The Light and the Dark

by Shishkin, Mikhail

  I say:

  ‘Yes.’

  It says:

  ‘But they walk along without even seeing that they’re barely knee-high to a snowdrift.’

  I say:

  ‘But they know the most important thing.’

  It asks:

  ‘What? That a person is not obliged to be happy?’

  I say:

  ‘Yes. They know it. But I don’t. I want to know that too.’

  It asks:

  ‘What is this, mutiny?’

  I say:

  ‘Yes.’

  It says:

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  I say:

  ‘I’m very tired of being myself.’

  It says:

  ‘It’s just that you still don’t know the way things happen. You forget your umbrella in a cafe and go back for it – and life takes a different turning. Remember, you went to that park of yours. It was snowing – small, dry grains that skipped about. You thought there was no one in the park but you, as if it was your own property. You walked up to a bench, brushed off the snow with your glove and sat down. And that boarded-up statue was there, right opposite you. When the blizzard howls on winter nights, she has time to think about what she did wrong. She stands there in her coffin – one hand up here, the other down there – and she changes. Becomes more herself. And she knows she’ll get out soon. They’ll open the lid, and there she is as if nothing has happened – one hand up here, the other down there. Here I am! Glad to see me? How have you been without me? What’s new with you? Have they taken Troy yet? The same, but different, she’s understood something over the winter. And this dog came running up to you. A spaniel, it sniffed at you, let you scratch it behind the ear, wagged its tail. And you sniffed at it, breathing in that delicious doggy smell. Then a girl with a lead appeared and told you straight away that she’s taking ballet classes now and she knows all the positions, and you mustn’t give Donka sweets, or she might get diarrhoea. The little girl has attached earlobes. And a slight squint. Then Yanka’s professor appeared, and you recognised him immediately, but he didn’t recognise you. He has big, fleshy ears, with tufts of hair, and the lobes hang right down to his collar. At first you thought the little girl was his early granddaughter, but he spoke to her the same way your father did to you – called her “childy”. He had a child’s enema bottle in his hand. He flung it and the dog chased after it through the trees, barking. Then he sat down beside you on the bench, clasping his hands together on his knees, and his fingers were strong, with peeling skin, corroded by solvent, and there were traces of paint on his nails. The little girl ran after the dog, and he said he hadn’t read anything for a long time because writing should be done with the vigour of life – with tears, blood, sweat, urine, faeces, sperm – but they write with ink. And even then you wondered how many foolish girls he had told that to in his long life.’

  I ask:

  ‘So what?’

  It says:

  ‘Twists of fate should be given a helping hand.’

  I ask:

  ‘What for?’

  It says:

  ‘A twig in a bottle of water puts out roots. There’s nothing for them to take hold of and they start clinging to each other.’

  I say:

  ‘I’m frozen.’

  Sashenka!

  My wonderful one!

  How I envy them. Tired out after the day, and now they’re sleeping. Snuffling, snoring, dreaming about their loved ones. I’m terribly tired too, but first I’ll write to tell you what happened today.

  We have been sent to Tientsin, that’s halfway to Peking. There’s still no telegraph connection. A detachment made up of soldiers from various countries set off to Peking under the command of the English admiral Seymour, including two Russian companies who went with him, but there’s been no news at all from them.

  Everyone here assumes that all the people besieged in the diplomatic quarter of Peking, who we are on our way to save, are no longer alive. There is, unfortunately, no one left to liberate. Those who have managed to break out say there was a massacre in the city, no Europeans were left alive and the missions were razed to the ground. The European detachment is still holding out in surrounded Tientsin and there is heavy fighting there. We have been sent to help them. We’ll probably get there tomorrow or the next day.

  There’s a railway line running from Tong Ku to Tientsin, but it’s in dismal condition – the sleepers have been burned, our linesmen have to dig the rails up or search for them in the villages where the peasants have hidden them.

  A section of the dismantled line has been repaired after a crude fashion. We took a heavy jolting over the joints of the rails. There aren’t enough sleepers or enough spikes to fix them with, so they lay one sleeper instead of three or four. The rails buckle and shift about. We rode along, expecting to end up at the bottom of the embankment at any moment. The telegraph poles along the line have been cut down to stumps. And the water pumps don’t work – the soldiers had to fetch water for the locomotive from an abandoned village.

  My Sashenka, you can’t even imagine how dreary all this is. The region is a desert – the local inhabitants have hidden away, the houses have been reduced to rubble, the fields have been burned and trampled.

  We travelled about halfway there. Then we stopped. What was repaired the day before had been rendered useless again overnight – the rails had been scattered about, some carried away altogether, there was no sign at all of any sleepers. We disembarked at some station or other or, rather, where there used to be a station. Not only had all the station’s brick buildings been destroyed, even the stones of the foundations had been dug up and smashed into fine rubble. That’s how much they hate everything of ours.

  We marched along the road bed all day in tactical formation. The line follows the course of the river. The Pei Ho meanders along here, but we could still make it out in the distance all the time from the clumps of trees.

  I was very thirsty, but there wasn’t any water. The wells in the villages were poisoned and the river was polluted. On the first day our poor horses only sniffed at it and didn’t drink, but then thirst got the better of them and now they drink this glop that looks like thin meat jelly.

  So we have to treasure every sip.

  And the little local mosquitoes never stop biting – my hands and neck have come out in big red blisters that itch unbearably. But that’s only a small matter, of course.

  The advance detachment has been ambushed twice, fortunately no one was killed, there are only several wounded, and then only lightly.

  As we marched past the site of a battle, I saw the signs of war for the first time: dead horses, a broken rifle, an abandoned forage cap, bloody underwear.

  What else is there in store for me to see? Is there anything in store for me?

  I’ve become friends with an interpreter seconded to work with us. He’s a student from the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Petersburg University by the name of Glazenap. His rucksack is crammed full of books, scrolls and proclamations that he picks up everywhere and holds right up to his nose to read. He has poor eyesight and spectacles with immensely thick lenses.

  In one village we went into a joss house, already ravaged quite badly. Soldiers were ripping up books for the soft paper and our interpreter objected to this barbaric behaviour but, of course, he got nowhere.

  It was a depressing sight – the large painted glass lanterns hanging in the shrine of the joss house and outside on the porch had all been smashed. The figures of the Chinese gods were sprawling on the floor with their stomachs and backs ripped open. Someone had told our men that the local people were in the habit of hiding gold and precious stones there.

  I walked round and looked at everything, it was interesting. Full-length idols with ugly faces were still standing in some places at the sides, with pots of ash in front of them for sticking little candles into. The shrine was empty, the main idol was lying on the floor, with its head chopped of
f. I stood in front of the head for a moment. It lay on the nape of its neck, gazing at the inverted world with love and forbearance from under half-lowered eyelids. Blue dragons with gaping jaws twined around the columns with their gold scales glittering.

  There were huge gongs there, and the soldiers started beating on them with big wooden hammers. Glazenap dashed over to take the hammers from them. He explained that it was bad to summon the spirits in vain and that dragons were a symbol of benevolence. The soldiers burst into raucous laughter.

  I’m glad that this young man with his ecstatic love for the language of Confucius, Li Po and Du Fu has appeared in our detachment. He reminds me in some ways of Jules Verne’s hero Paganel from In Search of the Castaways. Paganel was probably like that in his young days – awkward and lacking in confidence, but still a spunky little know-all. Today he taught us how to drink the brackish, slimy water from the Pei Ho by mixing it with the Chinese vodka, huang jiu.

  Well then, Sashenka, I’ll try to get to sleep now, although the blisters from the bites are itching terribly.

  It’s hard to believe that tomorrow there will be a battle in which I shall be killed or maimed.

  You know, a man is constituted in such an incredibly strange way that he can easily believe in death all around him, but not in his own.

  And another thing, very important. Perhaps it’s because I’m waiting for my first experience of combat, I don’t know, but I feel everything here more keenly, and everything around me, the entire world, is more honest with me – if that’s the right word – more adult, more manly. I see everything differently, more clearly, as if some kind of veil through which I used to look at life before has fallen from my eyes. All my feelings are heightened, I hear the night around me with piercing clarity – every murmur and bird call and rustle in the grass. As if I had been living in some unreal world, but now I am beginning – the real me.

  Without this feeling there would probably never be any wars.

  In actual fact what I wanted to say was that I love you more and more every day. I just don’t know how to write what I feel. If only we were together right now, I would take your face in my hands and kiss it – and that would be much more than I can write on these pages that I’m finishing off now without really having said anything.

  Haven’t I told you again and again that I love you? But now I feel as if I’m telling you for the first time. Because now I love you quite differently. The words are the same, but they mean far more to me.

  I feel at ease now and glad, because I know that you will wait for me, no matter what happens!

  I love you.

  Volodya!

  My darling! My only one!

  I’m so happy that I have you!

  You know, don’t you, that the moles on people’s skin wander about, appearing and disappearing, and can even switch bodies? I found one of your moles on me, can you imagine? Right here, on my shoulder. It’s so wonderful!

  I tired myself out running around town today and I can’t get to sleep. You know how it is, tossing and turning, trying to find a cool spot in the bed, then it gets warmed up and you start looking for another one. So now there isn’t even a tiny little island of coolness left, and there’s still no sign of sleep.

  Snatches of something or other in front of my eyes, whether they’re open or shut. At two in the morning it’s all the same – the visible world or the invisible one.

  Or is it three already?

  My thoughts run through time as if it was grass. Time doesn’t grow evenly, there are bald patches in it. As if I’m walking to a watering place, always trampling the same spot.

  The same pictures come to mind endlessly, always the ones I don’t want.

  I forgot my change in the shop and they came running after me, shouting:

  ‘Miss, miss! Come back!’

  In the tram someone sat down beside me and trapped the edge of my skirt, I had to pull it free.

  Then this old couple got in, with their heads shaking – his saying no-no and hers saying yes-yes.

  Yanka told me she and her beau went to a restaurant and left small change for a tip, and the waiter flung the change after them as they left.

  I’m walking along the street and there’s somebody’s hand in an open window – either beckoning me in or driving a mosquito out.

  The newspaper said that up in the North they found a plane with a broken ski prop and the frozen pilot with his fur boots burned – before he died he stuck his frozen feet into the fire to warm them up. But when his watch thawed out, it started working again.

  And this scene is from my childhood – Daddy and I have been walking in the park, our shoes are all covered in mud, at the entrance he scrapes his sole against the edge of the pavement and the grass, and just for a moment it seems to me that he’s trying to free himself from his shadow.

  And here’s Mummy making me my favourite milksop. She cuts the bread into little cubes and throws them into the bowl of warm milk, then sprinkles them with sugar and my throat suddenly contracts at the thought that she will die some day and this is what I’ll remember – her making me milksop and sprinkling sugar from a teaspoon.

  Chartkov invited me to a concert at the home of a female pianist he knows. She’s tall and her legs are so long that she sat at the piano with them splayed out wide. Our seats were almost directly behind her, so we could see the reflection of her hands in the lid of the piano, as if she was playing a four-hand duet with herself. And her cheeks kept shaking all the time.

  On our way back there was an accident, someone had been killed and was lying on the pavement with a newspaper over his face.

  And now look, it’s back again, the time I worked in an ambulance.

  A woman who was trying to hang curtains fell and broke the same leg that she had already broken several times before.

  A man who was tending a campfire snagged his foot on a branch and fell – they took the skin off his hands like gloves.

  Another man’s trouser leg got caught in the chain of his bike, he fell off and smashed his head against the kerb so hard that his eye was dangling on the nerve like a thread.

  A child was eating ice cream on a stick, he started running, tripped and the stick pierced his larynx.

  And on and on like that every day.

  How can I escape from all this?

  I was out walking with Chartkov and his little Sonya, she’s so funny – she took pity on someone’s old shoe that had been thrown out because now it couldn’t walk any more and had to look at the rubbish tip all the time, and she moved it somewhere else so that it would have a view of lilac bushes. Then we reached the studio and she started drawing my portrait in profile: she sat me down sideways-on to the wall, pointed a lamp at me, pressed a piece of paper against the wall and started tracing round the shadow with a pencil.

  Something should be done about her squint. I move my finger about in front of her little nose, one eye watches the finger, but the other pupil wanders.

  Donka keeps trying to chew on my shoelace. I shook her, and then my hands had that delicious doggy smell too.

  The studio always smells of paint, turpentine, charcoal, wood and canvas. The pictures stand facing the wall in the corner, as if they are being punished. Easels, stretchers, boxes of paints, oily brushes, palette-knives. Floors covered with bright splashes of colour. Unwashed dishes in the dirty sink. Mouse droppings in the corners.

  The second time I came, he sat me on a splotchy, splattered stool, then took a piece of charcoal and set to work. Looking at me over the top of his spectacles. Sniffing, biting his lip, sticking out his tongue. Humming, moaning, whistling. Whispers, groans, sighs. The rustle of charcoal over heavy paper.

  The sudden sound of a bell from the window – his place is opposite a school.

  An old man with a broom in the schoolyard – he doesn’t understand a thing, just like me.

  It’s so strange to pose. I’m just sitting there, looking out of the window, and the irrelevant and tr
ansitory becomes relevant, important.

  And then some boys came running into the yard and started playing football with a doll’s head. Lanky beanstalks. They’re probably skipping physics or something – they’ll miss something important, for instance, the Universe stopped expanding a long time ago and it’s contracting at the speed of darkness. The doll’s head somersaults, smacks against the asphalt with a hollow, ringing, joyful sound. And it jerks its plaits perkily as if to say, never mind, we’ll break through, we’re not done for yet, keep your pecker up!

  He started telling me how he made sketches of his dying mother.

  He says the primary canvas is a person’s face, their expressions. Then the body. And then comes stone.

  It’s really the woman who inseminates, and the man who carries and gives birth.

  The Houses of Parliament in London were burning, people were dying, but Turner tried to capture the colours of the fire in watercolour. Nero was no artist, but every artist is Nero.

  We talked about Job too. He’s not real, because he really didn’t exist. But every living person is real. First everything is given to him, then everything is taken away. And without any explanations.

  Yesterday I walked in and he was working in oils. I wanted so much to squeeze a living worm out onto a palette. So I stood there and squeezed one, then felt it with my finger.

  Suddenly he said:

  ‘Yes, paint has to be felt with the skin.’

  He ran his palm across the palette and pressed his paint-smeared hand against my face.

  My Sashenka!

  I don’t know when I’ll be able to send this letter, but I’ll write it anyway. So many different things have happened in recent days and it’s only now that I can have a quiet talk with you. I’ll tell you what’s been happening to me in a moment, but first the most important thing – you are very dear to me. And the longer we are not together, the more powerfully I sense you.

  I feel you beside me so strongly, it seems impossible to me that you can’t feel it.