The Light and the Dark (35 page)

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 later.

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.

I walked through a formation of trams that had spent the night at the depot.

As I approached the zoo, I was presented with a scene out of a parable. My she-elephant was being led along the tramlines. She
was walking somewhere, in no hurry, swaying and flapping her ears, sniffing at the road surface and the rails with her trunk, raising swirls of fluff. The sage knows where she’s being taken to and what for.

I got back home and felt a desperate desire to get washed. First I took a shower, then I filled the bath and lay down to soak.

I lay there watching tiny bubbles appear on the little hairs all over the skin of my body.

Suddenly I wanted to slip completely under the water, head and all. Become a water monkey.

I took the snorkelling tube out of the cupboard, the one I’d bought once upon a time and never used. I submerged and froze.

The silence underwater is so strange, more like a noise. I can hear everything, even things I don’t normally hear. Only everything comes through some kind of thick membrane. And my pulse beats loudest of all.

It occurred to me that this was probably how it was in Mummy’s stomach.

I don’t know how long I sat under the water with the tube in my teeth, perhaps ten minutes, perhaps an hour, until the water went cold. I was chilled right through.

I climbed out, slipped on my bathrobe, went over to the mirror and looked at myself for a long time.

Then I puked all morning long.

Sashenka!

Tientsin has been taken.

I’ve just finished the lists.

We have only 150 men killed. There are three times as many wounded. Our brigade commander, Major-General Stessel, is wounded too, but he returned to headquarters after being bandaged up.

In all the allies lost more than 800 men. The Japanese got the worst of it. They launched straight into a frontal assault and blew up the city gates. The Americans’ General Butler was killed.

The allies attacked the Chinese city from the west, while our detachment attacked from the east, by the Lutai Canal, and stormed Li Hunchan’s fortifications. Part of the Chinese force scattered, part withdrew towards Yantsun and Beitsan.

And so I wrote a victorious communiqué. Everyone here is rejoicing. All the staff officers are walking around as if it’s their birthday.

Those who have become my letters and numbers are probably especially delighted.

That was yesterday, and today we went to look at the captured city.

Here is my victorious communiqué for you, Sashenka.

On the way we first stopped at the
impans
– the fortifications taken by our men yesterday. The Chinese camp had been abandoned, together with all its contents. I saw a scattered deck of Chinese playing cards, and I was going to take them as a souvenir, but I changed my mind. Why would I want to remember this? The bodies of Chinese soldiers that had not yet been cleared away were lying nearby, already flyblown and gnawed on by dogs.

Peasants under guard were clearing away the bodies. They caught hold of them with hooks and dragged them into large pits. The sun rose and started beating down and the stench from the dead
men became unbearable. The peasants worked with bunches of grass stuffed into their nostrils.

Fire had raged all night in the city, and now the ruins were smoking. It was impossible to believe that this had been a living city of a million people. There were battered and broken wagons, handcarts, rickshaws, dead animals and people lying everywhere, and a smell of smoke and scorched fat.

We came across dead people every step of the way, some of them still dressed, but most naked, for some reason. One old woman was lying on her back and her breasts had slipped up along her sides towards her armpits. In some places they were already raking the bodies together into heaps and carting them off somewhere. Everywhere there were swarms of vicious flies that couldn’t tell who was already dead and who was still alive.

We had to clamber over heaps of debris. At one spot my foot slipped on something and I almost fell. Under the rubble I glimpsed a scorched, twisted face.

A dog growled at everyone passing by. Its front legs were sound, but the back ones were broken, and a wound in its side was teeming with maggots and flies. The dog couldn’t bark any longer, it could only try to crawl with its front legs. It growled hoarsely at us too.

Everyone walked by. But I stopped and shot it.

There, Sashenka, that was my first killing, I make a poor soldier.

At the site of the fire, pigs smeared with ashes were rummaging under the smoking beams and rafters, among some scorched and burning timbers – I didn’t realise straightaway that they were charred bodies. I saw the fingers of a smouldering hand crumble at a jolt. And all of this gave off an appalling stench. A thought flashed through my mind: I’ve just seen pigs eating roasted people, why did I have to see that?