Soul by Andrey Platonov

Author:Andrey Platonov [Andrey Platonov]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

THE THIRD SON

AN OLD WOMAN died in a provincial town. Her husband, a seventy-year-old retired worker, went to the telegraph office and handed in six telegrams for different regions and republics, with the unvarying words: MOTHER DEAD COME HOME FATHER.

The elderly clerk took a long time doing the sums, kept making mistakes, and wrote out the receipts and stamped them with trembling hands. The old man looked meekly at her through the wooden hatch; his eyes were red and he was absentmindedly thinking something, trying to distract grief from his heart. It seemed to him that the woman also had a broken heart and a soul now confused forever—perhaps she was a widow or a wife who had been cruelly abandoned.

And so here she was, muddling money, losing her memory and attentiveness; even for ordinary, straightforward labor, it is essential to have inner happiness.

After sending off the telegrams, the old father went back home; he sat on a stool by a long table, at the cold feet of his dead wife, smoked, whispered sad words, watched the solitary life of a gray bird hopping from perch to perch in its cage, sometimes cried quietly to himself and then calmed down, wound up his pocket watch, glanced now and again through the window, beyond which, out in nature, the weather kept changing—leaves were falling, along with flakes of wet tired snow, then there was rain, then a late sun shone, with no warmth, like a star—and the old man waited for his sons.

The eldest son arrived by plane the very next day. The other five sons all gathered within two more days.

One of them, the third eldest, came with his daughter, a six-year-old who had never seen her grandfather.

The mother had been waiting on the table for more than three days, but her body did not smell of death, so neat and clean had it been rendered by illness and dry exhaustion; after giving plentiful and healthy life to her sons, the old woman had kept a small, miserly body for herself and had tried for a long time to preserve it, if only in the most pitiful state, so that she could love her children and be proud of them—until she died.

The huge men, aged from twenty to forty, stood in silence around the coffin on the table. There were six of them—seven including the father, who was smaller than even his very youngest son, and weaker too. In his arms he held his granddaughter, who was screwing up her eyes from fear of a dead old woman she had never met and whose white unblinking eyes could just see her from beneath their half-closed lids.

The sons silently wept occasional slow tears, twisting their faces in order to bear grief without a sound. The father was no longer crying; he had cried himself out alone, before the others, and now, with secret excitement and an out-of-place joy, he was looking at this sturdy band of his sons. Two of them

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.