The Third Son

In a regional town, an old woman died. Her husband, a retired factory worker of seventy, walked to the telegraph office and sent six identical telegrams to remote places: “Mother died come home father.” He watched with reddened eyes as the aged telegraph worker counted the money, wrote out his receipts laboriously and stamped them with her trembling hand. Her heart, it seemed, had been crushed too. She worked slowly and dejectedly; even the simplest tasks require inner peace.

Back in the house, the father sat at the dinner table, before his wife’s cold feet. He smoked; whispered to himself; watched the lonely life of a little gray bird in its cage; cried from time to time, then grew calm again; wound up his pocket watch; observed the weather in the window that changed from wet, tired snow to rain, to chilly autumnal sun; and waited for his sons.

The next day, the eldest arrived by airplane; the five others took two more days to reach home.

The third son brought with him a daughter, a girl of six, who had never seen her grandfather before.

The old woman had been dead for three days, yet her neat body, emaciated by a long illness, didn’t smell of death. After giving her sons a bountiful, healthy life, she had retained for herself only a tiny frugal frame, which she had sustained—even in its most pitiful form—for as long as she could, in order to love her sons and be proud of them, until she died.

Six tall men, aged between twenty and forty, gathered silently around the coffin. The father, the seventh, and smaller and weaker than even his youngest son, held the girl, who kept her eyes shut from fear of the strange dead woman whose white eyes seemed to watch her from beneath closed lids.

The sons shed infrequent tears, and strained their faces to keep their grief quiet. The father didn’t cry; he’d had his cry earlier, and now watched his progeny with inappropriate joy. Two of the sons had joined the navy and now commanded their own ships. Another worked in a Moscow theater. His third son, who had brought the daughter, was a physicist and a Communist. The youngest was studying to be an agriculturist, and the eldest headed a division at an airplane plant and wore a medal for excellent work. All seven men stood around the dead mother mourning her silently; the sons were hiding their despair, their memories of childhood, of the extinguished happiness of love that had constantly and generously renewed itself in their mother’s heart and that had always, across a thousand miles, found them and made them stronger and bolder. And now she had turned into a corpse. She couldn’t love anyone anymore, but just lay there like an indifferent old stranger.

Each son felt at that moment scared and alone, as though somewhere in a dark meadow, in the window of an old house, a light used to burn, and it illuminated the surrounding night, the flying bugs, the dark blue grass, the clouds of gnats in the air—the entire universe of their childhood—and the doors of that house always remained open for those who had left it, even if none of them chose to return. And now that light was extinguished, and the world it illuminated turned instantly from reality into a memory.

by Andrei Platonov, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Marcellus Hall