The Light and the Dark (39 page)

When I was getting Mummy ready, I sprayed her perfume on the body and put the bottle in the coffin.

It turned out that Mummy had paid for everything in advance. She already had a place in the cemetery. It was her mother’s old grave, and her first child was buried in it too. For some reason she had never taken me to the cemetery. Now she wanted to lie with them. She had chosen an old photograph for the headstone, one in which she was young and beautiful. That’s the advantage parents have – they leave without seeing their children in old age. Mummy will never see me as a tearful, irritable old woman, the way I have seen her.

I also recalled how we used to quarrel when I was a spiteful, heartless young baggage and once even wished that she would die – and now look, it had happened.

On the day of the funeral, thick snow fell from early in the morning and turned the cemetery into a world of snow statues – the trees, bushes, fences and gravestones stopped being themselves.

Everyone kept brushing the wet snow off their coats and caps, Daddy wiped his bushy eyebrows with the end of his scarf.

On the way there we ran into another funeral at the entrance and we had to wait. There was a beard covered in snow protruding from the coffin. It stopped being a beard and turned into a little snow statue as well. The other funeral had music. The musicians shook the snow off their instruments, knocked the saliva out of the mouthpieces, huddled up discontentedly, stamped their feet under the falling snow. One of them furtively sipped cognac from a little bottle.

Fires were burning here and there in the cemetery, to thaw out the ground. The smoke drifted to us through the wet flakes as they fell.

I had the strange feeling that we weren’t burying Mummy, but someone else.

I knew it wasn’t her, that the body in the coffin was empty, that Mummy couldn’t be lying there, piled over with snow in an uncomfortable wooden box, with bare, blue hands crossed on her sunken chest, but there were moments when the similarity of this dead woman in the coffin to my mother became unbearable and the tears started pouring from my eyes. Especially because the snow didn’t melt either on her hands or her face and I had to brush it off with my glove.

When I leaned down over her, just before they closed the coffin, I sniffed her for the last time – the aroma of the perfume mingled with the smells of the upholstery in the coffin, the snow, the fires, the flowers, the dead body. But all that wasn’t Mummy’s smell.

My father leaned down and pressed his forehead against hers.
Then he came over to me, with droplets dangling on the hairs sticking out of his nostrils. He was going to say something, but just shook his head, as if he was swimming and water had got into his ears. I wiped him under the nose with my handkerchief and hugged him, pressed my head against his wet hair.

‘Daddy, put your cap on, you’ll catch cold!’

A workman was shoving a rope though under the coffin to lower Mummy into the grave. It seemed as if everybody wanted to hug someone at that moment, and he hugged the coffin.

I was surprised that, apart from her closest women friends, some other people I didn’t know at all had come to the funeral. As one woman kissed me, she said:

‘Sasha! How much like your mother you’ve become!’

We went back along the path between the dead cemetery, where nobody had been buried for a long time, and our living cemetery, and the thought came to me that now I could never hug Mummy again, but some tree could hug her with its roots and snuggle up to her.

Yanka didn’t come to the funeral, although I was expecting her. Something had happened to her in general, after that time she was in hospital and I stayed at their place. We used to be best friends, but now she didn’t call, didn’t come round, didn’t ask me to sit with the children. I lugged a tree home for the New Year, decorated it and bought presents for the boys, I wanted to invite them over, have a party for them and me. But Yanka wouldn’t let the children come to me, she said they’d both caught a cold. Only I could hear them shouting into the phone that they wanted to go and see Aunty Sasha.

After Mummy died, I sorted through all her papers and photographs, and met my father to give him some of them. He announced that he had started writing his memoirs and all this
could come in useful. I asked him to give me something to read but he refused.

‘All in good time.’

We talked about Mummy, about how hard it was for her to die.

‘You’re still young, bunny, you don’t understand anything about this life! Illnesses are necessary – they help! When the suffering’s that bad, it’s not so frightening to go.’

He drank a little bit, got drunk quickly and started exclaiming indignantly:

‘They go sticking rags in a dead man’s mouth to give him plump cheeks like a little baby, pomading his hair and painting a happy smile on his face! When I imagine them putting that clown’s makeup on me at the end, I feel sick! And I can’t imagine myself in the ground at all. I don’t want that! I want to go like a sailor – splash into the ocean!’

‘Daddy, you ought to get married again!’

The exhausting trips to the hospital were over, it should have been easier without the cancer, injections, bedpans, vomiting and groaning, the odours of a decaying body, but I found myself thinking that I’d got used to going to see Mummy in the evening and thinking on the way how I would tell her about my day, the good things and the bad things, all the walking about and standing in queues and worrying, how hard it had been for me – and how I managed it all in the end.

I sorted through Mummy’s things. The combs, powder compacts, little mirrors, scent bottles, hair pins, little jars, tubes, tweezers, pairs of scissors, brushes – everything that can’t exist without a woman – went into the rubbish bag.

I came across her old dresses in the wardrobe. As I sorted them out I recalled where and when I had seen her in this dress or that
one. Sometimes I couldn’t remember anything, but sometimes a living picture appeared in my mind’s eye immediately: there was Mummy in her blue velvet dress, getting ready for the theatre, combing her hair, talking on the phone in front of the mirror and assuring the receiver that no one wore their eyebrows that way any more. And then I found her Chinese robe with the sky-blue dragons – I scrunched it up and plunged my face into the flowing silk, but it only smelled of old laundry.

Little paper envelopes. All accurately labelled.

‘Sashenka’s first tooth’.

I think: Is that mine or his?

‘Sasha’s hair – one year and three months’.

And again I can’t tell if it’s mine or not.

I found a home-made cardboard fan that I made for her some time at the dacha when I was little, to drive away the wasps. She had kept it for some reason.

I looked through the photographs and was amazed – in her young days Mummy really did look very much like me. Is it possible that if I live to be old I shall be exactly like she was during her illness?

Some of the photographs had dates on them in Mummy’s writing. In one photo Daddy is hugging Mummy somewhere surrounded by snowdrifts. It’s strange that there are snowdrifts already in October. They’re both wearing old-fashioned skiing outfits, but there are no skis to be seen. I checked the date and calculated – it turned out that they had been photographed exactly at the time when I was conceived. Although Mummy’s smiling, her eyes are serious somehow. But Daddy’s laughing with his mouth wide open. He still didn’t know anything about himself then, or about Mummy, or about me. Generally in old photographs nobody ever knows anything about themselves.

Mummy once told me the kind of precautions they used to take: they put a metal cap smeared with petroleum jelly on the neck of the womb. But during menstruation it had to be taken out. Mummy didn’t always put the cap in and she protected herself with acid tampons instead – before she went to bed with Daddy, she diluted some citric acid, moistened a piece of cotton wool with it and tucked it inside herself.

But that night they wanted me.

Somehow I can picture that night, my night, very clearly.

They got back late in the falling snow, like the snow that fell on the day of her funeral, and Mummy hung her black astrakhan coat up to dry.

I see Daddy trying to take off Mummy’s stockings and she whispers:

‘Careful! You’ll ladder it like that!’ Mummy told me there used to be a little repair shop at the railway station for fixing ladders in stockings – there was always a queue of women standing there.

Daddy probably kissed her impatiently while she neatly rolled off her stockings, then stuck them in the gap between the mattress and the headboard of the bed. And then she still had to lean backwards and curve her back to pull off the belt with the rubber bobbles. Or did her punctilious attention to detail not extend to lovemaking?

I don’t know anything about her.

But I do know that afterwards, when I had already begun, Daddy got up for a smoke and opened the window that hadn’t been papered shut for winter yet.

‘Look, the snow’s teeming down again! Come here!’

Mummy threw her astrakhan coat on over her naked body and walked across to him barefoot, holding the collar closed at her neck. Still hot after making love, she leaned out of the window,
scooped up a handful of wet snow off the windowsill and started munching on it.

They stand in the dark at the open window and watch the snow falling.

Daddy puts one arm round her, moves the
papyrosa
in his other hand as far away as possible and blows a stream of smoke out sideways from the corner of his mouth. In her wet winter coat Mummy snuggles up against Daddy and runs the handful of snow over the inflamed skin on her neck, and in the snowy light from outside the window her arm, naked to the elbow, is as white as white, as if she’s wearing a long opera glove.

My Sashenka!

Rain has set in here. It’s pouring down almost without a break.

We’re back at the camp. At this moment it’s drumming on the roof of the tent above my head. I’m watching yellow mud creeping along the path. And there are bubbles on the puddles.

Everything in the tent is damp and unbearably dirty. But, by contrast, on the outside the canvas is clean and white, all the dust has been washed off.

At first everyone was delighted when it started lashing down, they put out cooking pots and buckets to catch the rain, took their clothes off, had a wash, ran around naked, washed their uniforms and underwear. The rain here is southern, steamy, strong.

We’ve washed everything, but there’s nowhere to dry it – now it’s hanging up all round the tent and it smells of mould.

That drumming on the canvas is driving me demented.

And I’ve been shivering since the morning too. It looks as if I’ve picked up a fever. A strange kind of sensation. I seem able to see and hear everything, only from the outside, somehow.

And sometimes the connection is suddenly lost, that is, I stop understanding obvious things. For instance, I don’t understand how all these people around me appeared in my life. Or why I’m here with them now in this damp, smoky tent as they chortle loudly, taking off their shoulder belts, smelling of
huang jiu
: one of them has blown two fangs of smoke out of his nostrils, another has a red stripe on his forehead from his forage cap, and another doesn’t have a single hair on his cranium, his skin glistens like thin cigarette paper. And now they’re swearing as they discuss the action of melinite shells.

Or do I simply have a temperature? I must have fallen ill, that’s why the flow of life is such a messy jumble.

The cook complains that without any butter he has to fry everything in soya bean oil.

I walked past the admiral’s tent and there were cages with wet chickens. I don’t understand.

What is there to understand? Chickens, cages, rain, an admiral – but even so I don’t understand a thing.

An inspection was arranged for Admiral Alexeev’s arrival – the men prepared, smartened themselves up, polished their forage cap badges bright and shiny, everybody was lined up in the rain early in the morning, they waited for two hours, the corps commander arrived, saluted and looked at one infantryman’s rifle, it was dirty and he gave everybody an earful. But what have I got to do with all that?

I don’t understand who we are, where we are and why we’re together. This rain and the shots somewhere in the distance are
inexplicable. These documents I have to copy out interminably are inconceivable. It’s not possible that the same hand that is writing this letter about my love to you will later trace out the lines that bring grief into someone’s home, as if I’m a messenger bearing bad news. I’m not a messenger.

Kirill found an amulet on a dead Yihetuan – a piece of yellow paper in a little bag on a string round his neck. A note with an incantation written in red that was supposed to make him invulnerable. Kirill hung it on his own neck. I don’t understand.

He and I have quarrelled again. I understand that even less.

The soldiers have never read Shakespeare and they never will, but they know they shouldn’t eat a lot before a battle, it complicates their condition if they get a stomach wound. They know that a dirty wound can be washed with urine or disinfected by cauterisation – as a last resort the powder from a cartridge can be used. What do they want with the monologues of the Prince of Denmark? To be or not to be. Absurd. Impossible to understand.