The Fierce and Beautiful World

THE THIRD SON

AN OLD WOMAN DIED in a provincial town. Her husband, a seventy-year-old worker living on a pension, went to the telegraph office and sent off six telegrams to various districts of the country, all with the same wording: “Your mother has died come Father.”

The elderly clerk in the telegraph office counted the money for a long time, figured it wrong, and wrote out the receipts and stamped them with shaking hands. The old man looked gently at her through the wooden window out of his reddened eyes, and thought absentmindedly about something, trying to distract his heart from its grief. It seemed to him the elderly clerk had a broken heart, too, and a soul that was permanently confused—maybe she was a widow, or a wife abandoned in ill will.

So here she was, working slowly, getting the change mixed up, her memory and her attention wandering; even for ordinary, uncomplicated work a person needs to have happiness inside him.

The old father went back home after the telegrams had been sent; he sat down on the bench next to the long table, at the cold feet of his dead wife, and he smoked, and whispered to himself a few melancholy words, looked after the lonely gray bird hopping on the little perch in its cage, sometimes quietly cried a little, and then calmed down, wound up his pocket watch, looked at the window beyond which the weather was changing back and forth— first leaves would fall with flakes of wet, tired snow, then it would rain, then the late sun would shine, as cold as a star—and the old man was waiting for his sons.

The oldest son arrived by airplaine the next day. The other five sons had arrived by the end of two more days.

One of them, the third in age, came with his daughter, a little girl of six who had never before seen her grandfather.

On the fourth day their mother was still lying on the table, but her body did not smell of death, so neat and tidy was it from her illness and from her dry exhaustion; having given abundant, healthy life to her sons, the old woman had kept for herself only her small, spare body, and she had tried to save it for a long time, no matter how wretched it was, so she could love her children and be proud of them until she died.

The big men—ranging in age from twenty to forty—stood around the coffin on the table without talking. There were six of them, and the seventh was the father, smaller than the youngest of his sons and weaker, too. He held his granddaughter in his arms, her eyes blinking in terror at the sight of this strange, dead old woman, who barely looked at her out of unblinking white eyes all but closed under their eyelids.

The sons silently wept their occasional, controlled tears, twisting their faces to endure their grief in silence. The father was no longer crying, he had cried himself out before the others, and now he was looking at his half-dozen powerful sons with concealed emotion, and with inappropriate joy. Two of them were sailors—ship captains—one was a Moscow actor, another—the one with the daughter—was a physicist, and a Communist, while the youngest son was studying to be an agronomist, and the oldest was working as foreman of a department in an airplane factory and wore a ribbon on his chest awarded him for his achievement as a worker. All six of them and their father stood quietly around their dead mother and mourned her wordlessly, hiding from each other their despair, their memories of their childhood, of the vanished happiness of that love which had welled up without interruption and freely in their mother’s heart and which had always found them— across thousands of miles. They had felt this constantly and instinctively, and been made stronger for feeling it and bolder in achieving success in their lives. Now their mother had been transformed into a corpse, she could no longer love anyone, and she lay there like any indifferent, strange, old woman.

Each of her sons felt lonely now, and frightened, as if a lamp had been burning somewhere on the windowsill of an old house in a dark field, and it had lit up the night and the flying beetles and the blue grass, the swarms of midges in the air—the whole world of childhood around that old house abandoned by those who had been born in it; the doors had never been locked in that house, so that anyone who left it could come back, but no one had returned. And now it was as if the light had suddenly gone out in that window in the night, and reality had been transformed into remembrance.

When she was dying, the old woman had instructed her husband to have a priest celebrate a requiem for the dead over her while her body was still lying in the house, but then to take her out and bury her in her grave without a priest, so as not to offend her sons and so that they could walk behind her coffin. The old woman did not believe in God as much as she wanted her husband, whom she had loved all her life, to mourn her more deeply and to grieve for her to the sound of prayer-singing and in the light of the wax candles above her lifeless face; she didn’t want to part from life without a celebration and without leaving some memory of herself behind. After their children’s arrival, the old man looked for a long time for some kind of priest and finally in the evening brought back with him a man, also elderly, dressed in ordinary, nonclerical clothes, pink-faced with the flush of vegetarian, Lenten eating, and with lively eyes in which some sort of small thoughts, for some special purpose, were glistening. The priest arrived holding an army officer’s map case against his thigh; he carried his spiritual requirements in it: incense, thin candles, a book, the vestment to hang around his neck, and a small censer hanging on a chain. He set up the candles quickly around the coffin and lit them, blew on the incense burning in the censer, and without any warning started to mutter, as he walked, what he read from the book. The sons who were in the room stood up; they felt uncomfortable and somehow a little ashamed. They stood there in a file in front of the coffin without moving, their eyes cast down. The old priest sang and muttered there in front of them without hurrying, almost ironically, watching these sons of the dead woman out of small, understanding eyes. Partly he was a little afraid of them, partly he respected them, and it was clear that he was not far from starting up a conversation with them, even from expressing his own enthusiasm for the building of socialism. But the sons were silent, no one—not even the old husband—crossed himself; this was an honor guard around a coffin and not participation in any divine service.

When the priest had finished his requiem, he quickly packed up his things, blew out the candles burning around the coffin, and put all his property back in the officer’s map case. The father put some money in his hand, and the priest, without delaying, made his way through the ranks of the six big men without looking at them, and meekly disappeared outside the door. Actually, he would have stayed in this house for the funeral repast with pleasure, he would have talked about the perspectives of war and revolution, and been comforted for a long time by this meeting with representatives of the new world which he secretly admired but which he couldn’t make his way into; when he was alone he used to dream of sometime accomplishing some kind of heroic feat so he could burst into the brilliant future together with this new generation—to this end he had even submitted a petition to the local airfield, asking that he be taken up to a great height and dropped by parachute without an oxygen mask, but they had given him no answer.

In the evening the father fixed up six beds in the second room of the house, and he put his little granddaughter beside him in his own bed, where the dead old woman had slept for forty years. The bed was in the same big room where the coffin was, and the sons went off into the other room. The father stood in the door until his sons had undressed and lain down, and then he closed the door and lay down to sleep next to his granddaughter, after having put out all the lights. The granddaughter was already asleep, alone in the big bed, her head under the blanket.

The old man stood over her in the dim nighttime light: the falling snow outside picked up the faint glow of the sky and with it lighted the darkness inside the room through the window. The old man walked up to the open coffin, kissed his wife’s hands, her forehead, and her lips, and told her: “Now you rest.” He lay down carefully next to his granddaughter and closed his eyes, so his heart might forget everything. He drowsed off, and suddenly woke up again. A light was shining underneath the door to the room where his sons were sleeping—they had turned on the electric light again, and laughter and noisy talking could be heard.

The little girl began to toss and turn from the noise; maybe she wasn’t sleeping but only afraid to take her head out from under the blanket, afraid of the night and of the dead old woman.

The oldest son was talking about hollow metal propellers with enthusiasm and with the pleasure of deep conviction; his voice had a satisfied and powerful sound, and one could imagine his healthy teeth, which had been taken care of in good time, and his full red throat. The sailors were telling stories of foreign ports, and giggling because their father had given them old blankets they had used to cover themselves in childhood and adolescence. White pieces of coarse calico had been sewed on to the tops and bottoms of these blankets with the words “head” and “feet,” so the blankets could be spread correctly, without covering your face with the dirty, sweaty part where your feet had been. Then one of the sailors started to wrestle with the actor, and they rolled on the floor as they had when they were boys and all lived together. The youngest son egged them on, promising to take them both on with just his left hand. It was clear that the brothers all liked each other and were glad at this meeting. They had not been together for many years now, and no one knew when they might meet again in the future. Perhaps only at their father’s funeral? While they were wrestling, the two brothers tipped over a chair, and for a minute they were all still, but then, apparently remembering that their mother was dead and could hear nothing, they continued what they had been doing. Soon the oldest son asked the actor to sing something in a low voice: he must know the good new Moscow songs. But the actor said it was hard for him to start cold like that.

“Cover me up with something,” the actor insisted. They covered his head with something, and he started to sing from under the covering, so he wouldn’t feel embarassed. While he was singing, the youngest son did something which made another brother fall off the bed onto still a third who was lying on the floor. They all laughed, and they told the youngest one to lift his brother up again with just his left hand. The youngest son answered his brothers in a low voice and two of them burst out laughing—so loudly that the little girl stuck her head out from under the blanket in the dark room and called out.

“Grandfather! Oh, grandfather! Are you asleep? ”

“No, I’m not asleep, I’m all right,” the old man said, and he coughed shyly.

The little girl gave way, and sobbed. The old man patted her face: it was all wet.

“What are you crying for?” the old man whispered.

“I’m sorry for grandmother,” the little girl answered. “All the rest of us are alive, and laughing, and she’s the only one who died.”

The old man said nothing. First he puffed a little through his nose, then he coughed a little. The little girl grew frightened, and she raised herself up to see her grandfather better and to find out why he wasn’t sleeping. She looked at his face, and she asked him:

“And why are you crying, too? I’ve stopped.”

The grandfather patted her head, and answered in a whisper:

“It’s nothing… I’m not crying, it’s just sweat.”

The little girl sat down near the head of the bed.

“Do you miss the old woman?” she said. “Better don’t cry: you’re old, and you’ll die soon, then you won’t cry anyhow.”

“I won’t,” the old man answered quietly.

Silence suddenly fell in the other, noisy room. One of the sons had said something just before this. Then they all were quiet. One son said something again in a low voice. The old man recognized his third son by his voice, the physics scholar, the father of the little girl. His voice had not been heard before this; he had said nothing and had not been laughing. He quieted all his brothers somehow, and they even stopped talking to each other.

Soon the door opened, and the third son appeared, dressed for daytime. He walked up to his mother’s coffin and leaned over her dim face in which there was no more feeling left for anybody.

Everything was quiet in the late night. No one was walking or driving on the street outside. The five brothers did not stir in the other room. The old man and his granddaughter kept watching his son and her father, so attentively that they didn’t breathe.

The third son suddenly straightened up, put out his arm in the darkness and reached for the edge of the coffin, but he could not hold on to it and only shoved it a little to one side on the table, as he fell to the floor. His head hit the floorboards, but the son did not make a sound—only his daughter screamed.

The five brothers in their underclothes ran in to him and carried him back to their room, to bring him around and to calm him. After a little while, when the third son had recovered consciousness, all the others were dressed in their suits or their uniforms, even though it was only two o’clock in the morning. One by one they covertly scattered through the rooms and the yard outside, through the night around the house where they had lived their childhood, and they wept there, whispering words and sorrowing, just as if their mother was standing over each of them, listening to him, and grieving that she had died and forced her children to mourn for her; if she could have, she would have gone on living forever, so that nobody should suffer on her account, or waste because of her the heart and the body to which she had given birth…. But the mother had not been able to stand living for very long.

In the morning the six sons lifted the coffin on to their shoulders and carried it off to bury it, while the old man took his granddaughter by the hand and followed after them; now he had already grown used to sorrowing for the old lady and he was satisfied and proud that he, too, would be buried by these six powerful men, no worse than this.