The Light and the Dark (5 page)

I walk past your neighbours on the corner, peep over the fence at the roses – huge and heavy, like heads of cabbage. They’re even more fragrant in the rain.

I felt afraid to walk up the steps onto the porch, I folded the umbrella and sneaked across to the veranda windows. I went up on tiptoe and saw you there inside the rainy window panes. You’re lying on the divan, with your bandaged foot up on its back, reading some thick volume.

You see, I wished you ill, and you fell off your bike into the ditch.

Now you know why you twisted your ankle that evening and ended up lounging about in bed.

I stood there in the rain and looked at you. You sensed something, looked up, saw me, smiled.

Yes, Sashenka, my dacha girl, how long ago that was, and in some quite different, faraway life.

It was so good to lie there and write all sorts of nonsense in my diary, listening to the rain rustling on the roof and the mosquitoes buzzing on the veranda. If I look out of the window, the apple trees have no feet in the mist. The clothes pegs on the washing line are soaking wet and the water is dripping off them.

The rain makes it dark for reading – I switch on the light in the middle of the day.

I set a huge tome of Shakespeare on my knees – it’s convenient for putting my notebook on when I write.

Do you know what I was writing about then? About Hamlet. Or rather, about myself and how my father had died, or maybe he hadn’t, and my mother had married someone else, who was blind into the bargain, but I absolutely can’t understand why everyone has to harass each other and run each other through with pointed instruments – and it doesn’t even flood the stage with blood. What if they all die without any contrived acts of dastardly villainy and subtle scheming, just like that, all by themselves, after they’ve lived their lives – does that mean it wouldn’t be Hamlet any more? Why, it’s even more frightening. His father’s ghost – so what? A bogeyman for little children.

And as for that poison poured into his ear!

And why does all of it only start when he comes back to his father’s castle, wasn’t he Hamlet before all that? Even before anything has happened, before the curtain has opened, before
Bernardo and Francisco have started squabbling – all that may be specified precisely in the general service regulations, but he’s already Hamlet, isn’t he?

And that’s the most interesting thing of all, surely – what happened to them before all these encounters with ghosts, poisonings and stupid theatrical tricks, like hiding behind the arras?

He was just getting on with life – the way I live. Without any deathbed monologues in verse.

And his life before that should be written. For instance, how he played at postmen when he was little – he used to take an armful of old newspapers and stuff them into all the postboxes. And how during the breaks between lessons at school he used to hide away with a book in the cloakroom and the library – the weakest and most cowardly boys used to taunt him, getting their own back for what they had suffered from others. By the way, do you know what was the first thing that disenchanted me with literature? I’d read how the medieval jesters used to ask their lords tricky questions and the lords tried to answer them with painstaking correctness, and every time they just made fools of themselves, so during the break I tried asking my tormentors something artlessly ironic, but they just slapped me round the ears without even bothering to listen to me!

And in addition people ought to be told about the time when one day Hamlet was bathing in a lake and this man swam up to him and said: ‘You swim quite well, boy, but your style’s a bit messy. Let me show you!’ And then this swimming teacher supported him from underneath with one hand and his other hand kept slipping down off the boy’s stomach, lower and lower, as if by accident.

And about the dovecot. In my childhood, when we still lived in the old apartment, our neighbour had a dovecot in the courtyard, and when he was waiting for his pigeons to come back from a flight
he didn’t look up into the heavens, but into a basin of water – he could see the sky better like that was how he explained it.

I also wrote that I wanted to become myself. I still wasn’t me. It wasn’t possible that this could be me. I wanted to break out of the calendar.

And look, now I have.

It’s a good thing you can’t see where I am now and what I’m surrounded by. But if I don’t describe it, it’s as if it doesn’t exist at all.

Remember those beautiful stones you had on your shelf, the ones you brought back home from the seaside once upon a time? One day you took a round pebble and put it in your eye, like a monocle. I took that pebble away and it used to lie on my windowsill, watching me all the time. Then suddenly I realised that it really is the pupil of someone’s eye. And it can see me. And not only me, but absolutely everything. Because before that pebble can even blink, everything will flash past in front of it and disappear – me and this room and this town outside the window. At that moment I realised the absolute insignificance of all the books I had read and all the notebooks I had filled up with writing, and I felt very upset. I was seized by this terrible anxiety. I suddenly realised that in fact that pupil simply couldn’t see my room or me and couldn’t have seen them even if it wanted to, because for it I would flash past so quickly, it wouldn’t notice a thing. It’s real, it exists, but do I really exist for it?

Do I even exist for myself?

What does it mean to exist? Is it to know that you were? To demonstrate your existence with your memories?

What are my arms, my legs, my moles, my intestines gurgling with pearl barley, my bitten fingernails and my scrotum to this stone? My thalamus? My childhood memories? One New Year’s
Day I woke up early in the morning and ran to the tree in my bare feet to look at the presents. There were guests sleeping all over the room, but there was nothing under the tree – the presents had been bought, but after the champagne and vodka they had simply forgotten to put them out. I went to the kitchen and cried there until my mother got up. Is that stupid?

Probably, in order to become real, you have to exist, not in your own awareness, which is so uncertain and subject to the influence of sleep, for instance, when even you don’t know if you’re alive or not, but in the awareness of another person. And not just any person, but one for whom it is important to know that you exist. You know that I exist. And here, where everything is topsy-turvy, that makes me real.

When I was still a child I avoided death by a miracle – I got up at night to go to the toilet and the book shelves collapsed onto the bed.

But I only started thinking seriously about my own death for the first time at school in a zoology lesson. We had an old teacher, an invalid, and he warned us to put a tablet from his pocket in his mouth if he ever fell unconscious. We put the tablet in, but it didn’t help.

He always used to wipe his glasses with his tie.

At first he taught us botany and I took such a liking to him that I was always collecting herbariums, but later I decided to become an ornithologist, like him.

It was very funny the way he used to lament the disappearance of various plants and birds.

He stands there at the blackboard and shouts at us, as if we’re to blame for something.

‘Where’s the shady crocus? Where’s the weak sedge? Where’s the caldesia? And the summer snowflake? And Dubyansky’s
cornflower? Well, say something, will you? And the birds? Where are the birds? Where’s Steller’s sea eagle? Where’s the bearded vulture-eagle? Where’s the glossy ibis? I’m asking you! And the crested ibis! And the marbled teal! And the shikra! Where’s the shikra?’

And when he asked this, he himself looked like some sort of bird with ruffled feathers. All the teachers had nicknames, and he was called Shikra.

Do you know what I used to dream about? About how some day sooner or later I would meet my father and he would say:

‘Right, show me your muscles!’

I would bend my arm and tense my muscles. My dad would put his hand round my biceps and shake his head in surprise, as if to say: ‘My, my, aren’t you something!’

But I understood all about the invisible world when Granny got a job for the summer working at a dacha for blind children and she took me with her.

Ever since I was little I’d been used to her having all sorts of blind things at home. For instance, she would lay out a game of patience with special cards with holes pricked in the upper right corner. For my birthday she gave me a chess set, a special one, with the figures all different sizes – the white ones bigger than the black ones. And she whispered to Mum, but I heard her:

‘They don’t play there anyway.’

It was strange at first at that dacha, but then I actually got to like it – it felt as if I’d become invisible.

There’s a boy with a watering can in his hand, feeling the kerb of the path gingerly with his foot, and I walk past him and he can’t see me. But that was only the way it seemed to me. Often they would call out:

‘Who’s there?’

It’s actually very difficult to hide from a blind person.

In the morning they had P.T. and after that the whole day was study and games. At first it felt odd to see them running out for P.T. in a chain, each one holding on to the shoulder of the one in front.

There were rabbits living in a cage in the yard, and they looked after them. It was a great tragedy one morning when the cages were found empty – the rabbits had been stolen.

They did a lot of singing there. For some reason blind people are thought to possess exceptionally keen hearing and they’re all supposed to be born musicians. It’s nonsense, of course.

Every day they did modelling. One little girl modelled a bird sitting on a branch like a person sitting on a chair. I remember how amazed I was that in their lessons they had to dip their hands in the aquarium and feel the fish. I thought that was really great! Afterwards, when there was no one else in the room, I went over to the aquarium, closed my eyes, rolled up my sleeve and lowered my hand into the water. When I touched the beautiful goldfish, it felt slippery and disgusting. That was the moment when I suddenly felt afraid, genuinely afraid, that I might go blind some day.

But being blind wasn’t frightening for them. A sightless person is afraid of going deaf. He’s afraid of darkness in his ears.

Blindness was basically invented by the sighted.

For a blind person, things are what they are, he lives with that, that’s his starting-point, not something that doesn’t exist. You have to learn how to suffer over something that doesn’t exist. We can’t see the colour to the right of violet in the spectrum, but that doesn’t bother us. If we feel unhappy for some reason, that’s not it.

Granny pitied all of them, and they clung to her. I sometimes thought she loved them more than she did me. It’s nonsense of
course, but I wanted her to stroke the back of my head like that too, hug me against her immense breasts and sigh tenderly:

‘There now, my little sparrow!’

She never used to thrash them with a withy, but I got plenty of that.

I always wanted to ask her about my father, but I was afraid to.

She didn’t tell me very much at all. I learned one family story from her when I grew up a bit. Her own granny had a child when she was still a young girl. She claimed she had conceived without sin, but no one believed her. They hadn’t heard about parthenogenesis in those days. 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.

I remember I couldn’t get that picture out of my head for a long time – night, the ice floe drifting along and that little bundle squealing.

But I was consoled when I read Marcus Aurelius many years later. The way he put things there was like this: imagine a piglet is being carried on its way to be sacrificed, the piglet’s struggling and squealing – but what is it squealing for?

You know, every living creature and every thing struggles and squeals like that every moment. You just have to hear that squealing of life in everything, in every tree, in every person on the street, in every puddle, in every murmur and rustle.