ANDREY PLATONOV
569
useful activity. He had been surprised to be born and he had stayed sur–
prised, with light blue eyes and a youthful face, until he was an old man.
While Zakhar Pavlovich was making an oak frying-pan, the loner had said
in astonishment that they would never be able to fry anything in it. But
Zakhar Pavlovich poured water into the wooden frying-pan and got the
water to boil over a slow flame without the frying-pan catching fire . The
loner
could
not believe his eyes: "That's really something! But how, broth–
er, does one ever get to know everything?"
These overwhelming universal mysteries caused the loner's arms to
drop to his sides. Nobody had ever explained to him the simplicity of
events-or else the loner was entirely muddle-headed. And when Zakhar
Pavlovich tried to tell him what makes the wind blow rather than stand
still, the loner was still more surprised and failed to understand anything,
although he sensed the origin of the wind precisely.
"I don't believe it! Say that again! From the rays of the sun, you say?
What a story! .. ."
Zakhar Pavlovich explained that the sun's rays were not a story, but
simply heat.
"Heat?!" repeated the loner in surprise. "E-e-e-h, the witch!"
The loner's surprise merely shifted from one object to another, chang–
ing nothing in his consciousness. What kept him going was not his mind,
but a sense of trustful respect.
By the end of the summer Zakhar Pavlovich had remade out of wood
all the articles he knew of. The hut and the patch of ground attached to it
were filled with the products of Zakhar Pavlovich's technical skills-a
whole collection of agricultural tools, machines, instruments, devices, and
everyday appliances, all entirely in wood. Strangely, there was not one
object which repeated nature: a horse for example, or a pumpkin.
In August the loner went into the shade, lay down on his stomach and
said, "Zakhar Pavlovich, I'm dying; yesterday I ate a lizard...
.I
brought you
two little mushrooms, but I fried myself a lizard. Wave some burdock
leaves over me-I like wind."
Zakhar Pavlovich waved a burdock leaf, brought some water, and gave
some to the dying man. "You're not going to die. You just think you are."
"I will die, Zakhar Pavlovich, really and truly 1 will," said the loner,
afraid to lie. "My insides don't hold anything; there's a huge worm living
inside me; it's drunk up all my blood...." The loner turned over onto his
back. "What do you think-should 1 be afraid or not?"
"Don't be afraid," Zakhar Pavlovich answered positively. ''I'd die straight
away myself but, you know, when you're so busy working on things...."
The loner was glad of this sympathy and died towards evening with–
out fear. At the time of his death Zakhar Pavlovich had gone to bathe in
