ANDREY PLATONOV
Chevengur
Old
provincial towns have tumbledown outskirts, and people come straight
from nature to live there. A man will turn up there, with a keen-eyed face
that has been worn out to the point of sadness, a man who can
fix
up or
equip anything but who has lived through his own life quite unequipped.
There was not one object, from a frying pan to an alarm clock, that had
not at sometime in its life passed through the hands of this man. Nor had
he refused to resole shoes, to cast shot for wolf-hunting and to turn out
counterfeit medals to be sold at old-time village fairs. But he had never
made anything for himself-neither a family, nor a home. In summer he
just lived outdoors, keeping his tools in a sack and using the sack as a pillow–
less for softness than to keep the tools safe. He warded off the early sun by
placing a burdock leaf over his eyes when he lay down in the evening. In
winter he lived on what remained from his summer's earnings, paying the
verger for his lodging by ringing the hours through the night. Nothing
especially interested him-neither people, nor nature-apart from made
objects of every kind. And so he treated people and fields with an indif–
ferent tenderness, not infringing on their interests. During the winter
evenings he would sometimes make things for which there was no need;
he would make towers out of wire, ships from pieces of roofing iron, air–
ships out of paper and glue, and so on-all entirely for his own pleasure.
Often he would even delay someone's chance commission; he might, say,
have been asked to re-hoop a cask, but he would be busy fashioning a
wooden clock, thinking it should work without a spring-on account of
the earth's rotation.
The verger disapproved of these unpaid activities. "You'll be begging
in your old age, Zakhar Pavlovich! That cask's been standing there for days,
and you just keep holding some piece of old wood to the ground–
goodness knows what you're up to!"
Zakhar Pavlovich said nothing; to him the human word was like the
sound of the forest to people who live there-something you don't hear.
The verger went on calmly watching and smoking-from frequent atten–
dance at services he had lost his faith in God, but he knew for sure that
Zakhar Pavlovich was not going to get anywhere; people had been living
in the world for a long time and they had already thought up everything.
Zakhar Pavlovich, however, thought otherwise: there were still many things
