The Light and the Dark (41 page)

This one would like to have everything like everyone else: husband, child, breakfast together in the morning, but she doesn’t know how. Last year she bought a river cruise, decided this is it, nowhere to retreat, I’ll sail off into my holiday alone and come back happy. And there she is on the last evening, sitting on deck and looking at a seagull that’s sitting on the handrail, looking at her. And the seagull thinks: ‘We’re sisters, aren’t we? You, me and that landing stage over there that no one ever lands on.’

And this one here, with the languorous sheep’s eyes, is an absolutely hopeless painter who gives her paintings to all her friends for their birthdays, and they don’t have a clue what to do with them and last year this couple – he’s a big-mouthed dope and lucky devil, when they ask ‘which hand is it in?’ he always gets it right, and she works in a dog parlour, washing and clipping dogs, it’s hot and everything’s closed up tight, because after the bath a little doggy could catch cold, and so she runs outside for a smoke all sweaty, covered in dog hair – well anyway, they hung the artist’s gift up in the dining room when she was there, then took it down and forgot to put it back up the next time she came. She arrives, and there’s a clock hanging where her still life used to be. Now she’s sitting on the little bench by the window, lost in thought and counting something on her fingers.

I walk in, take my dress off, hang it on the hanger behind the door, put on a crisp white coat.

And it begins.

‘Next!’

She takes off her warm leggings and panties, wiping her runny nose on her wrist, and clambers onto the cold chair. Goose bumps have spread across her blue, skinny thighs and her buttocks with the red stripes from the elastic. Curling ginger.

The fine threads of justice and mercy.

And this morning, when the snow and the half-light were still a single whole, there was a girl with a cold at the tram stop, sniffling snottily.

I was standing beside her. There was no tram for a long time.

Then someone gasped:

‘It’s coming!’

The tram stop started shuffling and rustling.

‘Number five? Or number twelve?’

‘A five!’

The tram came closer and closer, but the girl suddenly skipped away from it, darted behind the shelter, and started choking as she leaned over to vomit. Her granny’s salted cucumber saw the light of day again, along with something chopped fine, like vinaigrette.

Before she could get her breath back and spit out the last bits, the tram was long gone. I went too.

I stayed.

I’m riding in the tram and standing at the stop.

Steam hovers over the blob of vomit. A jackdaw has flown in and hopped up lopsidedly. It pecks at this hot dish.

I walked right up close to her, our patches of breath meshed and crumpled together. I ask:

‘Are you all right?’

She wipes her lips with snow and squints sideways at me, as if to say: Get lost.

I:

‘How old are you?’

She:

‘That’s none of your business.’

I:

‘Of course not. It’s just that once upon a time I didn’t have a daughter. I looked at you and suddenly thought she could have been like you now.’

She:

‘What do you want from me? Who are you?’

I:

‘What difference does that make? I’m just waiting for a tram. In short, I’m the Empress of Life. The message and the messenger. It’s not important. Don’t be afraid of me.’

She:

‘I’m not afraid.’

I:

‘I know everything.’

She:

‘You don’t know anything.’

I:

‘Conceived without sin and no one believes you?’

She:

‘Mind your own business!’

I:

‘But where did it come from then? Just went for a swim in a pond, did you, and there it was?’

She:

‘But I never did anything wrong! I swear I didn’t!’

I:

‘Well now, my little girl, all, sorts of things happen. You could
have picked it up on your finger and stuck it in. Birds manage to introduce the sperm on the wing.’

She:

‘What have birds got to do with it?’

I:

‘Birds don’t have anything to do with it. But a human being, as you don’t know yet, is completely alone. The only state in which a human being is truly not alone is when a woman is expecting a child. Be happy, you stupid fool! Do you think you’re the only one? What’s the big deal? All sorts of things happen! You’re not the first, you won’t be the last. Children aren’t from the seed. So consider it a virgin birth.’

She:

‘I’m afraid.’

I:

‘Everything will be all right. You’ll see. Don’t take on so! You’re healthy and beautiful, you’ll manage. And you’ll have a healthy, beautiful child.’

She:

‘I don’t want to. I’ve decided I’m not going to.’

I:

‘But that’s not for you to decide, if you want to or not. Who’s asking you? You think about that stomach of yours. A watermelon’s a lad, a cantaloupe’s a lass. Whatever way it turns out, basically.’

She:

‘No!’

I:

‘Calm down, there’s a clever girl! Go and thank that pond for the present and, like Alyonushka at the millpond, ask for the child to be born normal and with eyes as huge as possible, and for it to
have everything in the right place – arms, legs, head, you know, all sorts of things happen!’

She:

‘I’m not going to have it anyway!’

I:

‘Yes you are!’

She:

‘No I’m not!’

I:

‘Yes you are! Pull yourself together! Here, take my handkerchief, blow your nose. And listen. Once upon a time there was a little girl, just like you, with the same kind of head cold, she blew her nose just like you, and she conceived without sin just like you. No one believed her. And what was in her girlish head was the same as in yours. The ice on the river had just started to break up. She went down there one night and put her little bundle on an ice floe. The child floated off downstream. Weeping bitterly, she walked away from the river, back to her non-home, but she realised there would be nothing but non-life there. She wandered round the streets until morning. The milk flowed from her breasts, because when woman was created, they forgot the tap. The child’s cry was ringing in her ears all the time. Eventually she couldn’t stand it any more and went back to the river. The child’s cry came closer and closer. And then she saw her little bundle on an ice floe that was slowly drifting along the other side of the river, from upstream. She threw herself into the river and ran over the ice, falling through into the water all the time, grabbed the child and clambered out, barely alive, onto the bank. She sat down in a snowdrift, freed her hot breast and stuck it in the child’s mouth. The child fastened on it and slurped greedily. And life began – clamorous, fragrant, and imperishable.’

My Sashenka!

We’ve been on the march for several days now.

There are only snatches of things in my head, so I’ll write to you in snatches.

The rain has stopped, we’ve managed somehow to light campfires. The night is thick all around, I can’t see anything, only the faces are lit up.

At night everyone’s different somehow, unfamiliar. Everyone’s tired and bad-tempered.

Sometimes the campfire flares up, and suddenly I can see a cart and a horse’s face, then once again the darkness closes in from all sides.

I do have a fever after all. Inside my head as well there are glimpses of light, then darkness all around. Then thoughts appear, but very remote somehow.

Remember, you asked what I thought about the Mona Lisa? Now I know for certain what she’s smiling at. She’s smiling because she’s already there, and we’re still here. She’s smiling at us from over there. And it isn’t a smile at all. She already knows what we don’t know yet. We all hope that there might be something there, but she already knows there isn’t anything, so she’s grinning at us for being so foolish.

I’m feverish, everything gets jumbled up together in my head! A day’s gone by, it’s raining again, and it’s windy too. It’s lashing down harder than ever, and the flap of the tent is snapping. My head’s hot, but my feet are cold.

Everybody walks about wet all day long, and there’s nowhere to dry ourselves.

Something bad is happening to me. Every now and then I stop understanding where I am and what’s happening to me. Is this me?

Darkness all around, then sudden glimpses of light.

The wet canvas flutters, but somehow I don’t have the strength to do anything about it.

The mosquitoes have appeared again with the rain. My face and hands are swollen all over from bites. At this moment I have to write with my eyes screwed up, constantly shaking my head.

The roads have been washed away, in the ruts the water is up to our knees. The sticky mud hangs like heavy weights on our feet and coats the wheels, it’s very hard for the horses.

I’m unbearably thirsty. I’ve drunk water from puddles several times, although I realised I was only upsetting my sick stomach even more. But I was tormented by thirst.

The paddy fields are flooded with water, there are lots of snakes in them. They weave along right at the surface and their tracks can be seen on the water for a long time afterwards.

As I walk along, the grass always seems to be stirring nearby, and I hear rustling sounds.

Yesterday they arranged a midday halt and everybody was so tired, they collapsed where they were standing. Afterwards one infantryman showed everyone a dead snake that he discovered he had been sleeping on.

‘And I was wondering what that rope was, irking me under my side.’

Total confusion. Units fall behind and get mingled together. Men get frightened and start shooting at each other. Yesterday the English thought that some Russian infantrymen who had
captured a village off to the side of the road were Chinese, and they started shelling them. Several men were wounded and one died on the way to the infirmary, he’d lost a lot of blood.

The plans for the offensive keep changing endlessly. Right now the Japanese are at the front of the advance, we’re behind them, the Americans are behind us.

Today we passed through several villages abandoned by their inhabitants and devastated by the Japanese.

From one village they started firing at our extended column. General Stessel ordered a battery to be deployed – in a few minutes there was nothing left of the village.

We are advancing along the right bank of the Pei Ho. The Chinese army is withdrawing in total disarray. At the villages we come across the sites of their halts, abandoned all higgledy-piggledy: they leave everything behind – crates of shells, cartridges, rifles. Where the Japanese have passed through, the villages are totally devastated. They take everything edible and force the remaining Chinese to go with them as porters. They shoot some to intimidate the rest. There are many bodies of local people killed like that scattered around the villages.

The pillage is continued by our men, although they can’t carry much away with them. They prowl round the villages and lug off watermelons, cantaloupes, vegetables, chickens.

The Chinese don’t have bread – instead they eat boiled rice and pancakes, all without salt.

The soldiers have stopped eating the pigs, of which there are huge numbers everywhere – they devour the corpses that litter the villages around here now. There’s no one to clear the dead away.

All the detachments have many stragglers. We keep coming across Japanese trailing behind their forces in an endless procession
or on their way back to Tientsin. And everybody, regardless of nationality, is suffering from dysentery. Everywhere men sit along the sides of the road with their trousers lowered and agony on their faces, whether Japanese or Russian. Our men pick up the weakest of the Japanese stragglers and sit them on their two-wheeled carts, infirmary wagons and big guns.

It’s a hot day, not a breath of wind. But the road still isn’t drying out, although it runs along an embankment built to separate the fields from the Pei Ho when it floods. There are puddles of stagnant water everywhere, and a terrible stink rises up on all sides. Traces of matter regurgitated by sick stomachs are ever-present.

Everyone is afraid of being ambushed. From time to time shots ring out from the thickets. The kaoliang is impenetrably thick and so tall that it can easily conceal a man on horseback. Sometimes the soldiers’ nerves give out and they start blazing away wildly at the thickets. All the time it seems as if there’s someone skulking in there.

I’ve set my hand to writing a few more words. The same villages, the same kaoliang. The thickets are so dense that a man disappears in just a few steps. The soldiers have been forbidden to run in there to relieve themselves. There have already been several cases of men being found with their stomachs slashed open.

Forgive me, my dear Sasha, it is so long since I have been able to write you a real letter, a good one. I write down whatever comes into my head at the halts.

Right now, I want to hide from everything that’s going on here, but I still write anyway – what if my letters are useful to someone some day?