The Light and the Dark

by Shishkin, Mikhail

  Mummy once told me the kind of precautions they used to take: they put a metal cap smeared with petroleum jelly on the neck of the womb. But during menstruation it had to be taken out. Mummy didn’t always put the cap in and she protected herself with acid tampons instead – before she went to bed with Daddy, she diluted some citric acid, moistened a piece of cotton wool with it and tucked it inside herself.

  But that night they wanted me.

  Somehow I can picture that night, my night, very clearly.

  They got back late in the falling snow, like the snow that fell on the day of her funeral, and Mummy hung her black astrakhan coat up to dry.

  I see Daddy trying to take off Mummy’s stockings and she whispers:

  ‘Careful! You’ll ladder it like that!’ Mummy told me there used to be a little repair shop at the railway station for fixing ladders in stockings – there was always a queue of women standing there.

  Daddy probably kissed her impatiently while she neatly rolled off her stockings, then stuck them in the gap between the mattress and the headboard of the bed. And then she still had to lean backwards and curve her back to pull off the belt with the rubber bobbles. Or did her punctilious attention to detail not extend to lovemaking?

  I don’t know anything about her.

  But I do know that afterwards, when I had already begun, Daddy got up for a smoke and opened the window that hadn’t been papered shut for winter yet.

  ‘Look, the snow’s teeming down again! Come here!’

  Mummy threw her astrakhan coat on over her naked body and walked across to him barefoot, holding the collar closed at her neck. Still hot after making love, she leaned out of the window, scooped up a handful of wet snow off the windowsill and started munching on it.

  They stand in the dark at the open window and watch the snow falling.

  Daddy puts one arm round her, moves the papyrosa in his other hand as far away as possible and blows a stream of smoke out sideways from the corner of his mouth. In her wet winter coat Mummy snuggles up against Daddy and runs the handful of snow over the inflamed skin on her neck, and in the snowy light from outside the window her arm, naked to the elbow, is as white as white, as if she’s wearing a long opera glove.

  My Sashenka!

  Rain has set in here. It’s pouring down almost without a break.

  We’re back at the camp. At this moment it’s drumming on the roof of the tent above my head. I’m watching yellow mud creeping along the path. And there are bubbles on the puddles.

  Everything in the tent is damp and unbearably dirty. But, by contrast, on the outside the canvas is clean and white, all the dust has been washed off.

  At first everyone was delighted when it started lashing down, they put out cooking pots and buckets to catch the rain, took their clothes off, had a wash, ran around naked, washed their uniforms and underwear. The rain here is southern, steamy, strong.

  We’ve washed everything, but there’s nowhere to dry it – now it’s hanging up all round the tent and it smells of mould.

  That drumming on the canvas is driving me demented.

  And I’ve been shivering since the morning too. It looks as if I’ve picked up a fever. A strange kind of sensation. I seem able to see and hear everything, only from the outside, somehow.

  And sometimes the connection is suddenly lost, that is, I stop understanding obvious things. For instance, I don’t understand how all these people around me appeared in my life. Or why I’m here with them now in this damp, smoky tent as they chortle loudly, taking off their shoulder belts, smelling of huang jiu: one of them has blown two fangs of smoke out of his nostrils, another has a red stripe on his forehead from his forage cap, and another doesn’t have a single hair on his cranium, his skin glistens like thin cigarette paper. And now they’re swearing as they discuss the action of melinite shells.

  Or do I simply have a temperature? I must have fallen ill, that’s why the flow of life is such a messy jumble.

  The cook complains that without any butter he has to fry everything in soya bean oil.

  I walked past the admiral’s tent and there were cages with wet chickens. I don’t understand.

  What is there to understand? Chickens, cages, rain, an admiral – but even so I don’t understand a thing.

  An inspection was arranged for Admiral Alexeev’s arrival – the men prepared, smartened themselves up, polished their forage cap badges bright and shiny, everybody was lined up in the rain early in the morning, they waited for two hours, the corps commander arrived, saluted and looked at one infantryman’s rifle, it was dirty and he gave everybody an earful. But what have I got to do with all that?

  I don’t understand who we are, where we are and why we’re together. This rain and the shots somewhere in the distance are inexplicable. These documents I have to copy out interminably are inconceivable. It’s not possible that the same hand that is writing this letter about my love to you will later trace out the lines that bring grief into someone’s home, as if I’m a messenger bearing bad news. I’m not a messenger.

  Kirill found an amulet on a dead Yihetuan – a piece of yellow paper in a little bag on a string round his neck. A note with an incantation written in red that was supposed to make him invulnerable. Kirill hung it on his own neck. I don’t understand.

  He and I have quarrelled again. I understand that even less.

  The soldiers have never read Shakespeare and they never will, but they know they shouldn’t eat a lot before a battle, it complicates their condition if they get a stomach wound. They know that a dirty wound can be washed with urine or disinfected by cauterisation – as a last resort the powder from a cartridge can be used. What do they want with the monologues of the Prince of Denmark? To be or not to be. Absurd. Impossible to understand.

  The water has gathered into little puddles on top of the tent and Kirill is draining it off by pushing a stick of bamboo up into the canvas where it sags under the weight. Why am I writing this? I don’t understand.

  The depredation in the city is unrestrained and insatiable. They loot everything. The Englishman Captain Bailey was appointed commandant. In order to stop the pillaging, he promptly had one of the English soldiers, a Sepoy, shot. Our superiors decided not to let themselves be outdone and ordered two Russian soldiers to be shot. They grabbed the first two who came to hand and shot them. When he learned about this, General Fukushima ordered three Japanese soldiers to be shot.

  I drew up the documents about those two soldiers. Vasilii Alexandrovich Zimin and Alexander Mikhailovich Loktev. One was twenty, the other twenty-one – incidentally, his birthday was only three days ago.

  I saw the firing squad cleaning their rifles with expensive silk textiles. I don’t understand any of this at all.

  This rain is enough to drive me insane.

  And I knew that Loktev – pale eyes and white hair, almost no eyebrows.

  While I was writing just now, Glazenap ran to get some boiling water in the rain, and on the way back he slipped in the mud and scalded his left hand. He’s sitting there, howling quietly, the skin has come up in red blisters. Everybody’s pestering him with advice. Now he’s run off to the infirmary.

  The day after tomorrow we set out for Peking, despite the rain. Today I copied out the plan of march onto clean paper. There was water dripping from the ceiling of the staff HQ tent. I had to take care all the time that drops didn’t fall on me.

  What do they mean, Peking? Does it exist anywhere on the face of the earth?

  And how can we walk anywhere through this impassable mud?

  I find it hard to concentrate. My stomach’s in a terrible state. When I don’t eat anything, it’s not too bad, but when I do eat, the diarrhoea and vomiting are instant. They gave me some kind of powder in the infirmary – it doesn’t help.

  I feel hungry all the time.

  It’s a good thing you can’t see the way I am now, unshaven and barely alive. Everyone here is the same. And covered in mud. All our tents are smeared
with yellow clay, and our beds, and our clothes. But I think I’ve already written to you about that. I can’t understand if I have or I haven’t. And if so, what for?

  What do people write for? As long as they write, it means they’re still alive. If you’ve read these lines, it means death’s been postponed. I’m a match for Scheherazade and her stories! Only she’s a rich woman compared with me. A thousand nights, just imagine it – it’s an entire eternity! But how many more nights have I been granted? That number exists somewhere, it’s out there waiting for me, like an undiscovered America.

  Sometimes I’m not myself, my darling, and I need you to find myself again, to rediscover and restore myself. I have to cling to something real, and I cling to you.

  If I am writing to you, it means that everything is all right, I’m still alive. I write therefore I live. Strange, that’s exactly what I wanted to escape from. But I can’t.

  Sometimes what’s happening seems like a dream in which everything is inexplicable, absurd, but painfully real, with sounds and smells. I probably just need to wake up into reality, but where can I wake up to get away from this ragged dripping of water all round the tent and the smell of mould on clothes that aren’t drying out?

  I tried to do the opposite – if not wake up, then at least fall asleep. But I couldn’t. My head’s too thick and heavy.

  I drank some water – the sand’s grating in my teeth.

  Glazenap came back with his hand bandaged. He sat down on his bed, admired the fresh white dressing for a moment and said thoughtfully:

  ‘Everything in the world is a sign of something, isn’t it? Everything has a meaning, it tells us something. Maybe this is a sign to me that everything will be all right?’

  It’s a good thing no one but me heard him.

  If only I could believe stupid Glazenap that I can fall asleep and wake up living in a different time, with all this forgotten, like a bad dream.

  And finally, what death is, I absolutely cannot understand. And I probably never will.

  Will I ever understand anything!

  I’m must be asleep after all, dreaming. I’ll wake up some time. I will wake up. If only I could wake up!

  I can’t take any more of it.

  Now some men around me are drinking tea.

  I don’t know who these men around me are. I don’t understand what they say to me.

  I don’t understand what I’m doing here – why aren’t I with you?

  My Sashenka! I think I’ve already understood everything I was supposed to understand. That’s enough for me. I want to come to you.

  But they’ll drive us off to somewhere or other along impassable muddy roads.

  Sasha, every step I take here has meaning only because it’s a step towards you. My love, whichever way I walk, I’m walking to you.

  I listen to the rain drumming, beating my brain out of my head, and I remember the way the rain used to patter at the dacha – what a sweet sound that dacha rain made, whispering on the roof of the veranda in the morning!

  How I loved those rainy days when I could lie on the divan, listen to the rustling of the wet leaves through the window and read.

  And now I’m amazed that I couldn’t feel happy that summer.

  Of course I was happy, only I didn’t know it. But it seemed to me that I knew everything and understood it all.

  I remember reading in Hamlet: ‘The time is out of joint’.

  And it was all clear to me. What’s so difficult to understand?

  But I’ve only really understood here. Now I know what he meant.

  Do you know what Shakespeare was really writing about? About the fact that the time will be back in joint when we meet again and I put my head on your knees.

  My love, my only one!

  It’s such a long time since I wrote to you.

  Everything’s all right here.

  Only I get very tired.

  Don’t think that I’m complaining. I’m strong. Or rather, my sister is, she’s the strong one, but I can just burst into tears for no reason at all. You know how easy that is for me.

  There I go again, making things up, some sister or other.

  I just can’t get used to myself. I’ve been trying all my life and I still can’t. And I can’t get used to life either, although it’s high time I did.

  It’s very hard sorting out the fine threads of justice and mercy. I know everything, I understand everything, but it’s hard.

  And getting up every morning in the dark. And then coming back alone and in the dark again.

  But she’s not like that at all, everything’s easy for her. She sees everything and feels everything differently. It’s impossible to explain this to anyone, but you’ll understand. For instance, say I’m going to work in the morning. I’m waiting for the tram, the icy wind has brought tears to my eyes and my cheeks are scorched by the cold. The frozen crowd at the tram stop is sullen and silent. Not quite shadows, not quite people. The tram still doesn’t come, perhaps it won’t come at all. They jig up and down, hawk and spit, catch up on their sleep standing. I close my eyes too, so as not to look at all this.

  But she looks, and she sees something different.

  Snow-powder slithering slantwise over the ground. Little stars on the snow. Overnight the trees and wires have sprouted furry hoarfrost as thick as a finger. Even the rubbish tip is dolled up like a bride.

  And thick, steamy clumps round the crowd at the tram stop – the soul scattering as it self-seeds. The tram comes rumbling up, listing over and jangling. Rasping sparks off the wires.

  The shadows at the stop start stirring and make a dash.

  We’ve squeezed in somehow. The conductress abuses us, shaking her satchel of change. Her glasses have steamed up.

  I’ve grabbed a strap, I’m swaying about. The leather loop smells sour. The tram churns its human contents on the points.

  In the dull light of the little lamps, the paper of yesterday’s Evening News looks like a drowned man’s skin. War on the front page, crossword on the back page. We have been treacherously attacked by the kingdom of Prester John. The convergence point of lines in perspective, the navel of the world, a handful of letters.

  The news is still the same. Some have been stabbed, but these were trampled to death. Pharaohs’ tombs ransacked while they’re still alive. Lambing proclaims the end of winter. You went sinister, but we went dexter. Right now, at this very moment, a gondolier is pushing off with his foot from a slippery wall covered with mould and waterweed.

  Scientists inform us that our warm-blooded breathing is why it’s getting warm and damp in the tram. But at every stop the frosty chill from the door creeps in under my skirt.

  And the researchers are still obsessed with time. After all, they discovered experimentally long ago that it doesn’t just fill space up to the edges, like thin porridge, it’s heaped up, like thick porridge. But now a problem has arisen with the way it’s stored. According to the latest data, it can only be preserved by chronographiclers, and only consecutively, one thing after another, in a line that runs back to where the tramlines go, where it joins up with them, but for convenience this linear time, like an infinite string of macaroni, has been chopped into handy snippets of words.

  Readers’ letters. There’s a game for very young children – a board with a circle, a square, a little house and various objects cut out of it, and these shapes have to be inserted into the correct holes. If you lose a piece, there’s nothing to cover the hole with. No little house, just a gaping void. And I have the feeling that my life is a similar collection of gaping voids: house, husband, love, this evening – and nothing to fill them with. Holes in the universe, they let in a draught. And more and more of these holes as the years go by – as more people leave.

  The weather overseas: sunny, warm.

  Tomorrow’s horoscope: crooked and twisted.

  Wanted.

  Lonely, happy despite everything, sick, red eyes, couldn’t get to sleep last night, kept gasp
ing and panting, blocked nose, slept with her mouth open, woken again and again by her own snoring, walks around all day long with a nose full of snot and head full of lead, blows her nose hard enough to burst her nostrils, dries her hanky on the radiator, the hanky gets harder every time, it crunches when she picks it up. Sees everything and knows about everything. Was given her serving of happiness and keeps asking for more.

  I’m lucky, I’m already at the window. I grab my mitten with my teeth, breathe on the glass and rub a cavity in the crust of hoarfrost with my fingers. The tram jolts over the points, rumbles across a bridge.

  I put my eye to the spy hole and watch the river-dawn, ruled across with the lines of ski tracks. We used to have P.T. classes here too. I recall the strange sensation when I passed under the span of the bridge on my old skis – rusty railway structures above my head, an invisible tram rumbling, and I’m soaring above the void, there’s an abyss below my skis. It’s so wonderful moving clumsily along above the water, thrusting with the little poles.

  Every time we rumble across this bridge, I remember the squealing bundle on the ice. Perhaps this is the very same river?

  I look into the cavity and there’s a lunastice in it. The wintry smoke above a factory looks brainy. Gasholders drift by for a long time, crowned with signal lamps, then it’s the school stop – in there behind the hoarfrosted windows the first lesson has already started and the sleepy yawners are being told that you mustn’t gaze at the moon for a long time, or you’ll turn into a lunatic, that little boys are future soldiers and little girls are nurses, and that a caterpillar’s self and a butterfly’s self are quite different, but still the same.

  I have to go almost all the way to the final stop, the tram empties and loads up with frost again.

  I get out. Hoarfrost like untrimmed velvet on the bushes, squiggly golden monograms in the snow by the fence. Canine? Human? I’m constantly amazed by the things that pass through my mind.

  A woman wearing an orthopaedic shoe limps down the steps of the porch, screwing her leg into herself at every step. She works in the library and loathes the readers because they take out a book and bring back a flat greasy pancake with its pages falling out, and in revenge she writes who the killer is on the first page of the detective novels.