The Fierce and Beautiful World

APHRODITE

WAS HIS APHRODITE still alive? Nazar Fomin was no longer asking this question, with doubt and with hope, of people and of institutions—they had already answered him that there was no trace of his Aphrodite anywhere—but of nature, of the sky, the stars and the horizon, and of lifeless things. He believed some kind of oblique sign or cryptic signal would show him if his Aphrodite was still breathing, or if the breath within her had grown cold. He walked out of the dugout into the field, stopped in front of a small blue flower, looked at it for a long time, and finally asked it: “Well? You can see more down there, you’re connected to the whole earth, while I walk around up here all by myself—is Aphrodite alive or not?” The little flower was moved neither by his grief nor by his question, it stayed silent and went on living in its own way, the wind went on blowing indifferently over the grass just as it had already blown, perhaps, over Aphrodite’s grave or across her living, smiling face. Fomin looked into the distance, at the clear shining light of a cloud floating above the horizon, and he thought that maybe up there, from that height, it might be possible to see where Aphrodite was. He believed in a general bookkeeping in nature, in which could be measured the sadness of loss as well as the satisfaction of saving what one values, and through the general connectedness of all the living and dead things in this world, he wanted to find some faint, secret news of the fate of his wife Aphrodite, of her life or of her death.

At the start of the war Aphrodite had disappeared among the people fleeing toward the east from the Germans. Nazar Ivanovich Fomin himself was already in the army at that time and could not help his beloved in any way to save herself. Aphrodite was a young woman, easy to live with, not one to get lost without trace or to die of hunger or need among her own people. Some misfortune, of course, was possible along the roads so far away, or death by accident. But neither in nature nor among people could a word be heard or a trembling felt which answered a man’s open, expectant heart with sad news, so Aphrodite should still be living on this earth.

Fomin gave himself up to memories, reliving his past at the slow pace of happiness which has been lived through and fixed in the mind for good. In his memory he could see a little town, its lime-chalked walls blinding white in the sunshine, the tiled roofs of its houses, its orchards growing in gladness under a blue sky. Toward midday Fomin used to walk for lunch to a cafe not far from the fireproofing construction enterprise where he was works superintendent. A gramophone played in the cafe. Fomin would go up to the counter, ask for sausages and cabbage, a so-called “flier” (salted peas to be thrown into the mouth), and also take a mug of beer. The woman serving the beer poured it into the mug, and Fomin would watch the stream of beer, interested chiefly in seeing that it was poured accurately, without filling the mug with empty foam; in this daily struggle with the foam on his beer he never looked carefully at the face of the woman serving him, and did not remember her when he walked out of the cafe. But one time the woman sighed deeply and desperately at the wrong moment, and Fomin stared at her as she stood behind the counter. She looked at him, too; the foam overflowed the mug, and she forgot what she was doing, paying no attention to the beer. “Stop!” Fomin said to her and for the first time he noticed that she was young, with a clear face, and dark, shining eyes, strangely combining thoughtfulness with laughter in their expression, and with thick black hair growing with a wild sort of strength on her head. Fomin turned his glance away from her, but his feeling had already been attracted by this woman, and the feeling was quite independent of his intelligence and of his peace of spirit, cutting right across them both, leading the man toward his own happiness. He looked at the foam, and did not mind its spilling uselessly across the marble surface of the counter. Later on, he called Natalya Vladimirovna his Aphrodite, because her image had appeared rising above the foam, although not of ocean waters but of another liquid.

And so Nazar Ivanovich lived with his Aphrodite for twenty years, as man and wife, not counting one interruption of two and a half years, and then the war had separated them; and now here he was hopelessly asking the plants and all the good creatures of the earth about her fate, and even looking at the movement of clouds and of stars in the sky with the same question. The information bureau concerned with evacuees had been searching for Natalya Vladimirovna Fomin zealously and for a long time, but so far they had not found her. There was no one closer to Nazar Fomin than Aphrodite; all his life he had grown used to talking with her, because this helped him to think and built up his confidence in whatever task he was carrying out. And now, at war, separated from Aphrodite for four years, Nazar Ivanovich Fomin used up all his free time in writing her long letters, which he mailed to the information bureau for evacuees in Buguruslan, with a request that they be forwarded to her as soon as she was found. During the war a great many such letters had probably piled up at the information bureau—some of them would be delivered some day, others never and would turn to dust unread. Nazar Ivanovich wrote his wife calmly and in detail, still believing in her existence and in his future reunion with her, but so far he had never received an answer from Aphrodite. The Red Army soldiers and officers under Fomin’s command checked the mail with great care, so that no letter might be lost which was addressed to their commander because he was practically the only man in the regiment who never received a letter either from his wife or from his relatives.

Now the happy years of peace had long gone by. They could not have lasted forever, for even happiness must change if it is to be preserved. In war Nazar Ivanovich Fomin had found another happiness for himself, different from what his peacetime work had given him but related to it; after the war he hoped to find a higher kind of life than anything he had yet experienced, either as a worker or as a soldier.

Our front-line units recaptured the southern city in which Fomin had lived and worked before the war. Fomin’s regiment was withdrawn into the reserve, held out of action because it was not needed. It made itself comfortable around the city, in the rear, so it could advance later on the long march to the west. Nazar Ivanovich wrote a letter to Aphrodite on his first day of rest, and then went on leave in what was the city he loved best in all the Russian land. The town had been shattered by artillery shelling, consumed by the flames of big fires, and its solid buildings had been reduced to dust by the enemy. Fomin was already used to seeing wheat fields trampled down by big machines, the earth cut with trenches, settlements where people lived torn apart by high explosives: this was the ploughing of war, in which the land is planted with what should never grow again upon it—the corpses of scoundrels, and with what was born for good and active living but preserved only in everlasting memories—the flesh of our soldiers, watching in death over our enemies in the earth.

Fomin walked through a fruit orchard to the place where Aphrodite’s cafe had once been. It was December. The naked fruit trees had grown cold for the winter and quiet in sorrowful sleep, and their spreading branches which had held fruit in the autumn had now been ripped by bullets and hung down helplessly in the ribbons of wood that survived, with only an occasional twig left whole and healthy. Many of the trees had been chopped down by the Germans for material with which to build defenses.

The building where the cafe had been more than twenty years before, and which had later become a dwelling house, now lay shattered into broken bricks and rubbish, murdered and dead, blown into space by the wind. Fomin could still remember the look of the building, but soon, after a little time, this would be effaced in him, and he would forget it too. Wasn’t it the same somewhere in the faraway, wild fields where Aphrodite’s big, beloved body was lying cold, gnawed at by carrion-eating animals, melting into water and air, the wind drying and blowing it away, so that all the substance of Aphrodite’s life might be spread evenly across the world, without trace, so that she herself would be forgotten as a person?

He walked on to the outskirts of the city where he had lived as a child. The desertedness cooled his spirit. A late wind was fluttering through the ruins of the silenced homes. He saw the place where he had lived and played as a youth. The old wooden building had burned down to its foundation, tiles crumbled by great heat lay on the scorched earth on top of his childhood home. A poplar in the courtyard, under which the little Nazar had slept in summertime, had been cut down, and it lay there next to its stump, dead, its bark rotting.

Fomin stood for a long time next to this tree of his childhood. His numbed heart suddenly seemed to lose all feeling, so as not to take any more grief into itself. But Fomin picked up some of the tiles which were still whole and put them in a neat little pile, as if he were getting material ready for future building, or collecting seed with which to plant all of Russia once again. This tile and all the others around it had been made in the kiln which Fomin had established here in the old days of peace and which he had managed for years.

Fomin walked out into the steppe; there, about a mile from the city, he had once upon a time built his first dam. He had been a happy builder then, but now the meadow of his youth was sad and empty, ripped up by the war and barren; unfamiliar little blades of grass could be seen in places through the thin, melting snow, indifferent to man, bowing humbly under the wind…. The earth dam had been shattered in the middle, the reservoir had dried up, and the fish in it had died.

Fomin went back to the city. He found Shevchenko Street and the house where he had lived after his return from Rostov, when he had finished the polytechnic institute. The house was no longer there, but a bench remained. It had formerly stood under the windows of his apartment; he used to sit on this bench in the evenings, at first alone and then with Aphrodite, and in this house that was now destroyed they had lived together in one room, with windows facing on the street. His father, a foundry worker, had suddenly died while Fomin was still studying in Rostov, and his mother had married again and gone away to settle in Kazan. The young Nazar Fomin had been left then to live by himself, but the whole sunlit world, filled with attractive people, that seductive world of youth and eternal unsolved mysteries, a world not yet constructed, poor, but filled with the hope and with the will of the Bolshevik workers, this world was waiting for young people, and their familiar, native land, made hungry and naked by the miseries of the first world war, lay there in front of them.

Fomin sat down on the bench where he had passed so many quiet summer evenings talking and making love with Aphrodite. Now there was an empty, shattered world in front of him, and his best friend, perhaps, was no longer on this earth. Everything had now to be done from scratch, in order to go on with what had been planned a quarter of a century ago.

Probably Nazar Fomin’s life would have worked out quite differently if belief in the idea of the working class had not inspired him in those bygone days of his youth. It is possible he might have lived more quietly, but cheerlessly and fruitlessly; he might have worked out his own individual destiny, but he would not have known that invincible necessity which came when, trusting his people with nothing but his heart, he felt and understood the meaning and sense of his own existence. But when he presses close to the people who gave him birth, and through them to nature and to the world, to past time and to future hope—then there is opened to his spirit that secret spring where a man must drink to win strength without limit for what he does, and the power of really believing that his own life is important.

Soviet Russia was then only starting to work out its own fate. The people had set off on a great road with no returning, into that historical future where no one had marched before: it wanted to find the fulfillment of all its hopes, to achieve through work both deeds of lasting value and the dignity of human life, and to share these with other peoples…. Fomin had once seen a simple vision on the Sea of Azov when he was a boy. He was on the shore, and the single sail of a fishing boat was moving in the distance on a blue sea under a shining light-gold cloud; the boat moved farther and farther away, its white sail reflecting the sun with its gentle light, and the boat was still visible for a long time to the people on the shore; then it disappeared entirely over the enchanted horizon. Nazar had felt a melancholy happiness then, just as if someone he loved had called to him from the shining distance of sky and water when he could not follow him. And Soviet Russia seemed to him just like that boat disappearing into the distance, sailing off into the world and into time. He also remembered a midday hour of a forgotten day. Nazar had been walking through fields, moving down into a ravine where wonderful wild grass was growing; the sun called out to everyone from high in the sky, and plants and beasts moved up to answer it from the darkness of the earth—they were all of different colors, each of them different, not resembling each other: each took shape and came to life on the earth as best it could, just so it could come for this, take breath and celebrate, and play its part in the general assembly of all existence, succeed in loving all living things and then once more part forever from them. The young Nazar Fomin felt at that moment the great, dumb, and universal grief which only man can understand, express, and overcome, and this is precisely what man is for. Nazar was happy then about what he owed to mankind; he knew in advance that he would pay it because the working class and the Bolsheviks had taken on themselves all the obligations and all the burdens of humanity, and by heroic labor and by the power of an accurate understanding of their meaning on this earth the working people would carry out their assignment, and the dark destiny of mankind would have the truth break over it. This was how Nazar Fomin thought in his youth. He felt things then more than he knew them, he could not yet express the idea of all the people in clear language, but he was content with just the happy certainty that the dusk which had covered the world and shadowed the hearts of men was not an eternal darkness but only the dark which comes before the dawn.

Nazar Fomin’s contemporaries, Young Communists and Bolsheviks, were inspired by the same idea of creating a new world; just like Nazar, they were convinced that they had been challenged by Lenin to take part in a worldwide triumph of humanity. It was in order that a time of true living should begin at last on this earth, in order to fulfill all the hopes which people had earned by their centuries of hard work and of sacrifice, the hopes they had saved up through long trials and much patient thinking…

When he had finished the special institute in Rostov, Nazar Fomin returned to his birthplace, to this same town where he was now sitting all alone. Nazar had become a technical builder, and started his lifework. He took everything that was material, rough, and ordinary so close to his heart that it became something spiritual for him, and sustained his passion for his work. Now he no longer remembered: had he realized then or not that everything that is truly spiritual comes only from the living needs of human beings? But with his own hands he accomplished this transformation of the material into the spiritual, and he believed in the truth of the revolution because he had accomplished this and seen its effect on the destiny of his people.

At first Nazar Fomin had been in charge of rural production of fireproof materials throughout the district; this was not considered a big responsibility. But he was excited by this work and he cherished it, not just as a public service but as the very meaning of his existence, and he looked with passionate eyes at the first baked tiles prepared in his village kiln. He stroked the first tile, sniffed it, and carried it back to the room where he was living so that he could look at it again in the evening and in the morning, to make sure it really was completely good and solid, fit to last for long years in place of the straw on the roofs of village houses and thus to save the peasants’ homes from fire. Then he studied the fire statistics of his district in the rural reports and figured out that if straw thatch could be replaced by tiles, this economy alone would save the peasants enough from fire damage to build, for example, an artesian well with abundant clean water in every village in three years’ time, or even more; and then in the next three or four years, out of the same funds saved from fire by the tiled roofs, enough to construct a local electric power station with a mill for hulling grain and another for grinding it. With these ideas Nazar Fomin could stare at a tile for a long time without growing bored, thinking about how it could be made stronger and cheaper. Tiles had become both feeling and experience for him, they had replaced books and friends; later on he understood that no object could really replace human beings, but when he was young just thinking about man was enough for him.

There are times when people live on hopes and expectations of a change in their destiny; there are other times when only the memory of the past can comfort the living generation; and there are lucky times when the historical development of the world coincides in people with the beating of their own hearts. Nazar Fomin was a man of his people’s lucky times, and at the beginning, like many of his contemporaries and those who thought as he did, he believed it was the beginning of an epoch of quiet happiness, of peace, of brotherhood, and of blessedness, all of which would gradually spread across the entire world. For all of this to happen it would be enough just to work hard and to build: this was how the young man Fomin thought at that time.

And Nazar Fomin found spiritual peace for himself in his love for his wife Aphrodite and his faithfulness to her; with these he conquered all the troubled passions inside himself which pulled him toward the dark sides of the world of sensations where a man could only squander his life to no purpose, even if with some delight, and he devoted all his energy to his work and to the service of the idea which had become his heart’s desire—not what wasted a man but what regenerated him again and again, in which his real delight was found, not furious and incapacitating but gentle, like quiet goodness.

Nazar Fomin was preoccupied then, like his whole generation, with the spirituality of a world which had existed until that time only in misery, in disconnection, and without any general, clear meaning.

At the beginning of his work, Fomin made tiles for fire-resistant roofing; then his responsibilities were increased, and he soon was elected vice president of the village Soviet, but the real significance of his job was to be the chief engineer of all construction in the settlement and the district around it. At that time this town was only a settlement, the center of a small rural district.

Fomin built dams in the dry steppe for watering the cattle, he dug wells in the villages and reinforced them with concrete tiles, and he paved roads all through the district with a kind of local stone, in order to use all the means available to overcome the poverty of the economy and to bring a unified peasant spirit to the whole people.

But even then he was already thinking about something more important and one idea dominated his dreams, giving hopes to his happiness. For two years Fomin worked on his plan before the district executive committee trusted him to start it. This plan was for the construction of an electric power station in the district with the gradual extension of a power network over the entire region, so as to give the people light with which to read books, machine power for lightening their labor, and warmth in wintertime for heating their houses and their stables. With the realization of this simple dream, the whole tenor of life of the population would be transformed, and man would then feel true freedom from poverty and grief, from the burden of heavy work which exhausts him to his very bones, and from all the hopelessness which leaves him no satisfaction in his life…

Reflections of these memories were moving now across the face of Colonel Fomin as he sat there among the ruins of his town that had been destroyed, the town he had built once upon a time together with his comrades. The memories showed on his face first in a smile, then in grief, in the quiet recollection of what had happened a long time ago.

He had built the power station. A dance had been organized in the hall of the district political education club to celebrate the completion of what was for that time a powerful generator, and Aphrodite had danced at that ball under the radiance of the new electric lights, with an orchestra of three accordians, and she had been even happier than Nazar himself, because her husband’s project had succeeded.

But it had been hard for Fomin to complete the construction. Too little money was available from the district budget, so it was necessary to explain the usefulness of electricity to the whole population of the district so the people themselves would invest in the station and in the power network their own labor and their wealth beyond what had already been accumulated for the purpose. Because of this Fomin organized thirty-four peasant associations for electricity and he joined them all up in a district union. This cost him a lot of courage, a lot of anxiety, and a lot of unquiet work. He remembered one peasant orphan girl, Yevdokia Remeiko; her parents had left her a small dowry, and she invested it all in her association and then went to work harder and more eagerly than most, as an assistant carpenter on the construction of the station. By now Yevdokia Remeiko would be a grown woman, if she was still alive, but if she had been still young, she would probably be serving in the Red Army, or fighting in a partisan detachment.

Fomin could remember a lot of the other people who had worked with him then—peasant men and women, people who lived in the settlement, old people and young ones. In all sincerity and candor they were building a new world on this earth with all the skills they had: their hidden, inhibited abilities burst forth then and started to develop in beneficial, intelligent labor; their spirits and their understanding of life blossomed and grew as plants grow out of the ground when stones are lifted from on top of them. The station had not yet been completely built and equipped when Fomin could already see with satisfaction that its builders—peasants working as volunteers over and above their work in the fields—had become so much more profound in doing this and had developed such interest in each other and in their relations to the working class, making turbines for generating the electricity, that the wretched loneliness of their hearts had disappeared, and their individual peasant-farmer indifference to the whole strange world around them and their terror in front of it also began to leave them. It is true that in the secret thinking of every man there is a desire to go out of his own courtyard, out of his own loneliness, to see and to live through all that is worldwide, but it is necessary to find a path which is not beyond a man’s powers and which is open to everyone. An old peasant named Yeremeyev expressed his tangled ideas about this at that time to Fomin:

“You see, Nazar Ivanovich, we don’t feel that Soviet power is giving us any easy life: go on, it tells us, be glad, and be responsible yourself for good and evil, it says, you’re not any longer just a bystander on this earth. And what kind of life did we have before! When you’re in your mother’s womb you don’t remember who you are, then you come outside and grief and hardship drive you, you live in a hut like in some dungeon where you can’t even see the light, and then you die and lie there quiet in your grave and forget that you even existed. We’ve been in tight places everywhere, Nazar Ivanovich—a womb, a prison cell, a coffin, with nothing but blankness all around us. And everybody hindering everybody else! While now everybody comes to help—that’s where Soviet power and cooperation have brought us!”

Where was that old man Yeremeyev now? Maybe he was still alive somewhere, although it wasn’t likely, a lot of time had gone by…

The power station did not work long; seven days after it began to operate it burned to the ground. Nazar Fomin was miles away when this happened; he had gone out to look at the dam near Dybrovka’s farmstead, which had been washed away by the autumn floods, and to estimate the work needed to rebuild it. They had sent him an urgent message about the fire, and Fomin had gone back immediately.

Just outside the settlement, where the new adobe building of the power station had been yesterday, there was nothing now. Everything had been reduced to ashes. Nothing was left but the dead frames of the machinery—the motor and the generator. But the heat had made all the copper parts run out of the body of the motor; the ball bearings and the fittings had melted like streams of tears and then hardened and grown cold on the building’s foundations; the coils had gone up in smoke and all the copper had boiled down to nothing.

Nazar Fomin stood next to his dead machinery staring up at him out of the blind holes of its burned-out vital parts, and he wept. A rainy wind was dolefully ruffling the sheets of metal on the floor which had been curled up by the heat of the fire. Fomin looked into the sky at this melancholy moment of his life; dark autumn clouds were scudding across it, driven by heavy bad weather; there was no interest to be seen there, no sympathy for man, because nature, despite its bigness, is all the same, knowing nothing except itself. Only what had been consumed in the fire had been different; here had been a world created by people in sympathy with each other, here in a small way a hope for a higher life was being realized, for a future end to all the pain with which nature oppresses even itself. This was a hope, perhaps, which existed in all creation only in the consciousness of men, and not of all men but only those who first in sacrifice, in work, and in revolution have struggled through to an understanding of their destiny. How small this blessed force still is, inside the enormous world, and how urgent it is to preserve it!

A sad time started for Nazar Fomin. Investigatory authorities informed him that the fire had started not by accident or because of carelessness, but had been set by a criminal. Fomin could not understand this at first—how was it possible that something good for everybody could provoke hatred, and become the reason for a crime? He went to see the man who had set fire to the station. The criminal looked to him like any ordinary man, but he did not regret his act. In what he said Fomin could feel an unslaked hatred; before his arrest the criminal had fed his spirit with it. Now Fomin could no longer remember clearly his face or his words, but he still remembered the man’s unhidden malice toward him, the chief engineer of this people’s building which had been destroyed, and his explanation of what he had done as an act absolutely essential to satisfy his own mind and his own conscience. Fomin had listened quietly to the criminal then, and realized that it would be impossible with words to make him change his mind and that this could be done only with deeds, except that he would never allow the deeds to be accomplished, he would constantly sabotage and destroy what he had not helped to build.

Fomin was seeing a creature whom he had thought not to exist on this earth, or at best to be living in a helpless, harmless condition since the revolution. In actual fact this creature was living a real life and even had its own intelligence, in the truth of which it believed. And then Fomin’s belief in an imminent heaven on earth was shattered by doubt; the whole picture in his mind’s eye of a shining future seemed to fade back toward the misty horizon, and under his feet was only that drab, hard, impassable earth along which there was still a long way to go before reaching the radiant world which had seemed so close and so attainable.

The peasants, the builders, and the investors in the power station held a meeting. They listened to Fomin, and they were quietly thoughtful, not hiding their general grief. Then Yevdokia Remeiko stood up and said shyly that they must collect the funds again and rebuild the burned-down station; in a year, or a year and a half, Remeiko said, they could do it with their own hands, and maybe a good deal faster. “What’s the matter with you, girl?” some cheerful peasant, nobody knew who, answered her from his seat, “you’ve burned up one dowry in the fire, and now you’re throwing in another, so you’ll never get married before you’re in your coffin, and you’ll just wither away with the old folks.”

When they had considered the problem, how much they could get from state insurance funds for the fire, how much the government would lend them, how much was left to be covered by voluntary labor, the investors took on the task of building the station from the beginning for a second time. “The electricity’s gone off,” a craftsman at making barrels named Yevtukhov said, “but we want to live without being turned off! So we empower you, Nazar Ivanovich, in a categorical sense to build it to the same plan and scale as it was before!” With both big things and little things, Yevtukhov loved to recommend that they be done in a categorical sense; he himself lived in a categorical and revolutionary style, and he had invented a completely spherical box. And now it was as if a warm light had shone on Nazar Fomin’s darkened spirit. Not knowing what to do or to say, he went up to Yevdokia Remeiko and, shy in front of all the people, wanted to kiss her cheek, but he managed to kiss only the dark hair above her ear. This is how it had been then, and the living feeling of happiness, the smell of the Remeiko girl’s hair, and her shy look had all stayed intact in Fomin’s memory.

Once more Nazar Fomin built an electric power station on the same site, and it was twice as powerful as the one which had been burned. Two years went into this work. During this time Aphrodite left Nazar Fomin; she fell in love with another man, an engineer who had come from Moscow to install a radio transmitter, and she married him. Fomin had a great many friends among the peasants and the working people, but without his beloved Aphrodite he felt himself an orphan, and his heart trembled with loneliness. He had always thought before this that his faithful Aphrodite was a goddess, but now she was pitiable in her wanting, in her need to satisfy her new love, in her pull toward happiness and enjoyment, which were stronger than her will, stronger than her faithfulness and her pride in relation to someone who had always loved her and no one else but her. But even after his divorce from Aphrodite, Nazar Fomin could not lose the habit of loving her just as before; he did not want to struggle against the feeling which was now turning into suffering—life had taken his wife from him, and she had gone away, but it isn’t essential to possess a person closely and to be happy only next to her—it is sometimes enough to feel a beloved person as a permanent dweller in one’s heart; it’s true that this is harder and more demanding than close, satisfying possession, because unrequited love lives only on its own true strength, feeding on nothing in return. But were Fomin and the other people of his country making the world over for a better fate simply in order to hold power over people, or to use them later like their property? Fomin still remembered that a strange idea had come to him then, which he could not explain. He felt that in his divorce from Aphrodite an evil power had again blocked his road to life; in its original cause this was perhaps the same force which had caused the fire in the power station. He realized the difference between the two events, he saw their incongruity, but they had destroyed his life with equal brutality, and it was one and the same man who had withstood them. It was possible that he had been to blame with Aphrodite, for sometimes it happens that evil is done without being intended, unwillingly and unnoticed, and even when a man is straining every nerve to do good to someone else. This must be because every heart is different from every other: one heart, recipient of what is good, applies it entirely to its own needs, with none of the goodness left over for another; a different kind of heart is capable of working over even what is evil, and of turning it into what is good and strong, for itself and for others, too.

After losing Aphrodite, Fomin realized that general blessedness and enjoyment of life, as he had expected them hitherto, were false dreams and that it was not in these that a man’s truth consisted and his real felicity. As he conquered his own suffering, endured what might have crushed him, and raised again what had been destroyed, Fomin unexpectedly felt a kind of free happiness which was independent both of scoundrels and of sheer chance. He understood his former naivete, all his nature started to grow harder, ripening in misery, and began to learn how to overcome the mountain of stone which blocked the road of his life; and then the world in front of him, which had seemed to him clear and attainable until now, spread itself out in a faraway mysterious haze, not because it was really dark there, or sad, or strange, but because it actually was enormously larger in all directions and could not be surveyed all at once, either inside a man’s heart or in simple space. And this new conception satisfied Fomin more than the miserable blessedness for whose sake alone, he used to think, people lived.

But at this time he found himself, together with the rest of his generation, just at the start of the new road to life of the whole Soviet Russian people. All that Nazar Fomin had lived through up to this time was only an introduction to his hard destiny, an initial testing of a young man and of his preparation for the urgent historical task his people had undertaken. In actuality, there is something base and insecure in striving for one’s own happiness; a man begins to be a man only with the paying of his debt to those who brought him to life in this world, and it is here that his highest satisfaction lies, the true, eternal happiness which no misery, no grief, no despair, can ever destroy. But at that moment Fomin could not hide his grief over his misfortune, and if there had not been people around him who loved him as someone who thought as they did, perhaps he might have lost his courage completely, and not survived. “Calm down,” one of his closest comrades told him with the sadness of understanding, “calm yourself! What else did you expect? Who has guaranteed us happiness and truth? We’ve got to make them ourselves, because our party is giving meaning to life for all the world. Our party—it’s humanity’s honor guard, and you’re a guardsman. The party is not bringing up happy cattle, but heroes for a great time of war and revolution…. Problems will keep right on growing in front of us, and we’ll be climbing up such high mountains—from their tops you’ll see all the horizon right up to the very ends of the earth. What are you whining and being bored about? Live with us—what’s wrong with you? You think all warmth comes from the stove at home, or from a wife, don’t you? You’re an intelligent man, you know we’ve got no need for weak creatures who take care of themselves. A different kind of times have started.”

It was the first time Fomin had heard that phrase “honor guard.” His life went on. Aphrodite, Nazar Fomin’s wife, hurt by the infidelities of her second husband, met Nazar one day and told him that life was sad for her, and that she missed him, that she had understood life wrongly when she had tried to find nothing but joy in it, without knowing either debts or obligations. Nazar Fomin listened to Aphrodite silently; jealousy and hurt pride were still inside him, held down and almost mute but still alive, like creatures that never die. But his joy at seeing Aphrodite’s face, the nearness of her heart, beating its way toward him, killed the wretched sadness in him, and after two and a half years of separation, he kissed Aphrodite’s hand which was being held out to him.

New years of life followed. Circumstances often made Fomin their victim, leading him to the very edge of destruction, but his spirit could no longer grow weak in hopelessness or in dejection. He lived, thought, and worked as if he constantly felt some great hand leading him gently and firmly forward, to the destiny of heroes. And the hand which led him strongly forward was the same big hand that warmed him, and its warmth penetrated inside him to his very heart.

“Good-bye, Aphrodite!” Nazar Fomin said out loud.

Wherever she was now, alive or dead, her footprints were still on the ground here in this deserted town, and the ashes held things she had at some time touched with her hands, printing the warmth of her fingers on them—everywhere around him there still existed unnoticed signs of her life, which are never completely destroyed, no matter how deeply the world is changed. Fomin’s feeling for Aphrodite was humble enough to be satisfied even by the fact that she had breathed here once upon a time, and the air of her birthplace still held the diffused warmth of her mouth and the weak fragrance of her body that had disappeared—for there is no destruction in the whole world that leaves no trace behind it.

“Good-bye, Aphrodite! I can feel you now only in my memories, but I still want to see you, alive and whole!”

Fomin stood up from the bench, looked at the town which had settled into its own ruins and could be easily seen from one end to the other, bowed to it, and walked back to his regiment. His heart, schooled now in patience, would be able to stand, perhaps, even eternal separation, and could preserve its faithfulness and its feeling of affection until the end of his existence. He kept quietly inside himself the pride of a soldier who can perform any labor or human deed; he rejoiced when he triumphed over an enemy, and whenever despair in his heart turned into hope, and hope into success and victory.

His orderly lit the candle in a saucer on the wooden kitchen table. Fomin took off his greatcoat and sat down to write a letter to Aphrodite: “Dear Natasha, trust me, and don’t forget me, just as I remember you. Trust me, that everything will work out as it ought to, and we’ll live again together. You and I will still have these wonderful children we’re sure to have. They wear my heart out in my yearning for you…”