I write out these lists and I think – no one will ever pity these men either.
Do you remember what Héloïse and Abelard called their son?
Astrolabius.
And what became of that Astrolabius later? His story would probably have made another whole Hamlet. But no one will write it. Who needs him? Who will ever remember him?
I’ve just remembered my grandmother. She always used to get distressed like this about people who died. When she was told that someone she knew, or even someone she didn’t, had died, she always wanted to find out exactly how he died – she wanted him to have had a painless, easy death, she wanted him to have suffered as little as possible. That seemed funny and stupid to me then: the man had already died and now, God knows how long afterwards, here was someone wishing him an easy death.
Glazenap really got my back up today. When you’re drowning in a dysentery-ridden pit and your head could be blown off at any moment, isn’t it ludicrous to be pondering on your own immortality?
He sits there, trying to convince himself.
‘So, I didn’t exist before – and that wasn’t death, but something else. And afterwards I won’t exist either. And that won’t be death either, but that same something else again.’
But I said:
‘A slap round the ears!’
He didn’t understand a thing, of course, and I didn’t try to explain. He wouldn’t understand anyway.
He doesn’t understand that all the religions and philosophies in the world only try to charm away death, the way village women charm away the toothache.
It’s probably like this: the body fights against death with pain, and the brain, the mind, fights it with thought. Neither of them will save you in the end.
And the most important thing, something that I know now, is that Christ and Siddhartha of the line of Gautama both had their mouths open – like all dead men. I can imagine them dead very clearly now. It’s no problem. I can imagine the flies walking about in their mouths too. All their lives these wise men taught that death does not exist, they taught resurrection and reincarnation, and they got slapped round the ears! The Saviour can’t save anyone, because he never rose from the dead and he never will. And Gautama rotted like everybody else, he didn’t become anybody – not any kind of Buddha! And he wasn’t anybody for thousands of years before that. The world is not a dream, and my self is not an illusion. My self exists and it needs to be made happy.
Today there was a scraggy horse standing tethered by the kitchen. Waiting to be slaughtered for meat. It fanned itself with its tail and shook its head about. Its eyes were all flyblown. An animal tied to the door of the kitchen doesn’t know how much longer it has to live. That’s the difference that makes a man a man: we are the only living creature that knows death is inevitable. And that’s why happiness must not be put off for the future, we have to be happy now.
But how can I be happy, my Sashenka?
I shall have to break off at any moment now – we’re going on a reconnaissance mission, the plans for attacking Tientsin have been changed again. They change everything here all the time, we can never be certain of anything. But if the assault has been postponed, it means someone has had the good fortune to live for a day or two longer. If only I knew exactly who. Never mind, we’ll soon find out. And what are they doing anyway – delighting in the two days of life they have been granted? It’s unlikely. Everybody’s hoping for something.
The surgeon and his mate have arrived, they’re going with us too, they want to look at the area from which the wounded will have to be brought back. I can hear Zaremba telling some funny story and everybody laughing.
There, you see, I have no quiet time to do a bit of thinking. But how I long to think about something far away, as far away as possible from all this!
What am I talking about? The fact that there’s no such thing as time.
Oh yes, there are hours and minutes, but time is us. Does time really exist without us? I mean, we are merely the form of time’s existence. Its carriers. Its agents of infection. So time is a kind of disease of the cosmos. The cosmos will eventually overcome the infection, we’ll disappear and the recovery will begin. Time will pass off, like a sore throat.
Death is the cosmos’s way of fighting against time, fighting us. After all, what is the cosmos? In Greek it means order, beauty, harmony. Death is the defence of universal beauty and harmony against us, against our chaos.
But we resist.
For the cosmos time is a disease, but for us it is the tree of life.
Only it’s strange that the cosmos flowers were called that – such mundane flowers, nothing out of the ordinary.
My stomach’s churning, forgive me for these details. I’m afraid I might be coming down with typhoid fever. And my head is splitting.
There now, they’re calling me. I’ll finish writing this evening.
Sasha!
I’m back. It’s night already.
My hands are still shaking, forgive me. I simply can’t pull myself together. And my ears are still ringing from the blasts.
I shouldn’t tell you all this, but I can’t help myself. I’ve been through too much to keep it all in.
There was our new battalion commander Stankevich, deaf Ubri – I told you about him – our surgeon Zaremba, his assistant and another officer, Uspensky, very young, the order for his promotion to warrant officer arrived only today. And several staff officers and privates as well.
That Uspensky prattled away without a break, but he stuttered all the time. A garrulous stutterer. He was bursting with happiness at having been promoted. Even Stankevich ordered him to shut up.
I got a cramp in my belly and moved away from them a bit into a small ravine. I squatted down, and that was when the bombardment began. A shell fell right on the spot where they were standing.
I ran to them. I can’t tell you here what I saw.
Forgive me, I’m starting to shake again.
I see Ubri lying about ten steps away, closest of all to me. His arms and legs seem to have been amputated. They’re not there! A boot with the remainder of a leg is lying beside him, his face is covered with grey soot. I leaned down and he seemed to be still alive. His mouth was open. As I watched, a kind of curtain descended smoothly over his pupils. He died at the very moment that I leaned down over him. I don’t know why, but I realise what I should do – reach out my hand and close his eyes. I do reach out, but I can’t touch them.
I walk on. Around me men are screaming, groaning, writhing about in blood.
I see Stankevich, our commander, lying in the grass. I get the impression that he simply got tired and decided to lie down for a while. I run over to him. His face is calm, his eyes are open slightly, as if he is peeping. But his hands look as if they have been put through a meat grinder. I take him by the shoulders and try to lift him up. His body yields to me easily, but the back of his head stays on the grass.
A wounded horse is jerking its hind legs close by, behind it is our surgeon’s mate, Mikhal Mikhalich – with no face. A bloody mush of teeth, bones and cartilage.
I hear groans and run towards them – it’s Dr Zaremba. He’s still alive, looking at me, bleating something and gurgling blood. His stomach is ripped open and a pile of intestines has tumbled out onto the dust of the road. Zaremba is lying in a puddle of black blood, groaning, and I can’t understand why he’s still alive and what I can do. I shout at him.
‘What? What shall I do?’
He can only bleat, but eventually I understand what he wants. He wants me to kill him.
I hear more screams, jump up and walk on.
I see one of the staff officers – dead, with his legs doubled up under him like a circus acrobat. And his mouth – again, like all of them – is open. The eyes look, but they don’t see. There are thick gouts of blood on his beard.
Finally I find one person alive – the stutterer Uspensky. I can’t tell where he’s wounded, but blood is gushing out of his thro
at. The uniform is smoking on him, his eyebrows and hair are scorched, through his tattered breeches I can see bloody abrasions on his legs.
I lost my head completely, I didn’t know what to do. I sat beside him, trying to reassure him.
‘Hold on, everything will be all right!’
Some other soldiers came running up, medical orderlies. I helped them carry Uspensky to the infirmary. On the way he started choking on his own blood and an orderly stuck his fingers into his mouth so that the blood could flow out feely.
At the infirmary I sat with him for a whole hour, I just couldn’t leave him. He was conscious and I kept repeating over and over:
‘Hold on! Everything will be all right!’
It was very hot in the tent: sultry air, clouds of flies, odours of putrefaction. I fanned him and drove away the flies. There was nothing more I could do for him.
But when he died, I reached out to his face and closed his eyes. It’s not really all that hard, after all.
He had to be moved and I helped to lift him. A dead man is much heavier than when he was alive. I’d heard about that before from the other men.
Sasha, I need to be with you very badly, right now!
I’m very tired.
I need to come and lay my head on your knees. You’ll stroke me and say:
‘It’s all right, my love! Everything’s all right now! It’s all over. Everything will be fine now, now that I’m with you!’
As I got ready first thing in the morning, I already knew I would stay at this stargazer’s place. My nostrils recalled the tantalising scent of his eau de cologne.
I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognise myself. A grey face, black circles under my eyes.
My body is turning drab.
I sorted through my hair and pulled out a few grey ones.
The eyes are still the same: the left one blue, the right one brown, but the eyelids are a bit swollen.
The skin on the neck is starting to wrinkle.
I leaned down over the washbasin, washed my breasts with cold water. They dangle, gelatinous and dismal, covered in little blue veins.
I pulled out the hairs round the nipples with tweezers.
The toes are gnarled.
Over coffee I started filing down my nails, but I need to file down my life.
We met at the entrance to a park strewn with poplar fluff. An old woman there was playing an accordion.
We walked for a little while. Then I took him home.
On the way I lingered for a moment in front of a shop window with a mirror displayed in it. I simply tidied up my hair, and suddenly I caught the glance of a young girl walking by, looking at me. And in her mocking eyes I read who I was for her – an old, fading woman, whom no hairstyle in the world could help any longer.
A telescope on a tripod by the window.
A candlelight supper. Music. Don Giovanni.
He lists the moons of Saturn.
‘Titan, Iapetus, Rhea! Dione! Mimas! Hyperion! Phoebe!’
I smile admiringly, although he has forgotten Tethys and Enceladus.
He laments the fact that it rained during the last lunar eclipse.
He closes the window so the mosquitoes and the poplar fluff won’t fly in. A moth kept fluttering against the window all the time.
He started telling me about his telescope, stroking it affectionately on the back.
‘This, by the way, is the only real time machine. And mine is six times more powerful than the one Galileo had!’
Then the promised performance – he took the telescope and we went up onto the roof.
As we were walking up the stairs, he leaned down to tie his shoelace and suddenly I could see that he had a bald patch.
On the top floor – the door to the attic. He unlocked a huge padlock with his own key. We clambered out onto the roof. A warm wind. The bottom of space awash with lights, the top spangled with stars. The fluff is lying in snowdrifts even on the roof.
‘There, I have my very own sky up here.’
He started showing me the constellations.
‘Look – the Pleiades. And over there,’ – he put his arm round me – ‘Alpha Tauri. It’s cool, sure you won’t catch cold?’
He hugged me more tightly.
‘But in actual fact all the constellations are nonsense. Fleeting juxtapositions that mean nothing. Might as well call people passing by in the street or birds flying past constellations. Giving names to the stars is actually like keeping an inventory of the crests on the waves in the sea.’
He explained that it was all a matter of the time discrepancy. Those stars passing by have one time, and we have another.
‘Do you understand?’
‘Yes, I understand.’
‘All these globular clusters and diffuse nebulae are like snapshots for us, click – and it’s for ever. Once upon a time there was a big bang. Boom! And everything went flying apart. But it flew apart for us. In actual fact it rapidly flew apart and rapidly gathered itself back together again. Another boom, and it flew apart again, gathered itself back together again. Another boom. How can I explain this more simply for you? Well, say, it’s like a child that takes a piece of plasticine and makes little animals, people, trees and houses out of it. Then he rolls it all up, scrunches it all back into one lump. But the next day he starts modelling again. Or this is better: remember the old woman by the park? For us it’s eternity, but it’s really just like a chord on an accordion – pull your hands apart, squeeze them back together. Apart, together. Understand?’
‘I understand.’
While he set up the telescope on the tripod and lingered over adjusting it, wispy clouds piled up in the sky. When I glued my eye to the eyepiece to take a look at the moon, he started stroking my head.
‘You’ve got fluff in your hair.’
We went down. The wardrobe in the bedroom was open and I was amazed at the number of suits and pairs of shoes hanging and standing in it.
On the wall there are photographs of his children, a boy and a little girl, twins: in a pram, then going to school, then graduating from it.
Everywhere in the flat there are traces of other women. They probably mark their territory deliberately. On the shelf in the bathroom there are panty liners. And hair lacquer. Among his eau de colognes – a lipstick. In the waste basket, on top – a clump of black hairs. And on the dark armchair in the sitting room my eye was caught by an obvious long ginger hair.
I asked:
‘Do you have a lot of women?’
He laughed.
‘One. And she loves me. Have you heard of metempsychosis? The woman who loves is a single being. She dies and is transformed into a woman who doesn’t love, and her soul migrates to another woman, who loves. It’s one woman who loves, with different bodies.’
I thought I would be undressed, the way it supposedly ought to be done, but he disrobed deftly first, lay down and put his hands behind his head. The light in the corridor was on, and in the semi-darkness of the room he could see everything. I felt embarrassed about my breasts and didn’t take my bra off.
He fumbles and fusses about on top of me and I ask myself a question that I can’t answer: Why am I sleeping with a man I don’t love?
I remembered the parable about the sage who instructed his companions to do strange, inexplicable things. But afterwards profound meanings were revealed for their stupid actions, meanings invisible to them but intelligible to the sage. First he instructed them to make holes in a boat belonging to poor fishermen and it sank, then he ordered them to kill a traveller they met on the road, and finally, without taking any payment, he restored a ruined wall in a village where the people had refused him shelter and food. And then he explained the meaning of these actions. They sank the boat so that it would not be seized by a tyrannical king who was pursuing them and confiscating all the boats, the traveller was on his way to kill his son, and the wall belonged to orphans, and there was buried treasure there, which they would discover late
r.
I remember that one day I met a man with a bucket of snow in the street. I was surprised and wondered where he could be taking a bucket of snow, when there were snowdrifts all around. But the sage who had sent him no doubt knew why it was necessary. That same sage has sent me to this stale, musty bed, but not yet revealed the meaning.
The stargazer was still beavering away, he’d come out in a sweat.
Afterwards he flopped over onto his back, lit a cigarette and asked in a complacent voice:
‘Well, how was it?’
I replied:
‘Like Donna Elvira, who realised it was Leporello.’
‘What?’
He didn’t even understand.
He deftly tied the condom in a knot before tossing it into the waste basket. Grinned with a yawn.
‘A teaspoon of that fluid tyrannises a man – makes him do what it wants! What humiliating enslavement!’
He started snuffling almost immediately.
I tried to get to sleep, but I couldn’t. The bed’s uncomfortable, soft, like a feather bed. I sink into it. And what about these sheets? Who has slept here before me?
That mocking glance in the mirror kept creeping into my mind. That girl’s eyes repeated again and again that no hairstyle would do me any good now. And if that was how people saw me, it was how I really was.
And all night long the moth fluttered against the window.
I suddenly felt frightened of seeing this man in the morning. And even more frightened of seeing myself with him. I got dressed quietly, picked up all his things, his trousers and shirt, off the floor, arranged them neatly on a chair and left.
It was already getting light. The city was quiet, empty, with a hollow echo. Even the deposits of poplar fluff had frozen motionless along the edges of the pavements.
The Light and the Dark Page 25
