The Light and the Dark

by Shishkin, Mikhail

At first he taught us botany and I took such a liking to him that I was always collecting herbariums, but later I decided to become an ornithologist, like him.

  It was very funny the way he used to lament the disappearance of various plants and birds.

  He stands there at the blackboard and shouts at us, as if we’re to blame for something.

  ‘Where’s the shady crocus? Where’s the weak sedge? Where’s the caldesia? And the summer snowflake? And Dubyansky’s cornflower? Well, say something, will you? And the birds? Where are the birds? Where’s Steller’s sea eagle? Where’s the bearded vulture-eagle? Where’s the glossy ibis? I’m asking you! And the crested ibis! And the marbled teal! And the shikra! Where’s the shikra?’

  And when he asked this, he himself looked like some sort of bird with ruffled feathers. All the teachers had nicknames, and he was called Shikra.

  Do you know what I used to dream about? About how some day sooner or later I would meet my father and he would say:

  ‘Right, show me your muscles!’

  I would bend my arm and tense my muscles. My dad would put his hand round my biceps and shake his head in surprise, as if to say: ‘My, my, aren’t you something!’

  But I understood all about the invisible world when Granny got a job for the summer working at a dacha for blind children and she took me with her.

  Ever since I was little I’d been used to her having all sorts of blind things at home. For instance, she would lay out a game of patience with special cards with holes pricked in the upper right corner. For my birthday she gave me a chess set, a special one, with the figures all different sizes – the white ones bigger than the black ones. And she whispered to Mum, but I heard her:

  ‘They don’t play there anyway.’

  It was strange at first at that dacha, but then I actually got to like it – it felt as if I’d become invisible.

  There’s a boy with a watering can in his hand, feeling the kerb of the path gingerly with his foot, and I walk past him and he can’t see me. But that was only the way it seemed to me. Often they would call out:

  ‘Who’s there?’

  It’s actually very difficult to hide from a blind person.

  In the morning they had P.T. and after that the whole day was study and games. At first it felt odd to see them running out for P.T. in a chain, each one holding on to the shoulder of the one in front.

  There were rabbits living in a cage in the yard, and they looked after them. It was a great tragedy one morning when the cages were found empty – the rabbits had been stolen.

  They did a lot of singing there. For some reason blind people are thought to possess exceptionally keen hearing and they’re all supposed to be born musicians. It’s nonsense, of course.

  Every day they did modelling. One little girl modelled a bird sitting on a branch like a person sitting on a chair. I remember how amazed I was that in their lessons they had to dip their hands in the aquarium and feel the fish. I thought that was really great! Afterwards, when there was no one else in the room, I went over to the aquarium, closed my eyes, rolled up my sleeve and lowered my hand into the water. When I touched the beautiful goldfish, it felt slippery and disgusting. That was the moment when I suddenly felt afraid, genuinely afraid, that I might go blind some day.

  But being blind wasn’t frightening for them. A sightless person is afraid of going deaf. He’s afraid of darkness in his ears.

  Blindness was basically invented by the sighted.

  For a blind person, things are what they are, he lives with that, that’s his starting-point, not something that doesn’t exist. You have to learn how to suffer over something that doesn’t exist. We can’t see the colour to the right of violet in the spectrum, but that doesn’t bother us. If we feel unhappy for some reason, that’s not it.

  Granny pitied all of them, and they clung to her. I sometimes thought she loved them more than she did me. It’s nonsense of course, but I wanted her to stroke the back of my head like that too, hug me against her immense breasts and sigh tenderly:

  ‘There now, my little sparrow!’

  She never used to thrash them with a withy, but I got plenty of that.

  I always wanted to ask her about my father, but I was afraid to.

  She didn’t tell me very much at all. I learned one family story from her when I grew up a bit. Her own granny had a child when she was still a young girl. She claimed she had conceived without sin, but no one believed her. They hadn’t heard about parthenogenesis in those days. The ice on the river had just started to break up. She went down there one night and put her little bundle on an ice floe.

  I remember I couldn’t get that picture out of my head for a long time – night, the ice floe drifting along and that little bundle squealing.

  But I was consoled when I read Marcus Aurelius many years later. The way he put things there was like this: imagine a piglet is being carried on its way to be sacrificed, the piglet’s struggling and squealing – but what is it squealing for?

  You know, every living creature and every thing struggles and squeals like that every moment. You just have to hear that squealing of life in everything, in every tree, in every person on the street, in every puddle, in every murmur and rustle.

  I want so much to cuddle up tight against you and tell you something terribly stupid and terribly precious.

  I remember the first time my parents took me to the seaside – perhaps it wasn’t the very first time, but it was the first time I can recall the booming of the breakers drawing me in and grabbing me in its fist and carrying me like that for the whole summer – held tight in its fist.

  I remember so clearly how we started walking down through the crooked little streets, with the sea shouldering aside the horizon as it rose higher and higher, all covered in little pricks of sunlight, and the way it breathed its scent of salt, seaweed, oil, wood-rot and vastness straight into my nose.

  I ran out onto the jetty and it exploded into breaking surf – and immediately I got a wet slap on the face from the sea.

  The seafront is paved with wooden boards, transparent to the spray, like holes in the sky, with reflections of seagulls in the planks.

  A breakwater white with bird droppings.

  Seaweed like tattered rags.

  A log scoured smooth by the sea.

  A sail lying low, flush with a wave.

  Every day the beach, with people airing their armpits.

  What happiness to run through the shallow water, raising clouds of spray that glitters in the sun!

  The gravel is incandescent, sizzling in the foam. The waves beat against my ankles and pull me back into the deep with them, they clutch at my legs, trying to tumble me over and drag me away.

  Nimble black flies skip about on clumps of eelgrass thrown up by a recent storm. Waves creep up skew-wise, sending the startled little flies darting up into the air again and again.

  Pieces of bottle glass are the sea’s sugar candies – it has already given them a good sucking and spat them out. I gather them up and give them to my parents as a treat.

  Daddy starts building a castle with me out of little stones and sand, we build walls and towers, he gets carried away, flies into a real passion. I decorate the towers with pieces of broken shells and flags made from sweet wrappers, and he shouts at me not to interfere. I resent that – it’s my castle he’s building, isn’t it, for me? Then suddenly a wave comes along and wrecks everything. I burst into tears and Daddy’s really upset too. Then in his despair he starts smashing everything that’s left. And I join in. We skip about on the remains of our castle, laughing happily again. He rakes me into his arms and drags me into the sea, we fall into the breaking waves. He clowns about, diving in and folding his hands together before every dive, as if he’s praying.

  The water’s so transparent, I can see the scarlet nails on my toes – I painted them with Mummy’s varnish. I pinch my nose shut and duck under the water, head and all, Daddy holds me, I swim, my ears are blocked, there�
�s an abyss of turquoise below me, the stones down there on the bottom are overgrown with woolly fleece that stirs about. I surface and the booming surrounds me again.

  We swim as far as the wooden jetty. Over the long sea years a pillar has sprouted a beard of seaweed and frightens away the small fry with it.

  A broad hairy back swims past.

  I keep wanting to get as far away from the shore as possible, go out deep – Daddy doesn’t let me, I start ducking him, I grab his shoulders, pull his ears and his hair – he fights me off, grabs hold of the slimy pillar, surfaces and snorts, drops of water glitter on his eyelashes, he’s laughing. We climb out onto the jetty and walk over the boards, trying not to get splinters in our feet from the rough wood corroded by salt. We run to Mummy, both of us shivering, wrap ourselves in towels with our teeth chattering.

  Daddy keeps asking me:

  ‘What time is it?’

  He’s given me a little watch – not a real one, a toy, with the hands painted on. I look at it proudly and reply:

  ‘Ten to two.’

  The watch always says ten to two.

  The salt smarts on my skin in the sun.

  Mummy is sunbathing on a broad towel, she slips off her straps so her shoulders will tan evenly and asks Daddy to unfasten the clasp on her bra. A man with sturdy footballer’s thighs is lying on the gravel nearby and he looks at her.

  Mummy pretends not to notice anything around her.

  The man lifts himself up on his elbows to peep in there, where the towel is pressed down by her round, heavy, wide-set breasts.

  I still didn’t understand anything then.

  Or rather, I already understood everything.

  My father catches these glances. The gratification of ownership shows in his eyes. He likes the feeling that he has something others dream about.

  Several times we saw a very strange couple on the beach. Young, handsome, in love. She was missing one leg below the knee. I remember her sunbathing with her legs spread apart – ten to two. The whole beach watched them when he took her in his arms and carried her into the sea. They splashed about and squealed, swam a long way out, all the way to the buoys. When they came back and clambered out of the water, she laughed and tore herself out of his arms and hopped to her towel on one leg. People gazed at them, transfixed either by horror or envy.

  Straight out of the water, I throw myself on Mummy. Icy cold, with wet sand sticking all over me, I climb up on her, shuffling my chilly knickers across her hot back. Mummy squeals, flings me off and gets ready to go for a swim – in the same painstaking way she does everything. She fastens her bra without hurrying, twisting her arms behind her back. She straightens her straps, puts on her white rubber cap, takes a long time tucking her hair under it. She walks down to the water slowly, as if she’s checking every step of the way. I skip round her, showering her with spray, she squeals and shouts for me to stop, tries to slap me on the bottom. In the bathing cap her head is suddenly very small.

  I remember her once squatting down in the water, raking it towards her with her boneless hands – under the water arms and legs looked boneless – and suddenly in the transparent water I saw that she was peeing. That seemed very strange to me then, but I was too frightened to say anything.

  She used to swim very far out and her rubber cap bobbed up and down on the waves like a ping-pong ball.

  Daddy and I sat in the breaking waves and watched Mummy. Everything was so wonderful! I sit there, stirring the water around with my toes, the waves move my legs apart. All around me there’s nothing but happy people, happy voices shouting, happy waves, happy legs.

  It was only later I realised that my father couldn’t swim at all. Mummy used to go for long swims, and every time I started worrying about her, but Daddy only laughed.

  ‘What could happen to our swimming bunny? Nothing will ever sink her!’

  There’s Mummy getting out and drying herself off – and that man with the footballer’s thighs watches her again as she dabs with the towel, blotting the swimsuit over her breasts, on her stomach, under her arms, between her legs.

  Mummy lies down on her stomach, slips off her bra straps again and reads a book. I sit down beside her and start plaiting her hair.

  As the sea water dries out, it leaves little crystals of salt on her skin.

  Seagulls scud by above us and for me they’re plaiting the wind’s hair.

  Then I lie down at Mummy’s side and close my eyes. The rustling of the waves is like someone endlessly turning pages.

  And I fall asleep happy.

  I’m woken by thunder. Darkness all around and sharp, cold gusts of wind. The deluge is about to start at any moment. Everybody runs off the beach. The first drops strike my bare body as if someone’s throwing pebbles.

  We grab our things and run. The wind is so strong, it tips the deckchairs over. Semi-naked people dash along the beach, trying to catch their parasols, towels and skirts that have gone flying away. The sea is already grey, restless, driving in tumultuous waves. We just manage to run to our house before the deluge begins. I get into the shower with Mummy – she unravels my plaits to wash the salt out of my hair. I snuggle against her cold skin, it’s puckered up into little goose pimples.

  Afterwards I sit on the sofa, wrapped up in a blanket, and wait for Daddy, who has promised to read me a book, and he’s getting washed in the shower and singing some aria or other.

  Papa was an orchestra conductor then.

  I didn’t think that was anything so very special.

  He told me how his father, my grandfather the violinist, used to rehearse at home, and when he was a boy Daddy used to take two sticks and repeat the movements while his father played the violin.

  I remember when I was still very little and loved to spin round on the adjustable stool, Daddy used to play the piano with me: clusters of bass notes sustained by the pedal represented dark storm clouds. Abrupt high sounds, clipped short by the pedal, melted in the air like scattered snowflakes. And summer rain was made with just the index fingers – one hand on the black keys, one on the white – skipping as fast as could be from one sound to the next. He had a broad hand – it spanned one and a half octaves.

  Another thing I remember is how he once opened the lid, showed me the instrument inside and said:

  ‘See how strangely it’s all arranged – in everything complicated and incomprehensible there’s something simple: all we’re doing is tapping away with felt hammers.’

  He forced me to practise, and in the end I came to hate our Rënish piano.

  I practise at home, I play endless scales and arpeggios, and he tells me:

  ‘Don’t frown!’

  The tension made me develop a wrinkle between my eyebrows – exactly like him.

  When my father wasn’t there, I used to cheat. I put a book on top of the music on the music stand and read it, playing endless exercises without looking. One day he caught me doing this and he swore terribly. He started running round the apartment, shouting that I had a tin ear and what had he done to deserve this punishment. He said that nature takes a break with the children of geniuses. That set me choking on my tears and I started playing even worse. He had never shouted at me before. It was as if someone had taken my daddy away and put someone else in his place. I couldn’t understand it then. But he’d got into the role and simply couldn’t get out of it.

  While I was playing he squatted down to see if my hand was slack, a false note made him shudder and groan as if he had bitten his tongue and once, when I thought he wouldn’t notice and I played a trill with my second and third fingers instead of the fourth and fifth, as required, he got so furious, he almost beat me with our tattered copy of Czerny.

  Eventually Mummy glanced into the room with a wet towel on her head and demanded silence. I don’t know if she was really suffering from a migraine or it was simply her way of rescuing me.

  I remember him coming back home late in the evening, furious, blowing his nose and complaining th
at he had been struggling with a cold in the head all the way through the concert. And upset because he had played the wrong piece for the encore. Even his tailcoat, which Mummy hung up to dry on the balcony, just couldn’t calm down, it carried on conducting.

  And I remember how he used to rehearse at home, in his underpants, to a record of some symphony or other that he put on. I watched through a crack in the door as he conducted the table and chairs, the bookshelves, the window. The sideboard was the percussion section. The carpet on the wall was the wind instruments. The cups on the table with the breakfast that hadn’t been cleared away yet were the violins. He jabbed his baton at the sofa and it responded instantly with the bass voices. He darted his fingers towards the table lamp – and a distant horn started playing. He waved his arms and writhed about so hard that drops of sweat ran down his face like hail and flew off his nose.

  Mummy glanced in and said he would do better to change the burnt-out bulb in the chandelier, but Daddy just rolled his eyes up and kept on shaking his head about, then slammed the door right in her face.

  At the end he grabbed all the sounds together in his fist under the chandelier and strangled them.

  When he wasn’t at home, without asking permission I used to take the case in which his director’s baton was kept, put a record on at full volume and start conducting for myself. I used to go out on the balcony and conduct our yard, and the nearby houses, and the puddles, and the dog with its leg cocked up against a tree, and the clouds. But the bit I liked most was strangling the music in my fist at the end.

  Then I would sit down at the piano and start hammering out Mendelssohn’s ‘Song Without Words’ once again, always fluffing it in exactly the same places.

  Later on Daddy became an Arctic pilot, and I liked that better.

  His long black raglan coat had such a glorious smell!

  The fur flying-suit, the high fur boots, the helmet with a microphone made him seem like a completely different person. I used to take the high boots, squeeze both my legs into one of them and hop around the apartment like that – like those people with one foot that he had told me about.