‘Just imagine!’ he almost shouted in his excitement. ‘This infusorian that we are looking at here through the eyepiece of this microscope saw the dinosaurs!’
At the time I was astounded that there was real immortality in the world and that for these protozoa death was not natural, only accidental. But I was even more astounded that Victor Sergeevich, my favourite teacher, had thrown me to the untender mercies of those beasts. I cried bitterly into my pillow at night and decided that he didn’t love me any more. Well, then I ought not to love him any more.
Shikra.
But a week after that he had the seizure in our class.
Sasha! I write to you, my little girl, and I forget about everything around me! How good it is!
Here everything is permeated with death and pain and it’s absolutely impossible to imagine that somewhere life is carrying on as if nothing has happened. Streets, newspapers, shops, trams. The zoo. Restaurants. People can just drop into the post office. Or call into the confectioner’s to buy a little cake.
From here the very simplest things seem strange. Well, isn’t it strange that my city is living its own life without me? It has just become invisible to me. It’s summer there where you are too. But surely it isn’t as airless and sweltering?
How I long for the winter!
To gulp in the frosty air with my mouth. To hear my footsteps crunching across a crust of ice, as if I’m gnawing on dry biscuits as I walk along. To see the icy glacier under a drainpipe. And the early morning snow falling unhurriedly and thoughtfully.
You know, I remember the forest in March, the snow has already gone, but where people walked step-for-step through the snowdrifts in winter, there are still little stumps of ice on the dry leaves. A strange track of dirty, unmelted stumps running through the forest. What did I remember that for?
And I also remember that we left a bottle of water on the balcony – in the frosty night the glass shattered, but the water carried on standing there in a bottle shape.
All this is because we are dying of thirst here.
Sashenka, how many times I have imagined the way I will come back home! And everything there is still in its right place. My room. Books everywhere – on the windowsill, piles on the bookcase reaching up to the ceiling, a stack like firewood on the floor. My old sagging divan bed. My table lamp. No shooting. No death. Everything in its usual place. The clock ticks, but time has stopped. It’s all real, it’s home, it’s mine.
You know, I dream that I’ll get back and simply sprawl there, gazing tenderly at the wallpaper for half a day. It would never even have entered my head before that such a trifle could make a man happy.
Yes, yes, when I get back I’ll look at even the most familiar things quite differently – at a tea service, an electric lamp, a soft armchair, a shelf of books. At the factory chimney outside the window. I think that things have acquired an entirely new meaning for me now. If only for that, what has happened had to happen.
Do you know what surprises me about the dead? That they all become like each other. In life they were different, but afterwards all their eyes are the same – the pupils of the eyes are dull, the skin is waxy and for some reason the mouths are always open. It’s especially disgusting to look at the hair, I can’t explain why. And the fingernails.
And the smell is the same. Not just a smell, of course, but a stink. A stench. The most repulsive smell in the world.
You know, I’ve seen so many dead fish, birds and animals in my life, but nothing ever stank like human corpses.
And it’s impossible to get used to this smell. And it’s impossible not to breathe.
In comparison, faecal aromas with an admixture of the quicklime that they spread over the pits filled with our gastric contents seem like nothing at all. Or the smell of purulent bandages at the dressing station.
But the scent of straw imbued with the smell of horses is one that I just want to draw into myself, to smother the odour of sweat and dirty bodies.
Sometimes I feel I could just cut off my nose.
Really, cut it off and send it home at the first possible opportunity. Gogol’s runaway nose didn’t sniff at anything. But mine would walk around and sniff in the familiar smells.
It is amazing all the same that as time passes, the smells I remember don’t get weaker, but grow stronger.
I walk through a park and what the blossoming lime trees exude is not just a smell, but a vast field of fragrance!
There’s our confectioner’s shop – vanilla, cinnamon, chocolate. Meringue, marzipan. Éclairs. Marshmallows. Fruit pastille. Plum fudge. Halva. My favourite rum truffles.
The green, sappy smell from the flower shop – damp, white lilies and musty steamed earth.
The smells from open windows – freshly ground coffee. Here they are frying fish. And there the milk has boiled over. Someone has taken a seat on a windowsill and is peeling an orange. And here they are boiling up strawberry jam.
A whiff of an iron, hot material, an ironing board, steam.
Redecorating in progress – the paint sets my nostrils tingling.
And now the smell of leather – shoes, handbags, belts.
Then perfumery – the fragrances of scent, creams, eau de colognes, powders.
A fishy odour. Fish on crushed ice giving off the fresh smell of the sea.
Engineering workshops – the smells of rust and grease, kerosene, engine oil.
From the kiosk on the corner, a whiff of printer’s ink on fresh newspapers.
And here’s someone who’s come out of a boiler room, he reeks of sweat, sackcloth, coal.
Flooding out of the bakery – the warm, appetising aroma of freshly baked bread rolls.
And this is a chemist’s! A chemist’s smells so much like a hospital!
And further along they’re boiling up bitumen and asphalting the road. Everything is drowned out by the smell of hot pitch.
I could walk on like this endlessly, sniffing and sniffing.
It will soon be a month now.
More than three weeks have gone by since this thing happened to Sonechka. She still isn’t coming round.
And it’s not even clear how it all happened at the time. Donka probably set off with a sudden jerk on the lead, dragging Sonya after her, and she slipped on the icy steps and hit the back of her head against the sharp stone edge. She was lying in a puddle under the falling sleet.
I had her transferred to my hospital. What an effort it cost me to make them give her a separate room!
She lies there withered, skin and bone.
Her arms and legs are covered in bluish bruises from the injections.
They bring learned visitors to look at her.
‘Now here’s an interesting case. The girl that we were talking about. Since the injury occurred she has been in a coma for …’
Her parents come to the hospital by turns and sit there for hours.
After all, someone has to take the rags out from under her, drop pure water into her dry eyes. Moisten her parched lips. Turn her over, wash her.
I walk past, glance in – he’s looking out of the window and massaging her lifeless feet.
He blames himself for what happened. She blames me.
Ada keeps going to the chief physician, demanding, weeping.
In the corridor I can hear her.
‘Well, do something!’
When she’s with Sonya, I try not to go in.
When I’m on night duty, I go in often.
The glasses with one lens are lying on her bedside locker. And her watch. I wind it up. There are toys in the bed, brought from home. The tiger-cub with the dangling button-eyes.
Her slippers are under the bed. Waiting patiently.
Once I went in when he was with her and saw him running a squirrel-hair brush along her arm. He saw me, felt embarrassed, put the brush away.
Two of her friends from school came and sat there for a minute, cringing in fright.
He told them:
&nb
sp; ‘Say something, tell her what you’re doing in your class now!’
They cringed even more.
For some reason they put an acorn in her fist. When they walked out of the room, they burst into tears.
In the middle of the night he woke up with a shout – he’d dreamed that he trapped Sonechka’s finger in a door.
‘You know, I’m walking in front and I don’t see that she’s standing behind me and she’s stuck her hand into the opening.’
He’s soaking wet, breathing heavily. He tossed and turned in his room until the morning.
We sleep separately.
The first time I went to sleep in the other room because he was snoring and fidgeting and he stuck his hand into my eye in the middle of the night.
But now I understand exactly what he meant that time by a different kind of loneliness. One day I woke up and saw his face beside me on the pillow – old, distant, unfamiliar.
I started noticing things about him that I didn’t see before.
In some ways he’s incredibly fastidious – in company he puts his glass somewhere up high, on a cupboard, so that no one will take it by accident, but in other ways he’s slovenly. When I sort out the clothes for washing, there are always brown stains on his underpants.
I started being irritated by the way he eats. Rapidly, greedily, sloppily.
We leave his old friends’ homes and he starts running them down. This one’s a third-rater, that one’s a bootlicker. He hasn’t really got any friends left. Old family friends, or rather, their wives, stopped inviting him after he left Ada, on the assumption that a bad example was catching.
He’s getting old and he’s afraid of it. And he clings to me even more tightly. And that makes him feel even older.
He has started forgetting everything – important things and insignificant ones. He comes running to me, bewildered, and says:
‘Just imagine, I can’t remember who painted The Parquet Planers in the Musée d’Orsay! It’s been bothering me since this morning!’
Sometimes I feel very good with him, so light and easy. But sometimes this darkness surges up inside me.
The two of us are very lonely together.
One day, before all this happened to Sonya, he said:
‘But there was a time when we were happy together, wasn’t there?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s happening?’
And he explained it himself.
‘You know, you and I are like Fresnel’s double mirror. They took two mirrors that reflect light and joined them together. And at a certain angle two light rays produced darkness.’
Every now and then we have rows, like in a bad film. We wind each other up over trivialities, then shout and slam doors.
Sometimes it’s as if I’m watching all this from the outside: Who are these two people in the kitchen? What are they saying? What for?
She’s especially irritating. Who is that woman? Could it really be me? No, it’s impossible. But then where am I? What’s happened to me? Where have I gone to?
‘You don’t cook lamb right! You know how Ada used to …’
The innocent meat goes flying into the rubbish bucket.
‘Then she can cook your lamb for you!’
It isn’t possible that woman in the kitchen could be me, is it?
After Sonya’s accident the rows quietened down, but we still didn’t become closer to each other.
He comes back from the hospital and drinks. Once, when he was completely drunk, he muttered:
‘You know, Sasha, I’ve started feeling afraid because I thought: Could you really not be the person I’ve been waiting for all my life, could this really be another delusion? But if I thought it, it must be true, mustn’t it?’
I undressed him, put him to bed and finished off what was left in the bottle.
Another time he said:
‘I thought that what we had was the real thing. That when we were together we were real, and with anyone else we would just be searching for each other and never find each other. But it was probably just an illusion.’
The day before yesterday I met Ada in the hospital. She was on her way to her daughter, walking slowly up the stairs, and had stopped by the window on the landing to get her breath back. I had to walk past her. She saw me and suddenly smiled.
I walked over to her.
‘Sasha, I know you’re doing everything you can for our Sonechka. Thank you. And please don’t bear me any grudge!’
She walked on slowly upwards.
That night I simply couldn’t get to sleep and I realised from his breathing that he wasn’t sleeping either. So we both lay there without sleeping and I said:
‘Remember, you told me you made a mistake when you married Ada?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I think you ought to put that mistake right and live with her to the end.’
My Sashenka!
How are you over there? What’s happening to you?
I know you’re thinking about me, waiting for me, loving me, writing to me.
Before I would have crossed something out of this phrase, so that only one ‘me’ was left, but all that seems so unimportant now!
I miss your letters so very badly! We all wait for the post here, but there isn’t any, and most likely there won’t be in the near future. Your letters are travelling by some roundabout route. And they will definitely reach me – no matter where they might be. I wait and wait – and I’ll wait until they come, no matter what. I’ll get them, probably the whole bundle all at once. They’re accumulating somewhere, and later the dam will burst and they’ll come flooding through …
I’ve suddenly got a free hour or so – I want to be with you.
We have good news here. There can be good news even here, after all! Just imagine, the diplomatic missions in Peking are still holding out! Everybody thought those people were dead, but they’re alive. A messenger broke through from there with a letter, they write that they are besieged and waiting for help. Several messengers sent before him didn’t reach us. An expedition to Peking is being planned here, but first the fortified city of Tientsin has to be stormed. We can’t leave the Chinese army in our rear.
And here’s more news – we have been transferred to the Eastern Arsenal.
Our headquarters has been moved to the facilities of the former military engineering academy and the officers have been accommodated in the same little houses where the German and English professors used to live. I’m writing to you now, seated in the shade of an acacia and swathed in gauze to keep off the mosquitoes. Everyone is still suffering as badly as ever from the sweltering heat. And the sweat’s dripping off my nose onto the paper – pardon me for this blot!
When we arrived, everything here was in total disorder. It’s obvious that everyone fled at the last moment, after the arsenal had already been taken by the Yihetuan. The rooms and the courtyards were littered with student uniforms and books in Chinese, English and French. It was so strange to leaf through the students’ notebooks, with their pages laboriously filled with drawings and exercises. Everywhere there were broken cups, pens, ink, Chinese ink brushes, jade trinkets, caps, Chinese paintings, aphorisms on long sheets of paper, rifled trunks and boxes. Everything abandoned, torn, battered, trampled.
Kirill and I have found a rich European library here. For the most part the books are on mathematics, physics and chemistry. Our soldiers immediately took it into their heads to start ripping them up and burning them – no one tries to stop them any more. It’s interesting that all the academy buildings are built in the Chinese style and stand in single file, one behind the other. The first buildings used to house the professors, auditoriums, laboratories and teaching rooms, and the ones behind them were student residences. The various service buildings and the kitchen were right at the back.
A wooden observation tower has been built in the middle of the first courtyard. Today I climbed up to the very top tier, which would offer a delightful view,
if only I wasn’t thinking about what’s going on all around. Directly to the north of the arsenal the Lutai Canal is visible, the Chinese have set up artillery batteries along both of its banks. To the west is Chinese Tientsin, with the western concessions a little further away. The railway line to Tong-Ku runs off to the south-east. And stretching away to the east is a boundless plain, overgrown with kaoliang, with the dark patches of Chinese villages and groves of trees scattered here and there. Somewhere far away to the north and the east, through binoculars I could see the movement of Chinese forces, apparently advancing from Lutai to Tientsin.
Kirill and I wandered round the arsenal and were amazed by its riches. There are armaments workshops, depots and laboratories here. Chinese copper and silver coins used to be minted here too. The immense halls here contain an entire factory in which gunpowder was manufactured and cartridges were produced for the very latest models of Mauser and Mannlicher rifles. The underground depots contain huge stocks of various kinds of grenades, mines and shrapnel. Kirill translated the Chinese inscriptions for me. For instance: ‘Vault of underground thunder’ means ‘Mine depot’ and ‘Dwelling of the water-dragon’ is in fact nothing more than ‘Fire-fighting equipment depot’.
Beside the furnaces, large boilers and engines, the Chinese workers had set up images of the patron gods of labour and burned incense sticks to them. Notices in red were stuck on the engines and boilers, with maxims like ‘To start an engine is a great happiness’, ‘To open a boiler means great prosperity’.
This move of ours is a positive one, if only because we are no longer next to the infirmary and do not hear the groans of the wounded by day and by night. Of course, it’s bad that I no longer have the chance to drop in and chat with Zaremba or Lucie. You get attached to people very quickly here.
The Light and the Dark Page 21
