The Fierce and Beautiful World

HOMECOMING

ALEXEI ALEXEIEVICH IVANOV, a Guards sergeant, left the army on demobilization. In the unit where he had served all through the war they saw him off with regret, with affection and respect, and with music and with wine. His close friends and comrades drove to the railroad station with Ivanov, and after the last farewells left him by himself. But the train was reported to be hours late and then, when those hours had run out, it was still delayed. Finally the cold autumn night began; the station had been destroyed in the war, there was no place to spend the night, and Ivanov hitched a ride back to his unit in a passing car. The next day his colleagues saw him off again. They sang their songs again and hugged him with words of eternal friendship, but this time they poured out their feelings more briefly and the affair involved only a small circle of his friends.

The second time Ivanov went to the station he learned that yesterday’s train had not yet arrived and that he might just as well go back to his unit again to spend the night. But it would have been awkward to be seen off a third time and to trouble his comrades, so Ivanov settled down for the tedious wait on the empty asphalt of the station platform.

An undamaged switchman’s cabin stood next to the main switch of the station. A woman in a quilted jacket, with a warm shawl around her head, was sitting on a bench by the cabin; she had been sitting there the day before, surrounded by her things, and here she still was, waiting for the train. When he had gone back the day before to sleep at his unit, Ivanov had wondered if he should not invite this lonely woman to go too, she could have spent the night with one of the nurses in a warm cottage, why should she freeze all night, for it was uncertain if she could get warm in the switchman’s cabin. But while he was wondering, the automobile had started, and Ivanov forgot all about the woman.

Now she was where she had been the day before, and just as motionless. This constancy and patience showed the fidelity and the immutability of the female heart, at any rate in relation to her baggage and to her home to which this woman was probably returning. Ivanov walked over to her: maybe she too would find it less boring with him than all alone.

The woman turned her face toward Ivanov, and he recognized her. This was a girl everyone called “Masha, the spaceman’s daughter” because she had once called herself this, although she was really the daughter of an employee in a public bath. Ivanov had run into her from time to time during the war when he visited an airfield service battalion (BAO) where this Masha, the spaceman’s daughter, worked in the restaurant as assistant cook.

At this time of day there was something cheerless and sad about the autumn landscape around them. The train which was supposed to take Ivanov and Masha to their homes was lost somewhere in the gray distance. The only thing that could possibly distract and comfort a human heart was the heart of another human being.

Ivanov started to talk with Masha, and he felt better. Masha was pretty, simplehearted, with goodness in her big worker’s hands and in her healthy young body. She was also going home, and wondering how she would manage with a new, civilian life; she had become used to her army friends, used to the fliers who loved her like an older sister, gave her presents of chocolate, and called her “Spacious Masha” because of her size and her big heart which embraced all brothers in one love, as real sisters do, and no one of them separately. And now it was unusual, strange, and a little frightening to Masha to be going home to relatives whom she was no longer used to.

Ivanov and Masha both felt themselves orphaned without the army, but Ivanov could not stay long in any sad or despondent mood. At times like this it seemed to him that someone far away must be making a fool of him, being happy in his place while he went on scowling like a simpleton. So Ivanov always turned back quickly to the business of living, that is, he would turn up some occupation or relaxation, some simple, improvised happiness as he himself called it, and this would pull him out of his depression. He turned to Masha and asked her, like a good comrade, to let him kiss her on the cheek.

“Just a little kiss,” Ivanov said, “because the train’s so late, and it’s so tiresome waiting for it.”

“Only because the train is late?” Masha asked, and she looked carefully at Ivanov’s face.

The former sergeant looked about thirty-five, the skin on his face had been blown by the wind and burned by the sun until it was dark brown, and his gray eyes looked modestly at Masha, even shyly, and although he spoke directly to her, he talked delicately, and politely. Masha liked his toneless, hoarse voice, like that of an elderly man, and his dark rough face with its look of strength and defenselessness. Ivanov tamped down the fire in his pipe with his thumb, not feeling the burn, and sighed as he waited for permission. Masha drew back a little from Ivanov. He had a strong smell of tobacco, of dry toasted bread, a little bit of wine, and of the clean things which come from fire or can make fire. It was as if Ivanov lived on just tobacco, rusks, beer and wine. He repeated his request.

“I’ll be careful, I’ll just kiss you lightly, Masha… Just imagine that I’m your uncle.”

“I already imagined… I imagined that you were my father, not my uncle.”

“That’s the way…. So you’ll let me?”

“Fathers don’t ask their daughters,” Masha said, laughing.

Later Ivanov told himself that Masha’s hair smelled like leaves falling in the woods in autumn, and he would never be able to forget this…

Going a little away from the tracks, Ivanov lit a small fire so he could make an omelet for Masha and himself for supper.

During the night the train came and took Ivanov and Masha on their way to their homes. They traveled together for two days and nights, and on the third day they came to the city where Masha had been born twenty years before. Masha collected her things in the compartment, and asked Ivanov to adjust the duffel bag more comfortably on her back, but Ivanov took the sack on his own shoulder and climbed down from the train with Masha although he was still more than a day’s travel from his own home.

Masha was surprised and touched by Ivanov’s attention. She felt suddenly scared of being left alone in the town where she had been born and had grown up but which had now become almost a foreign country to her. Masha’s mother and father had been driven out by the Germans and had perished no one knew where or how, and now in her home town Masha had only a cousin and two aunts, and she felt no strong attachment to them.

Ivanov fixed up a stopover in the city with the station commandant, and stayed with Masha. He really needed to go on as quickly as he could to his own home where his wife and two children, whom he had not seen for four years, were waiting for him. But Ivanov was putting off the happy, frightening moment of reunion with his family. He didn’t know just why he was doing this, perhaps it was simply because he felt like strolling around in freedom for a little while longer.

Masha did not know about Ivanov’s family situation and out of some girlish shyness did not ask him about it. She trusted Ivanov out of the goodness of her heart, with no thought of anything else.

Two days later, Ivanov traveled on, to his own home town. Masha went to the railroad station with him. Ivanov kissed her conventionally and promised with affection to remember her forever.

Masha smiled in reply, and said:

“Why remember me forever? It’s not necessary, and you’ll forget anyway…. I’m not asking anything from you, so forget me…”

“Masha, my dear one… where were you before? And why didn’t I meet you a long, long time ago?”

“Well, before the war I was in school, and a long, long time ago I didn’t even exist.”

The train pulled in, and they said good-bye. Ivanov went away, and he did not see that Masha cried when she was alone, because she could never forget anyone, neither her girl friends nor her comrades, with whom fate had ever linked her. Ivanov looked out of the train window at the houses in the little town which he would probably never see again in his life, and thought that it was in just such a little house, only in a different town, that his wife Lyuba lived with their children Peter and Nastya and they were expecting him. He had sent his wife a telegram from his unit, saying that he was coming home without delay and that he wanted to hug her and the children as soon as he could.

Lyuba Vassilievna, Ivanov’s wife, met all the trains coming from the west for three days in a row. She took leave from her job, did not fulfill her production quota, and did not sleep at night for happiness, listening to how slowly and uncaringly the pendulum swung in the clock on the wall. On the fourth day, Lyuba Vassilievna sent the children Peter and Nastya to the station to meet their father in case he came in the daytime, but she herself went to meet the night train.

Ivanov arrived on the sixth day. His son met him. Peter was now in his twelfth year, and at first the father did not recognize his own child in this serious young fellow who seemed older than his age. The father saw that Peter was an undersized and skinny little boy, but still he had a big head and a broad forehead and his face had a kind of calm, as if he were already used to the worries of the world, and his small brown eyes looked out gloomily and unhappily, as if they could see nothing but disorder anywhere around him. Peter was carefully dressed; his shoes looked worn but still serviceable, his trousers and jacket were old, made over from his father’s civilian clothes, but without any rips or tears—they had been darned where this was needed and patched where that was necessary and all of Peter added up to a little man who was not rich but in good working order. The father was surprised, and he sighed.

“You’re my father, aren’t you?” Peter asked when Ivanov had thrown his arms around him and kissed him, holding him close. “You must be my father.”

“Your father…. How do you do, Peter Alexeievich?”

“How do you do? Why were you so long getting here? We’ve waited and waited.”

“The train, Petrushka, went slowly…. How are your mother and Nastya—alive and well?”

“As usual,” Peter said. “How many decorations do you have?”

“Two, Peter, and three medals.”

“But Mother and I expected—there wouldn’t be any empty space on your uniform at all. Mother has two medals, too, they gave them to her for her services to the war effort…. Why do you have so little baggage, just one duffel bag?”

“I don’t need any more.”

“Someone with a trunk, is it hard for him to fight?” the son asked.

“It’s hard for him,” the father agreed. “With just a bag it’s easier. Nobody at war had a trunk.”

“And I thought they did have. I would have kept my good things in a trunk. They would all get broken or mussed up in a bag.”

He took the duffel bag from his father and carried it home, and the father walked along right behind him.

The mother met them on the porch of the house; she had taken time off from her job again, as if her heart had told her that this was the day her husband would arrive. She went straight home from the factory, so she could go to the station later. She was worried—maybe Semyon Yevseyevich would show up at their house: he liked to come sometimes in daytime, he had the habit of appearing in the middle of the day and sitting there with five-year-old Nastya and with Peter. It was true, Semyon Yevseyevich never showed up empty-handed, he always brought something for the children—candy, or sugar, or a white roll, or a ration coupon for goods in the store. Lyuba Vassilievna had never had any fault to find with Semyon Yevseyevich; during these two years that they had known each other Semyon Yevseyevich had been good to her, and he treated the children like their own father and even more thoughtfully than if he had been their father. But today Lyuba Vassilievna did not want her husband to see Semyon Yevseyevich. She cleaned up the kitchen and the living room, everything in the house must be tidy, with nothing strange left around. And later, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, she would tell her husband the whole truth herself, just how it had been. Luckily, Semyon Yevseyevich did not show up today.

Ivanov went up to his wife, embraced her, and stood with his arms around her, not letting go, feeling the forgotten but still familiar warmth of a person who is loved.

The little Nastya came out of the house and, seeing her father whom she did not remember, began to pull him away from her mother, tugging against his leg, and then she began to cry. Peter stood silently next to his father and his mother, with his father’s duffel bag still on his shoulder, and after waiting a little, he said:

“That’s enough for you two, or else Nastya won’t stop crying, she doesn’t understand.”

The father moved away from the mother, and picked Nastya up in his arms. She was crying in terror.

“Nastya!” Peter called to her. “Pull yourself together, I’m talking to you. He’s our father, our own father!”

Once inside the house, the father washed his hands and sat down at the table. He stretched out his legs, closed his eyes, and felt a quiet happiness in his heart, and a deep satisfaction. The war was over. His legs had covered thousands of miles during these years, lines of fatigue lay on his face, and pain stabbed his eyes behind their closed eyelids—now they wanted to rest in twilight or in darkness.

While he sat there all his family bustled around the room and in the kitchen, preparing a feast to celebrate his return. Ivanov looked at all the things in his house in order: the clock, the china cupboard, the thermometer on the wall, the chairs, flowers on the windowsill, the Russian kitchen stove… they had all lived here a long time without him, and they had missed him. Now he had come back, and he looked at them, getting acquainted with each all over again as with relatives who had been living in grief and poverty during his absence. He breathed in the house’s own solid smell—decaying wood, warmth from the bodies of his children, a wisp of something burning in the stove. The smell was the same as it had been four years before, and it had not weakened nor changed while he had been gone. Ivanov had not found this smell anywhere else, although he had been in several countries and hundreds of dwelling places during the war; the air had smelled different there, it had none of the fragrance of his own house. Ivanov could still remember Masha’s smell, and how her hair had smelled; but that was of leaves in the woods, of some unfamiliar, overgrown road, not like a home at all but like all the troubles of life. What was she doing now, and how would she manage as a civilian, Masha, the spaceman’s daughter? God be with her…

Ivanov saw that Peter ran the house. It was not just that he worked hard himself, but he gave orders to his mother and to Nastya, what to do and what not to do and how to do it right. Nastya listened obediently to Peter, and she was no longer frightened of her father as a stranger; she had the lively, concentrated face of a child who takes everything in life as true and serious, and a good heart, too, because she didn’t resent her brother, Peter.

“Nastya, empty that pot of potato peelings, I need the dish Nastya dutifully emptied the pot and washed it. Meanwhile the mother was hurriedly fixing bread, made without yeast, to put in the oven where Petrushka had already made a fire.

“Beat it, Mother, beat it quicker!” Petrushka ordered. “You can see I have the oven ready. You’ve got used to dawdling, you Stakhanovite!”

“Right away, Petrushka, right away. I…” the mother said obediently. “I’ll put in raisins because your father probably hasn’t eaten raisins for quite a while. I’ve been saving them a long time.”

“He’s eaten them,” Petrushka said. “They give raisins to our soldiers, too. Our soldiers—just look how fat they are when they walk around, they must really eat their rations…. Nastya, what are you sitting down for? Did you just stop in here to visit? Peel the potatoes, we’ll heat them for dinner in the frying pan. You can’t feed a family just on cake! ”

While the mother was fixing the bread, Peter put a cast-iron pot of cabbage soup into the oven with a big oven tongs, so as not to waste the fire, and he gave orders even to the fire in the stove:

“Why are you burning so unevenly, fidgeting every which way? Burn evenly. Get hot right under the food. Do you think trees grow in the woods for nothing? And you, Nastya, why did you put the kindling in the stove like this, you should have put it in the way I taught you. And you’ve peeled the potatoes too thick again, instead of thin peels. And why did you cut the meat up with the potatoes? That way some of the nourishment is lost. How many times do I have to tell you? Well, now is the last time, next time you’ll get it in the back of the neck!”

“What’s the matter with you, Petrushka, picking on Nastya all the time?” the mother said meekly. “What has she done to you? How do you expect her to peel so many potatoes, and to get the peels as thin as a barber could make them, and the meat won’t be hurt anyway. Your father has come home, and all you do is lose your temper!”

“I’m not losing my temper, I’m serious. Our father needs to be fed, he’s come home from the war, and you’re just wasting what we’ve got. How much food do you suppose we waste in a year just in potato peelings? If we had a pig, we could feed it for a whole year on potato peels alone, and if we sent it to a show, they’d give us a medal…. You see how it should be, but you just don’t understand!”

Ivanov had not suspected that he was raising such a son. Now he sat there and marveled at his intelligence. But best of all he liked his little Nastya, whose small hands were busy with the housework, too, and they were used to it, and skillful. That meant, she must have learned to work around the house a long time ago.

“Lyuba,” Ivanov asked his wife, “why don’t you tell me anything, about how you’ve lived all this time without me, how your health is, what you do at your job…”

Lyuba Vassilievna felt as flustered by her husband now as a new bride: she had grown unused to him. She even blushed when her husband spoke to her, and her face took on the timid, frightened expression, as in her youth, which Ivanov had liked so much.

“There’s not much to tell, Alyosha. We’ve got along all right. The children weren’t sick much, I’ve brought them up…. It’s bad that I’m home with them only at night. I work at the brick factory, on the press, it’s a long way to walk from here…”

“Where do you work?” Ivanov did not understand.

“At the brick factory, where they stamp out the bricks. I had no training, so at first I did general work around the place but then they taught me, and put me on the press. Work is fine, only the children are alone all the time…. You see how they’ve grown? They know how to do everything themselves, they’ve become grownups.” Lyuba Vassilievna was speaking quietly. “Whether this is good or not, Alyosha, I don’t know myself…”

“We’ll find that out later, Lyuba. Now we’ll just all live together, and afterward we’ll work out what’s good and what’s bad…”

“With you here everything will be better, but I just don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong all by myself, and I was frightened. Just think now, how to raise our children…”

Ivanov stood up and started to walk around the room.

“Well then, in general everything’s been all right, you say, and you feel good?”

“All right, Alyosha, everything’s gone on, we’ve got through it. Only we missed you terribly, and it was awful to think you’d never come back to us, you could be killed there, like the others…”

She cried as she leaned over the bread, which was already in its iron plate, and her tears dropped onto the dough. She had just brushed the top of one loaf with beaten egg and she rubbed the dough with the palm of her hand, continuing now to grease the holiday dish with her own tears.

Nastya threw her arms around her mother’s leg, pressing her face into her skirt, and she looked up sideways at her father with a stern expression.

Her father leaned down to her.

“What’s the matter with you? Nastya darling, what’s wrong? Are you cross at me?”

He lifted her in his arms, and stroked her head.

“What’s wrong, daughter? You’ve just forgotten me entirely, you were very little when I went away to war…”

Nastya put her head on her father’s shoulder and started to cry.

“What’s the matter, my little Nastya?”

“Mama’s crying, so I’m going to.”

Peter, standing in bewilderment in front of the stove, was growing impatient.

“What’s the matter with all of you? Your feelings are all upset while the fire’s going out in the stove. Shall we stoke it up again, is that it? And who’ll give us a ration ticket for more firewood? We’ve drawn all our ration and burned it, there’s hardly any left in the shed, about a dozen logs and one aspen. Come on, Mother, give me the dough, before the heat’s all gone.”

Petrushka took the cast-iron pot of cabbage soup out of the oven and raked the fire across the hearthstone, while Lyuba Vassi-lievna, hurrying to please Petrushka, put the bread into the oven, forgetting to rub the second loaf with the beaten egg.

There was something strange and not yet quite understandable to Ivanov about his own house. His wife was just as she had been before, with the same beloved, shy, but now deeply exhausted face, and the children were the same ones that had been born to him except that they had grown during the war years, just as they should have. But something kept Ivanov from feeling the happiness of his return with all his heart—probably he had become too unused to home life and couldn’t understand even his own folk, those closest to him, right away. He watched Peter, his grown-up firstborn, heard how he gave orders and directions to his mother and his little sister, observed his serious, worried face, and felt ashamed to realize that his father’s feeling for this little boy, his attraction to him as a son, was just inadequate. Ivanov felt even more ashamed of his indifference to Petrushka because he sensed that the boy needed love and care more than the others—he was pitiful just to look at now. Ivanov did not know in any detail the life his family had lived without him, and he could not clearly understand why Petrushka had developed as he had.

Sitting with his family around the table, Ivanov realized what he had to do. He must get to work as quickly as he could, find a job in order to earn some money, and help his wife bring up the children properly—then gradually everything would get better, and Petrushka would be running around with other children, or sitting over his books, and not giving orders at the stove with the iron prong in his hand.

At the table Petrushka ate less than any of the others, but he brushed up the crumbs and put them into his mouth.

“What’s the matter with you, Petrushka?” his father said to him. “You eat up the crumbs, but you haven’t finished your piece…. Eat! Then Mother will cut you some more.”

“It can all be eaten,” Petrushka said, frowning. “But I’ve had enough.”

“He’s afraid that if he really begins to eat a lot, then Nastya will notice it and will eat a lot, too,” Lyuba Vassilievna said simply, “and he grudges it to her.”

“And you don’t grudge anything,” Petrushka said calmly. “All I want is that there should be more left for you.”

The father and mother glanced at each other and shivered at the words of their son.

“And why aren’t you eating?” her father asked Nastya. “Looking at Petrushka, aren’t you?… Now eat the way you ought to, or you won’t get to be a big girl.”

“I was born big,” Nastya said.

She ate a small piece, but another, bigger piece she pushed aside, and she covered it with her napkin.

“Why are you doing that?” her mother asked her. “Do you want me to put some butter on it?”

“I don’t want any more, I’m already full.”

“Come on, eat now. Why did you move that piece away?”

“Because Uncle Semyon’s coming. I left this for him. It isn’t yours, it’s what I didn’t eat myself. I’ll put it under a pillow, or it will get cold.” Nastya got up from her chair, and took the bread, wrapped up in her napkin, over to the bed and placed it under a pillow.

The mother remembered that when she had baked a loaf on the first of May she too had covered it with pillows so it would not get cold before Semyon Yevseyevich came.

“And just who’s this Uncle Semyon?” Ivanov asked his wife.

Lyuba Vassilievna did not know how to answer, and she said:

“I don’t know exactly who he is…. He comes to see the children, the Germans killed his wife and his children, he is used to our children now and he comes to play with them.”

“What kind of play?” Ivanov asked in surprise. “And why do they play here with you? How old is he?”

Petrushka looked quickly at his mother and father; the mother didn’t answer her husband’s question but just looked at Nastya with sad eyes, and the father smiled unpleasantly, got up from the table, and lit a cigarette.

“Where are the toys you and this Uncle Semyon play with?” the father asked Petrushka.

Nastya got up from the table, dragged a chair up to the chest of drawers, took out a little book, and brought it to her father.

“They’re book toys,” Nastya told him. “Uncle Semyon reads them out loud to me: look at Mishka here, he’s a toy but he’s in a book…”

Ivanov took in his hand the book toys his daughter gave him: about a bear named Mishka, about a toy cannon, about a little house where an old woman named Domna lived and spun flax with her granddaughter.

Petrushka remembered that it was time to close the damper in the stovepipe to keep the warmth inside the house. As he closed it, he told his father:

“He’s older than you are—Semyon Yevseyevich. He’s been good to us, let him be…”

Looking out of the window, Petrushka noticed that the clouds drifting across the sky were not the kind to be expected in September.

“Look at those clouds,” he said. “They’re like lead, it must be because they’re full of snow. Are we going to have winter by morning? Because if so, we’ve got things to do—the potatoes are all still in the ground, nothing is fixed up for storing them yet…. What a situation!”

Ivanov looked at his son, heard his words, and felt shy in front of him. He wanted to ask his wife in more detail just who was this Semyon Yevseyevich who had been coming to see his family for two years now, and just who it was he came to see—Nastya or his good-looking wife, but Petrushka was distracting Lyuba Vassi-lievna with household problems.

“Give me the bread cards for tomorrow, Mother, and the coupons to be clipped to them. And give me the kerosene coupons, too—tomorrow’s the last day, and we’ve got to get our charcoal, too, but you lost the sack for it. They’ll give it out only in our container, so look for the sack now, or sew up a new one out of old rags, we can’t get along without a sack! And Nastya shouldn’t let anyone cpme in our courtyard tomorrow to get water, or they’ll draw a lot out of the well. Winter will be here, the water level always drops lower then, and we won’t have enough rope to drop the bucket all the way down. You won’t have to eat snow but we’ll have to have firewood to melt it…”

While he was saying this, Petrushka was sweeping the floor beside the stove and at the same time straightening up the kitchen utensils. Then he took the pot of cabbage soup out of the oven.

“You’ve eaten the bread, now eat the cabbage soup,” he instructed them all. “And you, Father, tomorrow morning you’ve got to go to the District Council and the Military Commissary, to get on their lists right away, so we’ll get ration tickets for you sooner.”

“I’ll go,” the father agreed obediently.

“Don’t forget, be sure to go, or else you’ll oversleep in the morning and forget all about it.”

“No, I won’t forget,” the father promised.

The family ate its first dinner together after the war, cabbage soup with meat in it, in silence, and even Petrushka sat there quietly. It was as if the mother and the father and the children were all afraid of destroying by some accidental word the quiet happiness of the family sitting all together.

Then Ivanov asked his wife: “How are you off, Lyuba, for clothes? You’re probably short of them?”

“We’ve got along with our old ones, and now we’ll manage to get some new clothes,” Lyuba Vassilievna said smiling. “I made things over for the children, what they had, and your suit, two pairs of your trousers, and I altered all your linen for them. We didn’t have any extra money, you know, and the children had to have clothes.”

“You did just right,” Ivanov said, “to give the children everything we had.”

“I gave them everything, and I sold the overcoat you bought for me. I wear a quilted jacket now instead.”

“Her jacket’s too short; when she wears it, she can catch cold,"’ Petrushka spoke up. “I’m going to be a stoker in the public bath, and I’ll get paid, and then I’ll get her a good coat. They sell them at the market. I went and priced them, some of them look all right…”

“We’ll manage without you, without your wages,” the father said.

After dinner Nastya put on a big pair of glasses and sat at the window repairing her mother’s mittens which she wore over her gloves at work. It had already grown cold, autumn was in the courtyard. Petrushka looked at his sister and scolded her.

“What are you up to? Why are you in Uncle Semyon’s glasses?”

“I’m looking through the glasses, I’m not in them.”

“And so what? I can see! You’ll spoil your eyesight and go blind, and then you’ll be an invalid the rest of your life, on a pension. Take those glasses off right away, I’m telling you! And stop darning those mittens, Mother will do them herself, or I’ll do them as soon as I get time. Take your notebook and write out the alphabet, you’ve forgotten when you did it last!” •• “Is Nastya studying already, really?” the father asked.

“Not yet,” the mother answered, she was still too little, but Peter ordered his sister to keep busy every day, he had bought her a notebook, and she was writing out the letters. Peter was also teaching her arithmetic, making little piles of pumpkin seeds with her and then counting them, while Lyuba Vassilievna herself was teaching her the alphabet.

Nastya put the mittens down and took a notebook and a penholder with a pen in it out of a drawer in the chest. Content that everything was being done properly, Petrushka put on his mother’s jacket and went out to the courtyard to split wood for the next day; he usually brought the split wood into the house every night and piled it next to the stove so that it would dry out there, and burn both hotter and more economically.

That evening Lyuba Vassilievna got supper ready early. She wanted the children to get to sleep quickly so she could sit alone with her husband and talk with him. But the children were not sleepy after supper; Nastya, lying on the wooden couch, watched her father for a long time from under her blanket, while Petrushka, on top of the stove where he always slept in winter and in summer turned and tossed, coughed, whispered something, and didn’t settle down at all. It was already late in the night before Nastya closed her tired eyes and Petrushka started snoring on the stove.

Petrushka always slept lightly and on his guard: he was afraid something might happen in the night without his hearing it—a fire, or robbers breaking in, or his mother might forget to turn the key in the lock and the door would blow open and the house lose all its warmth. Tonight Petrushka was wakened by the troubled voices of his parents talking in the room next to the kitchen. What time it was—midnight or almost morning—he did not know, but his mother and father were not sleeping.

“Alyosha, don’t make so much noise, the children will wake up,” the mother was saying softly. “You mustn’t swear at him, he’s a good man, and he loved your children…”

“We don’t need his love,” the father said. “I love my own children…. Just think, he fell in love with somebody else’s children! I sent you an allotment from my pay, and you were working yourself—what did you need him for, this Semyon Yev-seyevich? Maybe your blood was still a little hot, no? Ah, Lyuba, Lyuba! I thought of you quite differently. It means, you’ve made a fool out of me…”

The father was silent, and then he struck a match, to light his pipe.

“What are you saying, Alyosha, what are you saying!” the mother said loudly. “I’ve brought the children up, they were hardly sick at all, and I’ve fed them…”

“Well, and what of it!” the father said. “Others left as many as four children behind, and they didn’t live badly, and the children grew up no worse than ours. But look at what kind of man you’ve let Petrushka grow into—he makes decisions like a grandfather but he’s probably forgotten how to read.”

Petrushka sighed on top of the stove, and he went on snoring carefully so he could go on listening. “All right,” he thought, “so I’m a grandfather, but it was all right for you with your meals all fixed for you…”

“But he’s been learning what’s hard and what’s important in life,” the mother said. “And he’s not behind in reading and writing.”

“Just who is he, anyway, this Semyon of yours? You could at least try to fool me by talking about him,” the father said angrily.

“He’s a good man.”

“You love him, don’t you?”

“Alyosha, I’m the mother of two children…”

“Well, go on, give me a straight answer!”

“I love you, Alyosha. I’m a mother, and it was a long time ago that I was a woman, and only with you, I’ve already forgotten when that was.”

The father was silent, smoking his pipe in the darkness.

“I missed you, Alyosha…. It’s true, the children were here, but they were no substitute for you, and I kept on waiting for you through those long, terrible years. I didn’t want to wake up in the mornings.”

“What does he do for a trade? Where does he work?”

“He works in the materials supply division at our factory.”

“Of course. A swindler.”

“He’s not a swindler. I don’t know… His whole family was Trilled in Mogilyev, he had three children and his daughter was already married.”

“That didn’t matter, he just took another family instead, one already prepared… and the old lady not so old, pretty good-looking too, so life was nice and cosy for him again.”

The mother made no answer. It was quiet, but soon Petrushka . heard his mother crying.

“He used to talk to the children about you, Alyosha,” the mother said, and Petrushka could tell from the voice that her eyes were full of big tears. “He used to tell them how you were fighting there for us, and suffering…. They would ask him: but why? and he would tell them: because you are a good man…”

The father laughed, and knocked the embers out of his pipe.

“So that’s the kind he is, your Semyon! Never saw me in his life, but gives me his blessing. That’s a character for you!”

“He never saw you. He made it all up on purpose, so the children wouldn’t forget you, so they’d love their father.”

“But just why, why did he need to do that? So that he could get you quicker? Just tell me, why did he do it?”

“Maybe he just had a good heart, Alyosha, that’s why. Why not?”

“You’re stupid, Lyuba. Forgive me, please. Everything has to be paid for.”

“But Semyon Yevseyevich always brought something to the children, every time he’d bring them candy, or white flour, or sugar, and just the other day he brought Nastya some felt boots but they didn’t fit—they were too small. And he didn’t ask anything from us for himself. We didn’t need anything either, Alyosha, and we’d have got along without it, we’re used to it, but he’d say he felt better inside himself when he was worrying about other people, then he didn’t grieve so much for his own family, all murdered. You’ll see him—this isn’t the way you think it is…”

“This is all some kind of nonsense,” the father said. “Don’t try to fool me… I’m tired of it, Lyuba, but I still want to» live…”

“Live with us, Alyosha.”

“I’m to live with you, and you’d live with Semyon?”

“No, I won’t, Alyosha. He won’t come here ever again, I’ll tell, him not to come any more.”

“So. That means there really was something between you, since: you now say there won’t be any longer. Ah, what a woman you. are, Lyuba! All you women are the same.”

“And just what are you?” the mother asked, offended. “What: does that mean—we’re all the same? I’m not…. I’ve worked day and night, we’ve been making fire-resistant bricks for the lining of locomotive fireboxes. I’ve got so thin in the face people don’t recognize me, even beggars don’t ask me for alms…. It’s been hard for me, too, with the children home alone. I’d come; home with the house not heated, nothing cooked, all dark, with the children unhappy, they couldn’t learn right off to take care of the. house themselves, the way they do now. Petrushka was little, too. And that’s when Semyon Yevseyevich started to come to see us.. He’d come, and sit with the children, because he lived all alone… ‘May I come and visit you,’ he asks me, ‘and get warm in your house?’ I tell him that it’s cold here, too, and our firewood is green and he answers me: ‘Never mind, it’s my spirit that’s chilled, just let me sit next to your children and you won’t have to light a fire for me.’ I said: ‘All right, come in for a while. With you here, it won’t be so frightening for the children.’ Then I got used to him, too, and we all felt better when he showed up. I’d look at him, and. remember you, that we had you…. It was so evil and sad here without you, let somebody come by, then it won’t be so lonely, and the time will go quicker. What good was time to us, when you weren’t here?”

“And then, then what happened?” the father asked hurriedly.

“Then nothing happened. And now you’ve come, Alyosha.”

“Well then, it’s all right, if that’s the way it was,” the father said. “It’s time to sleep.”

But the mother interrupted the father: “Let’s wait before we sleep. Let’s talk a little, I’m so happy with you back.”

“They can’t settle down any which way,” Petrushka thought on top of the stove. “They’ve made up, and that’s good; Mother has to get up early to go to work, but she’s still up. She hasn’t cheered up yet, but at least she’s stopped crying.”

“Did this Semyon love you?” the father asked.

“Wait. I’m going to tuck in Nastya, or she’ll throw the blanket off in her sleep, and freeze.”

The mother put a blanket on Nastya, and then walked into the kitchen and stood next to the stove to hear if Petrushka was sleeping. Petrushka understood this, and went on carefully snoring. Then his mother went back again, and he heard her voice:

“He probably loved me. He looked at me tenderly, I noticed that, but what was I—am I any good even now? Things weren’t easy for him, Alyosha, and he had to have somebody to love.”

“You might as well have kissed him, once your problem got so complicated,” the father said good-naturedly.

“Well, what do you think! He did kiss me twice, although I didn’t want to.”

“Why did he do it then, if you didn’t want to?”

“I don’t know. He said he just forgot, and then he remembered his wife, and I look a little like his wife.”

“And does he look like me?”

“No, he’s not like you. Nobody’s like you, you’re the only one, Alyosha.”

“I’m the one, you say. But that’s where counting starts—one, then comes two…”

“And he only kissed me on the cheek, not on the lips.”

“It doesn’t make any difference—where.”

“Yes, it does make a difference, Alyosha. What can you understand about how we lived?”

“What do you mean? I’ve fought all through the war, I’ve seen death a lot closer than you have…”

“You were fighting, and here I was helpless without you, my hands were shaking with grief, but I had to go on working cheerfully, to feed the children, to help the government against the Fascist enemies.”

The mother was talking quietly, but she was sick at heart, and Petrushka felt sorry for her: he knew that she had learned how to repair shoes, for himself and Nastya, so as not to pay the shoemaker, and he knew that she had repaired electric stoves for their neighbors in return for potatoes.

“But I just couldn’t go on living, and missing you,” the mother said. “If I could have, I’d have died. I know I would have died, but I had the children…. I just had to feel something else, Al-yosha, some kind of gladness, just to relax. One man said he loved me, and he treated me just as tenderly as you did once…”

“Who was that, your Semyon again?” the father asked.

“No, another man. He was working as a teacher for the district committee of our union, he had been evacuated…”

“The hell with him, whoever he was! So it turned out that he comforted you too, did he?”

Petrushka had known nothing of this instructor, and he was surprised that he hadn’t known about him. “Well, our mother’s a pretty sharp one, too,” he whispered to himself.

The mother answered the father: “I didn’t get anything from him, no happiness at all, and afterward everything was still worse. My heart reached out toward him because it was dying, but when he was close to me, really close, I didn’t care at all. I was thinking at that moment about all my household problems, and I was sorry that I had let him be close to me. I realized that I could feel peaceful only with you, really happy, and that I’d be able to relax only when you’d be close to me again. There was just nowhere for me to go without you, I couldn’t save myself even for the children. Live with us, Alyosha, things will be good for us!”

Petrushka heard how his father got up from the bed without speaking, lit his pipe, and sat down at the table.

“How many times were you with him, when you were close to him?” the father asked.

“Only once,” the mother said. “It never happened again. How many times should I have been?”

“As many as you liked, it was your business,” the father declared. “Only why did you say that you were the mother of our children, and had been a woman only with me, and that a long time ago… ?”

“It’s the truth, Alyosha.”

“What do you mean? What’s the truth? You admit you were a woman with him?”

“No, I wasn’t a woman with him. I wanted to be, but I couldn’t… I felt I’d be lost without you. I needed someone to be with me, but I was just worn out, my heart had grown dark, I couldn’t love my own children any longer, and for them, you know it yourself, I’d endure anything, for them I’d give the bones out of my body!”

“Wait a minute!” the father said. “You say yourself that you made a mistake with this new Semyon of yours, you didn’t get any happiness from him, but just the same you say you didn’t fall and weren’t ruined, you stayed safe and whole? Is that it?”

“I wasn’t done for,” the mother whispered. “I go on living.”

“It just means you’re lying to me about this, too. Where is the truth, for you?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I don’t know anything very much.”

“All right. To make up for it, I know a lot. I’ve lived through more than you have,” the father declared. “You’re a bitch, and that’s all there is to it.”

The mother was silent. The father could be heard breathing fast and hard.

“Here I am home,” he said. “The war’s over, but you’ve wounded me, in the heart. Well, what of it? You can live now with both of them, your Semyon and your Yevseiev. You’ve had your fun, and you’ve made a fool out of me, but I’m a human being, too, and not just some toy…”

In the dark the father started to put on his clothes and his shoes. Then he lit the kerosene lamp, sat down at the table, and put his watch on his wrist.

“Four o’clock,” he said, talking to himself. “Still dark. It’s the truth, what they all say, there’s lots of women but not a single wife.”

Everything grew quiet in the house. Nastya was breathing evenly in her sleep on the wooden couch. Petrushka burrowed into his pillow on the warm stove and forgot that he was supposed to snore.

“Alyosha!” the mother said in a gentle voice. “Alyosha, forgive me!”

Petrushka heard his father start to groan, and then the sound of breaking glass. Through cracks in the curtain, he could see the room grow darker where his mother and father were sitting, but the lamp was still burning. “He’s broken the lampshade,” Petrushka guessed, “and there’s no glass to be had anywhere.”

“You’ve cut your hand,” the mother sard. “You’re bleeding. Take that towel from the cupboard.”

“Shut up!” the father yelled at her. “I don’t even want to hear your voice. Wake up the children, wake them up right away! Wake them up, I tell you! I’ll explain to them what kind of mother they have! Let them know about it.”

Nastya gave a little shriek of fright in her sleep, and woke up. “Mama!” she called. “Can I get in bed with you?”

Nastya loved to get into bed with her mother at night, and get warm under the blanket.

Petrushka sat up on the stove, swung his legs over the side, and said to them all:

“It’s time to sleep! Why did you wake me up? It’s not daylight yet, everything’s dark outside. Why are you making such a racket, and burning the lamp?”

“Sleep, Nastya, sleep, it’s still early, I’ll come to you in a minute,” the mother said. “And you, Petrushka, don’t get up, and don’t say anything more.”

“And what are you talking for? What does Father need?” Petrushka said.

“Just what business is it of yours what I need?” the father answered. “What a sergeant you are!”

“And why did you break the glass in the lamp? What are you frightening Mother for? She’s so thin because she eats her potatoes without any meat, and gives the meat to Nastya.”

“Do you know what your mother was doing here, what she was busy at?” the father screamed in a complaining voice, like a little boy’s.

“Alyosha!” Lyuba Vassilievna said sharply, and she turned toward her husband.

“I know, I know it all!” Petrushka said. “Mother was crying for you, waiting for you, and now you’ve come and she’s crying again. It’s you who don’t know!”

“You don’t understand anything about it!” the father said angrily. “What a sprout we’ve raised in you!”

“I do too understand it all, completely,” Petrushka answered from the stove. “It’s you who don’t understand. We’ve got things to do, we’ve got to live, and you’re cursing here like some kind of madman…”

Petrushka stopped talking, lay back on his pillow and unexpectedly, quietly, began to cry.

“You’ve become the boss in this house,” the father said. “Well, it’s all the same now, you can live as master here…”

Wiping his tears, Petrushka answered his father:

“Well, what kind of a father are you? What do you think you’re saying? And you’re a grownup, and were in the war…. Look, tomorrow, you go to the wounded soldiers’ cooperative, that’s where Uncle Khariton works at the counter, he cuts the bread, and doesn’t cheat anybody. He was in the war, too, and then came back. Go and ask him, he tells everything, and laughs about it, I’ve heard him myself. He has a wife, Anyuta, she learned to drive a truck and she delivers the bread now, but she’s very good, she doesn’t steal any of it. She made friends, too, and went out with them, they used to stand her treats. And she made friends with a man with a medal, only he has no arms, and he was the head man in the store where they sell manufactured goods…”

“What are you talking about? You’d better go back to sleep, it will be light soon,” the mother said.

“But you two wouldn’t let me sleep…. It won’t be light yet for a long time. This man with no arms became friends with Anyuta and they started to live all right. And Khariton was off at the war. Then Khariton came back, and he started to swear at Anyuta. He cursed her all day, and at night he drank wine and stuffed himself with food while Anyuta just cried, and didn’t eat a thing. He swore and he swore, then he got tired of it, and he told her: ‘What if you did have one fellow, and without any arms, too, you’re just a stupid old woman, while I managed without you to have Glashka and Aproska and Maruska, and there was a namesake of yours, another Anyuta, and then there was a Magdalinka thrown in, too.’ And he laughed and laughed, and Aunt Anyuta laughed, too, and then she started to praise him: ‘Khariton’s still a good man, there’s no better anywhere, he killed the Fascists, and there was no way for him to get away from all those girls.’ Uncle Khariton still tells us all about it at the store while he’s handing out the bread, piece by piece. And now they’re living together peacefully, as fine as can be. But Uncle Khariton goes right on laughing, and he tells us: ‘I was fooling Anyuta. I didn’t have any of those girls. There wasn’t any Glashka, or any Anyuta, or any Aproska, and there wasn’t any Magdalinka thrown in, because a soldier is the son of his fatherland, he hasn’t got time to be fooling around, his heart works only against the enemy. I was just frightening Anyuta on purpose.’ Lie down and go to sleep, Father, and turn out the lamp, the flame’s smoking without a lampshade…”

Ivanov had listened with amazement to the story Petrushka told. “What a son of a bitch!” the father thought. “I was afraid he was just about to tell about my Masha…”

Petrushka was starting to snore; this time he had really fallen asleep.

He woke up when it had already become fully light, and he was frightened that he had slept so long, with nothing done in the house since dawn.

Nastya was alone in the house. She was sitting on the floor turning the pages of a picturebook her mother had bought her a long time ago. She looked at it every day, because she had no other real book, and she traced the letters with her finger, as if she were leading.

“What are you messing with the book for all morning long? Put it back where it belongs!” Petrushka told his sister. “Where’s Mother? Has she gone to work?”

“To work,” Nastya said in a low voice, and she closed the “book.

“And where did Father go off to?” Petrushka looked around the house, in the kitchen and in the main room. “Did he take his bag with him?”

“He took his bag,” Nastya said.

“What did he say to you?”

“He didn’t say anything, he just kissed my mouth and my eyes.”

“So, so,” Petrushka said, and he pondered for a moment. “Get up off the floor,” he ordered his sister. “Let me wash you cleaner and get you dressed, you and I are going out together….”

At this moment, their father was sitting in the station. He had already drunk two hundred grams of vodka and had eaten a morning meal with a coupon issued for travelers. During the night he had made up his mind definitely to go back to the town where h had left Masha, to see her again, and maybe never to go away from her. It was too bad that he was much older than the spaceman’s daughter, whose hair smelled of outdoors. But there it would become clear how things might work out, there was no good in guessing about it in advance. Still Ivanov hoped that Masha would be at least a little pleased when she saw him, and this would be enough: it would mean there was someone close to him again, and someone fine, cheerful, with a good heart. And there he’d see how things stood.

Soon the train came which would take Ivanov back in the direction from which he had come just the day before. He took his bag and walked out on the platform. “Masha won’t be expecting me,” Ivanov thought. “She told me to forget her anyway, and that we’d never see each other again, but here I am going back to her for good.”

He climbed on to the platform of the last car in the train, and stayed there so he could see for the last time, when the train pulled out, the little town where he had lived until the war, where his children had been born. He wanted to look once more at the house he was leaving; he would be able to see it from the train because the street on which he lived ran straight from a level crossing which the train would go through.

The train started off, moving quietly past the station switch-points into the empty autumn fields. Ivanov held on to the railing of the car and watched from the platform the little houses, the buildings, the barns, the fire tower of what had been his native town. From a distance he could recognize two high chimneys: one was the soap factory and the other the brick factory. Lyuba was working there right now, at the press which shaped the bricks: let her live now as she liked, and he would live the way he wanted to. Maybe he could have forgiven her, but what would that have meant? Anyway, his heart had grown hard against her, and there was no forgiveness in it for a person who had kissed and lived with someone else just so the time of war and of separation from her husband would not go by so tediously, all by herself. And the fact that Lyuba had been close to her Semyon or her Yevseiev, just because her life had been hard, because need and grief had got her down, this was only proof of her real feelings. All love springs from need and grief; if a person didn’t need anything and didn’t grieve he would never love anyone.

Ivanov was getting ready to leave the platform, to go into the car and lie down and sleep, no longer wanting to see for the last time the house he had lived in and where he had left his children: there was no reason to punish himself to no good end. He looked ahead to see how far away the level crossing was, and he saw it at once. Here the railroad tracks crossed a country dirt road leading into the town; wisps of hay and straw were lying on this dirt road where they had fallen from farm wagons, together with willow twigs and horse droppings. Usually, except for two market days each week, this road was empty; it was not often that a peasant drove into town with a load of hay or went back to his village. Today was no exception; the country road was deserted. But from the town, out of the street the country road ran into, two children were running. One was bigger, the other smaller, and the big one was pulling the other by the hand because the little one could not keep up no matter how great the effort, no matter how hard the little legs pumped up and down. Then the bigger one started to drag the other behind him. At the last house, they stopped and looked toward the station, probably deciding whether to go on or if it was already too late. Then they looked at the passenger train going through the level crossing, and started to run along the road straight toward the train, as if they were trying to catch up with it.

The car on which Ivanov was standing was almost at the crossing. Ivanov had picked up his bag to go into the car and lie down to sleep on an upper seat where the other passengers would not disturb him, but would those two children manage to make it before the last car had gone by? Ivanov leaned out of the platform, and looked back.

The two children, still holding hands, were running along the road toward the crossing. Suddenly both fell, then stood up, and started running again. The bigger one raised his free hand and, with his face turned in the direction of the train, beckoned toward himself, as if he were summoning someone to come back to him. And then they both fell down again. Ivanov noticed that the bigger child had one foot in a boot and the other in an overshoe; this was why he was falling down so often.

Ivanov closed his eyes, not wanting to see and feel the hurt of the falling, exhausted children, and he realized how hot his chest had grown, just as if the heart languishing inside it, after beating uselessly all his life, had suddenly broken out into a kind of freedom, filling his whole being with warmth and with trembling. He was now aware of all that he had known before, but much more precisely and more realistically. Before, he had felt life through a barrier of pride and self-interest, and now suddenly he had touched its naked heart.

Once more he looked from the steps of his car at the children disappearing in the distance. Now he knew they were his children, Petrushka and Nastya. They must have seen him when his car went past the crossing, and Petrushka was calling him home, to his mother, yet he had looked at them indifferently, thinking about something else, and had not recognized his own children.

Now Petrushka and Nastya were running far behind the train along the sandy path beside the rails. Petrushka was holding on to Nastya’s hand as he had before, and dragging her behind him when her running couldn’t keep up with his.

Ivanov dropped his bag from the car onto the ground, and then lowered himself to the bottom step and dropped off on to the sandy little road along which his children were running toward him.