The Light and the Dark (20 page)

Mum started coaxing me:

‘Volodenka, come on, please! Granny might never ask you for anything again. Why is it so hard?

But I couldn’t do it. I tore myself out of Mum’s arms, ran off as far away from everybody as I could and burst into tears.

Before the funeral I was astounded by her calm hands in the coffin. Mum sat there brushing the dead woman’s hair.

At the cemetery they pushed me forward to kiss her and throw the first handful of earth. I resisted in stubborn silence. I wasn’t afraid, but I felt uneasy somehow.

I remember that when the lumps of earth started thudding down gently onto the lid of the coffin, for some reason the thought came to me: If only I could open the coffin now, and it’s empty – and Granny’s waiting for us at home!

They buried her and smoothed out the ground like a flowerbed. And it was absolutely impossible that Granny could have turned into a flowerbed.

The funeral went on for a long time, I wanted to go to the toilet very badly – Mum let me go to the cemetery’s little hut with a hole in the floor. Standing there over the pit that reminded me of the grave, I felt very acutely that Granny couldn’t be waiting for us at home, that she was there, in her coffin under the ground, because death was real, as real as this putrid, stinking hole.

Granny’s death left me with a feeling of childish horror. Only somehow I just couldn’t get the fact that I would die some day too into my head. I didn’t become really frightened of that until much later.

But now I listen to the wounded men’s groans coming from the infirmary tents and I think: What a marvellous death that was! How wonderful to live your life right through and die of old age.

There, you see how the concept of happiness changes here.

Do you know what has just occurred to me? That I haven’t given anybody anything in life. I don’t mean the trivial things, but for real. Everybody gave me something, and I took. But I didn’t give anybody anything. Especially Mum. And not because I didn’t want to – I simply didn’t get round to it.

Yet again these simple ideas come swarming in as if they were revelations.

And now I’ve realised that I want to give so much – warmth, love, thoughts, words, tenderness, understanding – and everything can simply break off before it has even begun, tomorrow, in five minutes, this very moment! It hurts so much!

That’s all, I’ll finish for today. My hand’s tired. And my eyes ache – I’m writing to you by the light of a night lamp.

My Sashenka, I want so much for everything to be well with you.

I know we’ll meet again.

What for?

I keep asking myself that question: What for?

Why did I have to be punished in this way? In this particular way.

I was going somewhere in a tram. A sudden pain below my stomach, acute and unbearable. I felt frightened and understood everything straight away, but I tried to persuade myself that it wasn’t that at all. I didn’t know what, but not that. I started bleeding.

I should have gone straight to the hospital, but I went home, to him. I dragged myself in, he started scurrying about, running round the flat and babbling:

‘Tell me what to do. Tell me what to do.’

I never thought I would see him in such a panic. He didn’t even know how to call an ambulance. He was more frightened than I was. I start trying to reassure him that it’s really nothing terrible, but I understand that if the bleeding from the womb isn’t stopped, I could die from loss of blood, and it won’t stop on its own.

We waited an eternity for the ambulance.

It felt like my stomach had been stuffed with stones and was being squeezed in a vice. My toes go numb. I’m covered in perspiration and trembling all over. I howl, the pain and the insult are making me hysterical, and he keeps pouring himself cognac, glass after glass, to calm himself down. The pain is hellish. Everything
starts going dark, the room is slithering about. Several times I think I’m blacking out.

Straight onto the operating table at the hospital. Anaesthetic. Curettage. My child came out of me and I didn’t even notice. I was bleeding torrents of blood that flowed in clots.

Everything inside has been scraped raw – my soul and my womb.

Now that there is less of my flesh, I seem to collide with everything in the world: a door, people, sounds, smells. Everything is a collision for me. Everything has become noisy, petty, irksome. Unnecessary.

How could it happen? Only the other day I stopped to examine a shop window full of things for children and was amazed at how much of everything this little mite needed, and now I’m already alone.

When Mummy found out, she said:

‘Cry! That’s what you need right now – a good cry.’

But Yanka said:

‘You should have had an abortion straightaway, then you wouldn’t have suffered.’

We rented a flat with a nursery for our future child – and now Sonechka stays in it overnight.

I was recuperating in bed after the hospital and Sonya asked her usual question:

‘Well, how’s my little brother?’

I smiled at her and answered:

‘Fine.’

‘But why are you lying in bed?’

‘I’ve got a bit of a cold.’

I turned away, pretending to cough into the pillow, so she wouldn’t notice that I was blubbering again.

And yesterday I took her to the bathroom and started undressing her, but she wouldn’t let me, she turned sulky, the high and mighty
madam. To coax her along, I started playing with the clothes pegs, snapping at her, but got too close and pinched her skin just a little. I handed her a clothes peg:

‘There, you pinch me too!’

She takes it and pinches me really hard, so it hurts. I wash her and she yells that the soap’s going in her eyes and her mummy does everything a different way.

Then I rub her down with the towel, and her clean-washed hair squeaks loudly. When I was little my mummy always said that hair had to be washed squeaky-clean.

I’ll have a child some day, I will definitely, and I’ll wash my child’s hair squeaky-clean.

I only realised later why Sonya was so very reluctant to stay the night with us. She still wets the bed. Someone has to get up in the night, check if her sheet’s dry and change it if it’s wet. She knows all this about herself and feels terribly ashamed.

Today I took her to the dance class instead of him.

As she was changing her shoes she suddenly stuck her ballet shoe under my nose.

‘Breathe in it!’

I took the shoe and stuck it under her nose.

‘You breathe in it!’

She flashed her eyes at me angrily.

Sasha! Sashenka!

My wonder! My glorious one!

I know I’m not there with you, and it’s hard for you. I wonder
all the time how you’re doing there. What’s happening to you? What are you doing right now? What are you thinking about? What’s worrying you? How I long to walk up to you this very instant, stroke you, hug you, press your head against my chest. Please, hold on! You’ve got to hold on!

I’ll come back, you’ll see, and everything will be all right.

We only parted so very recently after all, but the time has stretched out for years.

Especially since I ended up here, time flies by quickly and imperceptibly or, on the contrary, it stands completely still, and I can’t really tell if it exists at all. It’s probably just that behind all the events, time seems to become invisible, but if I remember the day when I tore myself away from you, I realise that an awful lot of it has gone by.

You can’t even imagine how much you help me, simply because I can write to you! It’s my salvation. Don’t smile – it really is my salvation!

What have I written? Smile, Sashenka, my wonder, smile.

I woke up early – that’s the best time of the day here. It was only just light, the morning breeze was still gentle and fresh. Hours like that are the only time it’s possible to live here. Even as I rejoice in the coolness I can already feel the horror of the heat foretokened by this immense red sun clambering out of the haze above the fields of kaoliang. Soon the sun will turn golden, then white. The haze above the fields will evaporate, the morning breeze will fade away and hell will begin again. The heat here can bake your brain in the most literal sense – many men collapse from sunstroke.

Now I’d like to record the impressions I have accumulated during these days here. Forgive me, my dearest, if I have to write about unpleasant things.

I won’t write about things because they are important, but simply about whatever comes into my head first.

Yesterday an officer called Vseslavinsky got drunk on
huang jiu
and started pestering everybody with his smashed binoculars. That was actually the reason why he got drunk – a bullet hit the binoculars hanging on his chest and he escaped with only a bruise. He showed everybody the binoculars and the bruise. I used to think that fortunate accidents like that only happened in books. He went completely to pieces, he burst into tears like some little boy and kept on and on drinking. It’s strange, because before all this he gave the impression of being a very cool-headed and courageous man. And this morning he was found drowned in a pond. Near a ruined
fanza
close by here there’s a little pond in which even a child couldn’t drown. He probably slipped. He was completely out of his mind, after all. When we got him out, streams of dirty liquid flowed out of his mouth and his nose. They tried giving him artificial respiration – it was useless. The surgeon’s assistant stuck his fingers deep into his mouth and pulled out something sticky.

How stupid it all is!

And his family will receive notification of a heroic death.

On the other hand, what else can we write to them? The truth?

The truth is that we suffer losses every day but, as you see, by no means all of them in battle. Accidents and sunstroke are more common. The heat is still as unbearable as ever.

The men aren’t the only ones to suffer. Here is what happened right in front of me only the day before yesterday. The second artillery battery was moving out into position. The road ran down from a slight elevation, the horses were moving at a trot. Suddenly the horse that the guiding soldier was riding fell. Fortunately the soldier managed to jump out of the way, but the gun crashed into
the horse and broke both its hind legs. It was whinnying pitifully. They shot it.

But here’s some good news – the remainder of Admiral Seymour’s expedition has returned. They couldn’t break through to Peking, the line had been dismantled ahead of them. They couldn’t leave enough men everywhere to guard it and the railway stations behind them had been occupied by the Chinese army, so there was nothing else they could do but fight their way back. They came back empty-handed. That is, with two hundred wounded. They buried their dead, when they were able, on the spot.

Two companies of Russian sailors under the command of Captain Chagin had left with this detachment. Only half of them came back. Our sailors spent two weeks in constant action in extremely difficult conditions. I heard Chagin tell the officers that at one point they had to withdraw briefly and leave some of the wounded in a ruined station, and when they won the station back, the wounded men had all been hacked to pieces. The cruelty here is incredible. And our men didn’t take any prisoners either. Chagin did at least try to prevent his subordinates from torturing anyone they captured, but he wasn’t always successful. And it’s precisely the wounded and helpless who are captured. Men go berserk when they see what is done to their comrades.

Our situation here hasn’t changed much as yet. Every now and then fighting flares up around the railway station, by the earth wall of the city and further away, by the Lutai Canal, but it’s not extensive. Did I already tell you that a canal that was dug a thousand years ago and stretches right across China flows through Tientsin?

So far both sides are marking time, but the bombardment of the city continues ceaselessly. The Chinese turn out to be incredibly punctual. The shelling of the concessions usually takes place
from three in the afternoon until eight in the evening, and then again from two until ten in the morning.

Sashenka, I’ve listened to that ceaseless rumbling for so long now that I can distinguish our shots from the Chinese guns and even tell the calibre. The Chinese fire from the forts with six-inch Krupp cannon and Hotchkiss rapid-fire guns. Naturally, you’ll say: What kind of connoisseur of calibres are you! Well, no kind at all, of course! But the ears just get used to it. And I’m changing here too. I’m becoming someone else. It’s impossible not to change here. But that’s exactly what I wanted, isn’t it?