The Light and the Dark

by Shishkin, Mikhail

  The powder magazines are laid out in an open area in the western section of the arsenal. It’s terrifying to walk past them and feel that a single lucky shot will send everything here flying sky-high. And the best thing would be to be killed outright, not maimed.

  No, Sashenka, that’s what I used to think, but now I think quite differently about that. I used to think that life as a deformed freak or a cripple was a tremendous misfortune, the futile, pointless existence of a worm. I dreamed of an ideal death, so that I wouldn’t even notice I had died. Of vanishing in an instant.

  But now I want to live. Any way at all.

  Sasha, I want to live so much – as a cripple, as a deformed freak! To live! Not to stop breathing! The most terrible thing about death is stopping breathing.

  Once in the infirmary I was struck by the following scene: there was a wounded man there with everything smashed – all his arms and legs – waiting for amputation, and some joker was telling a funny story, and everyone in the tent roared with laughter, and this wounded man laughed too. I didn’t understand what he was laughing at, I couldn’t understand then. But now I understand.

  They can wound me, I can become a cripple. But I will live! Hop about on one foot. So what if I only have one foot, I can gallop off anywhere I like on it. Let them tear off both my legs! I’ll look out of the window!

  If I’m blinded, then I’m blinded, but I’ll still hear everything around me, all the sounds, what a miracle that is! My tongue? Let there be nothing left but my tongue – I’ll be able to tell if the tea is sweet or not so sweet. If there’s a hand left, I want that hand to live! I can touch and feel the world with it!

  Sashenka, I’m afraid this letter will seem like delirious rambling to you. Forgive me, my dear one, for all this raving. The raving is not because I’m ill, but because I am who I am.

  And the most surprising thing is that everyone here hopes to get back home safely.

  And everyone, when he sees someone else whom he knows or doesn’t know with dull pupils, waxy skin and an open mouth, thinks joyfully: him, not me! A shameful, insuperable joy: today they killed him, not me! And today I’m still alive!

  And I can’t rid myself of the thought that any letter of mine, even this one, could be the last. Or might never be finished at all. It’s only in operas that everything comes to a meaningful end with the final note of the concluding aria. But here men die at random.

  Sashenka, what could be more terrible than to die simply at random?

  Every minute and every letter could be the last, so I absolutely must say what’s most important and not write about inconsequential trifles.

  And precisely because this letter could be broken off at any moment, I have to tell you now everything that I haven’t said before or put off for later.

  But what can I write about? Everything seems like inconsequential trifles.

  You know, there’s a story I was going to tell you some time, many years from now, when it will be amusing. But I’ll write it now. What if I can’t tell you later? It’s of no interest to anyone except me. But I need to tell it. It’s a short story.

  And perhaps, viewed from here, it has already become amusing.

  I met my father after all.

  Mum had a box that she kept locked in the sideboard. I saw where she hid the key. When there was nobody at home, I opened it. It was full of various documents, papers and receipts. And it turned out that all those years my father had been sending my mum money regularly. I hadn’t known anything about that. But the important thing was that I found his address.

  I didn’t tell Mum anything.

  At first I wanted to write to him, but I didn’t know what to say. Then I decided to go to see him. One night in a train, and there I was standing outside his door.

  I stood there and couldn’t bring myself to ring the bell.

  Imagine it – living for years and years, thinking about this meeting. And now I couldn’t explain to myself what I wanted. What did I need this for? I hadn’t slept a wink all night in the train. I wasn’t some naive adolescent, to go thinking I would finally acquire the loving and beloved father I had dreamed about so much. I knew I would meet someone who was a stranger. And that he didn’t need me at all. After all, he had abandoned me. And he hadn’t enquired after me once in all those years. Maybe he wouldn’t even let me inside the door. What was it I wanted? Finally to receive the love of which I had been deprived all my life? That wasn’t possible. I had already lived the part of my life when I really needed him, without him. Perhaps I was an avenger? Come to wreak vengeance on the scoundrel who had abandoned his wife and infant child? To spit out my backlog of hatred? My righteous wrath? Someone had to punish him for his villainy, didn’t they? To punch him in the face? Humiliate him? Perhaps what I needed was his repentance, his pleading for forgiveness?

  Strangely enough, I felt hate for my mother and stepfather, rather than for this man, about whom I knew nothing.

  What if he feels frightened that I want something from him? I don’t want anything from him. If he tries to give me anything, I won’t take it.

  I felt uneasy. And the longer I stood in front of that door, the more obvious it became that I no longer wanted this meeting that I had been dreaming about since my childhood. And I didn’t want him.

  I was already on the point of leaving, but just then the door opened. He must have sensed that there was someone standing there.

  A flabby, wheezing body. He drew the air into his blocked nostrils noisily. I hadn’t been expecting to see an obese old man with puffy circles under his eyes and flabby cheeks. It was him. He looked at me without saying anything.

  I said:

  ‘Hello! I’m here to see you.’

  I was astounded that he realised who I was straightaway, as if he had also been waiting for this moment while he lived through all those years.

  The confused expression on his face lasted only a brief moment, then he raised his eyebrows, sighed and simply said:

  ‘Well, come in. Are you hungry after your journey?

  It was a strange feeling, as if all this wasn’t happening to me, it was all so impossible and so commonplace at the same time. He introduced me to his wife and children, saying that I was the son of his first wife, Nina. Everybody felt awkward – nobody had been prepared for anything like this. Nobody said anything. His wife spoke for everybody, but she spoke in a hoarse, strangled whisper. She explained that nervous stress had triggered a growth on her thyroid gland and it pressed on her windpipe. Strangely enough, she reminded me of my mother somehow.

  My sister turned out to be a young maiden of vast proportions. She sat down and the armchair was instantly overflowing with her. She glared sideways at me, as if I wanted to steal something from her.

  But the little boy, on the contrary, really took to me. It obviously tickled his fancy that an older brother had suddenly appeared out of nowhere. He asked straight away if I knew any combat holds and was disappointed when I said no. Probably in his boy’s world the presence of an older brother who knew some combat holds would have made his life a lot easier.

  They were my brother and sister, but I didn’t feel anything for them – and why should I feel anything?

  My brother dragged me into his room and started hastily showing me his riches – models of ships, toy soldiers, a cardboard fortress – and he told me his sister didn’t go to the grammar school because they were boycotting her there, no one wanted to sit with her in the classroom or the dining hall. And so she hung about at home all the time, since she didn’t have any girlfriends, let alone boyfriends.

  It was strange suddenly to find myself in the middle of someone’s life.

  When she and I were left alone together for a while, I had no idea at all what to talk about and I started asking what she read. I had absolutely no intention of offending anyone, but she suddenly declared in a resentful tone of voice:

  ‘A woman knows that men who look at her make no distinction between herself and her ap
pearance.’

  I was glad when we were called to dinner.

  Nobody said anything at the table either, only my father’s wife asked me in her strangled wheeze about my plans for my life.

  The poor girl took the lid off the tureen to pour herself more cabbage soup, but our father admonished her:

  ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have any more?’

  Her face immediately turned scarlet, tears spurted from her eyes, she jumped up from the table and ran off clumsily to her room.

  Our father heaved a sigh, crumpled up his napkin and went after her, but he came back empty-handed. She wouldn’t open the door for him.

  After that everyone finished eating in silence, staring at their plates. I sat there and thought: ‘What am I doing here? But everything in the world happens for some reason, doesn’t it? Surely there must be some kind of sense to all this?’ That sense refused to reveal itself to me. How could I ever have imagined that my meeting with my father would be like this?

  I sat with my little brother for a while, helping him solve problems about trains and pedestrians and feeling astonished that he could be so backward at his age. Our sister looked in and tossed a scarf that had been dropped in the corridor onto the bed.

  He pulled a face at her back as she left and whined:

  ‘Barrel-belly, wobbly jelly!’

  I put my hand on his neck.

  ‘Don’t talk about her like that.’

  He twisted up his face.

  ‘She’s my sister! I talk about her any way I like.’

  I squeezed his neck. I could see from his face that it hurt.

  ‘She’s my sister! Don’t you dare talk about her like that again! Do you understand?’

  He squealed that he understood and I let him go. His glance made it clear that he didn’t like having an older brother at all any more.

  In the evening my father and I were left alone together. He kept sipping tea from a large cup – he said he had kidney stones.

  I asked what he did. It turned out that my father was an architect. I hadn’t even known that about him.

  I enquired what he was designing at the moment and the answer was:

  ‘The Tower of Babel!’

  Then he told me they had been commissioned to design a new prison.

  He sat there, shoulders hunched, one leg crossed over the other. Just like me. Only now did it strike me how alike we were. I started noticing my inflections, gestures and grimaces in him. My nose was his, too, and the shape of my eyes, and my lips.

  I asked if my father remembered me being born. He livened up at that and started telling me about the first time he saw me. He said that immediately after I was born my little face was like an Egyptian bas-relief, but the next day the depth of everything had increased – my nose was more convex, my eyes were more deeply set, my lips were lips. I was carrot-coloured from infantile jaundice, and he was also amazed that I appeared in the world with fingernails that were already long.

  I asked if he remembered how we went to meet Mum at the railway station, and he sat me on his shoulders so I could look out for her. He nodded uncertainly.

  He asked me about Mum, about her blind husband, about my universities. But I could see that he wasn’t very interested. Neither was I. We were both yawning. I’d had a sleepless night in the train before all this.

  They made up a bed for me in his study, on the divan beside the bookcase.

  I kept waiting for him to say something important to me. But all I heard was:

  ‘Goodnight, we’ll have another good talk tomorrow.’

  There was something pitiful about him.

  Before I went to sleep I took down a book at random from the shelves to read, it was some old work about types of building stone. Apparently ‘sarcophagus’ was the name of a type of stone quarried in Troas that possessed the property of annihilating the body of a dead man, including even the bones, without leaving a trace, so they made tombs out of it. Flesh-devouring. It was strange, stone absorbing a human being.

  I woke up early in the morning, in the dark, when everyone was still asleep, and went to the railway station without saying goodbye to anyone. I left on the first train.

  Before I left I had lied to Mum, saying that I would stay overnight at a friend’s place, but after I got back, as we drank tea I told her I had gone to see my father.

  She didn’t speak for a long time, clinking the spoon in her cup. Then suddenly she said:

  ‘What for? He’s not your father.’

  I was dumbfounded.

  And then Mum told me that when she was young this architect had wooed her for several years, but she had never loved him.

  ‘He invites me to a concert and we walk along the aisle in the hall, everyone’s looking at us, and I’m dying of shame for him – scruffy and crumpled, smelling of plain soap.’

  He asked her to marry him – she refused. But when she became pregnant with me, she remembered about him and agreed. She said that at the wedding she tried to pull her stomach in, but nobody noticed anything anyway.

  It was as much as I could do to mumble:

  ‘But that means you used him!’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I acted meanly. Perhaps. But for your sake I would have done anything. I told myself: the child has to have a father. I thought it would be possible to love him. It didn’t work out. I told myself I had to! But in the end I realised I couldn’t carry on. I tried to persuade myself to be grateful to him, but when it came to it I was almost sick every time he touched me. It wasn’t a family, it was torture. And the moment came when I exploded. It was a difficult time for him – a bridge he designed had collapsed. And then I told him everything as well.’

  When I recovered my wits I asked:

  ‘Then who is my father?’

  She took out a pack of papyrosas that she hid from my stepfather and lit up at the window. I waited.

  Finally she answered.

  ‘What difference does it make? Perhaps you never had a father. From the moment you appeared in my stomach you had no one else but me. Consider it a virgin birth.’

  And she gave a bitter laugh. She never said another word about it.

  There, my Sashenka, I’ve told you.

  Do you know what is really amusing? At the time I wanted to write a serious story or even a novella about this: a youth searches for his father and finally finds him. I didn’t understand that it is really a very funny story. Good Lord, and I wanted to be a writer! To be a writer is to be no one.

  Sasha, I find that me, the old one, funny and repulsive now. I have crossed him out. I’m so old already, and I still don’t know anything about myself. Who am I? What do I want? I’m still no one! I still haven’t done anything in this life! I could find any number of excuses for that, but I don’t want to look for them. I’m starting all over again from the very basics. I know, I can feel, that someone different, someone real, is growing inside me. And he has so much strength and desire to do something important! When I get back, I’m not going to waste a single minute. Everything’s going to be different. I shall have time to do so many things, accomplish so much! I shall even look at the sky quite differently.

  I know, you read these stupid lines and you thought: He can look at the sky anyway …

  No, Sashenka, that’s not right, not right!

  Do you know what idea has just come into my head? You’ll laugh. Please don’t laugh, my darling!

  When I get back, I could become a teacher.

  I imagine that now you’ll recall how the ancient Greeks chose their teachers. A slave breaks his arm or his leg and becomes useless for any kind of work, and then his masters say: ‘That’s another pedagogue we have!’

  I don’t know what sort of teacher I would make, but somehow I have the feeling that it’s for me. In any case, I could give it a try.

  Yes, somehow I have the feeling that I could make a good teacher. I could teach literature. Why not? What do you think?

  In general, thoughts keep coming into
my head now that were completely impossible before. For instance, I want us to have a child. Are you surprised?

  I was surprised at myself. And for some reason I want it to be a boy.

  But I imagine him already grown up a bit. I don’t know anything at all about babes in arms and I’m probably afraid of them. I think, for instance, about how we’ll play chess – and I’ll play without a queen, to encourage his love of the game.

  I’ll record his height by putting a book on his head.

  We’ll draw together, make things. I’ll show him how to make a whistle out of an acacia pod.

  I imagine myself teaching him to ride a bicycle, he weaves all over the place and I run behind, holding on to the saddle. But that’s after he grows up a bit.

  We’ll have everything, Sashka, my darling, believe me!

  And I also imagine that you’ll go away somewhere and we’ll wait for you and go to meet you at the railway station. There’ll be heaps of people there. I’ll sit him on my shoulders and tell him to look out for you, or else we’ll miss each other. He’ll see you and shout:

  ‘Mum! Mum! We’re here!’

  Yesterday I had night duty. I dropped into the children’s ward and showed them a slide strip on the wall about little Tom Thumb. He threw his crumbs to the hungry birds, as if he knew from the very beginning about the ogre’s castle he had been brought to with his brothers and sisters and he didn’t need bread any more.

  Then I get to Sonechka’s room.

  She’s still lying like that with the acorn in her little fist, still absolutely doesn’t want to die, although nothing at all can be done.

  I stroked her gaunt arm.

  Wound up the grasshopper-watch.

  Snow falling outside. Quiet, slow. Soft, fluffy, mute.

  I lay down on the edge of the bed and hugged her, pressed her against myself. Started whispering in her ear:

  ‘Sonechka, listen to me. I’m going to tell you something very important. Try to understand. I know you can hear me now. In one book I read about death that it’s like when you’re a child playing outside in the snow, and your mother watches you through the window, and then she calls you. You’ve just been out playing for long enough and it’s time to go home. You’ve tumbled about in the snowdrifts, you’re wet, your felt boots are full of snow. You’d like to go on and on playing, but it’s time. And it’s no good trying to argue. You’re stubborn, and that’s really great. There’s only a little handful of you left, and you’re still clinging on to life. You don’t want to go. You’re a great girl! Such a tiny little girl, you’re really great! But you have to understand that you can’t live, you know. It’s all the same to you, but you’ve worn your parents ragged. They love you so much! They’ve been told there’s no hope. The doctors who looked at you and wanted to help you very much, they can’t do anything. Don’t feel hurt about it! Perhaps they might not understand some other things, but they know all about this. They seem like big, grown-up, clever people to you, but they really can’t do anything. Believe me, if you could just look at your body, you’d realise straightaway that it’s no use to you any more. You shouldn’t cling to it any longer. Do you understand that if you let your body go, you’ll be helping your parents – you love them very much too, don’t you? They’re worn out. Even just a little drop of hope could give them the strength to carry on, despite everything. But when there’s no hope left, it just hurts really, really badly. They’ll feel better if you die. It’s hard to understand, but try, my skinny little honey-bunny. Just look at this body, it’s absolutely no use to you now. It can’t dance any more, it will never be able to curtsy, or run, or skip about, or draw, or go outside. When it dies, that will be great. You know, life is a lavish gift. Everything in it is lavish. And your death is a gift. A gift to the people who love you. It’s very important for people when their dear ones leave them. That’s a gift too. It’s the only way they can understand anything about life. The death of the people we love, people dear to us, is a gift that can help us understand the important reason why we are here. And then, just imagine, you’re a little girl who really doesn’t know anything yet, not even why a light bulb shines, not to mention things like Fresnel’s double mirror, but when this happens, you’ll learn something that none of the grown-ups here, not even the wisest ones, know – it will all be revealed to you. If you like, I can take your acorn, bury it in the ground in spring and it will grow into a little tree. Now you tell me, what can an acorn, living its little acorny life, know about the life of an oak tree? A body is just a body. You grow out of your ballet shoes, don’t you? It’s just that you’ve grown out of your body too. And here’s the most important thing: don’t be afraid that you’ll suddenly be alone. Remember, you drew the way a tight little thread runs back from every object to a single point? That’s the way the world is. In the beginning we were all together, a single whole. Then everything was scattered, but that little thread pulling us back was attached to every one of us. And afterwards the whole world will gather back together at that single point. Everyone will go back there – first you, then Donka, then your mummy and daddy – it’s doesn’t matter who goes first. Some people call it the vanishing point, but its best name is the convergence point, because that’s the place where we’ll all be together. Even railway tracks come together there. And all the trams go there. And the kite that you and your daddy launched was flying back there to that point, only it got tangled in the wires. Just imagine, it’s still hanging up there. It waved to me today as I was coming to work. But it’s late already. Outside the window the snow’s falling, thick and white. It’s quiet. Everybody’s sleeping already, they’ve run themselves to a standstill. My little girl, this body of yours can’t do anything any more, but you can do everything. Now curl up tight and warm!