And look, I’ve remembered about the gondolier’s gesture and only now realised how important the unnecessary things are.
And I also remember that I asked her about something and she answered:
‘That’s why!’
She pulled me towards the mirror and pressed her cheek against mine.
I don’t remember the question at all, but her answer has stuck in my mind: We both look in the mirror and I see my seven-year-old face and her wrinkles, the old, flabby skin, the hairs above her lips and on her chin, the bushy eyebrows, I catch her unpleasant, old woman’s smell and try to break free quickly, but she’s holding my head tight.
I came back home after the summer holidays and she wasn’t there. They told me she had gone away. I believed them then.
But I’ve just thought: Where are those two bucketfuls of water that she carried about in her bandaged legs? Perhaps they have mingled with the waves of the Pei Ho?
I just read that again and wondered: How did this old woman, whom probably no one remembers apart from me, end up here with me and you? It isn’t important.
The only thing that is important, my Sashenka, is that we are together. And nothing can separate us.
I’m responsible for you, after all! That means I can’t simply disappear – someone has to take care of you, love you, think about you, share everything with you, delight in your successes, share your misery. There, you see, I absolutely cannot disappear!
It’s only now, so far away from you, my darling, that I realise how little I told you about my love, about how much I need you! I cling to you as I do to life itself. It’s hard to explain, but the very fact that I still breathe and see – all that is only because I love you.
Volodenka!
I can’t really think how to explain this to you, but I know you’ll understand.
I’m getting married.
He proposed to me today.
It was very funny, we went to a restaurant, and he let me go through the door first – they have revolving doors there – and I wanted to say something to him, so I leaned my head back, but just at that moment he leaned down towards me, and I hit him on the nose with the back of my head. Poor thing, he started bleeding. He sat right through the grand festive dinner with his head held back and bloody cotton wool in his nose.
He said he had already applied for a divorce.
He checked to see if the bouquet of flowers in the vase was real or paper and then asked:
‘Yes?’
I nodded.
And went out to the toilet.
The window was open there and I could hear the sound of rain, it had been threatening since the morning. As I washed my hands I thought: ‘What am I doing? What for?’
Then a woman about forty years old came in and started putting on eyeliner. Muttering to herself:
‘I don’t want to pull myself together.’
Then she started putting on scent: she sprayed it up into the air from the bottle and stood under the cloud.
She put on her lipstick, squinting at me in the mirror. And probably she read in my eyes who she was for me – an old, fading woman whom no lipstick in the world could help any longer.
I went back to the table and everybody – especially the waiters – looked at us with mocking eyes.
He talked about homelessness and asked what was the point of painstakingly decorating a compartment in a random railway carriage where you would only spend the night between points A and B.
I smelled of the fragrance of that other woman in the toilet, and he decided he wanted to give me a present, so after the restaurant we went to buy perfume. He probably tried everything they had in the shop, spraying my wrists, pulling up my sleeves and then, when there was no more free skin left on my arms, he sprayed my neck and then himself, and every time he wrinkled up his face and said it wasn’t my scent but some other woman’s. So in the end he didn’t choose anything. And I walked down the street in a thick fur coat of fragrances and started feeling nauseous.
I still haven’t told you the most important thing – I’m expecting a child.
Now that I’ve written those words – I’m expecting a child – I want to write them again.
I’m expecting a child.
All the time I imagine what it’s like. The size of a pumpkin seed. Or an earlobe. Or a thimble. Or a scrunched-up stocking. Nine centimetres, forty-five grams. I examined a photograph in a book – the spine is already clearly visible, you can even count the vertebrae.
Mummy told me that when she was carrying me, she had a craving for everything bitter – Daddy said she had a bitter tooth. And I strike a match on the box and lick its hot emery-paper side. We used to do that when we were children. Is that terrible? I guzzle halva too. I open a pack and an instant later there’s nothing but crumbs.
And I also suddenly had the thought that this was why the world could not have been created. I mean from the way that I or, rather, someone inside me, wants to sniff into herself the smell of a match after it has scraped along the side of the box. No imagination would be enough to create that, there has to be knowledge. And only I can know this. You understand, there are details that no creator could invent. They can only be seen, experienced, remembered.
I have a ferocious appetite, but everything is vomited straight back up. In the morning, as regular as clockwork, and sometimes in the middle of the day at work. I can smell my own bad breath all the time now. Once I didn’t get to the bathroom in time – I held my mouth shut with my hand, but everything broke out and spurted through my fingers. I felt terribly ashamed, although what is there to be ashamed of in this?
Female animals don’t have nausea and vomiting when they’re pregnant, though – only humans do. We’re unfortunate animals altogether, in every way, even this one.
It’s so exhausting that sometimes I simply lie down for hours with a basin beside the bed, waiting and feeling afraid.
I store up the flesh inside me and count the moons.
I feel myself becoming different. Smooth movements. Glistening eyes. A sweet lethargy. Graze directed inward. Why do I need the visible world, if the invisible one is ripening within me? The visible is receding, shamefaced. Preparing to give way to what is still invisible.
I have an amazing feeling, as if I’m involved in the formation of a new planet that will bud off from me when the time comes, as if I am life’s sister and a close relative of every tree. I tousle the hair on Donka’s shoulders and think: my doggy, you and I have a common albuminous ancestor, do you understand? She does understand! Look, she has a navel and so do I. And we are linked together by those navels. I scratch her belly and she wags her tail happily. And I’m chock-full of happiness like her, only I don’t have a tail for thumping so joyfully on the parquet floor!
Donka’s funny and silly. I point to something in the distance and she looks at the finger. She also likes it when I pull my sandals off my weary feet and lie down for a moment, then she arranges herself beside me and licks my toes. It’s so ticklish! And her tongue’s rough.
But the most important thing is that inside this blob inside me, the next life is already maturing, and the next one after that and so on without end. I’m simply stuffed full of future lives! In school I couldn’t imagine infinity at all – but here it is, under my hand.
I look at the women around me and it seems strange that, when they have an opportunity like this, they walk about empty.
And another strange thing – I’m different, but it’s the same familiar reflection in the mirror. And my stomach hasn’t started growing yet.
But at night I wake up sweating in fear that I might give birth to something wrong. I lie there, trying to forget how they showed us a lump of meat with fur and teeth or a half-child, half-flounder with both eyes on the same side of its head.
And these fears make me look terrible in the morning. But this is what Mummy said to console me, she’ll always find something good to say:
‘The meaning of a flower,
any flower, is only to wither and leave behind a plain seed box.’
My father, when he gets drunk, calls me and asks me not to hang up and rejoices that he’s going to be a grandfather. He babbles all sorts of nonsense.
‘Look here, if I feel like it, I’ll have kids too, and I’ll have a grandson older than my own children! You have a boy for me!’
I say I’ve got no time to talk and hang up.
Mummy has also given me a bra with a big hook and a suspender belt to go with it, with a fastener that moves along as the time advances.
She gives me advice all the time:
‘If you notice cloudiness in your urine, go to the doctor straight away! When I was carrying you, I had albumen in mine.’
I started thinking about something and biting my hangnails, and she gave me a loud slap on the hand, like she used to do when I was little.
It’s strange, when she starts reassuring me that everything will be all right, it only makes me feel more anxious.
His studio is now our shared homelessness.
I walk around, learning everything all over again – here are the teaspoons, here’s the teapot, but where’s the tea? To be precise, I’m domesticating his non-residence.
I wander through the drawers of the kitchen buffet – on my honeymoon trip.
And every forty-five minutes I hear the school bell from the yard.
There’s also a sound of banging all the time – a sculptor works in the next-door studio. Hammering on his chisel with his mallet from early in the morning. He borrowed a book to read and gave it back covered in stone dust.
Sonechka comes to us twice a week. He’s told her that soon she’ll have a little sister or brother. She’s decided it’s a brother. And every time she asks:
‘How’s my little brother doing?’
I laugh.
‘Fine!’
He takes her to ballet school. The last time I went with them. She holds his hand, but she won’t give her hand to me. She asks him:
‘So aren’t you and Mummy ever going to get married again?’
He explains to her that now he’s going to live away from home all the time.
And she says:
‘But I’m still your very best girl, aren’t I, Daddy?’
‘Yes.’
And she looked at me with a triumphant air.
I went there with them for the first time in early spring, there was already a hint of damp in the wind, but it was still getting frosty by evening time. We step on ice-crusted puddles and the crunch is joyful. But before it cracks, the thin ice whines.
We arrive at the dance class from out of the frost and the ballet shoes are cold. He lifts them up to his mouth and breathes into them, warming them up.
And suddenly I wanted so much to take ballet classes too. Oh, why didn’t Mummy put me in a ballet school when I was little!
The sound of shuffling feet and rustling muslin. The girls sit in rows on the floor in the corridor, pulling on woolly leg-warmers over their stockings. The teacher – a former ballerina – manoeuvres along the corridor with a straight back, stepping between their legs. Parents and grandmothers in fur coats take seats along the walls. The accompanist warms his hands on a radiator.
‘Chin up, higher! Stretch that instep! The instep! A straight back! The legs must be as straight as a compass! The back! The head! Don’t stick your tongue out!’
Five positions – five chords. They froze in the fifth position.
Looking at them, I felt such a burning desire to be small and light and do exercises at the ballet barre, starting with the basics, all the positions, the plié, the préparation! I’ll definitely send my child to ballet classes. Perhaps it will be a little girl. But what difference does it make! I love him or her already.
All the girls there especially liked doing curtsies.
Yesterday he worked with her at home and explained perspective, he’s really good at explaining everything.
‘Look, the world is held up by perspective the way a picture is held up by a string hanging from a nail. If it weren’t for that nail and string, the world would fall and smash to pieces.’
And then I watch as she takes a picture in some magazine and draws pencil lines from everything along a ruler – back to a single point. Strings running from every chair, flower, hand, foot, eye and ear to a single small nail. I walked over to her and said:
‘You do that really well!’
And she answers:
‘Do you know what a Chinese burn is?’
‘No.’
‘Shall I do it?’
‘Go on then.’
She took hold of my wrist with both hands and suddenly twisted them hard in opposite directions. I almost howled out loud from the pain. A red welt, my skin’s burning.
I smiled at her.
It’s her fighting me for him.
My Sashenka!
What a fine, warm feeling I have now that I’ve written your name on the first line – Sashenka!
How are you getting on? What’s happening with you? I think about you all the time. And I feel so glad to know that in your thoughts you are always with me.
I know you think about me and fret. Don’t be anxious, my darling! Look, if I’m writing these lines, it means that nothing has happened to me. I’m writing, so I’m still alive.
Only when will you get this letter? And will you get it at all? But you know what they say: The only letters that don’t get there are the ones that are never written.
You’re probably trying to imagine what’s happening with me, what I look like now, what I eat, how I sleep, what I see all around me. Well then, while I’ve been granted a free moment, I’ll try to describe our life here to you.
During the first few days, as I wrote to you, there was constant fighting, but now there’s a calm, only sometimes I hear exchanges of artillery fire.
The unbearable heat is still tormenting me as badly as ever, but now a strong wind has blown up, a genuine sandstorm. It brings fine sand from the Gobi desert and every single thing is covered with a layer of this yellow dust, it insinuates itself into the tents, my food grates on my teeth all the time. Dust in my eyes, in my ears, inside my collar, in my pockets – it’s disgusting.
We want rain, but it’s not subject to the general service regulations. Everyone here is dreaming of rain – then we could collect some clean water. After our men bathed in the Pei Ho, they came out in a rash all over their bodies. The doctor said it was caused by corpse liquor. There’s not much water in the wells that have been dug, and even that’s bad. They leave a guard on every well at night – out of fear that they’ll be poisoned.
New units keep arriving all the time and our camp has already stretched out to a verst in length. It was set up in fields of kaoliang, but that has all been trampled down now.
Now I’ll describe our surroundings to you.
To the south the ruins of Chinese villages are visible. The inhabitants have fled and pigs and dogs wander among the charred walls – sometimes our men hunt them. The dogs are the worst, they’ve turned completely feral and attack everyone with vicious fury. The villages here are generally dirty and poor.
In the foreground there are several clumps of trees. The whiteness of the tents, set out in straight rows, contrasts with the green background. The horses stand in a long line along the hitching rail, shaking their heads – there are clouds of flies hovering over them.
The staff headquarters tent is noisy. The mats were dragged in from a ruined fanza, or Chinese house, nearby. Instead of desks there are empty shell crates. They’ve just boiled up some tea, they say it’s the only thing that helps to survive the heat.
And right there in front of me is the infirmary. I’ve already written to you about this grim propinquity.
On the left between the tents I can see the range-finders bustling around their prismatic telescope on its tripod.
At a slight angle to my right, soldiers are cleaning their rifles under a canvas awning
. I catch the scents of lubricating grease and hear the metallic scraping of cleaning rods and brushes being pulled through barrels.
Further away is the kitchen. Today they killed a cow when I was there. A whole heap of innards came tumbling out, and I was amazed at how they could all have fitted inside it. Are there really all sorts of entrails inside us as well? Inside me? They buried it all – together with the eyes. It turns out that cows have huge eyes, the size of an apple.
But more often we eat horseflesh. It tastes rather like beef. At the very edge of the camp they are digging new pits, further away. They set up the toilets without thinking about it properly and the wind brings in an incredible stench from them.
My Sashenka, I don’t expect you find all this interesting. But now this is me.
In the middle of the bivouac, where the kitchen and the large tent allocated for the officers’ mess stand, there’s a large burial mound, with lower mounds scattered all around it. You’ll smile, but we are living in a graveyard in the most literal meaning of the word.
Their burial mounds are everywhere here, they cover the whole area surrounding Tientsin. Kirill Glazenap told me all about them. The fact is that they don’t have any graveyards like ours, but in every field cultivated by each family a corner is always given over to the ancestors. They don’t bury their dead, on the contrary, they make a small pile of earth on the ground, on which they stand the coffin, then heap earth up on top of it. This produces a cone-shaped mound, the size of which depends on the size of the coffin and the importance of the deceased. The outside of this mound is plastered with a mixture of clay and straw to produce something that looks like a Kirgiz nomad tent. They believe that ancestors help their grandchildren. And so they do – our soldiers dislike these mounds very much, because every one of them is a ready-made hiding place for a marksman. We have to be on our guard all the time.
The soldiers who spend hours at a time in covert posts also say that there are many snakes here, but I haven’t seen a single one of the vile beasts so far. I don’t remember if I told you or not that when I was a scruffy little boy, I grabbed a bundle of kindling for a campfire, and a viper slithered out of it and plopped down onto the ground. I’ve had the jitters all my life after that. There are more than enough petty nuisances here without any creeping reptiles – I reach into my pocket for a lump of sugar and it’s full of ants.
The Light and the Dark Page 12
