Frosya’s attention left the lesson altogether, and she wrote in her notebook: “I am a stupid, wretched girl, Fedya, come back quickly and I’ll learn communications and signals, and then I’ll die, you’ll bury me, and go off to China.”
At home her father was sitting with his boots on, his coat, and his engineer’s cap. He was sure that he’d be summoned to take a trip today.
“You’ve come home?” he asked his daughter. He was always glad when someone came into the apartment; he listened to all the steps on the staircase, as if he were constantly expecting some extraordinary guest who would be bringing him happiness, carrying it in his hat.
“Can I warm some kasha with butter for you?” her father asked. “I’ll do it right away.”
The daughter refused.
“Well then, let me fry you some sausage.”
“No,” Frosya said.
The father was quiet for a minute, but then he asked again, but more timidly:
“Maybe you’d like some tea and crackers? I’ll heat the water…”
The daughter remained silent.
“Or how about the macaroni from yesterday. It’s still there, I left it all for you…”
“Will you please drop it?” Frosya said. “They should have sent you off to the Far East….”
“I volunteered, but they wouldn’t take me—too old, they said, eyesight not good enough,” the father explained.
He knew that children are our enemies, and he did not get angry at his enemies. But he was afraid, instead, that Frosya would go off into her own room, while he wanted her to stay with him and talk, and the old man was hunting for some reason to keep Frosya from going away.
“Why haven’t you put any lipstick on your lips today?” he asked her. “Or have you run out of it? I’ll be glad to buy you some, I can run down to the drugstore…”
Tears started to well up in Frosya’s gray eyes, and she walked into her room. The father stayed alone; he began to clean up the kitchen and to fuss with housework, then he squatted down on his heels, opened the door of the warming oven, put his head in it, and started to cry on top of the pan holding the macaroni.
Someone knocked on the door. Frosya did not come out to open it. The old man pulled his head out of the oven, wiped his face, and went to open the door.
A messenger had come from the station.
“Sign here, Nefed Stepanovich: you’re to show up today at eight o’clock—you’re to go with a cold locomotive being sent off for major repairs. They’ll hitch it on to 309, take your grub and clothes with you, you’ll be gone at least a week.”
Nefed Stepanovich signed in the book and the messenger left. The old man opened his metal lunchbox: yesterday’s bread and onion were still there, with a lump of sugar. The engineer added some millet porridge, two apples, thought for a minute, and then closed the box with its enormous padlock.
Then he knocked carefully on the door of Frosya’s room.
“Daughter! Lock up after me, I’m going out on a job… for two weeks…. They’ve given me a ‘Shcha’ engine—it’s cold, but never mind.”
Frosya came out a little after her father had left, and closed the door to the apartment.
“Play! Why aren’t you playing?” Frosya whispered at the floor above, where the little boy with the mouth organ lived. But he had probably gone out for a walk—it was summertime, the days were long, the breeze fluttered in the evening among the sleepy, happy pine trees. The musician was still a little boy, he had not yet chosen some single thing out of the whole world for eternal loving, his heart beat empty and free, stealing nothing just for itself out of the goodness of life.
Frosya opened the window, lay down on the big bed, and dozed off. She could hear the trunks of the pine trees moving slightly in the air blowing at their tops, and one far-off grasshopper sounded, not waiting for the time of darkness.
Frosya awoke; it was still light, she should get up and live. She looked at the sky, full of a ripening warmth, covered with the lively traces of the disappearing sun, as if happiness were to be found there, happiness made by nature out of all its pure strength, so that this happiness might flow from nature into a man.
Frosya found a short hair between two pillows, it could have belonged only to Fedor. She examined the hair in the light, it was gray: Fedor was already twenty-nine and he had some gray hairs, about twenty of them. Her father was also gray, but he never came even close to their bed. Frosya was used to the smell of the pillow on which Fedor slept—it still smelled of his body and his head, they had not washed the pillowcase since the last time her husband had put his head on it. Frosya buried her face in Fedor’s pillow and grew calmer.
Upstairs on the third floor the little boy came back and started to play his mouth organ, the same tune he had been playing in the dark morning of that day. Frosya got up and hid her husband’s hair in an empty box on her table. Then the little boy stopped playing—it was time for him to go to sleep because he had to get up early, or else he was playing with his father, who had come home from work, and sitting on his knees. The mother was breaking up sugar with a pair of sugar tongs, and saying they must buy some more linen, what they had was worn out, and tore when it was washed. The father was silent, he was thinking: we’ll manage somehow.
All evening long Frosya walked along the tracks at the station, out to the nearest woods, and through the fields where rye was growing. She stood next to the slag pits where she had worked the day before—they were almost full again, but nobody was working. Nobody knew where Natasha Bukova lived, Frosya had not asked her yesterday; she did not want to go and see any friends or acquaintances for she felt somehow ashamed in front of everyone: she couldn’t talk about her love with other people and all the rest of life had become uninteresting and dead for her. She walked past the cooperative warehouse where Natalya’s husband was walking with his rifle. Frosya would have liked to give him some rubles so that he could drink fruit juice with his wife the next day, but she was embarrassed.
“Move on, citizen! You can’t stand here—this is a warehouse, a government building,” the watchman said to her when Frosya stopped and groped for the money somewhere in the pleats of her skirt.
Beyond the warehouse lay desolate, empty land, on which some small, coarse, wild grass was growing. Frosya walked up to it and stood there languishing in that small world of thin grass from which, it seemed, the stars were only a couple of kilometers away.
“Ah, Fro, Fro, if only someone put his arms around you!” she said to herself.
When she got home, Frosya lay down at once to sleep because the little boy who played the mouth organ had been asleep for a long time and even the grasshoppers had stopped chirping. But something kept her from falling asleep. Frosya stared into the darkness and sniffed: it was the pillow on which Fedor used to sleep that was bothering her. It still gave out the moldering, earthy smell of a warm, familiar body, and this smell started the grief in Frosya’s heart all over again. She wrapped Fedor’s pillow up in a sheet and hid it in the closet, and then she fell asleep alone, like an orphan.