You were the first to tell me I was beautiful. Well, apart from Daddy, of course. But I didn’t believe him. I believed Mummy. She called me her ‘fright-face’.
She used to wear her rippling, shimmering Chinese silk gown with the sky-blue dragons. We would pull our feet up on the old, deep sofa, make ourselves comfortable and whisper together. We talked about everything in the world, she told me about everything. How I was born, for instance – I didn’t want to come out, and they had to do a Caesarean section. I touched the hard scar on her stomach with my fingers and it was strange to think that was where I’d come from. It still feels strange even now.
And we talked about the first time too.
‘It has to happen beautifully,’ she said. ‘And only with someone who is worthy of it. The most important thing is you mustn’t regret that it happened. Perhaps you won’t marry him, perhaps you won’t stay together afterwards – anything can happen, but you mustn’t regret that night.’
I believed in ‘fright-face’ more than what Daddy said, even though she was always constantly abusing me and kept saying I had no taste, I dressed badly, I made conversation badly, even laughed badly. I always felt guilty with her. I could never even imagine that she was being too strict or unfair with me. He saw the virtues in me and she saw the shortcomings.
Daddy never even slapped me once, but I got the belt and slaps from her right through my childhood. One day they were arguing, and I came up to her from behind to put my arms round her, but she was taking a drink to wash down a tablet and I accidentally jogged her elbow. She spilt the water on herself, then went for me and started beating me and couldn’t stop. Daddy pulled me away.
They used to argue because of me.
Daddy shouted:
‘Why are you always picking on her?’
She answered:
‘What will she grow up like otherwise?’
She went away somewhere for a few days and when she got back she kicked up a fuss because everything was a mess. The next time I tidied everything up before she got back, made everything all bright and shiny, but she was still dissatisfied, in fact even more. Maybe she sensed that Daddy and I could get on perfectly well without her, that when she was away life at home carried on quite normally.
She always kept repeating something she’d read somewhere about life not being a novel, that it wasn’t all a bowl of cherries, in life you couldn’t just do what you wanted and, in general, we weren’t put on earth just to have a good time.
She didn’t like it when I went out, she didn’t like my girlfriends, she hated Yanka. She thought everything bad about me came from her.
Daddy always stood up for me:
‘But she needs friends!’
It all ended with Mummy crying and saying:
‘You always take her side!’
She could feel that there was more between me and Daddy than there was between them. Probably both of us felt that I meant more to my father than she did.
One day I realised exactly what it was I didn’t like about her. She was a woman who had everything right in her life – everything exactly as she wanted it – and it simply couldn’t be any other way. She had always known what she wanted and how to get it. It was the same with furniture and with people. In school she was a star pupil. Her women friends were all miserable, she was always telling them how to live their lives. And inside she despised them because they couldn’t live the right way, because everything about their lives was wrong. And she always stuck photos of our holidays in albums that were logbooks of happiness. She wanted to make me and my father fit her photo-albums. But it didn’t work.
Offers for my father to play parts in films became less and less frequent. He took it hard and went on binges. He didn’t drink at home, but he came home drunk more and more often.
I ask him:
‘Daddy, are you drunk?’
And he answers:
‘No, bunny, I’m pretending.’
They quarrelled as if they didn’t know that angry words can never be taken back and forgotten. They didn’t know that people quarrel with all their strength but only make up half-heartedly, so every time some love is sliced away and there’s less and less of it. Or they did know, but they couldn’t help themselves.
I used to lock myself away from them and simply die from this non-love.
The worst thing of all was the mirror. That non-face, those non-hands. Those non-breasts, untouched even by a suntan, promising to exist, but still not arriving.
And I couldn’t understand how it could have happened that Mummy was a beauty and I was like this.
I used to think how strange it was that this thing was called me.
And what a misfortune it was to be this.
Yanka had already had her first love ages ago, and her second, and her third, and I already believed that I would never have anything. I used to howl silently, staring at the wallpaper.
And then he appeared in our home. He and Daddy were friends from their young days. And now he was a film director and he took Daddy to play a part in his film.
He had ginger hair, and his eyelashes were fiery-red, long and thick. Like ginger pine needles. His hair was monstrously thick in general. If it was hot at the table, he unbuttoned his shirt and rolled up his sleeves, and I could see powerful biceps, covered in freckles. And red wisps stuck out through the open shirt collar on his chest.
I remember he said he’d just got back from the seaside, but his fair skin didn’t tan, it only turned pink.
He started coming often.
Daddy showed me a photograph of them fooling about, hanging upside down on a crossbar, I looked at those little boys and even then I thought: before he became a father, was my daddy already my daddy? And was that ginger-haired boy already him? And who was that?
He was an old bachelor, and Mummy and Daddy were always joking that they ought to marry him off. Once he said:
‘Once you’ve seen one woman’s breasts, you’ve seen them all.’
But Mummy objected that, far from it, women’s breasts were like snowflakes, no pair was like any other, and they laughed. I found all this strange and unpleasant.
He used to call me Sasha-the-smasher. I felt terribly self-conscious when he was there. Or rather, I divided in two again with him, but the one who was afraid was here and the other one, who wasn’t afraid of anything, used to disappear at the most inconvenient moments.
He would drop into my room, glance at the cover of my book and ask:
‘How’s Troy getting on? Still holding out? Or have they taken it already?’
I plucked up my courage and asked what he wanted to make a film about. He answered:
‘Well, for instance, you’ve been drinking kefir and you’ve got a little white kefir moustache left on your face, and outside in the street – they’ve just written about it in the Evening News – a bus has run into the stop where a lot of people were waiting for it, and they’ve been killed. And there’s a direct connection between the little kefir moustache and these deaths. And between everything else in the world too.’
I fell head over heels in love with him.
When he was visiting I used to creep out surreptitiously into the hallway to take a sniff at his long coat, white scarf and hat. He used some eau de cologne that I didn’t know and the smell was ravishing – astringent and manly.
I couldn’t sleep. Now I was dying of love. I wept into my pillow all night, night after night. Every day I wrote in my diary: ‘I love you, I love you, I love you …’ – I covered pages and pages.
It was so painful. I didn’t know what to do with it all.
Mummy saw everything and she suffered with me. She didn’t know how to help. She hugged me and comforted me, stroked my head as if I was a little girl and tried to bring me to my senses.
‘You’re still nothing but a child. You have an intense need to be loved and to give love. This is all wonderful. But who can you love? Your boyfriends have only just stopped playing wit
h toy soldiers. That’s the reason for all these tears cried into the pillow, the envy, the fantasy, the daydreams, the resentment against life, the anger with the whole world, with the people dearest of all to you. As if the people dearest to you are to blame for everything. And then you start inventing everything for yourself.’
She tried to convince me that it was too early for love, that none of it was real yet. I blubbered and asked:
‘And what is real?’
She said:
‘Well, like me and Daddy.’
Daddy used to come into my room, sit on the edge of the bed and smile guiltily for some reason. As if he was to blame. As if it was some serious illness and there was nothing he could do to help me. He sighed and said:
‘Bunny, I love you very much. So why isn’t that enough?’
It used to make me feel so sorry for them!
I started writing him letters. I sent them every day. I didn’t know what to write, I just sent whatever was a part of me that day in the envelope – a tram ticket, a little feather, a shopping list, a piece of thread, a blade of grass, a fireman beetle.
He answered several times. He wrote something humorous and polite. And then he started sending me stupid things too: a broken shoelace, offcuts of cinema film. Once I took a paper napkin out of the envelope, and wrapped inside it was his tooth that had been pulled out the day before. On the napkin he wrote that if it had really been love on my side, he hoped that now it would definitely pass off. The tooth really was horrible. But I took it and stuck it in my cheek.
One time he came and spoke about something for ages with Mummy and Daddy behind a closed door, then came into my room. I stood at the window as if I was paralysed. He wanted to come closer, but I pulled the curtain shut and hid behind it.
He said: ‘Sasha-the-smasher! My poor little lovesick girl! How can you possibly fall in love with such a monster? Listen, there’s something important I have to explain to you, although I’m sure you already understand everything anyway behind that curtain. You don’t love me at all, you simply love. These are two quite different things.’
And he left.
He didn’t come to our place when I was there any more after that. And he didn’t answer my letters.
One day I played truant from school. I just decided I wouldn’t go – and I didn’t. I wandered about in the rain, not even noticing that it was pouring from the heavens, the way that cows don’t notice rain.
I was holding his tooth in my fist in my pocket.
The only thing I remember is the smell of a burned rubbish bin that got stuck in my nostrils. And a sugar-coated pair of newly-weds in the mud-splattered window of a photographer’s shop.
I was chilled to the bone and soaked to the skin. I trudged back home.
I open the door of the apartment and there’s someone’s huge umbrella standing open on the floor.
I catch a familiar scent in the hallway. A long coat, a white scarf and a hat are hanging on the hallstand.
I hear water running in the bathroom.
The bedroom door is open. Mummy glances out with her hair in a mess. Pulling on her Chinese robe with the dragons over her naked body. She asked in fright:
‘Sasha? What’s happened? What are you doing here?’
Today the chief of chiefs and commander of commanders summons me and says:
‘Sit down, write an order.’
I sit down and write:
‘Brothers and sisters! Soldier boys! Contractors, peacekeepers and assassins! The fatherland is disintegrating like blotting paper in the rain! There is nowhere to retreat! Not a single step backwards! Whoah, take a look at that! Did you see the butt she has on her? No, not that one! She’s already turned the corner. Cross that out about the butt. Right, where were we? Ah, yes! Right then. Wigs to be woven into a hairy braid from the centre of the crown of the head and thereafter plaited into a braid woven with a ribbon. No toupees to be worn. All men to arrange their temples in identical fashion, as is presently established in the regiment, to one long pigeon-wing, but brushed out and backcombed smartly so as not to droop like an icicle, and in frosty weather to be made wider so as to cover the ear. This drill will preserve the men from the idleness that is the source of all soldiers’ wanton antics. Which seems reason enough to keep a soldier practising it constantly. Boots to be of each man’s correct size, neither too broad nor too narrow, such that in frosty weather straw or fibrous material may be inserted into them, nor too short, such as not to chafe the toes in walking, owing to which a soldier on the march often cannot keep pace with the fleet of foot, but to sit straight on the foot. Also to be kept always faultlessly repaired, cleaned and greased and changed daily from one foot to the other so as not to wear out and not to damage the feet during marching and walking. Shaving shall not be neglected. For the slower of wit I explain: the wearing of a beard may connote defeat in hand-to-hand combat, because it is easy to grab hold of it and defeat the enemy. We march out tomorrow. Our road is long. The night is short. The clouds are sleeping. First we shall march through the friendly kingdom of Prester John, whose great might is the talk of the whole world. It says here in the Evening News that he defeated Genghis Khan himself in a war of attrition. This terrain is difficult and most savagely savage. I most stringently recommend all gentlemen commanding regiments and battalions to expound and impress on their men that as they pass through the townships, villages and taverns they must not wreak even the slightest devastation. Local inhabitants are to be calmly spared and in no wise offended in order not to harden the hearts of the people and thereby earn the vicious reputation of marauders. Houses are not to be run into, enemies begging for mercy are to be spared, unarmed men are not to be killed, women are not be fought with, minors are not to be touched. To save the bullet, with every shot every soldier must aim at his own enemy, in order to kill him. The blessings of the heavenly kingdom on those of us who are killed, and to those who live – glory! Fear-mongers and cowards must be eliminated on the spot. Follow me into the attack, hurrah! Press on, press on! Attack! Fix bayonets! Rifles to the fore! Stab, shoot, finish them! Drop them where they stand! We’ll kill, drop, capture the lot of them! Chase, stab! Slash, beat! Hoik, skrike, dreck, doom, hell!’
He broke off to get his breath back, unfastened the button of his collar and walked over to the window. Blotted the sweat off his forehead with the curtain. Took a cigarette case out of his pocket. Tapped a papyrosa on the lid. Broke a match on the sodden box. Then another. Lit up with the third. Took a deep drag. Breathed a thick stream of smoke out through the open window frame.
For a brief moment he had the feeling that all this had happened before: this ink-stained youngster who reminded him so much of his own dead son had sat in this room in exactly the same way. With the milk not yet dry on his lips, and women still seeming mysterious. That long-cold teapot with the broken spout had existed before. Everything was exactly the same as then: this wallpaper with the pattern of small red flowers, like a rash – as if it had caught chickenpox from the draught. This bundle of dried fish hanging on the window latch threaded through their eyes. That man who had just walked past, shuffling his feet, with both of his jacket pockets weighed down with bottles. That sign opposite, ‘ARMY STORES’, which someone had altered with mud, so that it read ‘AMY SCORES’. From somewhere round the corner he heard the rattle of a child clattering a stick along a picket fence.
Running his hand over his chin, he heard the stubble rustling. That definitely had happened before – him running his hand over it and it rustling.
He reflected that the secret of déjà vu was probably that in the book of life, of course, all this was only written once. But it came back to life when someone read a page that had already been read before. And then it all lived again – the stick on the picket fence and the fish that smelled from close up, hanging on the window latch, and the rustling of this stubble and the teapot full of cold, strong tea, and women were still mysterious.
So it was simply that
someone was reading these lines at the moment – that was the entire secret of déjà vu.
He flicked his butt out through the window and it went spinning through the air.
He sucked bitter, cold tea out of the broken spout of the teapot. Wiped his lips on his sleeve.
Carried on dictating.
‘In the third place, and perhaps most important of all – do not kill without need. Remember – they are human beings like us. This will be tough, lads. And we’ll have to go a long way, to the ends of the earth. Even further than Alexander the Great went, he only reached the border, where he ordered a marble column to be erected with a line of verse written on it: “I, Alexander, did reach this point”. You don’t believe me? I’ll show you it. The cacti there have prickly pricked-up ears and the people are naked-wise. Alexander the Great was greatly surprised when he saw them and said: “Ask for whatever you wish, I will give it to you!” They replied to him: “Grant us immortality, which we desire more than anything, and we do not need any other riches.” But Alexander said to them: “I am mortal, how can I grant you immortality?” And they said to him: “If you consider yourself mortal, then why do you roam and wander through the whole world, doing so much evil?” See what a smart lot they are. Turn your back for a moment and you’ll get a bullet in the back of your head. First we’ll travel by railway and then by sea. And we’ll know we’ve arrived as soon as we see people with dogs’ heads. And when we carry oars, they’ll ask what kind of spades we’re carrying. In that place there are also public lupanaria with effeminate men and innumerable other abominations, so always keep your guard up! For us peace is a process, for them it is a result. They believe knowledge is remembrance. Everyone knows his own future, but he still lives his own life. So it turns out that lovers love each other even before they find out about each other, get to know each other and get talking. And they don’t pray for themselves, because we ourselves don’t know what we’re good for. Their gods are simple, but there are as many of them as there are birds, trees, clouds, puddles, sunsets and us. Concerning the existence of other worlds they are doubtful, but consider it madness to assert that apart from the visible nothing else exists for, they say, there is no nonexistence, either in the world or beyond it. They acknowledge two primary physical elements of all earthly things: the sun-father and the earth-mother. They regard the air as a rarefied section of the sky and all fire as deriving from the sun. The sea is the earth’s sweat and a link connecting the air and the earth, as blood connects the body and the spirit in living creatures. The world is an immense living creature and we live in its belly in the same way as worms live in our bellies. However, whether a worm is happy, we do not know, but a man is born, lives and dies happy, only he keeps forgetting this all the time. These naked-wisemen have unscrewed all the nuts off the rails. And not even for sinkers for fishing lines. Blast them for wreckers! The railway lines spoil the feng shui, you see! All these scumbags are to be exterminated mercilessly. Like mad dogs! Wipe the entire pack of these rotten hounds off the face of the earth! Remember, someone has to do the dirty work too. Men! We will avenge ourselves for our comrades and friends in battle, who are still alive, see them there, smiling among us, but very soon now. Most important of all, remember we have truth on our side and they have untruth! But perhaps vice versa. For is not light the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light? And does the Sun not strive to burn up the Earth, and not at all to generate plants and people? In this life there are no victors, all are the vanquished. Especially since when you stab them with a bayonet, they’ll still think like this: “To be concerned about what will happen to you after death is like asking yourself what will happen to your fist when you open it, or to a leg bent at the knee when you unbend it.” And most important of all, my lads, take good care of yourselves! Don’t fire until the order is given! Do you remember Pythagoras’s hippopotamus? Ah, you scatterbrains! You did it in school! It just flew in one ear and out the other! It’s pointless teaching fools like you anything! The only thing on your mind is skirts. What did Pythagoras teach us? Pythagoras taught us that when your destined time comes to die, as soon as your soul leaves behind the sublunary world and the light of the sun, direct your steps to the left through the sacred meadows and groves of Persephoneia. And when they ask who you are and where you’ve come from, you should reply: “I am a goat kid and I fell in the milk.” Well, now I think that’s all. Ah yes, one more thing. Please don’t spit in the bowl with the general staff clerk’s porridge. Just leave the holy fool in peace, will you! What if he does scribble out death notices with his little pen? Who’s he bothering? He doesn’t want to pray for the tyrant-tsar? Well, who does?’
The Light and the Dark Page 6
