The Fierce and Beautiful World

[I]

ALEXANDER VASSILIEVICH MALTSEV was considered to be the best locomotive engineer at the Tolubeyev station.

He was thirty years old, but he already had the rating of a first-class engineer and he had been driving express trains for a long time. When the first high-powered passenger locomotive of the “JS” (Joseph Stalin) series arrived at our station, it was Maltsev who was assigned to it, which was completely reasonable and right. His assistant was an elderly worker from the station repair shops named Fedor Petrovich Drabanov, but he soon passed his own examination as an engineer and went off to work on another locomotive and I was assigned to work in his place as an assistant on Maltsev’s crew. I had been an assistant before that, but only on older, less powerful engines.

I was pleased at the assignment. Just looking at that “JS” locomotive, the only one then in our division, filled me with enthusiasm: I could look at it for a long time and a specially moving kind of happiness welled up in me, just as wonderful as what I felt when I first read Pushkin when I was a child. Besides, I wanted to work under a first-class engineer in order to learn from him the art of driving heavy, high-speed trains.

Alexander Vassilievich was quiet and indifferent about my assignment to his crew; it was clearly all the same to him who worked as his assistant.

Before each trip I always checked every detail of the engine, testing all its maintenance and auxiliary mechanisms until I could relax, confident that the engine was ready for the trip. Alexander Vassilievich would watch me work, following each step, but then he would check the machinery after me with his own hands as if he didn’t trust me.

This happened repeatedly and I was already getting used to-having him mix into my responsibilities all the time, even though it disappointed me. But usually I forgot about my disappointment as soon as we started off. Turning away from the instruments which recorded the condition of the locomotive and from watching the left side of the train and the tracks ahead of us, I would watch Maltsev. He drove the train with the bold self-confidence of a great expert, with the concentration of an inspired artist, absorbing everything around him and thus achieving mastery over it. Alexander Vassilievich’s eyes looked straight in front of him, empty and abstracted, but I knew that through them he was watching the tracks in front and all of nature rushing toward us—even a swallow, swept upward by the edge of the wind made by the train, would catch his glance for an instant, and in that instant his head would turn after the swallow: what happened to him behind us, where had he flown?

We were never late through our own fault; on the contrary, they held us up often at way stations which were not scheduled stops, because we were ahead of the timetable and they could get us back into the schedule only by delaying us.

Usually we worked without talking. Occasionally Alexander Vassilievich would rap the boiler with his wrench, without even turning toward me, wanting to direct my attention to something that wasn’t quite right in the way the engine was working, or preparing me for some sudden change, so I would be ready for it. I always understood these unspoken instructions of my senior comrade and I carried them out diligently, but he still treated me as impersonally as if I had been a fireman or an oiler, and at all our stops he always tested the pressure gauges and the tightness of the bolts in the connecting rods, and he would check the axle-boxes on the driving wheels, and everything else. If I had just examined and oiled some moving part, Maltsev would examine and oil it again, right after me, as if he didn’t consider my work efficient.

“I just checked that crosshead, Alexander Vassilievich,” I told him once when he started to examine the block between a piston rod and a connecting rod just after I had done the same thing.

“And I want to do it myself,” Maltsev answered, smiling, and there was a kind of sadness in his smile which startled me.

I later understood the meaning of this sadness and the reason for his always holding himself aloof from us. He felt a superiority over us because he understood the locomotive better than we did and because he didn’t believe that I or anybody else could learn the secret of his skill, the secret of seeing at the same time the swallow flying by and the signal ahead, being aware at the same moment in time of the track, the whole train, and the power of the locomotive. Maltsev realized of course that we could outdo even him in our zeal, but he couldn’t imagine that we could love the engine more than he did or drive the train better—anything better, he thought, would be impossible. And this was why Maltsev was sad with us; he was lonesome with his talent, as if he lived all by himself, not knowing how to express it to us so we could understand.

And it’s true, we couldn’t have understood his skill. I asked him once to let me drive the engine by myself; Alexander Vassilievich let me have his place for forty kilometers, and sat in the assistant’s place. I drove the train, and after twenty kilometers I was already four minutes late, and at the end of the longer climbs we were doing no better than thirty kilometers an hour. Maltsev took the engine back again from me; he took the grades at a speed of fifty kilometers an hour, and the engine didn’t sway on the curves as it did with me, and he quickly made up the time that I had lost.

[II]

I worked as Maltsev’s assistant for about a year, from August to July, and on July 5 Maltsev made his last trip as the engineer of an express train…

We had picked up a train of forty passenger cars which was four hours late when we took it on. The train dispatcher came out to the engine and especially asked Alexander Vassilievich to make up as much of this time as he could, cutting it down to three hours if possible, for otherwise it would be hard for him to send a train of empty cars out on the next track. Maltsev promised him to make up the time, and we started off.

It was eight o’clock in the evening, but the summer day was still hanging on and the sun was shining with a kind of triumphal, morning-time power. Alexander Vassilievich asked me to keep the steam pressure in the boiler constant at only half an atmosphere below maximum.

In a half hour we pulled out into the steppe, on a quiet, soft stretch of land. Maltsev raised the speed to ninety kilometers and didn’t let it fall below this; on the contrary, he raised it to a hundred on the level and on small grades. On the grades I forced the firebox up to its maximum and made the fireman shovel coal by hand to help out the stoking machine, because my steam pressure was falling.

Maltsev drove the locomotive on, throttle wide open. We were now headed straight for a big stormcloud which had appeared above the horizon. From our side the cloud was lighted up by the sun, but its interior was being ripped by severe, angry bolts of lightning, and we could see how the shafts of lightning plunged vertically down onto the quiet distant earth and we were racing madly toward that distant ground as if hurrying to its defense. It was clear that the sight appealed to Alexander Vassilievich; he leaned far out of his window as he stared ahead, and his eyes which were used to smoke and flame and distance were glittering now with excitement. He realized that the work and the power of our locomotive were comparable with the might of the storm, and perhaps this idea made him feel proud.

Soon we saw a whirlwind of dust moving toward us across the steppe. This meant the storm was carrying the thundercloud straight at us. The air grew dark around us: the dry earth and the sand of the steppes whistled and crackled against the steel body of the locomotive, there was no visibility at all, and I started the generator to give us light and switched on the headlight on the front of the locomotive. Breathing was made hard by the burning whirlwind of dust forcing its way into the cabin and doubled in strength by the motion of the train toward it, and also by the gases from the firebox and by the early twilight surrounding us. The locomotive plunged on with a howl into the confused, stifling darkness, along the crack of light made by the front headlight. Our speed went down to sixty kilometers an hour; we were working and staring in front of us as if in a dream.

Suddenly a big drop of water hit the windshield and dried up at once, consumed by the hot wind. Then an instantaneous flash of blue light blazed past my eyelashes and seemed to move through me to my shuddering heart itself. I grabbed at the injector stopcock, but the pain in my heart had already stopped, and I looked at once toward Maltsev—he was looking in front and driving the engine, with nothing changed in his face.

“What was that?” I asked the fireman.

“Lightning,” he said. “It wanted to get us, and it didn’t miss by much.”

Maltsev heard what we were saying.

“What lightning?” he asked, quite loud.

“What we had just now,” the fireman said.

“I didn’t see it,” Maltsev said, and he turned his face again toward the tracks in front of us.

I was also wondering if this had really been lightning.

“But where’s the thunder?” I asked.

“We’ve gone right through it,” the fireman explained. “Thunder always comes afterwards. While it was striking, while the air was shaking loose, we’d already run past it. Probably the passengers heard it, they’re behind us.”

We went on through the downpour but were soon past it, and we came out onto the hushed and darkened steppe over which peaceful clouds were now resting motionless, their work done.

It had grown quite dark all around us, the quiet night had begun. We could sense the smell of the wet earth, the fragrance of the grass and the grain refreshed by the rain and the storm, and we plunged on, making up time.

I noticed that Maltsev was driving the engine worse than usual; it swayed on the curves, and the speed went up to a hundred and more kilometers an hour, and then would drop to forty. I decided that Alexander Vassilievich was probably dead tired, and so I said nothing to him even though it was very hard for me to keep the firebox and the boiler running properly when the engineer was driving as he was. But we were supposed to stop in half an hour, to take on water, and Alexander Vassilievich could get something to eat there, and rest a little. We had already made up forty minutes, and by the end of our run we’d make up at least an hour.

But still I was worried by Maltsev’s tiredness and I started to stare forward myself, at the tracks and the signals. On my side, on the left, an electric light was hanging on a cord, lighting up the driving shaft machinery. I could see quite clearly the heavy, accurate working of the left-hand driving shaft, but then the light above it flickered and began to burn dimly, like a single candle. I turned around in the cabin. There, too, the lights were now burning at quarter strength, hardly illuminating the instruments. It was curious that Alexander Vassilievich had not signaled to me with his wrench, to point out what was wrong. It was obvious that the generator was not producing the required number of revolutions, and the tension had fallen. I started to adjust the generator, beyond the steam pipeline, and I was busy at this for quite a while, but the tension did not increase.

At this moment a foggy cloud of reddish light moved across the dials of the instruments and the ceiling of the cabin. I looked outside.

Ahead of us in the darkness—it was impossible to tell whether near or far away—a red beam of light was oscillating across our tracks. I didn’t understand what this was, but I knew what had to be done.

“Alexander Vassilievich!” I shouted and I gave three whistles to stop the train.

We could hear torpedoes exploding under our wheels. I rushed across the cabin to Maltsev, he turned his face toward me and looked at me with quiet, empty eyes. The needle on the dial of the speedometer showed a speed of sixty kilometers an hour.

“Maltsev!” I screamed. “We’re going over torpedoes!” And 1 reached out my hand toward the controls.

“Get away!” Maltsev exclaimed, and his eyes began to shine, reflecting the light of the flickering lamps hanging over the speedometer.

He immediately pulled the brakes on full and put the engine in reverse.

I was pressed up against the boiler, and I could hear the wheels of the engine grinding hard against the rails.

“Maltsev!” I said. “We’ve got to open the stopcocks of the cylinders, or we’ll blow up the engine.”

“Not necessary. It won’t blow up,” Maltsev answered.

We stopped. I started water running into the boiler through the injector, and looked outside. In front of us, about ten meters away, an engine was standing on our tracks, its tender toward us. A man was standing on this tender with a long poker in his hands which had been heated red-hot at its end, and he had been waving this in his effort to stop our express train. This engine had been pushing a freight train which was now stopped at this point between two stations.

It meant that while I had been working on the generator and not looking in front of us we had gone through a yellow signal and then a red one and probably more than one warning signal given us by trackwalkers. But why hadn’t Maltsev noticed all these signals?

“Kostya!” Maltsev called to me.

I walked over to him.

“Kostya! What’s this, in front of us?”

I told him.

“Kostya… From here on you drive the engine. I’m blind.”

The next day I took the train back on the return trip to our station and turned the locomotive in to the repair shops because the rims of our wheels had been slightly damaged in two places. Having reported on what happened to the head of the station, I led Maltsev by his hand to the place where he lived; Maltsev himself was in deep depression and had not gone to see the head of the station.

We hadn’t got to the house where Maltsev lived on a street grown over with grass when he asked me to leave him by himself.

“I can’t do that,” I answered. “Alexander Vassilievich, you’re a blind man.”

He looked at me with clear, thoughtful eyes.

“Now I can see. Go on home…. I can see everything. There’s my wife who’s come out to meet me.”

At the gate of the house where he lived a woman really was standing and waiting for him, Alexander Vassilievich’s wife, and her uncovered black hair was shining in the sun.

“And has she got something on her head or not?” I asked him.

“Nothing,” Maltsev answered. “Now who’s blind, you or I?”

“Well, once you can see, go on and look,” I decided, and I walked away from him.

[III]

Maltsev was arrested, and an investigation started. I was summoned as a witness, and asked what I thought about the happenings on that express train. I answered what I thought—that Maltsev was not guilty.

“He was blinded by a very close explosion, by the bolt of lightning,” I told the investigator. “He was shocked, and the nerves which control sight were damaged. I don’t know how to say this precisely.”

“I understand you,” the investigator said, “you’re talking very precisely. This is all possible, but not very likely. Because Maltsev himself gave evidence that he never saw the lightning.”

“But I saw it, and the fireman saw it, too.”

“That means, the lightning struck closer to you than to Maltsev,” the investigator reasoned. “Why weren’t you and the fireman shocked, why weren’t you blinded, while the engineer Maltsev suffered damage to his optical nerve and was blinded? What do you think?”

I felt as if I were in a blind alley, and then I thought it over.

“Maltsev couldn’t see the lightning,” I said.

The investigator listened to me in surprise.

“He couldn’t see it. He was blinded instantaneously, by the electromagnetic wave that always precedes the flash of lightning. The flash of lightning is the result of an explosion, and not the reason for the lightning. Maltsev was already blind when the lightning produced its flash, and a blind man cannot see light.”

“Interesting!” the investigator said, smiling. “I would close Maltsev’s case if he were still blind. But you know yourself, he can see now just as well as you or I.”

“He can see,” I confirmed this.

“Was he blind,” the investigator went on, “when he drove his express train at enormous speed almost into the rear end of a freight train?”

“He was,” I stated.

The investigator looked at me attentively.

“Why didn’t he turn over the control of the locomotive to you, or at the very least instruct you to stop the train?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“So you see,” the investigator said. “A grown-up, responsible man driving the locomotive of an express train, taking hundreds of people to certain death, avoids catastrophe only by accident, and then excuses himself on the grounds that he was blind. What’s this all about?”

“But he would have been killed himself,” I told him.

“Probably. But I’m more interested in the lives of hundreds of other people than in the life of one man. Maybe he had some reason to kill himself.”

“He had no reason,” I said.

The investigator had grown indifferent; he was already bored with me as a stupid fool.

“You know everything except what’s most important,” he said with deliberation. “You can go.”

I went straight from the police station to Maltsev’s house.

“Alexander Vassilievich,” I said to him, “why didn’t you ask me for help when you were blind?”

“But I saw,” he answered. “What did I need you for?”

“What did you see?”

“Everything: the tracks, the signals, the wheat growing in the steppe, the pulling of the right-hand driving wheels—I saw it all.”

I was puzzled.

“Then how did it happen to you the way it did? You went through all the warnings, you were driving straight into the rear end of another train…”

The man who had been a first-class engineer thought sadly for a moment, and then answered me as if he were talking to himself:

“I’m used to seeing light, and I thought that I was seeing it, but what I saw was only in my head, in my imagination. I really was blind, only I didn’t know it… I didn’t even believe the torpedoes, although I could hear them: I thought I was hearing wrong. And when you blew the stop whistle and yelled at me, I saw green lights in front of us. I didn’t guess what had happened right away.”

Now I understood Maltsev, but I couldn’t think why he had not told this to the investigator—about how he had gone on seeing the world in his imagination for a long time, and believing in its being real, after he was already blind. So I asked Alexander Vassilievich about this.

“But I did tell him,” Maltsev answered.

“And what did he say?”

“That, he said, was your imagination; maybe you’re imagining something right now, I just don’t know. I’ve got to establish the facts, he said, and not your imagination or the state of your nerves. Your imagination—whether it was that or not—I can’t check, it was only inside your own head, this is all your words, but the catastrophe, which almost happened—that’s something real.”

“He’s right,” I said.

“Right. I know it myself,” the engineer agreed. “But I’m right, too, and not guilty. What’s going to happen now?”

I did not know how to answer him.

[IV]

They put Maltsev in prison. I went on working as an assistant but with another engineer, a careful old man who would start to brake a full kilometer before the yellow light so that when we got up to it the signal would have turned to green and the old man could start to drag the train along again. It wasn’t real work, and I was lonesome for Maltsev.

That winter I went to the district town to visit my brother who was a student, living in a university dormitory. He told me in one of our talks that in the physics laboratory at the university they had a Tesla induction coil with which to make artificial lightning. An idea came to me then that was not clear even to myself.

When I got home I thought out my guesses about the Tesla coil and decided that my idea was correct. I wrote a letter to the investigator who had been working on the Maltsev case with a request for an experiment on the prisoner Maltsev to test his susceptibility to the action of electrical charges. In the event that susceptibility of Maltsev’s psyche should be proved, or of his organs of sight to the action of sudden, close electrical charges, then his whole case should be reviewed. I told the investigator where the Tesla equipment could be found, and how the experiment could be carried out on a human being.

For a long time the investigator did not answer me, but then he notified me that the district prosecutor had agreed to carry out the experiment I suggested in the university physics laboratory.

Several days later the investigator served me with a subpoena. I went to see him in great excitement, convinced in advance that Maltsev’s case would have a happy ending.

The investigator greeted me but then was silent for a long time, reading some kind of paper with sad eyes. My hope disappeared.

“You’ve done your friend a bad turn,” the investigator told me.

“How? The sentence stays as it was?”

“No, we’ve released Maltsev. The order’s already been given, maybe he’s home by now.”

“I thank you.” I stood up in front of the investigator.

“But we won’t be thanking you. You gave very bad advice. Maltsev is blind again…”

I sat down again, exhausted. My heart felt as if it were burning. I wanted a drink badly.

“The experts tested Maltsev with the Tesla induction coil without any preparation by us, in the complete dark as to what it was all about,” the investigator told me. “The current was turned on, the lightning was produced, and a sharp blow was heard. Maltsev went through it calmly, but now he can’t see light—this has been proved objectively by experts in judicial medicine.”

The investigator drank a glass of water, and went on:

“Now he can see the world again only in his imagination… You’re his comrade, help him.”

“Maybe his sight will come back to him again,” I spoke my hope, “as it did before, after the locomotive…”

The investigator thought for a moment.

“Hardly. That was a first shock, this one is a second. He’s been hurt right at the spot where the wound was before.”

And no longer controlling himself, the investigator stood up and began to pace up and down the room in great agitation.

“I’m to blame in this…. Why did I listen to you, and insist on this experiment, like a fool? I put a man in great danger, and he lost.”

“You’re not to blame, you didn’t risk a thing,” I comforted the investigator. “Which is better—to be a free blind man or to see everything inside a prison when you’re innocent?”

“I didn’t realize that I would have to prove a man’s innocence by hurting him so badly,” the investigator said. “It’s too high a price.”

“You’re an investigator,” I explained to him. “You’ve got to know everything about a man, even what he doesn’t know about himself.”

“I understand that, you’re right,” the investigator said in a low voice.

“Don’t be disturbed about this, comrade investigator. Things inside a man were operating here, and you were only looking for things on the outside. But you were at least able to realize your own inadequacy, and you acted toward Maltsev like a good man. I respect you for this.”

“I respect you, too,” the investigator acknowledged. “You know something? We could make a good assistant investigator out of you.”

“Thanks, but I’m already busy. I’m assistant engineer on express train locomotives.”

I walked out. I wasn’t Maltsev’s friend, and he had always treated me without any care or attention. But I wanted to defend him against the misfortune he had suffered, and I was bitter at the fatal powers that can accidentally and indifferently destroy a man; I felt some secret, elusive calculation of these forces in the fact that they had destroyed Maltsev, and not—let’s say—me. I knew there was no such calculation in nature, in our human, mathematical sense, but I saw how facts do occur that prove the existence of hostile circumstances which are destructive of human life, and I saw how these terrible forces shatter the lives of selected, outstanding people. I decided not to surrender to them, because I could sense inside myself something which could not exist in the external forces of nature and in our destiny, I felt the special distinction of being a man. And I was in bitter despair, and I made up my mind to stand up against this, although I did not know how it would have to be dorie.

[V]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I said nothing, my heart was pounding inside me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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