The Light and the Dark (42 page)

Perhaps someone will want to find out something about us. About what I saw today. About how we marched until late and slept the rest of the night on the wet ground, without pitching
the tents. Everyone just toppled over anywhere at all. The rains have transformed the clayey road into liquid mush. The wagon train and the limbers of the guns sank up to their wheel hubs and the soldiers dragged them out with their bare hands. Today I pulled my foot out of the liquid clay and left my boot there.

But who could possibly be interested in my boot?

All the same, I’m going to write anyway.

Night again. We’ve settled into a ruined village. Our underwear and tunics are so wet, you could wring them out. There’s no chance of drying our puttees. We’ve stuck a candle stump in a Chinese paper lantern, it’s barely even glimmering. And we’re gulping down a murky, perfumed substance – Chinese green tea, brewed up in a soldier’s billycan. I made myself eat three eggs. Mosquitoes, sweltering heat, stupefying vapours from the puddles and ditches.

The men are afraid to drink from the wells, they make the Chinese drink the water from them first – the old men haven’t fled from the abandoned villages. The water’s brownish, thick as pea soup.

I’ve already told you that the Japanese are marching ahead of us – we’ve just passed a tree on which men are hanging by their own pigtails, knotted round their necks.

During the day either it’s scorching hot, so there are men sprawling about with sunstroke again, or a tropical downpour floods the whole area in about an hour. The water doesn’t soak into the clayey ground and it forms entire lakes in the hollows, while ditches and streams are transformed into unfordable rivers.

Men collapse, exhausted, and are dragged aside, onto the high, dry spots, otherwise they could choke on the puddles and the liquid mud.

The commander of the advance positions has just been setting
out his company in a sentry-line. The rain was lashing down and the sentries had to stand up to their ankles in water. The posts are deliberately set up on low ground – at night there’s a clearer view looking upwards.

Clumps of trees above the kaoliang – either burial grounds or villages.

An overnight halt under the open sky. Everyone bunched together, on their guard. The murmuring of the kaoliang is like the rustling of someone creeping up on us.

The moment there’s a brief halt, the column lies down instantly. The men get so tired that they fall asleep on the bare earth in all sorts of positions.

We walked all night, the nearby villages were burning all around us. In the glow we could see everything in the sky. Then the rain started again, but the glow forced its way through it. A reddish kind of rain, that sort of thing doesn’t happen.

The road is as impassable as ever, from time to time we have to help the horses drag carts that have got stuck out of the mud.

I was so tired that I collapsed in a heap and slept like that for a while, without getting undressed, in my dirty boots. We crammed into some kind of mud hut and the soldiers fell asleep on the floor, using each other as pillows. They all smell of mould, sweat and ingrained dirt.

My own smell is quite unbearable.

It was quiet outside, but then we heard either shouts or groans coming from the fields. Kirill asked:

‘Is that a bird?’

‘No. They probably haven’t picked up the wounded.’

We weren’t allowed to sleep. Early in the morning the sentries imagined they saw someone and opened fire. It turned out to be
a dog. Men’s nerves give way, they fly off the handle at the least little thing and shout at each other.

Everybody is so embittered that they’re turning savage. There are atrocities on all sides.

The Chinese soldiers shoot from ambush, concealed in the kaoliang thickets, and when there’s danger, they take off their jackets, fling their guns away and creep out, bowing, pretending to be peaceful civilians. The Japanese and the English and our men now kill everyone they meet.

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 shoulder 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!
’