ANDREY PLATONOV
The Seventh Man
A
man crossed the front to our lines. At first he wept, then he looked
round, ate some food, and calmed down.
The man was poorly dressed, in black rags tied to his torso with pieces
of string, and his feet were wrapped in straw. There was little soft body left
on him, no more than on the corpse of someone long dead: nothing had
been preserved but bones, and his life still clung on around them. Dark
blue had begun to cover his face, as if the hoar-frost of death had appeared
there, and his face lacked any ordinary expression, and only after close
scrutiny could one see that on it lay the sorrow of alienation from all peo–
ple-a sorrow which this man, worn down with suffering, evidently no
longer felt or else felt to be his normal condition.
He seemed to live only from habit and not from any desire, since
everything he breathed, was nourished by, and believed in had been taken
away from him and estranged. But he was still living and patiently wear–
ing himself out, as if he wanted to fulfil to the end the will of his mother,
who had borne him for a happy life, as if he were hoping she had not
deceived him, that she had not borne him only for torment.
His soul-the last desire for life, refusing destruction until the final
breath-had already emerged from the dried-up hiding-places of his body,
and his face and empty eyes were therefore so little animated by any vital
need as to have no meaning, and it was impossible to make out this man's
character, his evil and good; yet he went on living.
His papers made out that he was Osip Yevseevich Gershanovich, a
native and resident of the city of Minsk, born in the year 1894, and that he
had worked previously as a senior planner in the Union of Provincial Light
Industries; his life, however, had made him into another being, perhaps a
holy martyr, a hero of humanity, perhaps a traitor to humanity in the
impenetrable protective mask of a martyr. In our time, in time of war,
when the enemy has decided to destroy restless, inconsistent humanity ,
sparing only a worn-out, servile remnant of it-in our time evil-doing can
appear inspired and righteous, since violence has instilled evil inside man,
squeezing out from there his old sacred essence, and man devotes himself
to the cause of evil at firs t in despair, and then with fai th and satisfaction,
so as not to die of horror. Evil and good can now appear in an equally
inspired, touching, and attractive form: in this lies the special condi tion of
