The Light and the Dark (16 page)

Rybakov and his men spent several days at the station, where the fighting went on day and night. They made sorties to prevent any weapons that could fire directly over open sights from being brought in, and during one of these sorties he was wounded. He says he had already chosen the moment to shoot himself – he was terrified of being taken prisoner. But our men rescued him and carried him out of the line of fire.

Sashenka, I’ve seen that railway station through my binoculars – all that’s left of it now is a scorched, bullet-scarred ruin.

The bombardment of Tientsin has not stopped even now, we can hear explosions in the city as the Chinese army shells the European quarters. The French concession has suffered worst of all – that was where the Catholic missionaries hated so much by the Yihetuan lived. And that was where the Russian consulate was located, and the Russo-French hospital.

The shelling comes from the outskirts of the city and the artillery school, located on a high embankment by the river opposite the German concession. They say about three hundred young Chinese officers were studying there, the Germans had supplied them with the very latest guns. The European instructors fled, but one who
tried to damage the sights was torn to pieces and his head is still displayed on a bamboo pole. That is what they say, at least, and the head could be seen through binoculars only yesterday. Today the Germans and the English took the school by storm. Our allies and the Chinese both suffered heavy losses.

Another wounded man, by the name of Verigo, spent all this time in the concession. There was incessant fighting there too. People kept their clothes on night and day and barely slept at all. They couldn’t set up a camp – as soon as they pitched the tents, shells started falling on them. The firing was directed from the city – the Chinese there signalled to their men where to fire. People and horses had to be hidden behind walls, along the streets and in the buildings, and spread out as thinly as possible. But even then they suffered almost as many losses as when they were in battle position, because in all the concessions there wasn’t a single corner that wasn’t covered by artillery or small-arms fire. The buildings provided poor protection. Bullets flew in through the windows and doors and shells pierced straight through the walls. Women and children hid in the basements.

Both of Verigo’s hands are strapped to his chest. The unfortunate man can’t do anything himself, his wounded comrades help him, but still he jokes about his helplessness. He was wounded by a burst of shrapnel on the bridge.

Surprisingly enough, the Chinese have better weaponry than we do. Here is what Verigo said, word for word:

‘They have the latest artillery and a large stock of shells, supplied by the Germans, and we have obsolete guns. We fired only one shot in reply to five of theirs. And as for rifles, now every coolie has a Mauser or a Mannlicher!’

The railway station is connected to the city by a floating bridge that is made out of wooden barges so that it can be opened up to
allow junks through. The bridge was bombarded constantly and many of our soldiers were killed there. Every day burning boats loaded with dry reeds were launched downstream against it, and the barges had to be moved apart under fire.

The nurse who was caring for the wounded Russians in the French hospital has come to our field infirmary with them. She’s a Parisienne and they call her simply Lucie. Very pleasant, straight-forward and competent, with her hands all red from mercuric chloride. She seems frail, but she can easily change a bed under the wounded man lying in it. She has a large, ugly mole on her neck, which she feels embarrassed about. She keeps putting her hand over it without realising. I don’t know how she came to be in China. She speaks almost no Russian, but everyone here has really fallen in love with her.

Last night one soldier in the infirmary started screaming despairingly. Our tents are very close by. It was impossible to sleep and I went out to see what was happening. The unfortunate young man screaming had had both legs amputated the day before. They tried to calm him down, but he only yelled even louder and lashed out, so that he had to be restrained by force. They gave him an injection of morphine, but he didn’t settle down and he woke all the wounded men. Dr Zaremba flew into a fury and stalked out, saying:

‘Let him scream. He’ll soon stop when he gets hoarse!’

Then Lucie sat down beside him, took his head in her arms and started comforting him, in French at first, and then she repeated the few Russian words that she knew:

‘Yes? No? Good! Good! Papa! Mama!’

The poor legless man, who had probably never been caressed by any woman’s hand before, apart from his mother’s, gaped at her with his insane eyes, then calmed down, fell silent and went to sleep.

Every night someone dies in the infirmary. They are taken to a separate tent, but in this heat they don’t keep them there for long. Today they buried eight men. I saw two of them alive and well only yesterday morning, and in the evening they were brought back on stretchers: one had been hopelessly wounded by a bullet that passed straight through his throat, and the other in the stomach. The first one died that evening, but the second, Captain Popov, carried on suffering until the morning, groaning and wheezing both when he was delirious and when he came round. He had got married recently.

There were no planks for coffins – they were buried in sacks. The soldiers carrying the dead men hid their noses in their forage caps. One of the sacks looked too small – after the shell exploded, only the shoulders, arms and head were left intact, everything else had been blown to pieces.

They buried them half a verst from the camp on a low hill. Nailed together one cross for all of them and stuck it in the dry clay. The grave the dead were buried in was shallow – the men didn’t have the strength to dig a deep pit in the blazing-hot sun.

You know, Sashenka, as I listened to the muttering of the funeral service and looked at the soldiers shooting over the grave, thoughts that were quite inappropriate to the moment crept into my mind. The American Indians fired arrows into the air from their bows in order to drive away evil spirits, and we call shooting our guns at military funerals a farewell salute. But it’s the same ritual that the Indians observed when they shot arrows into the sky. And the men lying in the sacks under the clay don’t need any of it.

We walked back in silence, every man thinking the same thing: perhaps tomorrow he would be carried off in an empty oats sack and the soldiers would hide their faces from the stink in their forage caps.

While I was just writing these lines to you, my comrade Kirill Glazenap came into the tent. He is totally despondent. He told me that he had interpreted at the interrogation of a Chinese captured by our soldiers in a nearby village. The man had protested to them that he wasn’t a Yihetuan, but he had just been shot all the same.

Sashenka, I have to get used to everything here.

Now everything all around has gone quiet, I can’t hear any more shots or explosions. Only someone groaning in the infirmary and snoring from the next tent. A mouse gambolling about in a crate of provisions.

It has got dark, but even now it is still hot and stuffy and the mosquitoes have launched their attack again. I’m bitten all over from my head to my feet. There’s no comparison with our simple mosquito, who warns of his approach from a distance. These are invisible and inaudible, just a sudden bite. No escape. And they transmit malaria. They gave out special nets today, but they turned out to be too small. Now the soldiers are sitting and sewing themselves canopies out of two nets each, so that they can sleep under them.

My dearest, I’m not complaining, don’t think that, it’s just that I’m very tired after these last days, because in the daytime I’m always thinking of staying alive and at the same time I desperately want to sleep – I sit down for a moment and I start dreaming – but at night, when I lie down to rest, it’s impossible to free myself of the impressions of the day.

I close my eyes, but I still see that boy with the stumps, holding them out to a mug of tea that has been offered to him. I turn over onto my other side, and the bridge leading to the ruined railway station is there in front of my eyes again. I was there yesterday and I saw them open it to let through the dead bodies that had accumulated overnight. I don’t know what’s happening there, upstream, but the current brings an endless procession of dead. One had his
hands tied behind his back. I only saw the twisted fingers, I thought they were moving, but that was the effect of a wave.

My darling, forgive me for having to describe such sad and terrible things. But this is my life now.

I long so much to get away from all of this, to hide somewhere, lose myself in something else – to remember something from my childhood, my room, the books, you and me. To think about something good and dear to me.

There now, I started rereading my letter and it has made me sad – there is so little tender feeling for you in it and I have so much in me.

Now I reproach myself because when we were together I had so many opportunities to show you my love and I didn’t think about it. And now you are so far away that I can’t do anything for you – I can’t hug you or kiss you or run my hand over your hair. Love requires demonstration, not proof. How I long to buy you flowers! I never bought you any, did I? Only once, remember, I picked some lilac for you in our park. And I want to go with you and buy you something unnecessary, feminine – a ring, a brooch, earrings, a handbag. I always used to think all that was stupid nonsense, only now have I realised how important it is and what it’s all needed for. Only here has the understanding dawned of why unnecessary things are so essential!

Now that I’ve mentioned how essential unnecessary things are, I’ve remembered a neighbour I used to call round to see when I was little. She seemed a hundred years old to me then. Probably she was. She had thick, bandaged legs, on which she could barely even walk, leaning on the back of a chair. She pushed the chair forward and then dragged her legs up to it. Mum said she had water in her legs, a bucketful in each one. I can see her as if it was now. The pins sticking out of her grey bob of hair, her eyes
watering, her trembling fingers, swollen at the joints. Her ears were huge, with the lobes stretched from wearing earrings, and there was always cotton wool sticking out of them, because they suppurated. I wasn’t afraid of her, she always had a sweet or a honey cake ready for me, but what I really went there for was the chemist’s rubber bands from the potions and powders – she kept them for me on the window handles, and I needed them for the catapults that I crafted out of bobbins and pencils.

She was strange and she always spoke about things that I didn’t understand. She used to sit down slowly on her chair in front of the mirror and start telling me that in there, in the mirror, she wasn’t real, but once she had been real and pretty. I nod, but she can see I don’t believe her and she starts showing me old photographs. But the only thing I remember from them is the gondolas. She used to tell me how a gondolier guides his gondola though a narrow channel and pushes off from the walls of the houses with his foot.

One time she said:

‘I forget what I ought to remember, but that gesture, the gondolier pushing off with his foot, I remember that.’

She often used to tell me something and then add:

‘You won’t understand now. Just remember it.’

And look, I’ve remembered about the gondolier’s gesture and only now realised how important the unnecessary things are.

And I also remember that I asked her about something and she answered:

‘That’s why!’

She pulled me towards the mirror and pressed her cheek against mine.

I don’t remember the question at all, but her answer has stuck in my mind: We both look in the mirror and I see my seven-year-old face and her wrinkles, the old, flabby skin, the hairs above her
lips and on her chin, the bushy eyebrows, I catch her unpleasant, old woman’s smell and try to break free quickly, but she’s holding my head tight.

I came back home after the summer holidays and she wasn’t there. They told me she had gone away. I believed them then.

But I’ve just thought: Where are those two bucketfuls of water that she carried about in her bandaged legs? Perhaps they have mingled with the waves of the Pei Ho?

I just read that again and wondered: How did this old woman, whom probably no one remembers apart from me, end up here with me and you? It isn’t important.

The only thing that is important, my Sashenka, is that we are together. And nothing can separate us.

I’m responsible for you, after all! That means I can’t simply disappear – someone has to take care of you, love you, think about you, share everything with you, delight in your successes, share your misery. There, you see, I absolutely cannot disappear!

It’s only now, so far away from you, my darling, that I realise how little I told you about my love, about how much I need you! I cling to you as I do to life itself. It’s hard to explain, but the very fact that I still breathe and see – all that is only because I love you.