It seemed so strange to me then that I ought to have pity on Mum for something and not the other way round.
I never could forgive her for that slap.
Once he went out alone and fell, he came back all bloody and dirty, with his shirt torn. Mum burst into tears and rummaged in boxes, looking for sticking plaster and iodine, while my stepfather dripped blood on the parquet floor. I remember that I didn’t feel sorry for him at all.
On Sundays Mum strictly forbade me to wake them early and came out of the bedroom looking pleased and humming some tune, with red blotches on her neck – irritation from his stubble. It grew so fast that my stepfather sometimes shaved twice in one day, if they were going out somewhere in the evening. He didn’t need any light, he often sat in the dark and even shaved in the dark – by touch and the sound of where the razor scraped most.
Once there was a very muggy night and I was lying under the open window, unable to get to sleep. It was very quiet and I could hear every little rustle outside in the street. The window in their room was open too, and I could hear them talking, certain that I wouldn’t hear anything through two closed doors. He was purring about how firm her breasts were and her nipples were like thimbles. About how she had tropical jungles under her arms. And she liked all this, she was giggling.
How I hated him at that moment, and how I despised her!
Then the bed started creaking. I wanted to jump up and do something to spite them. But I just lay there listening to them wheezing and the sweat squelching between their stomachs. And then she started crying out in a muffled voice:
‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’
Afterwards she went dashing to the bathroom at full pelt, with a patter of bare feet.
Some way station or another. We’re stuck. I’ve decided to write another couple of lines.
Sashenka, why am I telling you about my stepfather? I don’t understand why myself. To hell with him!
I should tell you about something interesting instead.
How amusing it is that for Democritus the body is only divisible as far as the soul – the soul is the final, indivisible item, like the atom. There’s always a space between atoms. ‘If atoms touched, they would be divisible, but they are indivisible by definition: for it is only possible to touch with parts.’ That is, bodies can touch, but there will always be a gap between souls, a void.
I’m hungry.
Rooks – black and glossy, like locomotive seeds.
People are probably simply divided into those who understand how it’s possible that here I am, about to drink tea at ten minutes to two, and at the very same time the Earth is spinning, and they don’t see any contradiction in that, and those who can’t understand this at all and never will.
We’re standing at a water pump – the locomotive is about to drink its fill of water.
I sit at the window and stare at a little old shunting engine. It goes puffing past, giving off heat and sticky steam.
It’s got dark and we still haven’t budged.
It’s actually cold here at night, I have to wrap myself in my greatcoat in order not to get frozen.
There’s a little man with a hammer on a long handle walking along the rails for the full length of the train and tapping every axle box. He hears some special sound that no one but him and the axle boxes can hear.
The rails in the sidings are rusting.
Then suddenly I understand a very simple thing – that this railway halt, this lamp, the blows of the hammer on the axle boxes, the chirring of grasshoppers from the window of the telegraph office, the smell of smoke and the hot locomotive breathing steam and grease, and the call that locomotive gives, hoarse and weary – it’s all me. There is no other me anywhere and never will be. And all the assurances about eternal return are just fairy stories. Everything is only once and now. And if we start moving this moment, the railway halt will drop out of sight and I’ll disappear.
The locomotives have started bellowing for some reason. Perhaps we’ll move on soon.
Or perhaps they’re simply calling to each other, males and females, in their low chesty voices. Searching for each other in the night. Locomotive love.
And now there’s someone calling all alone and no one answering. For them, perhaps, that’s a very tender voice.
In Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov Grushenka had a special ‘curve’ of the body. I keep wondering what kind of curve that could be.
My love, I feel frightened.
In every unguarded moment the thought comes that something might happen to you. Then I take a grip on myself and I know that everything will be all right for us.
The longer you’re not here with me, the more you become a part of me. Sometimes I can’t tell where you end and I begin.
Everything that happens to me is only real because I think of how to write to you about it. And without that, even when things are good, I can’t feel any joy. I have to share it with you for it to happen.
For instance, yesterday we agreed that I would call round for Yanka, but I got there early, their classes hadn’t finished yet, and I decided to wait inside, so as not to hang about on the street, this summer’s not very summery, it’s cold and windy. They’re having repairs done, and some painters were just getting into their cradle by the entrance – one of them, with a huge unripe strawberry of a nose, winked at me and joked that he was going to pour paint on me from his bucket. I laughed. How little I really need to feel happy – if I can tell you about it afterwards. Otherwise, you know, none of it exists. Including the painter with his strawberry and his battered bucket of ochre paint.
I walked along the corridors for a while, the whole place felt uncomfortable, with a draught from the windows, the smell of paint from all sides and the stink of the toilets. I found the room from the timetable. I glanced in. They’re doing life drawing. I slip inside and sit down. No one even looks at me, they’re all busy, concentrating. Trying hard. There’s a woman standing on a dais, naked, and all those young men around her don’t even see her. Or, rather, what they see is something else.
The scraping of pencil leads in the silence, charcoal rustling over paper. One kept holding his pencil out at arm’s length and screwing up his eyes to measure some part of the woman.
The professor strode around from one student to the next, tapping on their drawings with a big door key, as if to say: That’s not right and this here is wrong. He told someone haughtily:
‘Distinguish the half-tones!’
He didn’t even glance at me.
Yanka called him ‘our Chartkov’, after Gogol’s character in The Portrait.
There was a heater on the floor in front of the model, but I could see that she was chilly – she kept sniffing all the time as if she had a cold.
And the way she was standing wasn’t really feminine either, with her arms and legs spread wide. As empty as a vase – her body was there, but she was somewhere far away.
There was something unreal about all of this – about that non-woman and those non-men.
And then that painter suddenly appeared in the window. He saw her and froze with the roller in his hands.
She noticed him too and covered herself at once. Such a womanly gesture, one hand up here, the other down there. She suddenly became real.
And I suddenly wanted so much to draw her!
At this point everybody started gathering up their things, she threw on a robe and darted behind a screen.
And again I thought that I would tell you all about it.
And there, now I have.
But today I woke up and lay there without opening my eyes, just listening to all the sounds around me, so alive and simple, part of my life – the sewing machine that has been stitching away somewhere since early in the morning, the lift droning, the door of the building slamming, a tram rattling past at the end of the street, some bird chirping through the open window – you could have looked at it and told me what it’s called.
It’s impossible to believe that
there’s war somewhere. And there always has been. And always will be. And they’re really maiming and killing people there. And death really does exist.
Believe me, my dearest, darling love, nothing will happen to you!
Received from the port as provisions for the company: sugar 19 poods, 5 pounds, 60 zolotniks; tea 23 pounds, 1/3 zolotnik; tobacco 7 poods, 35 pounds and soap 8 poods, 37 pounds.
Sick men: two sailors and 14 soldiers of Line Battalion No. 4. Water in the hold 5 inches after pumping.
The afternoon of the same day. A light wind, clear, barometer reading 30.01. Taken ashore on today’s date: crate of ammunition – 1 off; barrels of meat – 4 off; hemp 25 poods; rye flour 29 poods; grain 4 poods; crate of (illegible) – 1 off; cartridges – 2,160 pieces; cast-iron cauldrons – 3 off; ropes – 5 poods, 20 pounds; sheet iron – 50 sheets; seine net – 1 off; horse – one off and bulls – 2 off. Water in the hold at 12 o’clock – 24 inches.
Days under way – 193, days at anchor – 102.
Today the company was given maggoty meat – and it was all right, they scoffed it down. No mutiny.
After four months we reached a flat featureless island about one mile in length and disembarked from the ship to cook food for ourselves. As soon as the fire was kindled, the island sank under the water of its own accord and we ran back on board ship as fast as we could, leaving our supplies and pots behind. They told us that it wasn’t an island, but a fish by the name of Jaconious which felt the fire and sank under the water, taking our supplies with it.
Having sailed further to the north, for six days we journeyed between two mountains hidden in fog. On approaching close to an island, we saw there various rare animals and forest people without any clothes. We sailed on to an island on which there live dog-headed people and monkeys the size of a yearling calf, where we stood at anchor for five months owing to bad weather that prevented us from sailing further. The local inhabitants here have the heads and teeth and eyes of dogs. If they catch foreigners, they eat them. And the fruits here are not the same as ours.
It is very hot here. The sun burns so fiercely, I can hardly bear it. If I lower an egg into the water, before I can pull it back out it is cooked. There is much olibanum growing here, only not white, but brown. There is a lot of ambergris here, they have bombazine and lots of other goods. Huge elephants are born here, and also the unicorn beast, the parrot bird, the ebony tree, the red sandalwood tree, Indian nuts, cloves, the Brazil tree, cinnamon, pepper, mute cicadas and the fragrant reed. Peafowl also live here, they are bigger and more beautiful than ours and look quite different. And the chickens they have are not the same as ours.
There is much ginger and silk in this part of the world. There is so much wild fowl, it is quite amazing. For one Venetian farthing you can buy three pheasants. The people here are spiteful; robbing and stealing are not considered sinful, there are no greater jeerers and bandits in the world. Idolaters live here, they have paper money and burn their dead, they have plenty of all sorts of victuals, but they eat mongooses.
They pray to various different things. When someone gets up in the morning, he prays to the first thing he sees.
The Pole Star is not visible here at all, but if you stand on tiptoe, it rises up a cubit above the water.
They burn their dead, so they say, for the following reason: if dead bodies were not burned, worms would appear in them and those worms would devour the entire body and when they left it there would be nothing for them to eat and they would all die, and that would be a grievous sin on the soul of the person whose body it was. Worms have souls too, they say.
I walk along with an oar and someone passing by asks:
‘What’s that spade you’re carrying?’
Just imagine, my Sashenka, first there was the Brazil tree, and only afterwards was there Brazil.
I went out on deck, there was no one in the bow, I sheltered from the wind behind the windlass. It’s cosy in behind the canvas cover, I can smoke up my sleeve.
The sea and the sky – how strange that somewhere they can exist apart.
It will start soon. Sashenka, perhaps I’ll be killed. That’s still better than coming back a cripple. And God forbid that I myself should have to kill.
You know, I’m ready for anything.
I look at the waves, at the dark clouds. There’s a vague jolting under my feet. The rumbling of the engine room.
The wind seems to be trying to stuff the smoke back into the funnel. It’s wasting its damn time, though.
A seagull froze, motionless, in the sky – lost in thought. Then suddenly it remembered something important, perhaps that life is as short as a blink, and went dashing off at full pelt.
Why am I lying to you and myself? I’m not ready for anything at all!
They’ve thrown a vat of waste overboard – the seagulls are going wild.
You know, Sashka, the way it is is probably this: the corporeal, visible shell of the world – the material – gets stretched and greasy, chafed and worn into holes, and then the essence pokes out, like a toe sticking through a hole in a sock.
My darling, dearest, only precious one!
Listen to what happened.
I rode my bike to that forest of ours, then walked to the abandoned aerodrome. Do you remember?
Everything was overgrown with grass, there was a rubbish dump on the landing area, the hangars were empty, with piles of shit inside them. Thickets of rusty barbed wire everywhere.
I think: Why did I come out here? All I’ve done is get my legs stung by nettles. And my socks are covered in grass seeds.
And the sun is going down.
Then I go back to my bicycle and I see a bundle of barbed wire as tall as I am that is grown through with goosefoot. Lit up by the sunset, it starts glowing red, burning like a bush.
And suddenly it says:
‘Stop!’
I stop.
It doesn’t say anything else.
I ask it:
‘Who are you?’
The blazing bundle says:
‘Why, can’t you see? I am Alpha and Omega, Gog and Magog, Eldad and Medad, dexter and sinister, apex and root, inbreath and outbreath, seed and weed, udder and rudder, if I knew where the ace was, I’d scoop the pot. I am that I am. Sower, mower and tin-whistle blower. Do not fear me. It is simply that I talk differently to different people. For we live in a world where every snowflake is different from another, mirrors do not really reflect anything and every mole and freckle has its own person unlike all the others. Speak!’
I ask:
‘What should I say?’
‘Say: Everything around me is message and messenger at the same time.’
I say:
‘Everything around me is message and messenger at the same time.’
The blazing bundle asks:
‘Well, so what’s the problem?’
I say:
‘Everybody tries to explain to me that you don’t need anyone else for love. They tell me Plato said: Love is present in the one who loves, not in the beloved.’
It says:
‘What’s that got to do with anything? What does it matter who said what? Why do you listen to them all?’
I ask:
‘What should I do?’
It says:
‘Take a look at yourself!’
I ask:
‘Do I look terrible?’
It says:
‘That’s not what I mean. Those grass seeds on your socks. They’re the messenger and the message too. A special dispatch. About life. About victory. It’s the same thing. In this life there are no vanquished, everyone’s a victor.’
I say:
‘But I want to be with him!’
It says:
‘Say the words!’
I ask:
‘What words?’
It says:
‘You know.’
I ask:
‘I do? How would I know them?’
It says:
‘Think!’
I ask:
‘What then, is the servant of God Vovka the Carrot getting married to this woman? And shall I step on his foot too, to be the boss in the kitchen?’
It says:
‘No, no, not that!’
I say:
‘But I can’t guess!’
It says:
‘No need to guess. You already know everything. Look, there’s a mosquito. There’s a cloud. There are your fingers with the hangnails and the scar right beside the nail on your thumb.’
I say:
‘I think I’m beginning to understand.’
It says:
‘There’s the visible world. And there – close your eyes – is the invisible one.’
I say:
‘I understand!’
It says:
‘Well then?’
I say:
‘I understand everything.’
I understand everything. We are already husband and wife. We always were. You are my husband. I am your wife. And that is the most wonderful rhyme in the world.
Dear Such-and-Such!
I greatly regret to inform you that your son.
Well anyway, you understand the whole thing already.
Bear up.
I understand how you feel at this moment. There are no words that will help or console here.
Believe me, it’s not easy for me to write all this either. But that’s life. Duty to be done. No such thing as ‘I don’t want’, only ‘you have to’.
May it serve as at least some consolation to you that he did not die for no particular reason, but for something good and great. For what exactly? Well, let’s say at least for that Motherland of ours.
I understand. That’s no help at all.
In short, he was killed in battle.
In what battle?
Suffice it to say that your son did not return from a certain undistinguished war, as the poet T. put it. So what difference does it make? For the Whites, for the Reds, for the Hellenes, for the Hebrews.
What difference does it make which undistinguished war you die in?
I understand, it’s important to you to know exactly which hostile empire’s fields will be fertilised by a drop of your blood. But does that really matter? The Celestial Empire is as good as any.
The Light and the Dark Page 8
