Chevengur

by Andrey Platonov

But he had never made anything for himself—neither a family, nor a dwelling. In summer he simply lived out in nature, keeping his tools in a sack and using the sack as a pillow—more for the tools’ safety than for softness.

During winter evenings he would sometimes make things for which there was no need:

people had been living in the world for a long time and they had already thought everything up. Zakhar Pavlovich, however, saw things differently:

Ignatievna was standing beside her. “He’s passed on. He’s at peace now—better off than the living. He’s in paradise, listening to the silver winds.”

These overwhelming universal mysteries made the loner lose heart. Nobody had ever explained to him the simplicity of events—or else the loner was entirely muddleheaded.

The vomit was compact and dry, it had settled into a paste around the loner’s mouth, and white small-caliber worms were at work in it.

The loner never made a single artifact in all his life— all he ever did was watch, and try to get the hang of things.

“Look—true wisdom! A fish stands between life and death, that’s why it’s mute and why it stares without expression.

He saw death as another province, situated beneath the sky, as if at the bottom of the cool water, and it had an attractive pull.

Dmitry Ivanich gave death a try; three days later he was dragged out of the lake and buried beside the fence in the village churchyard.

Zakhar Pavlovich took offense to the roots of his craftsman’s being and inserted a hidden device that could be removed in one second but that was impossible to find without special knowledge.

What had moved him was something very different: How, he wanted to know, had this artifact been constructed—an artifact that could touch any heart and make a man better and kinder?

He was walking through the village in order to meet the unknown machines and objects thrumming beyond the line where the mighty sky joined the peasants’ unmoving strips of land.

He was walking with the same heart as a peasant who makes the pilgrimage to Kyiv, when faith dries up and life becomes just a matter of keeping going to the end.

The warden knew Zakhar Pavlovich as a man who allowed himself to be only too free with his hands but who did not know the value of time.

“What use is my ringing? Huh! With the bell I shorten time and sing songs.”

When Zakhar Pavlovich sat down for a smoke, he would see cozy little forests on the ground; each blade of grass was a tree.

There was an entire little habitable world, with its own paths and its own warmth, equipped with everything necessary to satisfy the daily needs of small, preoccupied creatures.

“Just give us the minds of ants or mosquitoes and we’ll set our lives straight in no time at all! When it comes to communal life, these little creatures are master craftsmen. Man’s nowhere near as skilled as an ant.”

The man was not joking. That very night his sons—who were between ten and twenty years old—drenched the sleeping Zakhar Pavlovich with their urine and jammed the shed door shut with an oven fork.

But Zakhar Pavlovich had never been interested in human beings and it was not easy to make him angry.

what was important about the boy, then, was not his urine but his skill with his hands.

As he wandered about the sunlit yard during the day, he was unable to overcome the thought that man had descended from the worm, and that a worm was a simple and ghastly little tube with nothing inside it—just empty stinking darkness.

As he observed the houses in the city, Zakhar Pavlovich discovered their precise resemblance to closed coffins, and he began to feel frightened of spending the night in the carpenter’s home.

His feral appetite for work, finding no outlet, was eatin...

The rotation of the locomotive’s wheels and its fast breathing made Zakhar Pavlovich’s body buzz with joy, and his sympathy with the engine made his eyes moisten with light tears.

whereas an engine was a tender, fragile, and defenseless being.

To drive it properly, you needed to leave your wife, clear your head of every worry, and dip your bread in machine oil;

his father was there, it was cramped there, and everything was small, sad, and protected by earth and trees from the wind. And so he went on toward the town, to find rusks of bread.

All the time, every minute, they live beneath blows and burdens—and this is why grasses in gullies grow hunchbacked, ready to bow down and let misfortune pass through them.

What tumbled down on Prokhor Abramovich was children—they came more often than harvests and brought more trouble than being born oneself.

But all his life children had streamed down on him, and his soul had been buried, as a gully is buried by silt, beneath clayey accumulations of cares—which had led to Prokhor Abramovich having almost no sense of his own life and personal concerns.

Those who were childless and free interpreted this state of oblivion as laziness.

He was glad of the famine, which would drive every good-looking man far away in search of work—and many of them would die, freeing the women for Kondaev.

“All right,” he said, content with himself. “The men will go away— and the women will stay. And once a woman’s had a taste of me, she’ll remember me all her life—I’m a mean lean bull of a man.”

The merest glimpse of life, whether in a blade of grass or a young girl, transported Kondaev into quiet jealous savagery.

If it was grass, he would crush it to death in his merciless, amorous hands, which sensed any living thing as avidly and terribly as the virginity of a woman; if it was a woman or girl, he was filled in advance and forever with hatred for her father, her brothers, and her husband or future husband, and he wished they would die or else disappear in search of work.

This second hungry year filled Kondaev with hope— soon he would be the only man left in the village and he would rage ove...

Sasha saw his father out on the lake amid damp mist.

Father was on a boat, disappearing into murky places and throwing mother’s tin ring onto the shore. Sasha was picking the ring up from the damp grass and then the hunchback was loudly hitting him on the head with it. There was a crack as the sky split apart and black rain suddenly poured from its fissures.

On these meadows stood the hunchback, pissing on a small sun that was already fading of its own accord.

But alongside the dream Sasha could see the present day, which was still continuing, and he could hear Proshka talking to Prokhor Abramovich.

The midwife carried a tub out into the yard and emptied it by the fence. A dog ran up and ate everything except the liquid.

The shadows of the grasses had joined together and the light, low wind that had been blowing through them all day had dropped.

Sasha looked at the buildings—changed by darkness but now more familiar than ever—at the wattle fences and the shafts of sleighs overgrown by grass—and he felt sorry for them: they were just like him, but they were silent, they couldn’t move, and one day they would die forever.

“Sure—why wouldn’t we? We’ve got one more bread eater here now—otherwise you could live here for free. But we don’t want you around now. You’re a burden. Mama didn’t give birth to you—you got born on your own.”

“Sasha,” Proshka ordered, “don’t go coming back here again! We’ve put bread in your bag, we’ve given you a hat—so get going!

If you like, you can sleep in the barn, it’ll be night soon. But don’t come anywhere near the windows or Father might change his mind.”

ZAKHAR Pavlovich lived without any need for anyone: he could sit for hours before the door of a locomotive firebox where a flame was burning.

Zakhar Pavlovich respected coal, wrought iron, sleeping raw materials, and half-manufactured items of all kinds, but he truly loved and sensed only the finished artifacts into which man had been transformed through labor and that would live on further with a life of their own.