In my presence Cossacks hacked to death several men they came across in a field. Perhaps they were peasants hiding from the troops passing by, but who’s going to investigate now? And who’s bothered anyway? No one will ever find out about those people’s deaths, or their lives.
I have seen a man being stabbed with a bayonet and still grabbing at the bayonet with his hands, trying to turn it aside.
In one village they captured a young man and interrogated him in my presence, and Kirill interpreted. The captive sat on the floor with his head thrown back, because his hands were tied behind his back with his own pigtail. Skin and bone. Eyes full of hate and fear. A gaunt, dirty face. To all the questions the young man answered ‘miu’, which means ‘no’. They shot him in the foot, he squealed and spun round on the floor, spraying blood, but still kept answering ‘miu’. They dragged him outside and threw him down the well.
Sashenka, I’m tired, deadly tired.
The only thing that gives me strength is that you’re waiting for me.
I’m writing this the next day. Kirill has been killed.
This is how it happened. Several of our soldiers were sent to a village nearby, Kirill went with them. They were gone for a long time. More men were sent, they came back and said there had been an ambush in the village. We dashed over there.
I didn’t understand immediately what I’d seen.
That is, I understood immediately, but I didn’t want to understand.
They had all been killed. But first they had been tortured. The bodies had been mutilated. I don’t want to write about what I saw.
Our men tried to set fire to the houses, but in the rain nothing would burn.
At the far end of the village they found an old man and dragged him back by his ankles. He was covered in yellow mud. When they dropped him, he stayed there like that, lying face-down, but he was alive. They turned him over onto his back with a boot.
An old man with a long grey pigtail wrapped round his neck.
They started beating him with their boots and rifle butts.
I intervened, tried to hold them off, but they shoved me away so hard that I slipped and fell in the liquid mud.
Someone stepped on his Adam’s apple with their heel and I heard his throat crunch.
Now we’re drinking tea. It feels good to have a hot drink.
What was the meaning of this day? What a stupid question. All my life I’ve been asking myself stupid questions.
The meaning of this day, if it has one, is probably only that it has passed.
Another day has ended and brought our meeting closer.
Volodenka!
I need you very much, because I am only real with you.
And you understand everything in me, even when I can’t understand something myself.
I’d really like to share only the good things, only it’s so important for me to share everything with you!
But I wasn’t intending at all to complain, on the contrary, I need to share my happiness with you.
I felt happy at the very moment when others feel grief.
I’ll never be able to explain this to anyone. Only to you. You’ll understand.
Well, I’ve learned what déjà vu is: it seemed like I’d only just been handed Mummy’s death certificate, and I was already going through the formalities for my father. The same documents, the same words. The same fuss and bother over the funeral, the strange, unnecessary rituals, the unreal ceremonies that have nothing at all to do with my real Mummy and Daddy.
Daddy died at home. That was what he wanted.
The funeral was rather absurd.
The lift was too small and the stairs were narrow, so the porters had a really hard time getting Daddy down from the fifth floor. The sides of the coffin kept banging against the walls and railings. The porters shouted to each other and the noise brought our neighbours out, peering through open doors. Several women stood at the entrance with their hands over their mouths.
Little boys playing football out in the yard shouted and came running to watch the funeral. The ball shot up in the air and bounced right up to the coffin.
We set off to the crematorium.
Daddy lay in the coffin with his arms folded like a real goody two-shoes. I stroked his chest, which was calm, not heaving wildly like it did during the last few minutes before he died.
I pushed a lock of hair back off his forehead and on the cheeks that I had shaved clumsily I saw tears – my tears.
It was hot, flies landed on Daddy and I drove them off.
In the crematorium, while we were waiting on the bench, all I could see were his knuckles. Daddy’s stomach had swollen up from all the tablets, it towered up above the sides of the coffin. As I looked, I automatically compared the hands folded on his chest with the window catch behind them and suddenly I thought that Daddy was breathing.
The people who came included some women I didn’t know. Lovers? Cohabitants? Did he love them? Did they love him? I don’t know anything.
When I kissed Daddy for the last time, I noticed that a ladybird had landed on his shoulder. I brushed it off, or it would have burned up.
I overheard someone enquiring what the temperature in the furnace was.
When they closed the lid, I saw Daddy smile.
Now I’m sitting and reading the exercise book in which he was writing something at the end but never showed me.
My father had been saying for ages that he was going to write his memoirs. Perhaps he really wanted to. But all that was left was a skinny exercise book with more pages torn out than written on.
He used to joke that he was writing the book of life.
‘This is my pamphlet of existence, bunny. When I’ve written it right to the end, to the very last full stop, then you can read it.’
After his stroke I spent a lot of time at his bedside. His right side was paralysed. One side of his mouth and the corner of his eyelid were twisted, there was mush instead of words, but I learned more or less to understand him. Even before he started getting up again, he was already jotting things down in the exercise book with his left hand. I offered to write for him – he wouldn’t let me.
In general, he recovered rather quickly. He didn’t spend much time at all in the hospital – he didn’t want to stay there. He said the nurses were ugly, they hardly ever looked in and only did what they were required to do with the seriously ill patients.
The district nurse who came to do his remedial exercises with him at home complained indignantly to me that he grabbed at every protruding part of her body with his good hand.
I replied:
‘Well, that means he’s on the mend.’
‘But I can’t do anything, because your father keeps grabbing my breasts!’
‘Slap his hand! It’s not sick.’
I told my father:
‘What do you think you’re doing? Can’t you be patient for a while?’
He mumbled something with his crooked mouth.
And now here I am, leafing through his notes – and there’s nothing there. That is, nothing that I wanted to find. Almost nothing about me, about my childhood. In fact, there’s only one mention of me.
‘Sometimes I think about my life: Well, that’s all down the drain. But sometimes I think: No, I made Sashka, didn’t I. She’s the one who’ll save my soul. Maybe my entire crazy life can be forgiven for her sake?’
I was probably expecting to find out something about myself, about the side of life that was hidden from a child’s eyes. Instead of that, there were fragmented jottings about everything in the world and about nothing.
‘At night I listen to the clock, taking my life away from me. Loneliness is when you seem to have everything not to be lonely, but you don’t really have anything. And so, in the middle of my insomnia, I stand there in the bathroom, naked and aging, in front of the mirror. I look at my body – it’s betraying me. Puffy bags under colourless eyes, clumps of hair sticking out of my ears. I scratch between my sh
oulder blades with a toothbrush and I think – I’ll die soon. How did it come to this?’
‘I should take death lightly: once you’re ripe, up you come, like a carrot in a vegetable patch. But I can’t do it.’
‘The time has been changed again. Seems like they only just changed it the last time. I’d better get a move on and write something, or they’ll cancel it altogether.’
‘In my youth I used to think about how some day I’d grow old and write my memoirs, so I used to note down in my diary things that might come in handy later. And now here, at the other end of life, after all these years I remember that youth writing the diary that was supposed to help me remember the important events and experiences of my life now. But now it turns out that what seemed important then is all nonsense. And I didn’t take any notice of what was really important. And that means that to write now about myself then would be a lie.’
‘I’ve just remembered that when I was a child my father bought me a tortoise in a pet shop. I was happy. It was a cold winter day and I hurried home, because I was afraid my tortoise would get cold. The pet shop’s still there, in the same building, half a century later. I was walking past it and dropped in for a minute. What did I want? To catch my old, happy self? What does that boy, whose father tried to din into him why Achilles could never catch the tortoise rustling in the box, have in common with this sullen and not entirely sober passer-by? Why, nothing!’
‘I read about reincarnation, then decided to have a shave. I look at my grey stubble and realise that the transmigration of souls goes on all the time, we simply migrate into ourselves. There was a boy who became an old man, and his soul migrated from body to body a countless number of times – every morning. The body becomes a different one overnight without our noticing.’
I remember my father young and strong, doing his exercises. We used to play at swings – he held out his arm and I clung to his wrist and swung on it. But now, after the stroke, it was terrible to look at him. He expressed himself in half-words, his right arm didn’t work, he’d lost weight, the skin on his neck had sagged.
Daddy had been ill earlier, but he had never told me. He was probably afraid of appearing weak to me. Once he even went into hospital for an operation on a stomach ulcer without saying anything to me. He didn’t phone. He only told me he had been ill after he recovered.
But this time he had to accept his own weakness.
The first few days were especially hard. I’d only just finished with all the worry and strain of Mummy’s illness, and now I had to go to see my father every day.
He lived in a complete mess, without any household things at all. There was no trivet, so he put the frying pan on an ashtray. He wiped his hands on the curtains. I had to buy everything or bring it from home.
Back to the bedpan, the massages, the bedsores, the spoon-feeding. Immediately after the stroke he was incontinent. I put nappies under him, as if he was a small child.
Afterwards, on the contrary, he developed constipation, and I had to give him enemas regularly.
Once, when I cleared up the contents of his stomach that had flooded across the sheet and changed the bed, wrinkling up my face at the stink, he mumbled something.
I don’t understand.
‘What, Daddy? What do you want?’
He was apologising to me.
‘Oh, don’t be silly, Daddy! You wiped my bottom, didn’t you?’
And at the same time he acts like a child. While I’m washing him, he starts acting up – the water’s either too hot or too cold. I lather him up with children’s soap on a sponge and he starts whingeing – the sponge is scraping his skin. I have to lather him with my hands. His skin dangles flabbily, as if it’s slipping off his body. I wash all his folds and wrinkles.
I massage his disabled arm and wonder what happened to the strong, muscular arm I once used to swing on like a monkey. Arms must be reincarnated too, if it has taken up residence in this length of limp, paralysed rope, covered with flabby fibrous veins and brown spots.
I cut his hair and his nails. I soaked his feet in hot water, steaming the calluses, the yellow nails that had grown into his toes, the gnarled excrescences on his bumpy heels. In his old age the second and third toes on his left foot had crossed. He joked, saying that was for good luck.
I washed him everywhere – his skinny thighs with dangling buttocks and his crotch. Could I really have been in there once upon a time – in that crumpled, wrinkled thing lost among the tufts of grey hair?
He was afraid that he had cancer too – of the prostate. I felt his prostatic gland.
‘Daddy! You’ll recover and give me brothers and sisters yet!’
My father started reading medical books and arguing with the doctors, explaining to them how they ought to treat him.
They told him not to smoke – he carried on puffing away as if nothing had happened. I gave that up as a bad job.
I cook him semolina – he turns sulky, clatters his spoon resentfully, sniffs, prods feebly at his plate, clears his throat, wrinkles up his face.
‘A bit of herring and some onion would be good!’
‘Eat it, or I’ll tip it over your head!’
He remembered how he once poured kefir over me and started chewing his semolina obediently. I sat by his bed, and enjoyed remembering my childhood with him. It was strange that he didn’t remember at all some things that stood out so clearly for me.
But he did remember the Hawaiian dance – with our hands in our pockets.
Once he brought me a Japanese print as a present. Before I could even get a proper look at it, Mummy saw it, flushed scarlet and took it away from me. So I never did see what was in it.
I remembered the wonderful smell of leather when he was an Arctic pilot and he put his helmet with the huge goggles on me and I climbed into his high fur boots.
When I watched that film afterwards I was surprised or, rather, very upset. Not because the film was rubbish, but because I realised for the first time that Daddy was a bad actor. Not real.
But when he tied a turban round his head and sat with his legs crossed and the kingdom of Prester John stretched out all around, as far as the eye could see – he was real then.
And just what were all those white and black lions, gryphons, metagalarinariae and lamias?
And there was something I remembered and told him that he couldn’t have known.
‘I went into your room, and you were asleep. Curled up tight and warm, like a child. I was so amazed then that my daddy slept like a child!’
And I also asked him to forgive me for the years when I spurned him and humiliated him, as if I was taking my revenge for something. Why was I taking my revenge? Because he turned out not to be the Ruler of Rulers or King of the Naked-Wise or Lord of All Lords? Because he didn’t live in the Capital of all Capitals, the paramount city of all lands, inhabited and uninhabited? Because he didn’t travel across his lands in a small tower on the back of a she-elephant?
Why did I say that I despised him and Mummy? Could it really be true that I despised them?
‘Daddy, forgive me for the way I behaved then! And for everything I said that hurt you! I’d ask Mummy to forgive me, but there’s no one to ask now.’
Daddy answered:
‘Oh come on, Sashka! I forgave you then already. It’s just a way people have of growing up.’
I took a book to leaf through off the shelves, opened it, and there were clippings of hair between the pages. I realised it was probably from when Mummy was cutting Daddy’s hair all those years ago and he was sitting there reading.
Among all the clutter on the cupboard I found a box of chess pieces.
‘How would you like to play, the way we did back then? We haven’t played for a thousand years!’
We started playing, and I suddenly won.
‘Did you lose on purpose?’
He smiled, but I realised that he hadn’t lost on purpose, he’d simply lost. He was a poor chess player.
&n
bsp; ‘You know, I started recognising my father in myself a long time ago. I can feel his movements in me, his wry smiles, his gestures. How did he get inside me? There was a time when what I wanted more than anything in the world was not to be like him, then suddenly bang – take that! He outwitted me, even in this I lost to him.’
Daddy had never told me anything about his parents. He only said that they had gone somewhere far away and died there. So I grew up without any grandmothers and grandfathers.
One day he said:
‘What actually happened then, nobody knew at the time. It only became an event when someone wrote it down in his memoirs. And you know what’s most important about memoirs? What you don’t tell!’
He threatened to take revenge on his enemies and those who had done him wrong by not mentioning them at all.
‘Not a single word! As if they never existed! Cross them out of life! Tell me now, Sashka, isn’t that just the perfect murder?’
On the day he first went outside with me and we walked slowly round the building, step by little step, he noted down in his exercise book:
‘How much I’ve shrunk! The collar of my shirt is too big for my tortoise neck. I just couldn’t understand about Achilles and the tortoise back then. But now I understand. I’m the tortoise and Achilles will never catch up with me.’
And here are some old entries:
‘Wisdom should accumulate with the advancing years of life, but what have I accumulated, old fool that I am? I’ve accumulated answers to all the questions that were so important once upon a time, but have now become absolutely unimportant. Even the incontestable fact that soon I won’t exist is something that I’m only vaguely aware of.’
‘They were talking on the radio about plants and birds that are threatened with extinction. Some unfortunate animals are on the point of disappearing. But that’s me, I’m an animal on the point of disappearing!’
And then this, when he started going outside on his own:
‘I went down in the evening to take a stroll round the block. How good it is, simply to take a stroll on my own! Get shafted by a stroke and you soon wise up to what’s good. I stopped to catch my breath and saw something on the asphalt, reflecting the light of the streetlamp. A worm or a slug had crawled across and left its mark in life, only not in its own, but mine. It even got onto this page. And it will never find out about it. For some reason that really cheered me up. I felt like springing up onto a bench and doing a tap dance the way I used to. What a young dope, how old was I then?’
The Light and the Dark Page 31
