The Light and the Dark (32 page)

But I try to drive away thoughts like that.

Today Lucie left for Tong Ku with a group of wounded. They were sent off down the Pei Ho on a barge. What joy I saw in the eyes of those men who were finally being carried away from Tientsin, away from the bullets, grenades, operating tables and agonising torment, and what envy in the eyes of those staying behind!

When Lucie was saying goodbye to our men, she burst into tears and kept putting her hand over the mole on her neck. Our new colonel, Stankevich – I haven’t told you about him, but I will later – gave Kirill leave to see her off, he’s there now, at the
quayside, but he should have been back ages ago. I hope nothing has happened to him.

I feel so glad for their happiness! They searched all their lives and then found each other – here and now! Kirill has confessed that they have decided to marry. She’s going to wait for him in Tong Ku.

Although, of course, I don’t really understand what Glazenap sees in her. She’s a sweet person, but too simple – I think that’s it – for him. And a lot older. But that’s not important. How does Ovid put it? The girl herself is only an insignificant part of what you like about her.

Kirill has come back now. Flopped onto the bed, turned to face the wall. He didn’t say anything at first, then he said:

‘Now I absolutely have to go back alive.’

Sashenka, in places where there is death, where they send men to kill, there is always so much falsehood. Do you know what I think about all that now? Winning or losing really isn’t important, because the only victory in any war is to survive.

But apart from the lies about the struggle between good and evil and the beautiful, false words about immortality, in all this there is still some very important truth, and I can sense it. Probably that is why I’m here, to understand it.

People grow coarser here, but they also become gentler. Something that was hidden before is revealed in them. I’ve noticed that even the soldiers I saw as coarse beasts start writing tender letters home. He probably used to get drunk and beat his wife there, but now he writes to her: Yours with kisses and hugs, your loving Petya. Wasn’t it worth sending him here for that alone?

And me? Without this experience, would I really have understood that I am scrambling my way through life from the complicated things to the simplest? The very simplest of all?

Yes, here there is so much evil all around, so much crude, senseless, ugly cruelty, but I only cling all the tighter to what is human in myself and around me. It is all the more important to preserve the small grains of humanity within me and around me. For instance, I never really had any friends. But here I share what could be the final days and hours of my life with a man, and all my human warmth flows into him, like into a funnel.

Kirill is as dear to me now as a brother, and this awkward man in thick glasses becomes ever dearer to me as the roll-call of killed and wounded grows longer. At this moment he doesn’t even suspect that I am writing to you about him. He has taken off his glasses in order to wipe them, and the gaze of his vulnerable eyes with the puffy eyelids is completely, childishly helpless. Now he has turned back to face the wall. He even sleeps in his glasses.

He and I have shared the same thoughts and fears – how close that brings us together! The same thought constantly in mind – let nothing happen for one more day, and another! And another! And another!

I remember him looking down at his feet and sighing:

‘How ugly they are! But it will still be a shame if they’re blown off.’

Kirill has an ingrown toenail on one foot. He joked that he will probably be identified by that toenail if he is left without a face when he is killed.

For the first time I have experienced that remarkable feeling about which so many lies have been told – male friendship. It really doesn’t require very much. Simply to know that he won’t abandon you and you will help him in every possible way you can. There’s always something miraculous in meeting each other alive and well.

And now I feel real joy that Glazenap is here and nothing has happened to him. I think he has fallen asleep. Nestled down on his little Chinese cushion stuffed with tea. I can hear husky breathing and babbling. He’s muttering something in his sleep. Probably dreaming of his beloved. Lucky man! Ah, no, he’s not asleep, he was talking to himself. Now he has got up and walked out.

The cicadas are already chirruping in the poplars, setting my ears ringing.

For some reason I’ve remembered Kirill telling me that he used to play at barbers when he was little, and he once trimmed a cat’s whiskers. Afterwards the cat used to bump into chair legs and thrust its face past its food.

I’ve started feeling differently about the men as well. The more of them that are killed, the more strongly I feel my closeness to them. Writing out the lists of the dead yesterday, I suddenly, for the first time, called this battalion my own in my heart and felt myself a part of it.

I used to think life was a preparation for death. You know, there was a time when I felt that I was some Noah to whom it had been revealed that sooner or later a flood would come and the life of everyone on earth would end. So he had to build an ark in order to escape. Noah no longer lives like everyone else, all he does is think about the flood. I also built my ark. Only my ark was not built of wooden beams, but of words. And so everyone around me was living in the present day, rejoicing in the fleeting moment, but all I could think about was the inevitability of the flood and the ark. They seemed wretched to me, and I probably seemed the same way to them.

I thought I had to write down all the most important things. All the creatures two by two. Events, people, objects, memories, pictures, sounds. Look, a grasshopper has flown in and nuzzled
against my knee. And it’s entirely up to me to take him with me or not. I’d been through something similar in my childhood with the tin buried under the jasmine bush. Only now I could take absolutely everything with me.

Noah’s work is a deliberate, wise acceptance of death.

I make a rather useless kind of Noah.

Sashenka! This is all nonsense, there never was any Noah. And my ark of words will sail away, and I’ll be left here! And we have to prepare ourselves, not for death, but for life! I’m still not ready for life, Sashka!

There I was, the Noah of Noahs and fool of fools, looking for something important, big, unachievable, and I had to end up here to understand that I have you. That I already have something big and important – you. Death is all around, but I can feel the deluge of life within me, it seizes me, lifts me up, bears me along towards you.

At night such anguish surges over me, and the only salvation I find is in us, for after all, what happened has not gone anywhere, it is still here, alive, it is in me and in you, it is our substance.

Do you remember, in winter I came to our monument after the hairdresser’s, I had stabbing pains in my back and my ears froze at once in the unaccustomed cold, and by evening a hard frost set in and we strolled about, both of us wrapped in your scarf. I can see that scarf now – the large, loose stitches of the knitting. We got frozen stiff, went to your place, got undressed and lay under the blanket with our teeth chattering – you took my icy hands and put them between your legs to warm them up.

Or do you remember how we went riding on a bike at the dacha and your skirt got tangled in the wheel?

These are little pieces of our life, after all. How many of them there are, Sashenka! Or rather, how few there still are!

When I stayed with you the first time, I went to the toilet at night and in the darkness I couldn’t see anything, I fumbled my way along the walls, knocking my knees against the chairs, and woke you up.

And when a speck got into my eye, you licked it out with the tip of your tongue.

Tell me, do you still bite your hangnails? Don’t do it, my darling, don’t gnaw on your fingers, you have such beautiful fingers, so delicate!

Once you started thinking about something and walked round the flat with a toothbrush stuck in the corner of your mouth.

And do you remember, you came to me, I put the coffee pot on the stove – and forgot to pour any water into it? I had to throw it out.

And another time we forgot about the kettle, it boiled away in the kitchen, turning it into a steam bath. Afterwards you took a sip of tea and then, staring at the light reflected in your cup, you suddenly said:

‘Look. I’ve got tea with a ceiling lamp and sugar!’

Your feet wouldn’t fit into your new shoes – you stretched them on with a tablespoon.

And your conch!
Strombus strombidas
, always stuffed full of cigarette ends! Knobbly, with horns. How is it? Where is it? Is it waiting for me?

My love, you and I parted so long ago, but I still feel you as if only a few days have gone by.

I close my eyes and I see you sitting there on the bed, as you did that time, in my shirt, with your arms round your knees and your chin resting on them, just out of the bathroom, you’d been washing your hair – you made a turban out of a towel. Your ankle with a scratched mosquito bite is right there in front of my face. I kiss your ankles.

I shall definitely feel the pulse in your neck, the way I did then. I really like the way it beats in that precise spot. I love that hesitant little bounce under the thin skin.

I’ll see your chapped lips, I’ll kiss them and kiss them. They change colour round the edges. And there’s a delicate crust in the middle.

I’ll be flooded with such love for you, for your lips, your ankles, for all of you! At night in the darkness I’ll whisper tender words to you, kiss you, caress you, make love to you!

You’re mine, I won’t give you away to anyone!

And I want you so frantically. I need your body so badly!

After all, I’m alive, Sasha.

A tram morning. There are so many of them.

Outside the window it’s still dark, and in the dull light of the bulbs inside the tram everybody has the blue faces of drowned people.

Some are dozing, some are soiling their eyes with newsprint.

On the front page – war, on the back page – the crossword.

From the major cities they inform us that people should not sit in a public library with a leaky ceiling that has green blotches on it – homeless people go there to catch up on their sleep, lying there, stinking, with their faces nestling in a binder of magazines.

They write from Gaul that in the evening, in the dense rays of the sunset a fine skin grows on the cobblestones of the street.

They write from Jerusalem.

Science news: scientists have calculated that for the last five thousand years most people have grown close not by choice, but like trees, which do not choose either their neighbours or their pollinators, but simply intertwine their branches and roots because they have proliferated.

It has also been demonstrated experimentally that there’s something funny going on with time. Events can take place in any sequence and happen to anybody at all. It is possible to play a comb and tissue paper in the kitchen so that it tickles your lips and at the same time, in an entirely different kitchen, read a letter from someone who no longer exists. There you are at the dentist’s, they’re poking the needle into your root canal, twitching the nerve, and then eight centuries later the fringe on the tablecloth flutters. And in general, as the ancients observed, as the years go by the past does not recede, but moves closer. And all the watches can only chirp like grasshoppers, showing different things to different people, when everyone has already known for ages that the time is ten to two.

As a result of barbaric over-catching in the Alps, butterflies have almost disappeared.

Tea rolled up in newspaper can replace a cigarette.

By evening it might perhaps turn a bit fresher.

Breaking news. There she was walking along, not knowing that life is shorter than a skirt.

Readers’ letters. How great it is when you’re expected back for dinner.

A snow woman laments, wondering why everyone pities the
Titanic
and no one pities the iceberg.

Wanted – a stamp with an image of a pigeon-fancier who is waiting for his pigeons to come back and not looking up into the heavens, but into a basin of water – he can see the sky better like that.

Single, nobody’s fool, brown-haired for ages already, no bad habits, well, maybe I smoke sometimes, a sister to myself, in the Druidic horoscope a Mustard Seed, height – fit under your arm, no volume to me at all, eyes like the pools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim. Fairly well-off. Used to work in a hospital behind a high brick wall with broken glass stuck on the top to scratch the wind. The children there were afraid of jabs, not cancer – it took a long time to find a free spot on a pincushion arm.

Now the Empress of Life. The message and the messenger.

I weave the fine threads of justice and mercy.

I scrape with the curette. A little arm and little leg lying on a little tray, I look to see what’s still missing – before I scrape everything out.

I come home tired after work and it’s a non-home.