Kompolka Ardalion Ivanovich Mayakov
I always despised that stare of his.
I refer to the disappointment my nag of a wife bore me as our last son. A mistake really, the longer you're married, my friend, the more lax you become about preventing the unwanted in life. It's carelessness, and I now regret I took little care in influencing the boy.
But I'm not entirely the culprit. No, my aforementioned nag of a wife, why she sank her claws right into the boy right from his infancy!
My military obligations, the campaigns, and rearing my two oldest sons to the cadence of the army preoccupied me- there was no time to fondle an infant.
I fell into the false lull of security my furlough would be granted eventually, and then I could focus on moulding the youngest.
But as it were, duty demanded all from me, and instead, I focused on the promising careers of my two other sons.
Mitya, though the second oldest, showed the greatest potential. He had all my good traits- my discipline, my strength, and of course, my tenacity.
We clashed, unfortunately. But this was much like me! I clashed with my father as he did me. As much I threatened and railed at the boy, I hid my approval at this show of defiance- it showed he learned from me not be some gullible sheep, or to be led around like a dumb ox with a nose ring. No! He thought for himself. Only that he thought more like me.
As for my oldest, Yura, well, he's hardly worth mentioning. He had such a firmness, a steely grit to his nature. But I underestimated his ambitions. What do you think he did after my Mitya died? Did he raise to go beyond his rank and honor his brother with a promotion? No! He eventually left after a resignation and discharge! He now farms, like a simple muzhik! Farming! It's an insult.
Did I really waste all the time and money at the military academies and training the ingrate?
Ah well! Sons will always disappoint you. If I had daughters, it would be a dull affair, but I wager I could have influenced them more rigidly. Women are impressionable creatures under unyielding male leadership.
But I always hated that stare of my youngest. Kuzma had this silent reproach he lit from those clear, grey eyes of his eyes. Both a reproach and a wordless judgment he passed on you if you were ever unfortunate to catch his eye. Even as a child he gave that damnably unflinching stare. It was never healthy or normal for a child to have such a stare! Only old men or those eccentric characters from an old story ought to claim such a gaze!
Of course, because his mother mollycoddled and shaped his mind in her own shrewish mold, the boy grew up like this. She turned him against me, the nag.
It's ironic how children can be shaped into weapons. No, I don't refer to the nobler aspirations officers like myself acted upon, training and placing our sons in the military. No, I refer to that sad, sick little game married couples engage in- it's like they have their own petty war and use their children like weapons. You can fashion a child into a weapon against your spouse. You play favorites, poison their minds, paint your spouse as the great evil the child must defend the other parent from. It's all tactics, really, much like propaganda and morale go hand in hand for a regiment's spirit.
So my battleaxe missus and I became like generals on opposite sides. She had the upper hand, damn the simple bitch! With my Mitya gone, and Yura off to become some "son of the earth", she carefully used my absence to form in our Kuzma, a staunch, obstinate ally of hers.
He treated me with a coolness, masking as it awkwardness supposedly stemming from my frequent absences.
Hah! Boy, I can see through your guise!
He then turned on me when his mother and I had an argument which had gotten out of hand.
She screamed everything but murder, and he played right along, like a willing actor or a damned, sniveling, pleasing sycophant exaggerating their loyalty for a superior.
They left.
The last thing I can remember of the boy was that cold stare of his!
Redarmyman Kuzma Ardalionovich Mayakov
"How unexpected! You? In the army? You've been drafted for the compulsory training and service for a year- but a career? Unexpected!"
Such were my father's incredulous declarations when I announced him of my intentions to pursue a career in the military.
Announce is perhaps too underwhelming a word- although in my father's dismissive assessment, he saw me as only underwhelming and nothing else- perhaps declare suits my intentions accurately.
Like a defiant faction claiming their own sovereignty over an entity or tract of land, so had I acted in such a vein by declaring to my father that I was determined to join the army and pursue a career- I would excel him beyond rank and conduct- that was the pivotal difference!
My father was always crooked, slightly sagging, like a decrepit building shoddily erected, or leather carelessly worn out by a thoughtless fellow.
No, not in his body. I mean in his character...
He gave me his usual crooked smile of sarcasm. There was no paternal warmth or encouragement- I expected none from the likes of him. His smile reeked of that sordid unsavoriness, that smug derision he always carried with and about himself.
Yes, it was unexpected- but expected, wasn't it? I, the Kompolka's last son, his last shot at glory of some legacy he dreamt he created through his progeny!
What a sorry joke.
Of course, I realized once he returned home for good, and he sized me up, assessed my strengths and weaknesses, he was something like a corrupt, modern Spartan rejecting the runt of his progeny to take his shield and rank.
The comparison, if you can forgive the bastardization such a comparison of a generally thought noble figure, is exaggerated, but surprisingly fitting.
We had not, as many thinkers and novelists are wont to pine over, "grown distant".
We never close from the beginning. I was simply his afterthought. He only remembered my significance when it serves him, or when he wanted to see if he could exploit my existence for his own gain of glory.
His absence endured for all of my childhood and most of my youth.
As such, my mother was my sole source of guidance and security. As much as I owe her for her care and rearing of myself, I must here criticize her for cramming me into a mold which she fashioned after being "abandoned" (as she lamentably put it) by not only her husband, but her two sons following their father's call to arms, she sought in molding me into her own ideal she obviously never had fulfilled in my father's role, nor in my brothers.
As much as she wailed and grieved for Mitya, my second oldest brother, she always was quick to criticize his hot-headedness. I concurred as well.
Mitya and my father shared that damnable quality of being hot-headed and rash. Both had tempers, though my memory, as childish as had it been, fails to remember any of Mitya's episodic bouts of temper.
My mother, aside from blaming my father for Mitya's death, also placed the fault of Mitya's own impulsive nature on his demise. She constantly warned me to avoid falling into a defect.
I preferred being cool to the point of cold. People often mistake this for being passive. (Or as my father relishes in scorning me, "weak".) On the contrary, I appreciate this hardness I can muster towards someone I dislike, and this hardness also applies to my own motivation in my ambitions.
Being cold begets a relentlessness.
In the military, I shortly realized why and how my father devolved as he did. It's a repulsive current of debasement and debauchery, all rigidly structured within a hierarchy one could deem animalistic- a survival of the fittest (or in such a case, the richest and high-ranking).
But it is here I intended to transcend expectations and the moral conformity within this institution. I can already imagine most of my fellow recruits assume I'm following my father's expectations. In reality, the truth is, I am rebelling and acting on the opposite of his expectations.
I may be a solider, but I would not become my father, debased and content in corruption, nor would I devolve into being a crass beast like the others, fueled by the visceral and sexual.
No, I intended going against expectations. I would do the unexpected.
That's what I expected of myself!
The Departure of a severance A cacophony of the clanking, shifting gears and the weighty wheels grinding against the rails as it halted at the train station alerted both father and son from their reveries. Ardalion, with a feigned sense of propriety and mainly because of curiosity how serious his son would pursue this self-proclaimed ambition into the army, accompanied Kuzma on the train route to the town where the army base was stationed. Kuzma resented his father's company, finding the grizzled man a dour, peeved companion who cracked a damnably mocking grin at every interval. He knew all too well his father scoffed at this act as nothing more than a quixotic stunt that would soon fail. Contrary to discouraging him, Kuzma's determination fed on a sort of poison his father's disdain had fueled over the past week ever since Kuzma announced his intentions. On the other hand, Ardalion employed his sardonic exterior as both a distraction and veneer against what he identified as a surrender to the baser feelings of "sentiment"- a weakness he had no tolerance for. It disgusted, the idea of sentiment, especially towards a disappointing scion as his last son proved to be. Favoritism played a huge factor; he might have harbored the notion of sentiment for Mitya... He scoffed at the idea of this pale, delicate boy suddenly enlisting and training to be a ruddy, muscled solider. The idea made him laugh almost, were it not so unthinkable. Still, he noted uneasily something gnawed at him as he and Kuzma sat like deadened in their compartment bench. He couldn't name what gnawed at him, but he found himself stealing glances at Kuzma and observing how he never noticed the youth's features or what his son really was a person. For the longest time, his last son only remained as an idea or reference in the recess of his mind. When he returned from Turkestan, he found Kuzma like a ghost that happened to coexist under the same roof. He seemed like an enigmatic shadow of his wife. But now, he loathed this rising tinge he felt. He suddenly did not want his son to depart. He suddenly found himself wanting to talk, even the most trivial subjects, with this ghost-like young man he called his son. He found himself, or rather, he felt his tongue trying to form words, but his mouth remained dry and mute whenever he mustered the effort to speak to the youth beside him. Kuzma stole his own glances, too, at the older man he deemed his father. He did not want to talk, but wanted to hear what his father would and should say to him. What could he say to this man? Kuzma, as he so imagined it, hailed from another land than his father. To speak to him was like speaking another language- all his ideas become lost in translation. Unlike Ardalion, Kuzma felt less of the sentiment, and more of an urgency to prove himself to the man besides him. But before either party could articulate their intentions, the train grind to a screeching halt. The hollow bass of the train conductor rang down the hall, muffled by the sliding glass door of their compartment, alerting them of the train's stop. Kuzma rose first. Ardalion unconsciously lifted a hand to reach ot for the youth's hand. But he stopped when Kuzma curtly shot a sharp look of surprise at his father's unexpected gesture. His look was tinted with a silent accusation, mixed with confusion. Ardalion withdraw his hand, biting his lip and giving a frustrated huff under his breath. The old man's eyes gave the look of a light going out. Both silently made their way down the hall and down the steps of their car's exit. Their thick-soled boots made a dull yet solid clack on the pavement of the train station. "I suppose you'll write?" Ardalion asked. Kuzma nodded, in the most automatic fashion, as though responding by reflex. "You'll receive correspondence reports from me, of course." Ardalion now felt that surge to speak his mind when Kuzma bent down to pick his satchels. But when the young man straightened again, Kuzma's eyes locked onto his father with that hallmark cold stare of his. Ardalion's resolved died like a flame gutted by the wind. He simply extended his hand for a handshake. Kuzma's pride prodded to accept the old man's hand. He gave a firm yet curt shake. Ardalion then turned to board the returning departure. He paused to look over his shoulder- not to see so much his son one last time, but to see if his son turned back to look at him. Kuzma did not. He walked, with a quiet resolve to the depot office to receive directions to base. Ardalion's eyes trailed on the young man until the conductor urged him inside the boxcar. Ardalion stared out his window, trying to pick out his son from the grey and brown muddle of the crowd. Kuzma furtively stole one glance at the train as it groaned its gears to begin locomotion once more. The windows reflected the light of the clouded sky, and he could not see his father. So much the better. Ardalion sighed and rested his hand in his chin, feeling emptied and sick, like man who thrown up everything. Kuzma drew and exhaled a sharp breath, his fine nostrils quivered in an inexplicable annoyance. Thus had both father and son parted their ways. Perfunctory. Unspoken. And unsatisfied.
Thank you so much for this awesome commission that you did for me years ago!
You did my characters Ardalion and Kuzma so much justice. You understand them so well and the dialogue, descriptions, and everything else are so on point. This is a very poignant scene between father and son that says so much about the two of them. I love how bitter and cynical Ardalion's voice is - you've always done a great job portraying him in our RPs, collabs, and everything.