The Light and the Dark

by Shishkin, Mikhail

  ‘Ballet girls are usually backward – no time for reading.’

  She also said that when you go out on stage, the audience are like stuffed decoys, and you have to make them real – make them fall in love with you.

  He usually takes Donka for her walks and Mummy has told me several times that she’s always seeing him with this ballerina woman.

  ‘Don’t be a fool! Keep an eye on him! A husband has to be fought for!’

  Poor Mummy. I already have a home of my own and she keeps on pestering me with exhortations, advice and reproaches. She’s lonely. I’m sorry for her. After my father left her, she switched her attention to me. I’m afraid of these rare visitations. Now I have to justify and explain everything I do again. And I do everything wrong, and there’s dirt and clutter everywhere, and in general I’m ungrateful.

  She’s always trying to educate me. I bought a raincoat and showed it to her: the colour’s wrong, it’s a bad fit, you’ve thrown your money away. When will you ever grow up? she lectures me. Since I don’t want to listen to her, it means I don’t love her. She’s absolutely insufferable and yet I have to feel sorry for her.

  Mummy’s always saying she wants me to be happy, she wants me to get on well with him, but what she really wants is for me to come back to her and be a little girl again.

  He’s a terrible hypochondriac, he takes my textbooks on illnesses and discovers he has everything except the woman’s ailments. But what he’s really afraid of is that he’ll inherit the illness his father had – at the end of his life he developed dermatosclerosis.

  Sometimes he suddenly starts telling me about himself. His father was a professor, who had an affair with one of his students. Then he slept with the girl, to show his father what she was really like and prove that she didn’t love his father at all. His father couldn’t forgive him. And when he had his first exhibition, his father said something so humiliating that they stopped talking to each other altogether.

  His father died a terrible death – when he was on his way home late one winter night he was robbed, and they fractured his skull.

  Now he feels guilty because his father died then, and he never told him he loved him.

  He smiled and said:

  ‘I condemned him then, because he wanted to leave my mother for a younger woman. But now I’ve done exactly the same thing. I wanted to prove something to my father, but now it turns out that he’s proved the opposite to me from the other side. It’s so strange, when I married Ada, you were still building sandcastles somewhere.’

  Sometimes he forgets and calls to me:

  ‘Ada!’

  He doesn’t even hear what he’s saying.

  I answer:

  ‘Who do you want?’

  ‘You, of course. Who else?’

  And then he says:

  ‘You know, Ada was an absurd mistake that I’ve put right now. You are my destiny.’

  That’s how he talks about the woman he lived with for eight hundred years. This is what he says:

  ‘What do you expect? Do you want me to free myself from her all at once? We lived together for eight hundred years.’

  And another time he said, about himself and her:

  ‘It was a different kind of loneliness.’

  Then again, about Ada: at first he wanted to tell her about his women – after all, they’d agreed to be honest and open – then he realised that, on the contrary, he shouldn’t say anything. You shouldn’t humiliate someone who loves you. He started lying to her.

  ‘And she trusted me completely! But it’s absolutely impossible to deceive someone who trusts you!’

  Once he said:

  ‘When you live with someone, you have to scour your feelings for that person with sand and pumice every day, and there isn’t enough strength or time for that.’

  Then he added that he meant himself and Ada, not us.

  On the day he decided to leave Ada, a boy selling newspapers in the street called him ‘granddad’. It felt catastrophic, he had to do something. He used to talk about it as if it was amusing.

  But then, he goes running back there just as soon as she calls him to come and hang the curtains. He explains that a family that lasted a whole lifetime can’t suddenly stop existing, just like that.

  While I was cooking flapjacks for Sonechka, she announced:

  ‘Mummy says you stole Daddy from us.’

  ‘And what else?’

  ‘That you don’t take proper care of me.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘That it’s your fault we’re not going on holiday. We don’t have any money now.’

  Once there’s a sudden phone call in the middle of the night: Sonya has a fever. He gets ready to go. I say to him:

  ‘Wait, I’ll go with you!’

  He’s wary of the idea.

  ‘You know, she’s convinced it’s something you overlooked when Sonya was with us.’

  I went with him. We took a taxi. We didn’t speak at all the whole way, looking in opposite directions. The taxi driver kept blowing his nose all the time and sneezing so hard, we almost crashed into a tram.

  It was the first time I’d been at their home.

  All the walls are covered in pictures. He did a lot of nude portraits of her. In this pose and that pose. Standing, sitting, lying. And then she walks in, and I’m astounded by the disparity between the young body in the pictures and this blowsy old woman in a faded housecoat and worn-out slippers.

  The child has a temperature of over 102. She’s soaking in sweat. The roof of her mouth and her tongue are covered with little white dots. Her face is flushed, with a whitish triangle round the mouth. A rash – grainy in her crotch.

  Ada flung herself on me, saying her daughter had come back from us with wet feet, she’d been running through puddles, and I hadn’t checked her shoes. There were tears in her eyes.

  ‘What if it’s laryngitis again?’

  I interrupted her:

  ‘I’m sorry, are you a doctor?’

  ‘No …’

  ‘Then I’m not interested in your opinion.’

  And I explained to them that it was scarlet fever and the rash would pass off the next day.

  I went to wash my hands, he brought me a towel, and without thinking I asked:

  ‘How old is she?’

  He replied, embarrassed:

  ‘We’re the same age.’

  I went home alone. He said he had to stay there until the morning.

  ‘You do understand?’

  I nodded: I understand everything.

  Three weeks later the skin came off Sonechka’s hands.

  At night we lay there in each other’s arms and he said:

  ‘Look here, I was born, and I’ll die – that’s clear enough. It’s not nice, but it’s clear. It’s frightening, of course, but it’s explicable. But what about my daughter? She already exists, and one day she’ll die – and that’s really terrifying. I never knew before that anything could be so terrifying.’

  He spoils her, and she exploits her power over her father shamelessly.

  He thinks he has to take her somewhere all the time – to the circus, the zoo, a children’s matinee show. After she’s been here there are sugary sweets, chocolate and paper wrappers all over the flat. He buys her all sorts of rubbish – he’s simply afraid to say no. And what lies behind this avalanche of generosity is the fear of losing contact with her.

  She acts up at the table – I won’t eat this, I won’t eat that. And everything’s different at Mummy’s place, it all tastes better. And I can’t say a word, he lets her do whatever she likes. And I stupidly feel anxious that she’ll go hungry.

  She takes my clothes out of the wardrobe without asking, takes my brooches and beads from the box beside the mirror, my scent and nail varnish. He shrugged and said I should talk to her about it myself. But when I started the conversation, he stuck up for her, started defending her, as if there was something unjust in what I was saying.

 
; I’m brushing her hair, and she won’t sit still, she keeps fidgeting and if the brush snags in her hair, she howls and says I’m hurting her on purpose.

  On Sunday morning, when we can sleep in for a bit, she jumps up at the crack of dawn, runs into our room, climbs into the bed, sits astride his chest and prises his eyelids open with her fingers. And he puts up with it all.

  I went with him to buy presents for her birthday. He wanted me to help him choose dresses and shoes. But he didn’t remember about my birthday. In fact, even I’ve forgotten I was ever born.

  She eats her favourite currant bun, puts a crumb on her hand and holds it out to him, and he has to peck at it – take it with just his lips.

  Or they sit down shoulder to shoulder and draw in a sketchbook – a tree on one page and a fox on another.

  They’re happy together.

  Do they need me?

  At night he gets up to check if her bed’s wet. He takes her out of the cot and carries her to the bathroom, dangling drowsily in his arms and muttering in her sleep, and sits her on the loo, and he sits on the edge of the bath beside her, so that she can put her head on his knees, and waits patiently until he hears the gurgling sound.

  Sometimes she wets the bed anyway, and he puts a new nightie on her and takes off the sheet and folds it in half, with the dry side upwards. He puts her to bed and scratches her back until she falls asleep.

  Before she goes to bed, she’s used to having her bottle of ‘Mummy’s sleepy water’.

  Her friends stay over with each other for the night, but she’s afraid they’ll find out and make fun of her, stop being friends with her. She invents excuses to avoid staying overnight when she visits them.

  She feels ashamed with me too, and I tell her it’s nothing to worry about, all children wet themselves, but when they grow up, it passes off, and they can sleep without a rubber sheet.

  Afterwards I wash her things separately.

  Sometimes I think we’ll never really be able to love each other. But then sometimes, on the contrary, she suddenly presses up close against me and I’m engulfed by a feeling of tenderness for this awkward creature.

  We’ve taken her to various different doctors for her squint. And they’ve prescribed special glasses for her to wear, with only one lens and the other eye covered over with black. She’s terribly shy about her spectacles and always tries to take them off – she’s terrified the other children will laugh at her.

  She may be lively at home, but at school she’s quite different. We went to a school concert at which she was supposed to recite a poem on stage. When she came out in her spectacles, one of the boys laughed, she forgot the words, got embarrassed and ran off. She cried her heart out.

  But she gets her own back at home. She’s a queen, surrounded by her subjects, who only exist on this earth in order to dance to the tune of her tin whistle.

  I watched her drawing with a pencil and noticed that when she thought a drawing was wrong, it simply ceased to exist for her, she didn’t see it any more, she drew another one on the same sheet of paper – she didn’t notice the old lines, she only saw the new ones.

  That’s the way I should learn to live.

  But most of all she likes painting with Daddy’s paints. I put his old shirt on her, so that she can get it messy. He tried to teach her how to do something properly, but it’s too soon, she’s not interested.

  Once she sheared off a lock of her hair with the handiwork scissors and stuck it on her chin with glue – like Daddy.

  One evening as he’s putting her to bed she cries into her pillow.

  ‘What’s wrong, my little wonder?’

  And through her sobs, she says:

  ‘Daddy, you’re going to die! I feel so sorry for you!’

  She’s only just started becoming really aware of herself. When we were watching the sunset at the pond, she suddenly said:

  ‘That trail of sunlight there, it’s not the sun, it’s me, isn’t it?’

  We went to the children’s theatre to see The Snow Maiden. I walked along, thinking: what a strange thing for them to do, sculpt a little girl out of snow. After all, it’s not like just building a snowman out of big balls of snow – you have to sculpt the hands and the feet, every finger and toe. But Sonechka didn’t see anything unusual about it, the question never even arose for her:

  ‘But she’s real, isn’t she? Alive!’

  He bought her an adult wristwatch. Sonya winds it up, holding it close beside her ear, and says delightedly:

  ‘Can you hear? It sounds like grasshoppers!’

  He cobbled together a kite for her, and we all went to launch it, but the kite only flew as far as the nearest telegraph pole and got tangled in the wires. When we walk past, we wave to it – there’s nothing left but ragged scraps, and it waves back to us with them.

  She likes to take my phonendoscope too, and listen to absolutely everything. Herself, Donka, the wall, the chair, the windowsill. She presses it against the glass and tells the world outside the window in a serious voice:

  ‘Breathe! And now hold your breath!’

  I read to her at bedtime, and she listens, spellbound, focusing on something inside herself and licking the little hairs on her arm just above the wrist – first one way, and then the other. She peeps into the book when I turn the page, to see if a picture has popped up.

  She has to be checked all the time. She goes to bed, she’s already slipped under the sheet, but her toothbrush is dry. Up we get! Into the bathroom! But she’ll still come up with some bright idea – she holds the brush still and runs her teeth over it, shaking her head from side to side, in a kind of protest.

  I feel that she’s afraid to love me, because that will mean she’s betraying her mummy. She’s afraid of treachery and betrayal. I tried to talk to her and explain that there’s nothing wrong, and if she really loves two people it doesn’t mean she’s betraying one of them.

  I think we’re going to manage all right. Sometimes we feel so snug and comfortable together. Just last Sunday I was putting her to bed and she asked me to sit with her for a while in the twilight. She’s afraid to sleep in the dark, she begs me to leave the light on. I leave her the nightlight, covered with a gauze neckerchief. The shadows are different every time. She lies there, imagining who it is up on the ceiling.

  And she always asks me to stroke her with a brush – like Daddy.

  I run the soft squirrel hair over her arms, her legs, her back, her bottom. It tickles her, she laughs happily and wriggles about.

  I kiss her goodnight and whisper:

  ‘That’s all, now curl up tight and warm!’

  My Sashenka!

  There is so much death all around! I try not to think about it. But I can’t help myself.

  They’ve repaired the road to Taku, and new detachments of allies are arriving from there every day, they’re preparing for an offensive. So there’ll be even more death.

  Kirill said a man should die easily, like Louis XVI – when he mounted the scaffold and saw the executioner, the first live human being with whom he could exchange a couple of words after his dungeon, the king asked him:

  ‘What news of La Pérouse’s expedition, brother?’

  Only a few minutes before he died, he was still interested in geographical discoveries.

  And I’d like to go like that too – as easily as if I’ve just shown up for breakfast.

  But for that you probably have to be very strong.

  Am I strong?

  Sashenka, I saw an ideal death here. A man, young and handsome, with white teeth – although he’d been complaining about his teeth all day long, walking around, almost howling out loud with the pain of an abscess – disappeared in a single instant. He took a direct hit from a shell. I wasn’t there at the time of the explosion, but afterwards I saw his arm, tossed up into the crown of a tree.

  That’s my ideal.

  But what if it’s not like that?

  Every day I see wounded men, and despite my
self the thought comes that tomorrow I’ll be one of them. Unfortunately, the probability of a direct hit on my skull is equal to zero. But being maimed and left writhing in agony is only too probable.

  A bullet or piece of shrapnel could hit me in the knee, couldn’t it? Or in the palm of my hand. Get stuck in my kidney – the left one or the right one. Tear open my heart sac. Puncture my bladder. But why list everything? A man is such a vulnerable creature altogether. I’ve seen more than enough here already.

  I look at a wounded man and can’t help thinking of his wound in my body.

  One soldier was shouting ‘hurrah!’, and that very instant a bullet pierced through both his cheeks and knocked his teeth out. And for some reason I imagine myself in his place. And I can’t stop doing it.

  At night I went out, half-asleep, to relieve myself, and heard someone pleading pitifully in the big infirmary tent:

  ‘I can’t find my bunk. Someone help me find my bunk!’

  It was a young man with his eyes swathed in bandages, feeling his way along the aisle between the camp beds. He’d gone out in the middle of the night too, but got lost on the way back.

  They’ll bandage me up, operate on me, saw through the bone, amputate the putrefying remains of this right leg of mine. Or my left one?

  It would be unbearable for me to hobble about for the rest of my life on one leg, or with no legs at all.

  And perhaps tomorrow Lucie will be washing my blood off the white oilcloth on the operating table.

  But perhaps, contrariwise, that will be the very time I decide I want to go – easily. When was it, now? The day before yesterday. The surgeon’s mate came out for a smoke and walked over when he saw me. Probably he just wanted to talk to someone, let off a bit of steam. Everyone addresses him formally by his forename and patronymic, as Mikhal Mikhalich. I like him, he always has a genial air, with the grey remnants of a student crew cut on his head – he left university without ever graduating – a respectable moustache, a round pot belly, walks with little old man’s steps. He has a funny, spongy nose, decorated with little blue and red veins. We sat in silence for a while, then he sighed:

  ‘Lord, all the things you see in this infirmary! This morning they brought in a young fellow just like you, so badly mutilated, he tried do away with himself. I held him until the doctor gave him an injection.’