He finished his smoke, slapped me on the shoulder as if to say: Bear up, we’re not done for yet – and trotted back into the operating tent.
Death. The number of times I’ve heard that word, or spoken it myself and written those five letters, but now I’m not quite sure I really understood what it means.
Now I’ve written that sentence, I’ve started thinking about it.
Do I understand now?
Sashka, the most important thing here is not to think. But I think all the time. And that’s wrong. After all, so many generations have thought about this and come to an immensely wise conclusion – you shouldn’t think. Why do they always give soldiers something to do, any task, even the most meaningless, just in order to keep them busy? So they won’t think. It’s profoundly good sense for a man not to think. He has to be saved from himself, from thoughts about death.
Here you have to know how to forget yourself somehow, do something with your hands – so they make them clean a field gun, or tidy up their uniform, or shovel something about. They invent jobs for them.
And probably that’s why I also invent something for myself to do – writing to you at every single opportunity. That is, making letters on paper. And that’s how you save me, my darling!
Sashenka, my sweet, my dearest, I’m not complaining to you, no, I know you understand that.
I think about death all the time. It’s all around here. From early morning until late at night, and even in my sleep. I sleep terribly badly. I suffer from nightmares and perspiration. Sometimes the way I perspire is really atrocious. Usually I don’t remember my dreams, they evaporate a few moments after I wake up – the way breath on a mirror evaporates in a draught, without a trace. But I remember what I dreamed about today.
In my dream I was back at the conscription centre, standing naked in front of the military medical commission – a rather humiliating ritual. It was all as real as if I was awake, and I wasn’t at all surprised to be going through the examination again. I stand in the queue, covering myself with my hands, and I can’t help inspecting the scars and bruises of the men standing in front of me, their hairy and smooth buttocks, their pimples and warts. All this is degrading, especially when the doctor feels everyone’s crotch, and then you have to turn round, lean over and spread your buttocks. And then my turn comes, and the doctor turns out to be Victor Sergeevich, my old schoolteacher who died during a lesson. He wipes his spectacles with his tie and looks at me. I start trying to tell him that I looked for those tablets he’d told us about, but I was so nervous, I couldn’t find them.
‘Victor Sergeevich! That time in the classroom, when you were lying on the floor by the blackboard, I rummaged through all the pockets in your jacket, but the tablets weren’t there! Word of honour!’
But he shakes his head and carries on wiping his glasses with his tie.
‘They weren’t there … But then the headmaster came running in and found them straight away! This is where they were, right here! I showed you!’
And he slaps his pocket.
After that I just couldn’t stand any more, and I woke up.
Sashenka, I never told you about that, did I?
When our Shikra had his attack during the lesson, I dashed over to him, to save him, but I couldn’t find those tablets. And when they gave him the medicine, it was too late. I know I’m not to blame, but even so I still have to explain that to myself over and over again, even now.
You know, I really loved him, and it used to offend me when they called him Shikra. And during the breaks I liked to drop in to see him on any trifling excuse, I really loved all those glass drawers of butterflies, and the old cupboards of nature specimens, filled with huge ostrich eggs, starfish and stuffed animals.
I remember he came to one botany lesson with wax copies of different sorts of apples on cotton wool in boxes. I wanted so desperately to take a bite out of them – they were so beautiful and juicy, so real!
The assignment he set us for summer was to collect a herbarium – how hard I tried! But what I enjoyed even more than picking plants in the ravines and drying them in volumes of the Brockhaus Encyclopaedia was writing the labels for them afterwards in neat writing: ‘Dandelion, Taraxacum’ or ‘Ribwort, Plantago’. It was amazing that a common ribwort could be such a solemn and beautiful word – ‘plantago’. The words probably fascinated me more than the actual dried, boring leaves did.
When Victor Sergeevich started teaching zoology, I developed what I thought of as a serious interest in ornithology, and even at lunch, when I ate my chicken leg, I put the gnawed bones back together to see how the joint worked – the function served by this little bone, or that piece of cartilage.
In fact, to be quite honest, I don’t know if I really loved all of this before him – the plants and the birds. It seems to me that I didn’t notice it at all. But I came to love all these living things with his love.
Or was it so that he would notice my efforts and praise me?
But then, even before the grammar school, there were a few instances of my love for feathered creatures – I remember I found three little jackdaws in a nest in a birch tree and climbed up there several times a day to tip little pieces of meat rissole into their gullets, and I poured water in too, from an old thimble that I’d begged from my grandmother.
But the real test of my love for nature came a couple of years later, also at the dacha and also with a nestling. The neighbour’s boy ran up, bawling his eyes out and choking on his tears, entirely unable to explain to me what had happened. I followed him at a run, and what I saw on the pathway leading to their porch really was no sight for a child’s eyes. A nestling had fallen out of the nest at a bad spot, beside an anthill, it was completely smothered with ants, squirming in silent agony, and I was at a loss, I didn’t know what to do. It was already impossible to save the nestling, but I couldn’t just stand there and watch its suffering either.
You know, Sashenka, I think that was the moment when I really started to grow up. I realised that from somewhere inside me I had to find the courage to do good. And at that moment, ‘good’ most likely meant putting an end to this suffering. I got a spade, told the boy to go into the house, went over to the nestling that had been transformed into a writhing black clump, and sliced it in half with the blade of the spade. Both halves carried on writhing – or it seemed to me that they did, because of the ants. I took the little ant bundles over to the fence and buried them. But that boy saw everything from the terrace window, and he was so upset by what I’d done that he couldn’t forgive me.
Another reason why I liked Victor Sergeevich was that he knew how to make familiar things seem unusual. In the literature class, we laughed at the caustic report written by the young Pushkin when he was sent to deal with a plague of locusts:
The locusts came, flying and flying.
And then they stayed, sitting and sitting,
Till nothing was left there for eating.
And off they went, flying and flying.
Well, it really is funny, isn’t it? But Victor Sergeevich made it into something quite different. Pushkin was an official for special assignments and the energetic, bright young man was sent to deal with an important issue. People had suffered a disaster, they had no means of subsistence, they were expecting help from the government.
I think my teacher simply took offence at such an arrogant attitude to insects, which for him were every bit as complex, important and alive as we are.
Everybody at the grammar school used to laugh at him, even the other teachers, and I resented that very much. But what could I do about it?
I could only love what he loved – the plants and the birds. Later, of course, after he died, my enthusiasm for all these gymnosperms, neognaths and ratites passed off. But the names have remained in my memory – and it was so grand not simply to stroll through the wood, but to know – that’s lovage, that’s costmary, that’s orchis, and that over there is pigweed. You walk along the forest path, and al
l around you there’s buckthorn, helleborine, codling, field scabious! And there’s marsh marigold, sow-thistle, gentian! And the birds! There’s a chiffchaff, there’s a black woodpecker, and this is a booby!
It really is grand to walk along the forest path and know why the willow herb likes the sites of old fires!
And all this gives you an incredible sense of life that will never end.
After his death I started thinking seriously about my own for the first time.
Of course, you’ll say that every adolescent boy experiences those fits of horror, those paroxysms of fear, and of course you’re right, all this is absolutely normal. I realised that perfectly well myself. But that didn’t make me feel any better.
My mother used to tell me that when I was five years old I heard the grown-ups talking about someone’s death and I asked in a frightened voice: ‘Am I going to die too?’ She answered ‘No’. And I stopped worrying.
When I was little and I played at war with buttons, I used to imagine myself as them on the battlefield, running into the attack, shouting ‘hurrah’ – and flinging my arms out and falling down dead. Then, after lying there for a moment, I jumped up and ran on as if nothing had happened – alive, eager for the hand-to-hand fighting. Slash, kill, stab!
One day I got so carried away with my game that I didn’t notice my mother standing in the doorway and watching me. She said:
‘Do you know that every button that’s killed has a mummy too, and she’s waiting at home, crying?’
I didn’t understand her then.
I remember that after my grandmother died, I tried to imagine myself dead – I lay down on the divan, folded my arms across my chest, relaxed all my muscles, squeezed my eyes shut and tried not to breathe for a long time. Just for a moment I even thought I could stop the beating of my heart. And what happened? I simply felt incredibly alive. Some power in me that I hadn’t been aware of before forced me to breathe. My will didn’t even exist as far as it was concerned. I didn’t move a jot closer to understanding death that time, but I did sense very clearly within myself what life is. It is my breathing. It is my master.
I didn’t love my body and despised it, I think, from that same time in my boyhood when I realised that I was not entirely it, and it was not entirely me. I found it strange, at the conscription commission’s medical examination, that someone was interested in my weight and height and my teeth, like my mother when I was little, and carefully noted down on paper all these figures that had absolutely nothing to do with me. What is all this for? Who needs it all?
Do you know what made me feel afraid the first time? When I was fourteen or fifteen – it was a realisation that suddenly hit me: My body is dragging me into the grave. Every day, every moment. Every time I breathe in and breathe out.
Isn’t that alone already a good enough reason to hate it?
I remember, I was lying on my divan and running my eyes over the exposed entrails of the steamship on the wall, and the idea came to me that this huge vessel would sink straightaway if it ever sensed the fathomless depths beneath it.
My body sensed those depths.
And time and again new reasons to hate came along. The time to shave arrived. You know what my skin’s like – hideously lumpy, with boils and pimples – when I shave I cut myself all the time, and it bleeds. I tried growing a beard – it didn’t grow properly, a miserable excuse for a beard. And I remember one time I cut myself yet again as I was shaving, and I was paralysed by the thought that right now, this very moment, as I press this scrap of newspaper against the cut, this abhorrent sack of skin stuffed with entrails is already foundering and dragging me down with it. And it will drag all the years of my life under before it finally sinks.
Everything became unbearable. Simple objects seemed to have conspired to hammer home a single idea: here’s a three-kopeck piece – it will still be here when I’m gone; there’s a door handle – people will still take hold of it; there’s an icicle outside the window – in three hundred years’ time an icicle will still be glittering and shimmering in the noonday sunshine of March.
And at daybreak the mirror suddenly changed from an innocuous object into what it really was – the throat of time. Glance into it after a minute has passed – and it has already gobbled that minute down. And my life has grown shorter by that minute.
And another depressing thing was that everyone around me was so sure of their own existence, but I sometimes seemed so unreal to myself and didn’t know myself at all. And if I wasn’t sure of myself, how could I be sure of anything else? Maybe I didn’t exist at all. Maybe someone had invented me – the way I used to invent the little men on the ship – and now he was torturing me?
I was sinking down into a bottomless black whirlpool, I was disappearing, ceasing to exist. In order to exist, I needed proofs. There weren’t any. The mirror reflected something, but, just like me, it had no notion of what I was. It could only swallow everything down indiscriminately.
I wasn’t able to do anything, everything I started doing – things that in normal times used to amuse me, bring me joy, those books, for instance – couldn’t keep me afloat any longer, everything was overlaid with a clammy layer of pointlessness, like a coating of grease.
And the blind man was especially annoying. I’m lying there in my little room, huddled up in the corner of the divan, hiding under the pillow and trembling in horror at the darkness and emptiness, and he shuffles cheerfully along the corridor, whistling, living a full life that doesn’t seem dark and empty to him at all, despite his blindness! What is it he sees with his blind eyes that I can’t see? What sort of invisible world is it?
My mother got the worst of it. I used to lock myself in my room and not come out, or eat, or talk to anyone.
Of course, it was pointless talking to my mother. She thought I was just having the usual fits for my age. I heard her explaining about me to a friend of hers:
‘The painting fad has passed off, now it’s the meaning of life fad. But that will pass too! At least he hasn’t got himself snared by some goodie-goodie young madam yet. You know what they’re like nowadays!’
I was terribly afraid of girls. Not exactly afraid, but so shy that it amounted to panic. One day I was riding in the tram and a girl with wonderful hair sat in front of me – a whole tubful of wavy chestnut hair! Every now and then she gathered it in from the sides with her hands and tossed it back over her shoulders. And I wanted so badly to touch that hair! I saw no one was looking and I touched it. I thought the touch was too gentle to feel. But she felt it and gave me a mocking sideways glance. And I was so embarrassed, I shot out of the tram like a bullet.
After something like that, you start despising yourself even more.
It seems funny to remember it now, but my mother was so worried about me that she searched my things in secret, in case I might have some poison hidden away – or a revolver.
One day I heard whispering outside the door – it was her begging her blind man:
‘Pavlusha, have a word with him, please, you’re a man, you should understand each other better.’
He shuffles his feet and knocks.
I shout back:
‘Leave me alone, all of you!’
I take a book by some wise hermit or other, hoping to find, if not the answer, then at least the correctly phrased question, and in a single voice all the wise men exhort me to live in the present, delight in the transient moment.
But it’s not that easy!
How can I rejoice in the present, if it’s pointless and worthless? And everything makes me feel sick – the wallpaper, the ceiling, the curtains, the town outside the window, all of it that’s not me. And I make myself feel sick, because I’m not me too, like all the rest of it. My short, squalid little past, composed entirely of stupidities and humiliations, makes me feel sick. And the future, in particular, makes me feel sick. Especially the future – after all, it’s the road that leads into that stinking hole in the graveyard shithouse.
And then, before that hole – what’s it all for? What did I choose? The flesh? The time? The place? I didn’t choose anything, and I wasn’t invited anywhere.
And just when it got really bad, when I really was thinking I could take the blind man’s razor from the bathroom, when I was choking on the impossibility of taking another breath in, and then a breath out, then a breath in again, and another breath out, when my skin was covered with perspiration, my heart was aching and I had the shakes – somewhere in the tips of my fingers an incredible vibration would suddenly start up.
An incoherent but confident humming came rising up from somewhere in the depths. Swelling upwards in a wave. Forcing me to run round the room, jerk open the windows that had been glued shut for the winter with a crack and tattering of paper, and breathe in the street. The hum grew louder and stronger, filling me to overflowing. And finally this incomprehensible, overwhelming wave scooped me up from the very bottom and tossed me up to the surface, towards the sky. I was brimming over with words.
Sashenka, this is impossible to explain, it’s something you have to experience.
The fear dissolved, evaporated. The world that had disappeared returned to itself. The invisible became visible.
All of that not me began responding, humming back to me, acknowledging me as its own. You understand what I mean, don’t you? Everything around me became mine, delightful, edible! I wanted to feel it, sniff it into myself, try the taste of the wallpaper and the ceiling, and the curtains, and the town outside the window. Not me became me.
I was only alive at those moments. I looked around and couldn’t understand how others could possibly manage without this. How was it possible to live without it?
And then the words went away, the humming disappeared, and the fits of emptiness started again, genuine seizures – I shivered and shook, I spent days sprawling on my divan bed and didn’t go out anywhere – I couldn’t explain to myself why I needed to go out. Who needs to go out? What does that mean – go out? What am I? What is ‘what’?
The Light and the Dark Page 17
