The Light and the Dark

by Shishkin, Mikhail

  The slim, invisible wavy hairgrip suddenly becomes visible.

  Someone else’s smells.

  Lipstick that isn’t yours on the coffee table.

  ‘Whose is it?’

  ‘What do you mean, whose? You scatter things all over the flat!’

  How does he caress the other one? The same way he used to caress you, or differently?

  What words does he say to the other one, as he clasps her in his embrace at their meetings and partings? With you he’s broken glass, but with the other one he’s a fire-breather with tender hands.

  Scrubbing a stain off the floor, you noticed little dents in the parquet. You imagined the other one clattering her sharp heels on the parquet and the drum tattoo excited him.

  During your rare caresses in the night, how could you tell if it was really you he wanted in the darkness and not the other one, so inexhaustibly creative at playing ‘let’s be different’?

  In bed you felt frightened that it wasn’t you he was holding with his eyes closed like that. You told him:

  ‘Look at me!’

  The most hurtful thing was that he brought the other one back to your home. The other one picked up your things, touched everything, grinned contemptuously as if to say: What strange taste your wife has!

  You started feeling afraid to go to bed – as if it wasn’t your bed any longer. Who had spread out the blanket, fluffed up the pillow?

  Your nails are short and scruffy.

  You try to imagine his feelings when he comes home, hugs you and feels your stomach pressing against him after he has been smooching with that other, slim one.

  He had unhooked the other one’s bra and kissed her breasts. What were they like?

  When he went out somewhere, you thought it was to see the other one. No matter where he was really going, it was to the other one.

  He would phone you to say everything was all right and not to expect him for dinner – while the other one was taking a shower.

  You saw every woman he knew as the other one.

  You look at what the other one is wearing and think perhaps it’s the very dress that he unbuttoned.

  You were afraid the other one would say to you:

  ‘You wore him down without love, but I can give him what you can’t. He has secrets from you, but he tells me everything.’

  What could you say, if that was the way it was?

  It was your own fault, after all, you forgot how to be different, didn’t you?

  He conceals his infidelities, so you have to forgive him, because he’s concerned for your feelings, he spares you. That means he needs you, that he values you, he’s afraid of offending or insulting you.

  A confession isn’t honesty, it’s cruelty. He doesn’t want to be cruel to someone dear to him.

  Infidelity isn’t the body, the body is always just itself. When people are together, it doesn’t matter where their bodies are.

  You can’t lose him, because you only lose what you don’t have.

  No one can manage without tenderness and you will never have enough, because the need for tenderness is always greater than any tenderness.

  If he has opened a window to get some air, then he was suffocating.

  And how can others resist him, if you couldn’t?

  You said nothing, pretending not to notice anything, that everything was all right. You were afraid of words – words can only destroy. What if he said:

  ‘When the other one touches me, it makes me tremble. But when you touch me it doesn’t. I’m unfaithful to her with you.’

  Not a single word, reproach or question. It was painful, but you forgave him.

  And no bitterness for him – after all, he’s in torment too. The feeling of guilt has made him kinder.

  When the other one phoned, you called him to the telephone, went into the bathroom and turned on the water so as not to hear.

  You were afraid to sniff his things, afraid of finding something in them before the wash – you asked him to look and see if he had left anything in the pockets.

  You tried to be light and easy with him – like a sister giving her brother a morning kiss.

  ‘See you!’

  Live as if the world isn’t falling apart. Don’t walk round the place in tears. Wash and iron, because if he goes to the other one in an unironed shirt, she’ll take pity on him and iron it.

  When the studio appeared, it was easier, he spent the night there on the divan bed.

  In the morning, when you don’t want to get up and live, smile. Smile again. And again.

  Speak words of gratitude to the ceiling that hasn’t been whitewashed for so long.

  After all, children are not from the seed.

  A daughter was born, a late child, long-awaited, the answer to a prayer. With a big bruised head – during the birth she tore her mother’s flesh to tatters.

  A little monkey is born and instantly clutches at its mother’s fur, but a child is born and there’s isn’t even anything for it to hang on to – it’s naked, defenceless.

  The surge of warmth rising from the infant brought you back together again, in a different way. It became clear again why you were together.

  There wasn’t enough milk and you felt jealous of the bottle.

  He loved changing his daughter himself. He used to say her toes were like little boiled sweets.

  After Sonechka was born, you weren’t interested in tender caresses, and he didn’t insist, and another hundred years went by.

  Your little daughter’s illnesses consumed you, body and soul, and it became easier to explain his lack of love to yourself. Now you could blame yourself for paying less attention to him because of the child. Your husband had started feeling lonely and abandoned, hadn’t he? When the child was ill, that was all you thought about, nothing else existed for you.

  When your daughter’s eardrum was punctured for otitis, your husband couldn’t stand it and left the doctor’s office to get away from the screaming. You put your daughter’s head on your knees and squeezed it tight in your hands like in a vice. Sonya looked up at you with frightened eyes, unable to understand why the two of you had brought her to this pain, and screamed submissively, without trying to break free.

  In front of the mirror you pulled down the skin under your eye with your finger and couldn’t believe there were so many wrinkles! You started losing your hair, the plughole in the bath got blocked – you pulled out the wet, matted clumps. You stopped smiling, so as not to show your teeth, eaten away by caries – but that other one yawned deliciously, revealing everything fresh, young and healthy in her voracious jaws.

  Behind your back his friends laughed at you, they all knew of course, didn’t they?

  Sometimes he left a note saying he might not be back for the night. Once he added: ‘Once upon a time you married a genius, but now you live with a conceited, aging void. My dear, put up with me for a little bit longer!’

  After that you loved him even more.

  You often remembered how one day, when you felt you just couldn’t go on, you closed your eyes and suddenly felt happy. That was probably the way happiness had to be, momentary, like the prick of a needle: the child is whining, the oilcloth smells of urine, there’s no money, the weather’s abominable, the milk has boiled over, now you have to scrub the cooker, they’re broadcasting an earthquake on the radio, there’s a war somewhere, and all of this together is happiness.

  Another rainy century. And another.

  For a long time already you had shared your table more than your bed, not husband and wife, but tablemates.

  You got undressed without looking at each other and each lay down on your own side – a big bed and a rift between you. Your head no longer rested on his shoulder. The distance dividing two frozen creatures on a winter night is negligible, but insuperable.

  Suddenly waking up from loneliness in the family bed, you looked at how he was sleeping – his face was really old.

  A new sound moved into the home – t
he slamming of a door.

  He was shouting at his life, but you took the brunt, realising that you were his life.

  Blazing rows. Long and drawn-out, gruelling, in front of a desperately whimpering child.

  One time he was holding a kettle of boiling water and you were scared he would pour it on you, but he restrained himself and poured it in the flowerpot with the aloe vera plant on the windowsill. Afterwards you dumped it in the rubbish, pot and all, and took out the bucket, but the smell of scalded aloe still lingered in the kitchen.

  Once when he was drunk he started shouting at you:

  ‘Don’t bring me my slippers in your teeth!’

  In the bathroom he still hadn’t learned to pull the shower curtain completely closed, you had to mop up after him with a rag every time.

  And he never cleaned off the streaks in the toilet bowl after himself with the brush.

  He despised his friends who had achieved something, and again you took the brunt of it. One day the thought came that your life was blotting paper for his. Destiny wrote something for him and immediately blotted it with you – and then snatches of his life showed through yours.

  Clumps of dust gather in the corners, fleeing from the brush like fluffy little animals. You wondered what they fed on and suddenly realised it was your years.

  He always threw his socks about. An apple core on the bookshelf. Nail clippings on the table. But the socks were the most important thing. They weren’t insignificant or accidental, they were territorial markers. People behave like animals, only they can’t remember why. People mark their territory with the smell of their feet, leaving a trail. All animals understand this and they walk barefoot. See how Donka loves to rest her muzzle on feet or slippers and let the smells of her owners tickle her nostrils.

  The more difficult it is for people to live together, the more emphatically they mark their territory.

  You were always afraid he would say:

  ‘I love someone else. And I’m leaving you for her.’

  And then he said it.

  He had prepared the words in advance. If you begged him (and you did beg him) to stay for the child’s sake, he would say (and he did say):

  ‘The only thing parents are obliged to do for their child is be happy. I’m not happy with you. But I am with her. Unhappy people can’t give a child happiness.’

  You yourself understood that ‘for the child’s sake’ was only an excuse. You were simply afraid of being left alone. After all, no one would ever love you again.

  You told him, not believing it yourself:

  ‘Don’t rush things! Let’s put it off until summer! Wait a bit! You both need to be sure of yourselves, test your feelings. What if it’s just a sudden impulse and it cools off as time passes? Why ruin our life for that? If you really still want to go then, I won’t try to stop you.’

  He didn’t believe it either.

  ‘It’s only with her that I’ve realised what love is.’

  ‘And what about me?

  ‘What do you want me to tell you?’

  ‘That it’s a mistake.’

  ‘But it’s you, you who are the mistake!’

  You grabbed a glass jar of murky water left on the table after Sonya had been using water paints and flung it into the crockery cupboard. Everything is smashed to smithereens, the room is covered in shards of china and dirty water. The child jumped up off her little bed but halted, barefoot, in the doorway.

  ‘Stop! Don’t come in here!’

  You both went dashing to Sonya. He slipped and hurt his hand on the glass. You grabbed your daughter up in your arms and carried her back to bed. Laid her down, reassured her, walked out, closed the door. Then you started haranguing each other in a whisper.

  The blood just wouldn’t stop, neither would the hate.

  When the words ran out, he smeared the blood from his hand across the chest of your blouse and left, stepping fastidiously over the broken glass.

  You collapsed on your bed and broke down in tears, regretting everything but the broken jar. You regretted waiting so many years before you threw it.

  You spent half the night clearing up, then took your daughter into your bed. Sonechka tossed and turned, and by morning ended up sleeping crosswise, squeezing you out to the very edge.

  The centuries had ended.

  The evenings when they collect Sonya are the hardest. You wander round the empty flat, thinking.

  Suddenly you realised that you had no women-friends. Over the years they had disappeared, only his friends were left. They spoke to you quite differently now. No one had the time any more. And anyway, you didn’t want to look into the eyes of those who had already known everything for ages.

  You used to take off your stockings and Donka wagged her tail and licked your toes, but now she licked that other one’s feet.

  You tried to get drunk, bought a bottle of wine – it was sour and nasty, you couldn’t make yourself drink it, poured it down the sink.

  Sometimes you try to pull yourself together, sometimes you don’t want to. You come across one of his old socks, and the tears are back again.

  No one snoring beside you, kicking you in the night, twisting the sheets into ropes.

  He has stomach problems. Will that other, young one, make sure he has oat porridge for breakfast and eats less salty food?

  You realised what was lacking for him in your life together. A different life was lacking.

  But what if he phoned you, drunk and miserable, repentant, and you weren’t at home? He will want to tell you that he behaved like a total idiot and ask you to forgive him, won’t he? That he loves you and is coming back. He’s tired and wants to come and lay his head on your knees. After all, everything in the world has to end like that – after all his trials and suffering, the man comes back to his beloved and lays his head on her knees.

  You tried not to go out anywhere, and there was nowhere for you to go to anyway, you drank rowanberry liqueur and kept watch, waiting for the phone to ring. Every now and then you picked up the receiver – a dial tone, the phone’s working. One day you flew out of the shower naked in your rush to get to the phone. It was Sonya, wanting to talk about her presents from Daddy.

  Sonya came back every time loaded with presents, and you thought that in time he would win the child over to his side entirely.

  You lectured him when he brought your daughter back on Sunday.

  ‘So now it turns out that I’m a killjoy all week long, I nag, I forbid, I find fault, I demand, I use discipline – but you’re so nice and kind, you’re corrupting the child, the word “no” doesn’t even exist, you’re spoiling her, getting her used to things I can’t afford to give her!’

  You noticed he still wore the sweater that you knitted for him.

  Sonya dances on the bed, boasting:

  ‘Look at the watch Daddy gave me. Can you hear it? Like grasshoppers!’

  You shouted at her:

  ‘Go to sleep straightaway!’

  She falls asleep with her moulting tiger cub, not her new toys.

  He also started sending Sonya postcards with drawings – foxes, bunny rabbits, monsters with two heads, three eyes, one leg, all smiling, waving their paws, calling to her. At first you threw them away, then you stopped when you saw the postcards were numbered. Sonya pins them up on the wall above her bed with thumbtacks. Talks to them before she falls asleep.

  Cooking Sonya buckwheat for her supper, you got distracted, gazing out of the window at the dingy colouring of the people walking by. Hurrying along, not realising that they are happy. The buckwheat burned. You sat down at the table, put your head on your bent arm and started bawling your eyes out. Just then Sonya came in.

  ‘Mummy, what’s that smell? What’s wrong? Are you crying?’

  She started consoling her mother like a grown-up, stroking your head.

  ‘Come on, Mummy, it’s just silly old buckwheat!’

  Sonechka had almost stopped wetting the bed at night but now, sin
ce he left, it had started all over again.

  You’re reading some children’s book, and in it a girl is on her way to a flea market where they sell old dolls and suddenly you realise the dolls are little girls who have died. How can anyone write things like that for children?

  You were on your way to the children’s clinic and Sonechka suddenly asked out loud, so the whole tram could hear:

  ‘Mummy, did Daddy leave us because of me?’

  During the school holidays they took Sonya for a week. You almost stopped going outside altogether, didn’t throw the rubbish out, didn’t wash the dishes, didn’t change the bed sheets, didn’t iron your clothes. You didn’t battle the fluffy little creatures with a rag, you surrendered. It felt to you like revenge. You went off your diet and onto chocolate. That was revenge too.

  Your hair hangs down in filthy, tangled ropes and it’s so grey, it’s frightening.

  You looked in the mirror at the wrinkles round your eyes, the dry skin on your cheeks, your withering neck. A woman withers inside first, in her soul, and then on the outside.

  You thought: how could it happen – the veins have spread right across my legs like tiny rivulets, my pubic hair is turning grey. And this parting from my body started a long time ago.

  You looked at your portraits hung across the walls and remembered how you posed naked and he used to break off to kiss you all over and now you asked yourself:

  ‘Who is that on the canvas? Then who am I?’

  You started talking to yourself.

  ‘You have to go into the kitchen, open the little window and put the kettle on. Do you hear?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because. To do that you have to love yourself at least for a moment.’

  ‘Love myself? What for?’

  You struck a bargain with fate – if you took a shower now, tidied yourself up, put on nice clothes and makeup and spent your last money on a bouquet of flowers for yourself, then something would happen.

  It did.

  ‘Ada!’

  The vet you used to take Donka to. Sonechka called him Doctor Doolittle. Doctor Doolittle’s the man, he can cure you, yes he can! No one had explained to the little girl that people brought him healthy cats and dogs and took them away castrated, with their claws torn out.