warmed him at the same time, as if someone dear to him and in some trouble had called on him for help. But then it seemed to Nikita that it had been an error and that it was not he who was being greeted. Afraid of making a mistake, he looked slowly around at the people who were walking past him. There were only two of them, and both of these had gone by him. Nikita looked behind him—a big, grown-up Lyuba had stopped and was looking at him. She gave him a sad, embarrassed smile.

Nikita walked up to her and looked her over carefully, as if to see if she had kept herself in good shape, for even in his memory she was precious to him. Her Austrian boots, tied up with a string, were clearly worn-out, her pale muslin dress came only to her knees, probably because that was all the cloth there was; the dress filled Nikita with compassion for Lyuba right away, he had seen dresses like that on women in their coffins, while here the muslin was covering a living, grown-up, even if impoverished, body. She was wearing an old woman’s jacket on top of the dress—probably Lyuba’s mother had worn it when she was a girl, and there was nothing on Lyuba’s head—just her hair twisted below her neck into a light-colored, firm braid.

“You don’t remember me?” Lyuba asked him.

“No, I haven’t forgotten you,” Nikita answered.

“One should never forget,” Lyuba said with a smile.

Her clear eyes, filled with some secret emotion, were looking tenderly at Nikita as if they were feasting on him. Nikita was looking at her face, too, and his heart was both glad and sorry at the sight of her eyes, which were sunk deep from hardships she had lived through and lighted up with confidence and hope.

Nikita walked back with Lyuba to her home—she still lived in the same house. Her mother had died not long before, and her young brother had been fed during the famine by a Red Army field kitchen and had grown used to it and gone off to the south with the Red Army to fight the enemy.

“He got used to eating porridge, and there wasn’t any at home,” Lyuba said.

Lyuba was living now in just one room—she didn’t need any more. Nikita looked with a sinking feeling at this room where he had first seen Lyuba, the little piano, and the expensive furniture. Now there was no piano, and no wardrobe with fretwork on its front, there were just the two upholstered chairs, a table and a bed, and the whole room was no longer as interesting and as mysterious to him as it had been when he was younger—the paper on the walls was faded and torn, the floor was worn down, next to the big tiled stove stood a small iron one in which a handful of chips could be burned to make a little heat.

Lyuba pulled a notebook out of the top of her dress and took off her shoes, so that she was barefoot. She was studying medicine at the district academy; in those days there were universities and academies in all the districts because the people wanted to advance their knowledge as quickly as they could; like hunger and want, the senselessness of life had tormented the human heart too long, and it was high time to find out what the existence of men was all about, was it something serious, or a joke?

“They hurt my feet,” Lyuba said, pointing to her shoes. “You sit down for a while, and I’ll get into bed, because I’m terribly hungry, and I don’t want to think about it…”

Without undressing, Lyuba climbed under the blanket on the bed and placed her braid on top of her eyes.

Nikita sat there silently for two or three hours, waiting for Lyuba to go to sleep. Then night fell, and Lyuba stood up in the darkness.

“My friend, probably, won’t be coming today,” Lyuba said sadly.

“What of it? Do you need her?” Nikita asked.

“Very badly,” Lyuba said. “They have a big family, and the father is in the army, she brings me supper when there’s something left over…. I eat, and then we study together…”

“But do you have any kerosene?” Nikita asked.

“No, they gave me firewood…. We light the little stove, and then we sit on the floor and we can see by the flame.”

Lyuba smiled helplessly, and ashamed, as if some cruel, unhappy thought had occurred to her.

“Probably her older brother didn’t fall asleep,” she said. “He doesn’t like to have his sister feed me, he begrudges it… But I’m not to blame! I’m not so fond of eating: it isn’t me, but my head starts to ache, it starts to think about a piece of bread and keeps me from living and thinking about anything else…”

“Lyuba!” a young voice said outside the window.

“Zhenya!” Lyuba called out.

Lyuba’s friend walked in. She took four big baked potatoes out of the pocket of her jacket and put them on the iron stove.

“Did you get the histology book?” Lyuba asked her.

“And where would I get it?” Zhenya answered. “I signed up for it at the library…”

“Never mind, we’ll get along without it,” Lyuba declared. “I memorized the first two chapters in the department. I’ll recite it, and you take notes. Won’t that work?”

“Even better!” Zhenya answered, laughing.

Nikita stoked up the little stove so its flames would light the notebook, and then got ready to go back to his father’s for the night.

“You won’t forget me now?” Lyuba asked as she said good-bye to him.

“No,” Nikita said. “I have nobody else to remember.”

Firsov lay around the house for a couple of days and then went to work in the same furniture workshop where his father was employed. They listed him as a carpenter and assigned him to getting materials ready, and his pay was lower than his father’s, hardly more than half as much. But Nikita knew this was temporary, while he got used to the trade, and then they would give him a rating as a cabinetmaker, and his pay would be better.

Nikita had never lost his habits of work. In the Red Army people were busy not just making war—in their long halts and when they were being held in reserve Red Army soldiers dug wells, repaired the huts of poor peasants in the villages, and planted bushes on the tops of ravines to keep the earth from washing away. For the war would be over and life would go on, and it was necessary to think about this in advance.

After a week Nikita went to call on Lyuba again; he took her some boiled fish and some bread as a present—it was the second course of his dinner at the workers’ restaurant.

Lyuba was hurrying to finish a book by the window, profiting from the light still in the sky, so Nikita sat quietly for a while in her room, waiting for the darkness. But soon the twilight caught up with the quiet on the street outside, and Lyuba rubbed her eyes and closed her textbook.

“How are you?” Lyuba asked him in a low voice.

“My father and I get along, we’re all right,” Nikita said. “I brought you something to eat there, go on and eat it, please.”

“I’ll eat it, thank you,” Lyuba said.

“Then you won’t go to sleep?” Nikita asked.

“No, I won’t,” Lyuba answered. “I’ll eat my supper now, and I’ll be full!”

Nikita brought some kindling from the shed and lit the iron stove to make some light. He sat down on the floor, opened the door of the stove and fed chips and little twigs to the flames, trying to keep the heat at a minimum with as much light as possible. Lyuba sat down on the floor, too, when she had eaten the fish and the bread, facing Nikita and next to the light from the stove, and began to study her medical book.

She read silently, sometimes whispering something, smiling, and writing down some words on a pad in a small, quick handwriting, probably the more important points she read. Nikita just took care that the fire burned properly, and only from time to time—not often—looked at Lyuba’s face, and then stared at the fire again for a long time because he was afraid of bothering Lyuba with his looking at her. So the time went, and Nikita thought sadly that it would soon go by completely and it would be time for him to go home.

At midnight, when the clock struck in the tower, Nikita asked Lyuba why her friend Zhenya had not come.

“She’s got typhus, for the second time, she’ll probably die of it,” Lyuba answered, and she went back to reading her medicine.

“That’s really too bad!” Nikita said, but Lyuba did not answer him.

Nikita pictured to himself a sick and fevered Zhenya, and it seemed to him he could have fallen really in love with her, if he had known her earlier and if she had encouraged him a little. For she was also pretty, it seemed: it was a shame he had not seen her clearly in the dark and could hardly remember what she looked like.

“Now I want to sleep,” Lyuba said, sighing.

“Did you understand everything you read?” Nikita asked her.

“Absolutely all! Do you want me to tell it to you?” Lyuba offered.

“You don’t have to,” Nikita said. “You’d better keep it for yourself, because I’d forget it anyway.”

He swept the floor around the stove with a broom, and went home to his father.

After that he called on Lyuba almost every day, except that sometimes he let a day or two go by so that Lyuba would miss him. Whether she missed him or not he didn’t know, but on these empty evenings Nikita had to walk for eight or ten miles, around and around the whole town, trying to control himself in solitude, to endure his longing for Lyuba and to keep himself from going to her.

When he did call on her, he was usually busy stoking the little stove and waiting for her to say something to him in the moments when she wasn’t reading in her book. Every time Nikita brought her some supper from the restaurant at the furniture workshop; she ate her dinners at her academy, but they served too little there and Lyuba was thinking a lot, studying, and still growing, too, so she didn’t get enough nourishment. The first time he was paid Nikita bought a cow’s horns in a neighboring village and boiled meat jelly on the little stove all night while Lyuba was busy at her books and her notebooks until midnight, when she mended her clothes, darned her stockings and washed the floor until the dawn came, and then took a bath in the courtyard in a tub filled with rainwater before people who might see her had even wakened from their sleep.

Nikita’s father was lonely every evening all alone, without his son, but Nikita never said where he was going. “He’s a man now, in his own right,” the old man thought. “He might have been killed or wounded in the war, so since he’s still alive, let him go!”

One day the old man noticed that his son had brought home two white rolls. But he wrapped them up right away in a piece of paper, and didn’t offer either of them to his father. Then Nikita put on his army cap, as was his habit, and walked out into the night, taking the two rolls with him.

“Nikita, take me along with you,” the father begged him. “I won’t say a thing, I’ll just look…. It must be interesting there, with something happening!”

“Another time, father,” Nikita said, embarrassed. “Besides, it’s time for you to sleep, you’ve got to go to work tomorrow.”

Nikita didn’t find Lyuba that night, she wasn’t home. He sat down on the bench by the gate, and began to wait for her. He put the white rolls inside his shirt so that they would keep warm until Lyuba arrived. He sat there patiently until late in the night, watching the stars in the sky and the few people passing by who were hurrying home to their children, listening to the sounds of the town clock striking in the tower, the barking of dogs in the courtyards, and various other quiet, unclear sounds which are not made in the daytime. He could probably have sat there, waiting, until he died.

Lyuba appeared, unheard, out of the darkness in front of Nikita. He stood up, but she told him: “You’d better go home,” and she was crying. She walked into her room, and Nikita waited a little longer outside, not understanding, and then walked after her.

“Zhenya’s dead,” Lyuba said to him in the room. “What will I do now?”

Nikita was silent. The warm rolls were lying against his chest— he didn’t have to take them out right then, right then there was nothing that had to be done. Lyuba was lying on the bed in her clothes, her face turned to the wall, and she was crying to herself, soundlessly and almost without stirring.

Nikita stood alone for a long time in the night-filled room, ashamed to disturb someone else’s deep sorrow. Lyuba paid him no attention, because the sadness of one’s own grief makes people indifferent to all other suffering. Nikita sat down without being asked on the bed at Lyuba’s feet, and took the rolls out of his shirt to put them down somewhere, but for the moment he couldn’t find anywhere to put them.

“Let me stay with you now!” Nikita said.

“But what will you do?” Lyuba asked, in tears.

Nikita pondered, afraid of making a mistake or of accidentally offending Lyuba.

“I won’t do anything,” he answered. “We’ll just live as usual, so you won’t be so worried.”

“Let’s wait, we’ve no reason to hurry,” Lyuba declared pensively and prudently. “But we’ve got to think what we can bury Zhenya in—they haven’t any coffin…”

“I’ll bring it tomorrow,” Nikita promised, and he put the rolls down on the bed.

The next day Nikita asked the foreman’s permission and started to make a coffin; they were always allowed to make coffins freely, without paying for the lumber. From lack of experience he took a long time making it but then he fashioned the place for the dead girl to lie inside it with special care and neatness; Nikita himself was upset just by thinking about the dead Zhenya and some of his tears fell among the shavings. His father, who was walking by, walked up to Nikita and noticed his trouble.

“What are you so sad about: has your girl died?” the father asked.

“No, her girl friend,” he answered.

“Her girl friend?” the father said. “Well, plague take her!… Here, let me even up the side of that coffin, you’ve made it look bad, it’s not right.”

When he finished work, Nikita carried the coffin to Lyuba; he didn’t know where her dead friend was.

A warm autumn lasted for a long time that year, and people were glad of it. “It’s been a bad harvest, so we’ll save on firewood,” thrifty persons said. Nikita Firsov had ordered ahead of time a woman’s coat to be made for Lyuba out of his Red Army overcoat, and it had been ready for quite a while without any need to wear it, thanks to the warm weather. Nikita kept right on going to Lyuba’s as he had before, to help her live and in return to get what he needed for the enjoyment of his own heart.

He asked her once how they should go on living—together or apart. And she answered that she would have no chance to feel happy before the spring, because she had to finish her medical academy as quickly as she could, and then they would see. Nikita listened to this long-term promise, he wasn’t asking for any greater happiness than what he already had, thanks to Lyuba, and he did not even know if there was anything better, but his heart was shivering from its long endurance and from uncertainty—what did Lyuba need of a poor, unschooled, demobilized man like him? Lyuba sometimes smiled when she looked at him with her bright eyes, which had large, incomprehensible spots in them, and the face around her eyes was filled with goodness.

Once Nikita started to cry, while he was covering Lyuba with a blanket for the night before he went home, but Lyuba only stroked his head and said: “Well, you’ll be all right, you musn’t worry so while I’m still alive.”

Nikita hurried home to his father, to take refuge there, to come to his senses, and to stay away from Lyuba for several days in a row. “I’ll read,” he decided, “and I’ll start to live the way I ought to, and I’ll forget Lyuba, I won’t remember her or even know her. What has she got that’s so special? There are millions of persons on this earth, and better than she is, too! She’s not good-looking!”

In the morning he couldn’t stand up from the bedding where he slept on the floor. His father, going out to work, felt his head, and said:

“You’re burning up. Lie down in bed! You’ll be sick for a while, and then you’ll get better…. You weren’t wounded anywhere in the war?”

“Nowhere,” Nikita answered.

Toward evening he lost his memory; at first he saw the ceiling all the time, with two late flies on it about to die, sheltering themselves there» for warmth with which to go on living, and then these same things began to fill him with melancholy and revulsion—it was as if the ceiling and the flies had penetrated into his brain, he couldn’t drive them out or stop thinking about them in one steadily swelling thought which had already eaten up all the bones in his head. Nikita closed his eyes, but the flies were seething in his brain, and he jumped up from the bed, to drive the flies from the ceiling, but fell back on the pillow; it seemed to him the pillow still smelled of his mother’s breath—his mother had slept right here next to his father—Nikita remembered her, and then he lost consciousness.

After four days, Lyuba found out where Nikita Firsov lived and showed up there for the first time. It was in the middle of the day, all the houses where workers lived were empty, the women had gone out to get food, and the children not yet old enough for school were scattered through the courtyards and the clearings.

Lyuba sat on Nikita’s bed, stroked his forehead, wiped his eyes with the end of her handkerchief, and asked him:

“Well, how about it, where do you hurt?”

“Nowhere,” Nikita said.

His high fever had taken him far away from people and from things around him, and he barely saw and recognized Lyuba; afraid to lose her in the darkness of his flickering consciousness, he held on with his hand to the pocket of her coat, made over from his Red Army greatcoat, and he clung to it as an exhausted swimmer, between drowning and being saved, clutches at the shore. His illness was trying all the time to sweep him over the shining, empty horizon—into the open sea where he could rest at last on its slow, heavy waves.

“You have the grippe, probably, and I’ll cure you,” Lyuba said. “Or maybe it’s typhus. But never mind—it’s nothing to be frightened of.”

She lifted Nikita by the shoulders and leaned his back against the wall. Then quickly and insistently she dressed him in her coat, she found his father’s muffler and tied it around the sick man’s head, and she stuck his feet into a pair of felt boots which were waiting under the bed for winter to come. With her arms around Nikita, Lyuba told him to move his legs and she led him, shivering, out into the street. A horse cab was waiting there, Lyuba pushed the sick man into it, and they drove off.

“He’s not long for this world,” the driver said and he turned to his horses, urging them with his reins into a gentle trot.

In her own room Lyuba undressed Nikita, put him to bed, and covered him with the blanket, an old strip of carpet, a decrepit shawl of her mother’s—with everything she had that could keep him warm.

“Why stay there at your house?” Lyuba asked with satisfaction, tucking the blanket around Nikita’s burning body. “Just why? Your father’s off at work, you lie there all day alone, you get no care of any kind, and you just pine for me…”

For a long time Nikita thought and wondered where Lyuba had got the money for the cab. Maybe she had sold her Austrian boots, or her textbook (she would have learned it by heart first, so she wouldn’t need it) or else she had given the cabdriver her entire monthly stipend.

At night Nikita lay there in deep trouble: sometimes he understood where he was, and could see Lyuba who had lit the stove and was cooking food on it, and then he could see only the unknown phantoms of his mind, operating independently of his will in the compressed, feverish tightness of his head.

His fever chills grew steadily worse. From time to time Lyuba felt Nikita’s forehead with the palm of her hand, and counted the pulse in his wrist. Late in the night she poured out some warm water for him and then, taking off her outer clothing, lay down under the blanket with the sick man because he was shaking with chills and had to be warmed. Lyuba put her arms around Nikita and drew him to her while he rolled himself into a ball, away from the cold, and pushed his face against her breast in order to sense more closely this other, higher, better life and to forget his own torment, and his own shuddering, empty body. But now Nikita did not want to die—not because of himself, but in order to keep on touching Lyuba, this other life—and so he asked her in a whisper if he would get well or if he would die: for she had studied and must know the answer.

Lyuba hugged Nikita’s head in her arms, and answered:

“You’ll be well soon…. People die because they get sick all alone, and have nobody to love them, but you’re with me now…”

Nikita grew warm, and fell asleep.

After three weeks Nikita was well again. Snow had already fallen outside, everything had suddenly grown quiet, and Nikita went home to spend the winter with his father. He did not want to bother Lyuba until she had finished the academy. Let her mind grow to its full size, for she came from poor people, too. The father was glad at his son’s return, even though he had visited him at Lyuba’s two days out of three, each time taking some food for his son while for Lyuba he took no present of any kind.

In the daytime Nikita started to work again at the workshop, in the evenings he visited Lyuba, and the winter went well; he knew that she would be his wife in the spring and that a long and happy life would start then. Sometimes Lyuba would poke him, push at him, run away from him around the room, and then—after the playing—Nikita would kiss her carefully on the cheek. Usually Lyuba would not let him touch her without some reason.

“Or else you’ll get tired of me, and we’ve still got a whole life ahead of us!” she said. “I’m not that attractive, it just seems so to you.”

On their day off Lyuba and Nikita took walks along the winter roads outside the town, or they walked, half-frozen, along the ice of the sleeping Potudan River—far downstream as it ran in summertime. Nikita would lie on his stomach and look down through the ice to where the quiet flowing of the water could be seen. Lyuba too would settle down next to him and, touching each other, they would watch the flowing of the water and they would talk about how happy the Potudan River was because it was running out to the sea and because this water under the ice would flow past the shores of faraway lands where flowers were now blooming and birds singing. When she had thought a little about this, Lyuba made Nikita stand up from the ice at once; he was now going around in an old quilted coat of his father’s, it was too short for him and didn’t keep him very warm, so he might catch cold.

They patiently were friends with each other almost all winter long, tormented by anticipation of their imminent future happiness. The Potudan River was also hidden under the ice all winter long, and the winter grain was sleeping under the snow—these natural phenomena calmed Nikita Firsov and even comforted him: his heart was not the only thing lying buried until spring. In February, waking up in the mornings, he would listen—were there new flies buzzing yet? Outdoors he would look at the sky and at the trees in the garden next door: maybe the first birds were already flying in from faraway countries. But the trees, the grass and the eggs of the flies were all still asleep in the depth of their strength, in embryo.

In the middle of February, Lyuba told Nikita that final examinations would begin on the twentieth, because doctors were so badly needed and people could not wait long for them. And by March the examinations would be over, and then the snow could stay and the river could go on running under its ice until July if they wanted to! Happiness would start in their hearts before warmth began in nature around them.

During this time—just before March—Nikita wanted to get out of the town, to make the time go more quickly until he and Lyuba could live together. He volunteered at the furniture workshop to go out with a brigade of carpenters to repair furniture in village Soviets and village schools.

At the same time his father finished making, at his own pace, a big wardrobe as a present for the young people. It was like the one which had been in Lyuba’s room when her mother was about to become the bride of Nikita’s father. In the old carpenter’s eyes life was repeating itself for a second or third time. You could understand this but you couldn’t change it, and Nikita’s father, sighing deeply, loaded the wardrobe on to a sledge and hauled it to the home of his son’s intended bride. The snow was getting warm and melting under the sun, but the old man was still strong and he pulled the sledge with some effort even across the black stretches of bare earth. He was secretly thinking that he himself could easily marry this girl, Lyuba, although he had once been too shy for her mother, but he was somehow still ashamed, and he didn’t have enough at home to attract and pamper a young girl like her. And Nikita’s father concluded from this that life was far from normal. His son had only just come back from war, and here he was leaving home again, this time for good and all. The old man would have to pick up a beggar off the streets, not for the sake of family life but so that there might be some kind of second being in the house, if only a domesticated hedgehog or a rabbit: it might upset life and dirty everything up, but without it he’d cease to be a man.

When he gave Lyuba the wardrobe, Nikita’s father asked her when he would be coming to her wedding.

“Whenever Nikita comes back. I’m ready now,” Lyuba said.

That night the father walked fourteen miles to the village where Nikita was fixing desks in a school. Nikita was asleep on the floor in an empty classroom, but the father woke him and told him it was time to go back to the town—he could get married.

“You get going, and I’ll finish the desks for you,” the father told him.

Nikita put on his cap and right away, without waiting for the: dawn, set out on foot for the town. He walked alone through the whole second half of the night through empty country: the wind off the fields was blowing fitfully around him, sometimes in his face, sometimes against his back, and sometimes disappearing entirely into the silence of the ravine next to the road. The ground lay dark along the slopes and in the high fields, the snow had run down into the bottom lands, there was the smell of young water and of rotting grass dead since the autumn. But the autumn was already a forgotten, long-past time—the earth was now poor and free, it would give birth to everything from scratch and only to new things which had never lived before. Nikita wasn’t even in a hurry to get to Lyuba; he liked being in that dim light of night on that unthinking, early ground which had forgotten all that had already died on it and knew nothing of what it would give birth to in the warmth of the new summer.

Toward morning Nikita got to Lyuba’s house. A light hoar frost covered the familiar roof and the brick foundations—Lyuba was probably sleeping sweetly now in her warm bed, and Nikita walked past her house so as not to wake his bride, not to let her body cool just because of him.

By evening of that day Nikita Firsov and Lyubov Kuznetsova had been registered in the district Soviet as married, and they went back to Lyuba’s room, and didn’t know what to do. Nikita now felt it on his conscience that complete happiness had arrived for him, that the person he needed most in all the world wanted to live together with him, as if there were some great and priceless goodness hidden inside him. He took Lyuba’s hand and held it for a long time; he delighted in the warm feeling of her palm, through it he could feel the distant beating of the heart he loved, and he thought about the mystery he could not understand: why Lyuba was smiling at him, and loved him for reasons he could not guess. He knew precisely, for himself, just why Lyuba was dear to him.

“First of all, let’s eat,” Lyuba said, and she took her hand away from Nikita.

She had already got something ready: on completing the academy she had been given a bigger stipend both in provisions and in cash.

Nikita shyly started to eat the different tasty dishes his wife had prepared. He could not remember that anyone had ever given him something for nothing, he had never visited people in his whole life just for his own satisfaction, and then been fed by them too.

When they had eaten, Lyuba got up from the table first. She opened her arms to Nikita, and said:

“Well!”

Nikita stood up and embraced her shyly, afraid of hurting something in this special, tender body. Lyuba herself squeezed him hard to help him, but Nikita asked her: “Wait a minute, my heart is hurting badly,” and Lyuba released her husband.

Dusk had fallen outside, and Nikita wanted to start the stove, to get some light, but Lyuba said: “We don’t have to, I’ve finished studying, and today’s our wedding day.” Then Nikita turned down the bed while Lyuba undressed in front of him, feeling no shame before her husband. Nikita walked over to his father’s wardrobe and took off his own clothing quickly and then lay down next to Lyuba for the night.

Nikita got up very early the next morning. He cleaned up the room, lit the stove to boil the teakettle, brought in water in a pail from the shed for washing, and ended up not knowing what else to do, while Lyuba went on sleeping. He sat down on a chair, and grieved: now Lyuba would probably tell him to go back to his father for good because, it appeared, one had to know how to take pleasure, and Nikita couldn’t torment Lyuba just for the sake of his own happiness, but all his strength was pounding inside his heart, rushing up into his throat, leaving nothing anywhere else.

Lyuba woke up and looked at her husband.

“Don’t be downhearted, it’s not worth it,” she said smiling. “You and I’ll fix everything together.”

“Let me wash the floor,” Nikita asked her, “else it will be dirty here.”

“Well, go on and wash it,” Lyuba agreed.

“How pitiful and weak he is from his love for me!” Lyuba thought in bed. “How good and dear he is to me! May I always be a girl to him! I can stand it. And maybe some time he’ll start loving me less, and then he’ll be a strong man.”

Nikita was fidgeting with a wet mop on the floor, scrubbing the dirt from the boards, and Lyuba laughed at him from the bed.

“Here I am a married woman!” she told herself with delight, and she stretched out in her nightgown on top of the blanket.

When he had scrubbed the room, Nikita wiped all the furniture with a wet cloth, then he added cold water to the pail of hot water and pulled a washbasin out from under the bed so that Lyuba could wash in it.

After they had drunk tea, Lyuba kissed her husband on the forehead and went off to work at the hospital, telling him that she would be back at three o’clock. Nikita touched the place on his forehead where his wife had kissed him, and stayed by himself. He didn’t know why he wasn’t going to work today—it seemed to him it was shameful now for him to be alive, and maybe he did not have to. Why did he need to earn money now? He decided somehow to live out the rest of his life, until he wasted away from shame and grief.

Having looked over all the family property in their new home, Nikita found the food he needed to fix a one-dish dinner—a thick beef soup. After this work, he lay face down on the bed and began to count how much time would have to go by before the rivers started to flow again, when he could drown himself in the Potudan.

“I’ll wait until the ice breaks up; it won’t be long now,” he said out loud, to calm himself, and he dozed off.

Lyuba brought a present back with her from work—two earthenware bowls with winter flowers in them: the doctors and the nurses had celebrated her wedding. And she had held herself important and mysterious in front of them, like a real married woman. The younger girls among the nurses and the nurses’ aides were envious of her, one earnest worker from the hospital pharmacy asked Lyuba confidentially: was it true or not that love was something fascinating but that getting married for love was truly an entrancing happiness? Lyuba answered her that this was the honest truth, and that this was why people go on living in this world.

The husband and wife talked with each other in the evening. Lyuba said that they might have children, and that they should think about this ahead of time. Nikita promised to begin making some children’s furniture in overtime at the workshop: a little table, a chair, and a cradle-bed.

“The revolution is here for good, now it’s all right to have children,” Nikita said. “There’ll never be unhappy children ever again.”

“It’s all right for you to talk, but I’m the one who’ll have to bear them,” Lyuba said, pouting.

“Will it hurt?” Nikita asked. “In that case, better not to have children, not to suffer…”

“No, I’ll survive it, thanks just the same,” Lyuba agreed.

At twilight she fixed the bed, and then, so it wouldn’t be too crowded for sleep she extended it with the two chairs for their feet and had them sleep across it. Nikita lay down as he was instructed, was silent, and late in the night he cried in his sleep. But Lyuba didn’t fall asleep for a long time, she was listening to his crying, and she carefully wiped Nikita’s sleeping face with the end of the sheet, and in the morning, when he woke up, he had no memory of his sadness in the night.

After that their life together went on at its own pace. Lyuba took care of people in the hospital, and Nikita made his furniture. In his free time and on Sundays he worked in the yard and in the house, although Lyuba didn’t ask him to do this—she herself no longer knew exactly whose house it was. Once it had belonged to her mother, then it had been taken over as government property but the government had forgotten about the house—no one had ever come to check on its condition or to ask any money as rent. It made no difference to Nikita. He managed to get some green paint, through acquaintances of his father, and he painted the roof and the shutters as soon as spring weather had set in. With the same diligence he gradually fixed up the decrepit old shed in the yard outside the house, repaired the gate and the fence, and prepared to dig a new cellar since the old one had caved in.

The ice was already breaking up in the Potudan River. Nikita walked down to the bank twice, looked at the flowing water, and made up his mind not to die as long as Lyuba could stand him, and whenever she couldn’t stand him any longer, he’d manage to end it all. The river wouldn’t freeze over quickly. Nikita usually did his work around the house slowly so as not to be sitting in the room, making Lyuba tired of him. And whenever he finished it completely, he would fill the hem of his shirt with clay from the old cellar and walk back into the room. There he would sit on the floor and shape little human figures and other objects out of the clay, with no meaning or likeness to anything—things like hills with animal heads growing out of them, or the root system of a tree in which the root seemed an ordinary root but so tangled and impassable, with each of its branches pierced by another, gnawing at and torturing itself, that looking long at this root made you want to go to sleep. Nikita smiled carelessly and blissfully while he worked with his clay, and Lyuba would sit there on the floor next to him, sewing linen or singing little songs that she had heard at some time, and along with what she was doing she would caress Nikita with one hand, sometimes stroking his head, sometimes tickling him under his arm. Nikita lived through these hours with his heart beating gently, and he did not know if he needed something higher and mightier, or if life in actual fact was nothing very big—just about what he already had. But Lyuba would look at him with her tired eyes full of patient goodness, just as if what was. good and happy had become heavy work for her. Then Nikita would knead his clay toys back into the clay from which he had made them, and he would ask his wife if she didn’t want him to stoke up the stove, to heat water for tea, or to go out somewhere on an errand…

“You don’t have to,” Lyuba would say, smiling at him. “I’ll do it all myself….”

And Nikita understood that life was indeed something very big, and maybe beyond his strength, that it was not all concentrated in his pounding heart—it was still stronger, more interesting and dearer in another person he could not reach. He picked up the pail and went to get water at the town well where the water was cleaner than in the tanks on the street. Nikita could not drown his grief with anything, with any kind of work, and he was afraid of the approaching night as he had been in childhood. When he had got the water, Nikita went along with the full pail to call on his father.

“What’s the matter, didn’t you have a wedding?” his father asked. “Did you do it in the Soviet way, secretly… ?”

“We’ll have it yet,” his son promised. “Come on, help me make a little table, with a chair and a cradle-bed. You talk to the foreman tomorrow, so he’ll give me the material…. Because we’ll be having children, probably.”

“Well, why not? That’s possible,” the father agreed. “But you shouldn’t be having children soon: it’s not time yet…”

In a week Nikita had made for himself all the children’s furniture he needed; he stayed late every evening, and worked hard at it. His father sanded each piece neatly, and painted it.

Lyuba set up the child’s furniture in a special corner, decorated her unborn child’s table with two earthenware bowls of flowers, and hung a newly embroidered towel over the back of the chair. Lyuba hugged Nikita in thanks for his devotion to her and to her unknown children, she kissed his throat, pressed herself against his chest, and warmed herself next to her beloved, knowing that there was nothing else that could be done. And Nikita dropped the hands with which he had covered his heart and stood there silent in front of her because he did not want to look strong when he was really helpless.

Nikita went to sleep early that night and woke up a little after midnight. He lay there in the quiet for a long time and listened to the sounds of the clock striking in the town—half past twelve, one, half past one, a single peal for each of the three times. In the sky outside the window a vague kind of growing started—it was not yet dawn but only a movement of the darkness, a slow stripping away of empty space, and all the things in the room and the child’s furniture, too, began to be visible, but after the dark night they had lived through they looked miserable and exhausted, as if they were calling out for help. Lyuba stirred under the blanket, and she sighed; perhaps she too was not asleep. In any case Nikita kept quiet, and began to listen hard. But Lyuba didn’t stir any more, she was breathing evenly again, and it pleased Nikita that Lyuba was lying there next to him, alive, essential to his soul, and not even realizing in her sleep that he, her husband, even existed. As long as she was whole and happy, Nikita needed for his own life only his consciousness of her. He dozed off in peace, comforted by the sleep of someone close and dear to him, and then he opened his eyes again.

Lyuba was crying, carefully, almost inaudibly. She had covered over her head, and was tormenting herself there alone, squeezing her grief to keep it down without a sound. Nikita turned his face to Lyuba and saw how quickly she was breathing and how dispirited she was as she sadly hid under the covers. Nikita was silent. It’s not possible to comfort every grief, there is some grief that ends only after the exhaustion of the heart, in long oblivion or in the distraction of the cares of daily living.

By dawn Lyuba had grown quiet. Nikita waited for a while and then lifted the corner of the blanket and looked at his wife’s face. She was sleeping quietly, warm, at peace, with dry eyes…

Nikita got up, dressed quietly, and went outside. A pale morning was starting across the world, and a wandering beggar was walking down the street, carrying a full bag. Nikita started to follow this man, so as to have a feeling of going somewhere. The beggar walked out of the town and set off along the high road to the settlement of Kantemirovka where from time immemorial there had been a big bazaar and many prosperous people. It’s true, they gave little away to a poor man there, and the beggar could really feed himself only in the faraway villages where poor peasants lived, but still it was fun in Kantemirovka, interesting, one could live at the bazaar just by watching the crowds of people, distracting the spirit for a little while.

The beggar and Nikita got to Kantemirovka about noon. In the outskirts of the town the beggar sat down in a ditch, opened his bag, and he and Nikita ate together, and then inside the town they went off in different directions because the beggar had his own plans and Nikita had none. He came to the bazaar, sat down in the shade next to a merchant’s bin with a hinged cover, and stopped thinking about Lyuba, about the cares of life, and about himself.

The watchman at the bazaar had already lived there for twenty-five years and all this time he had lived a rich life with his fat, childless old lady. The merchants and the cooperative stores were always giving him leftovers of meat, they sold him sewing materials at cost and even household necessities like thread, soap, and such products. For a long time he had been a small trader himself, selling broken-up packing cases and hoarding the money in a savings account. His responsibility was to sweep up the trash all through the fair grounds, to wash the blood from the counters in the butchers’ row, to clean the public latrines, and at night to patrol the trading sheds and the stores. But he only strolled up and down the bazaar at night in a warm sheepskin coat while he turned the hard work over to beggars and vagabonds who passed the night at the bazaar; his wife almost always emptied the remains of yesterday’s meat and cabbage soup into a garbage pail, so the watchman could feed some poor wretch for cleaning the latrines for him.

His wife used to order him not to do the dirty work himself, seeing how gray his beard had grown—he was no longer to be a watchman, but a supervisor. But it was hard to get a beggar or a tramp to work forever in exchange for grub like that; he’d work for a day, eat what was given him, ask for more, then disappear back into the countryside.

Recently the watchman had driven the same man out of the bazaar for several nights in a row. When the watchman shoved him, as he slept, this man would get up and walk away, saying nothing, and then he would sit down or lie down somewhere else behind a bin which was farther away. Once the watchman hunted this homeless man all night long, his blood fairly sparkling with his passionate desire to torment and to subdue this strange, exhausted creature. Twice the watchman threw his stick at him and hit him in the head, but by dawn the vagabond was still hiding from him—probably he had quit the fair grounds completely. In the morning the watchman found him again—he was sleeping on the roof of a cesspool at the latrines, out in the open. The watchman called to the sleeping man, who opened his eyes but did not answer, looked at him and then dozed off again with complete indifference. The watchman thought—this must be a dumb man. He prodded the sleeper’s stomach with the end of his stick and gestured with his arm that he should follow him.

In his neat, official apartment—kitchen and one room—the watchman fed the dumb man from an earthenware pot of cold soup, and after he had eaten ordered him to take a broom, a shovel, a scraper and a pail of lime from the shed and to clean the latrines thoroughly. The dumb man looked at the watchman with dull eyes: probably he was deaf, too…. But no, he couldn’t be, because the dumb man picked up in the shed all the tools and things he needed, just as the watchman had told him. This proved that he could hear.

Nikita did the job accurately, and the watchman came back later to see how it looked; for a start, it was tolerable, so the watchman took Nikita to the place where horses were hitched and told him to pick up all the manure and take it away in a wheelbarrow.

At home the watchman-supervisor instructed his wife that now she was no longer to scrape the leavings from their supper and dinner into the garbage pail but to keep them in a separate crock: let the dumb man have his fill to eat.

“And I suppose you’re going to have him sleep in the room, too,” the wife asked him.

“That’s not the point!” the man declared. “He’ll spend the nights outside: for he’s not deaf, let him lie there and listen for robbers, and when he hears one, he’ll ran and tell me. Give him a piece of sacking, he’ll find a place and make himself a bed.”

Nikita lived for a long time at the bazaar. Having first become unused to talking, he thought, remembered, and worried less and less. It was only rarely that a weight lay on his heart, and he endured this without reflecting about it, and the feeling of grief inside him gradually weakened and disappeared. He was already used to living at the bazaar, and the crowds of people, the noise of voices, all the daily happenings, kept him from remembering about himself and from his own concerns—food, rest, and the desire to see his father. Nikita worked all the time; even at night when he would fall asleep in an empty box somewhere in the empty bazaar, the watchman-supervisor would come up to him and order him just to nap and to listen, not to sleep like the dead. “You’ve got to,” the watchman told him, “only the other day the crooks ripped two boards off a shop and ate fifteen pounds of honey without any bread.” And by dawn Nikita was already working, hurrying to get the bazaar clean before the people came; in the daytime he couldn’t eat, there was the manure to be shoveled into the communal cart, a new pit to be dug for slops and sewage, or old boxes to be broken up which the watchman got free from the traders and then sold, board by board, to peasants from the country, and then there was still more work to do.

In the middle of the summer they took Nikita to jail on suspicion of having stolen some chandler’s goods from the government store at the bazaar, but the investigation cleared him because this dumb, desperately tired man was too indifferent about the charge against him. The investigator could find no evidence of any desire for life or enjoyment or satisfactions of any kind in Nikita’s character or in his modest work at the bazaar as the watchman’s helper. In jail he didn’t even eat up the food that was given to him. The investigator realized that this was a man who did not know the value of either personal or public property, and there was not even any circumstantial evidence against him in the case. “There’s no reason to dirty up a prison with a man like that!” the investigator decided.

Nikita stayed in jail for five days, and then went back to the bazaar. The watchman-supervisor was already tired out from having to work without him, so he was overjoyed when the dumb man showed up again. The old man summoned him to his apartment and gave him hot, fresh cabbage soup to eat, breaking all the rules of thrift in his own household. “Let him eat for once—it won’t ruin him!” the old watchman-supervisor reassured himself. “And then back to yesterday’s cold leftovers, when there are any.”

“Go over and clean up the rubbish along the grocers’ row,” the watchman instructed Nikita when he had eaten up the soup.

Nikita went back to his usual place. By now he was only dimly aware of himself at all, and he thought very little, about anything that happened to come into his mind. By autumn, probably, he would have forgotten entirely what he was. Looking around at the activity of the world he would have ceased to have any understanding of it. Other people might think this man was living but actually he would be there and exist only in forgetfulness, in the poverty of his mind, in his loss of consciousness, as if in some warmth of his own, taking shelter from mortal grief….

Soon after his stay in jail, at the end of summer when the nights were growing longer, Nikita started once to lock the door to the latrines, as required by the rules, when he heard a voice from inside:

“Wait a little, before you lock up! Are you afraid someone’s going to steal something out of here?”

Nikita waited for the man. His father walked out of the building, holding an empty sack under his arm.

“Hello, Nikita!” the father said, and he suddenly began to cry, sadly, ashamed of his tears and not wiping them away so as not to admit that he was crying. “We thought you were a dead man long ago. This means you’re all right?”

Nikita embraced his thin, drooping father; his heart, which had grown unused to feeling, had now been touched.

Then they walked through the empty bazaar and settled down in the passageway between two big merchants’ bins.

“I just came for some barley, it’s cheaper here,” his father explained. “But I was late, you see, the bazaar is closed. Well, I’ll spend the night now, and tomorrow I’ll buy it and go back home. And what are you doing here?”

Nikita wanted to answer his father, but his throat dried up and he had forgotten how to talk. He coughed, and whispered:

“I’m all right. Is Lyuba alive?”

“She threw herself in the river,” his father said. “But some fishermen saw her right away and pulled her out—she was in the hospital for a while, she got better.”

“And she’s alive now?” Nikita asked in a low voice.

“So far she hasn’t died,” his father declared. “Blood runs often from her throat; she probably caught cold when she tried to drown herself. She picked a bad time—the weather had just turned bad and the water was cold…”

The father pulled some bread out of his pocket, gave half of it to his son, and they sat there for a little, chewing their supper. Nikita was silent, and the father spread his sack out on the ground, and got ready to lie down on it.

“Have you got any place to sleep?” the father asked. “If not, you lie on the sack, and I’ll lie on the ground. I won’t catch cold, I’m too old…”

“But why did Lyuba drown herself?” Nikita whispered.

“What’s the matter? Does your throat hurt you?” the father asked. “You’ll get over it…. She missed you badly, and just wasted away from grief, that’s why… For a whole month she just walked up and down the Potudan River, back and forth, along the bank for sixty miles. She thought you’d drowned and would come to the surface, and she wanted to see you. While, it turns out, you were right here all the time. That’s bad…”

Nikita thought about Lyuba, and once more his heart filled with grief and with strength.

“You spend the night here alone, father,” Nikita said. “I’m going to have a look at Lyuba.”

“Go on then,” the father agreed. “It’s good going now, cooler. And I’ll come back tomorrow, then we’ll talk things over…”

Going out of the settlement Nikita started to run along the deserted high road. When he got tired, he walked again for a while, then he ran again in the free, light air spread over the dark fields.

It was late at night when Nikita knocked at Lyuba’s window and touched the shutters he had painted once with green paint. Now the dark night made them look blue. He pressed his face against the window glass. A pale light was filtered through the room, from the white sheets dropping off the bed, and Nikita could see the child’s furniture he had made with his father—it was all there. Then Nikita knocked loudly on the window frame. But Lyuba still did not answer, and she didn’t come to the window to see who he was.

Nikita climbed over the gate, went through the shed and then into the room—the doors were not locked; whoever lived here was not worried about protecting his property from thieves.

Lyuba was lying under the blanket on the bed, her head covered.

“Lyuba!” Nikita called to her in a low voice.

“What?” Lyuba asked from under the blanket.

She wasn’t asleep. Maybe she was lying there all alone in terror, or sick, or thought the knock on the window and Nikita’s voice were a dream.

Nikita sat on the edge of the bed.

“Lyuba, I’ve come, it’s me,” Nikita said.

Lyuba lifted the blanket away from her face.

“Come here to me, quickly,” she begged in her old, tender voice, and she held out her arms to Nikita.

Lyuba was afraid this would all go away; she grabbed Nikita by the arms and pulled him to her.

Nikita hugged Lyuba with the force that tries to pull another, beloved person right inside a hungering soul; but he quickly recovered his senses, and he felt ashamed.

“I didn’t hurt you?” Nikita asked.

“No, I don’t feel anything,” Lyuba answered.

He wanted her badly, so she might be comforted, and a savage, miserable strength came to him. But Nikita did not find from loving Lyuba intimately any higher happiness than he had usually known—he felt only that his heart was now in charge of his whole body and could divide his blood with his poor but necessary pleasure.

Lyuba asked Nikita—maybe he could light the little stove for it would still be dark outside for a long time. Let there be a fire inside the room, she wouldn’t be sleeping anyway, she wanted to wait for the dawn and look at Nikita.

But there was no more firewood in the shed. So Nikita ripped two boards off the side of the shed, split them into pieces and some kindling, and stoked up the little stove. When the fire was burning well, Nikita opened the little door so the light could shine outside the stove. Lyuba climbed out of bed and sat on the floor, facing Nikita, where there was some light.

“Is it all right with you now, you won’t be sorry to live with me?” she asked.

“No, I’m all right,” Nikita answered. “I’m already used to being happy with you.”

“Build up the fire, I’m chilled to the bone,” Lyuba asked him.

She was wearing only her worn-out nightgown, and her thin body was freezing in the cool half-light of early morning at the end of summer.