The Light and the Dark (38 page)

If not for Mummy’s cancer, I would never have felt that closeness again.

Mummy was at home, but then in late autumn Yanka ended up in hospital. She was walking along the corridor in her school during the break, when the junior pupils were dashing about, and
one rammed his head into her stomach at full pelt. She was frightened at first, but then everything seemed to be all right after all.

A little while later Yanka told me that she couldn’t feel any more movements in her stomach. Her husband took her to the hospital and I stayed with the children. He came back alone, despondent.

‘I ask the doctor: “Is it dangerous?” And he tells me: “If the foetus is alive – no. But if it’s dead and has decayed, then it is. But don’t you distress yourself!”’

He just couldn’t understand how his long-awaited daughter could suddenly be called a decayed foetus.

Yanka lost her baby, complications set in and she had to be kept in hospital.

During that period I was torn between Mummy and Yanka with her children. Mummy understood that I was needed more there, and I had to move into Yanka’s place to look after the boys. I took unpaid leave.

Those few days when I lived with them were difficult and wonderful at the same time. It was wonderful to feel that I was needed. I slept on a camp-bed in the children’s room. In the morning I rose early in order to tidy myself up and not wander round the flat with a sleepy face and tangled hair. I made breakfast. Yanka’s husband went to work. I took the older boy to school and the younger one to the kindergarten. I went round the shops, came back and did the cleaning, the washing, the cooking. Everything I hated doing so much at home was a joy here. Then I collected the children, fed them, did various things with them, including Kostik’s school work. Yanka’s husband came and I fed him. He praised everything I cooked. That was really lovely.

Yanka’s husband started looking at me quite differently. I felt it. Before, he didn’t seem to notice me at all. But now he helped
me with the housework and washed the dishes without a murmur. Once when he saw I was sitting slouched over, he gave me a back massage. He has very gentle hands. Another time he gave me flowers for no reason at all. He hugged me and kissed me self-consciously.

‘Thank you! What would we have done without you?’

I was as if I was playing a game – this is my family, this is my home, this is my husband, these are my children. And they all played along with me.

Almost every day we managed to visit Yanka in the hospital – it’s very close by.

As we walked along the street, all four of us holding hands, anyone looking from the outside might have thought that we were together, we belonged to each other.

Yanka looked very poorly, with sunken cheeks and bright red eyes from crying. She was running a temperature.

She told her husband:

‘Don’t look at me: it’ll give you a fright!’

She really did look terrible with her rabbity overbite, lop-ears and strands of greasy, unwashed hair.

She told me:

‘Sashka, you’ve really blossomed!’

They’d explained to her that she couldn’t have any more children.

I didn’t know what to say to that.

‘But that’s what you wanted, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, that’s what I wanted.’

And Yanka burst into tears again.

We sat beside her bed and she saw the boys keeping away from her, with her frightful, tearstained, sickly face, and snuggling up close to me. She saw her husband behaving quite differently with
me from the way he did with her. One time she asked with a bitter laugh.

‘Having a good time without me are you, then?’

Then Yanka was discharged, my game came to an end and I went home.

Mummy had a second operation.

I remember the conversation with the doctor who took away my last hope.

I asked:

‘Tell me, how much longer has she got left to live? A year?’

‘Oh no! Everything will move quickly now.’

‘And there’s nothing else that can be done?’

‘No.’

He apologised for having to go and added:

‘Tell her about it. I always think it’s best if someone close tells them, not the doctor.’

I went back to the ward, knowing that Mummy was waiting for me there and she would ask:

‘Well? What did he say?’

Before going to her, I went down into the courtyard, to gather my strength. I wanted to take a gulp of fresh air, with no hospital smell. Outside, light snow was falling and the yard keeper was scraping it into heaps with a spade. A cat ran by and for a moment I thought it was my Thumbtack, I called her, but it was Thumbtack in a new skin.

I remember I thought about the doctor who had given me the news:

The message and the messenger.

He could have suggested that I sit down, told me the same thing in a different tone of voice, let me hear at least a little bit of sympathy.

It’s probably his defence against news like this – that cold, dry tone.

The yard keeper smiled at me and blew his nose as if he wanted to boast: Just look how much snot there is in this nostril, and now look how much there is in this one!

An old couple walked by, talking.

‘In that sense liver cancer’s better than the others …’

I don’t know why all this has stuck so clearly in my memory.

When I went back to the ward, Mummy asked:

‘Well? What did he say?’

‘Everything’s going to be all right.’

Mummy dozed off after she was given a dose of painkiller.

I sat beside her, looking out through the window at the snowflakes, black against the bright background of the sky. Mummy fell asleep, but immediately gave a shudder and opened her eyes. She gazed round the ward, saw me and said:

‘I kept on believing that a miracle would happen. And you know, I think a miracle has happened. I’m ready for this. I’m not afraid of anything any more.’

Mummy’s illness entered some new stage. She had suddenly found peace and acceptance. She used to be afraid of being left alone, but now she seemed to be afraid of any intrusion into her narrowed world. Before, she used to ask me to phone her friends and get them to visit her in the hospital more often. She complained that when someone is ill, people start avoiding them.

‘If you have nothing more to give people, they go.’

But now she asked me to make sure there were fewer visitors. And if someone did come, she said nothing most of the time, waiting for her visitor to leave.

During the final days she and I didn’t talk, just spoke a few insignificant words to each other now and then.

One time she handed me a sealed envelope and said she had thought out all the arrangements for her funeral and written down what I should do.

‘Only promise me you won’t spend money on anything unnecessary! Don’t waste your money on me. Do you promise?’

I nodded.

Mummy’s appearance had changed a lot. She was being consumed by the cancer. She dried up, shrivelled away. It became easy to turn her over in the bed. Her eyelids turned black.

She was tormented by hunger, but she couldn’t eat anything any longer, every time she took food her body sent it all back. At first Mummy was ashamed of these fits of vomiting and didn’t want me to see her like that, but later she didn’t have the strength to be ashamed. I sat beside her and stroked her shoulder, and she groaned from the pain of the nauseous spasms that had just ended and the fear that she would start vomiting again soon.

I tried all the time to keep her hopes up, assuring her that everything would be all right, and she seemed to me to be clinging to this hope. But one of her friends met me in the corridor and said:

‘Sasha, your mum knows all about herself, she knows she hasn’t got long left to live, and she asked me not to tell you, so you wouldn’t be upset.’

She burst into tears:

‘Poor thing, she’s suffering so much. Oh, let it be quick!’

Mummy complained:

‘If death comes to everyone, what did I do to make mine so painful? Why do I have to suffer so much? I’d like to live out my last days with dignity, but what dignity can there be with pain like this! And the most terrible thing is not that I don’t even look human any more, but I’ve stopped caring.’

She was afraid of the nights and demanded a double dose of painkiller. Sometimes she asked for more medication only half an hour after her regular injection.

I wanted so much to do something for her, but there was nothing I could do, apart from insignificant little things: adjust the pillow yet again or warm the cold bedpan before slipping it under her.

Afterwards I went home and left her alone.

One day, only just before the end, Mummy started asking me to stay with her that night. She’d heard a conversation in the corridor and thought they were talking about her, saying she wouldn’t last until morning. She pleaded so desperately that I arranged it with the duty doctor and stayed with her, although in the morning I had to get up early and go to work. They made up a creaky old bed for me, one that a perfectly healthy person couldn’t get to sleep on, let alone a sick patient.

Mummy was restless, she couldn’t lie still, and I gave her cold compresses all the time.

She was suffering badly, I squeezed her hand and remembered how we had her cat put to sleep. The cat had been ill for a long time, and when we brought her to the vet, he looked at her and said:

‘Why are you tormenting a dumb animal like this?’

There was no hope of recovery and we decided to have the cat put down. Mummy took her in her arms, and she was given the injection. The cat curled up and started purring. I could see how fine and cosy she felt, falling asleep in loving arms.

And even then I thought how strange it was that we pity cats and help put an end to their suffering, and we pity people but do everything we can to prolong theirs.

It seemed to me that Mummy and I ought to say something important to each other that night, but we only said the usual things.

I was feeling very sleepy.

So we didn’t say any of the most important things to each other then.

They were giving her strong injections to help her sleep, but they had stopped working.

She had already lost her voice and she whispered:

‘When the pain is this bad, I’m not human any more.’

I saw the nurses leaning down, trying to understand what she was saying, but then drawing back from her breath, as if they could breathe the cancer into themselves.

Mummy whispered more and more often:

‘Let it be soon.’

The last time I saw her she was in a very bad way, she was groaning, her mouth had gone dry, beads of sweat had sprung out on her forehead. Nausea and vomiting even from a sip of tea. Hoarse, laboured breathing. The tumours were squeezing her out of her body.

They called me at work and told me to come, my mother was dying. I called my father.

He didn’t pick up the phone for a long time. When he answered, I realised at once that he was drunk, although it was only midday.

‘Bunny! Guess what I found yesterday!’

‘Daddy, listen, this is important!’

‘Felt boots! With galoshes! Like brand-new!’

‘Daddy, Mummy’s dying!’

I told him to come to the hospital. He mumbled something.

There was no tram for a long time. I had to wait and then take one that was packed.

At the railway station my father clambered into the tram, he didn’t notice me. I almost called to him, but he was already arguing with someone. I felt ashamed – I didn’t want everyone to know that he was my father.

It looked as if he had drunk more after our conversation on the phone.

I hadn’t seen him for a long time and was amazed at how much he had aged and let himself go. Sunken, unshaven cheeks, sprouting grey stubble. An absurd knitted cap and a dirty coat with one button torn off. And all the time he kept repeating, loudly enough for the whole tram to hear:

‘So she’s dying, is she? Well, aren’t we dying? Riding along in a tram! But where are we going? The same place, that’s where! Big deal, she’s dying! The swimming bunny!’

Then he accosted someone:

‘What are you looking at me like that for? The felt boots and galoshes? Aha, really practical, they are! Old tat, of course, but the frost kills the stink!’

He started gabbling something about galoshes and chocolate.

I couldn’t bring myself to go over to him. He noticed me after we got off at the hospital. Dashed towards me and tried to kiss me. I shoved him away.

‘Just take a look at yourself!’

He plodded after me, muttering something resentfully under his breath.

We were too late, Mummy had already gone.

I felt as if something had happened that I could never put right. Not because Mummy was gone – during her illness I had been prepared for that.

For all those months I had felt guilty about her, I don’t know why, perhaps because she was going and I was staying. And I thought this feeling would pass off if I was with her at the moment she died. I wanted to be with her and hold her hand. But I got there too late.

She was with me all the way through her illness, but she died all alone. That was what hurt me most of all.

For the first time in many months her face looked calm and at peace. Her suffering was at an end.

My father stood over her and cried, with his hands over his face. I noticed that they were covered with pigment spots and thought his liver must be in poor condition.

It was good that I had to deal with the documents and the funeral arrangements – all that business connected with a death takes your mind off things.

In the evening I sat by the phone with Mummy’s address book and called her friends and acquaintances to tell them she had died. It was a strange feeling, every time I called someone new, she seemed to come back to life again and only die after I said:

‘My mother’s died.’

It was all so strange. The wreath, the ribbons, the coffin. The motionless body, out of which I had appeared in the world. Once upon a time I was inside her, and I wasn’t anywhere else. And now she was inside me. And she wasn’t anywhere else.