The Light and the Dark (8 page)

And now I suddenly want our child to creep in under this heavenly firmament. Is that stupid? Too soon?

It feels so good to think that the two of us sat in this bath – you remember, face to face, we could barely fit in. I washed your feet with my hair, as if it was a bath mitt. Then you took hold of my foot and bit the toes, exactly like Daddy, he used to do that to me sometimes when I was little, growling and threatening me:

‘Now I’m going to eat you up!’

And he would bite my toes. It tickled me and scared me – what if he really did bite them off!

And after that I climbed behind your back and stuck my legs through under your arms, and you soaped them up with the sponge and scrubbed my toes and in between my toes, and I loved it all.

I really loved that, the way you lathered me absolutely everywhere!

My love, why aren’t you here now, so you could see my short gold fleece shimmering and shining in the water down there …

Sorry! I’m a fool.

Can you believe that between the sixth and eighth months a child is covered with fur that drops out afterwards? They showed us a child like that in the hospital after a premature birth – it’s horrible!

And do you know why people lost their fur and became naked? They told us at the lecture yesterday. After all, fur is such a useful thing! Look at a cat! Soft, comfortable, beautiful, so good to stroke! Can you imagine a naked cat? What a catastrophe! Well, the reason
is that the flood happened. All that stuff about Noah is made up – no people were really saved. But some monkeys survived, because they started living in the water. For thousands of generations we were water monkeys. That’s why our nostrils face down and not up. And the dolphins and seals lost their fur too.

That’s me – a water monkey. Sitting here and dreaming that you’ll come back and we’ll get into the bath together.

I look at myself and feel worried because I’ve got so much hair in the wrong places. You said you liked it, but now I think you simply didn’t want to upset me. Tell me, how can you possibly like it if I have hair here, and here, and there, and even down there?

I sit here pulling the hairs out with tweezers. It hurts!

Then I start imagining some cave girl pulling out her hairs with two seashells instead of tweezers. And she scrapes away the hairs under her arms and on her legs with blades made from flint or animal horns.

Yanka’s lucky, her hairs are light-coloured and small everywhere.

My love, what am I talking about? Why am I saying this? Here I am talking nonsense, and you put up with it all.

Yanka sends you her greetings, she called in yesterday.

She told me about her new beau, it was very funny. Can you imagine, an old man has fallen in love with her and proposed!

He tells her:

‘My dear child, I was falling in love with women before your parents were even born.’

Yanka showed me the way he went down on his knees in front of her and asked her to marry him, grabbing hold of her legs and pressing himself up against her, and she looked down on his bald head: one side of her felt so sorry for him she could have cried, but the other side really wanted to give him a flick with her finger
and she only just managed to stop herself!

She refused him, naturally, but she’s beaming as brightly as if she’d won a medal.

He worked all his life as an engraver and he entertained her with stories about all the inscriptions he had made on watches and cigarette cases.

Just imagine what he gave her as a present! He hands her this little case, like one for a ring. She opens it – and there’s a grain of rice inside! He’d written something on that grain for her. He said:

‘Yanochka, my dear! This is for you, the most precious thing that I have!’

Afterwards at home, she took a magnifying glass to read what he’d written, but the grain of rice slipped out of her fingers and skipped off out of sight. She searched and searched but couldn’t find it. So she still doesn’t know what he scratched on it.

What do they all see in Yanka? She has an overbite like a rabbit. And jug ears. She hides them under her hair.

I’m writing this to you now in the room, I’ve wrapped myself in a blanket and I’m sitting on the divan.

You were the first to tell me I was beautiful. Well, apart from Daddy, of course. But I didn’t believe him. I believed Mummy. She called me her ‘fright-face’.

She used to wear her rippling, shimmering Chinese silk gown with the sky-blue dragons. We would pull our feet up on the old, deep sofa, make ourselves comfortable and whisper together. We talked about everything in the world, she told me about everything. How I was born, for instance – I didn’t want to come out, and they had to do a Caesarean section. I touched the hard scar on her stomach with my fingers and it was strange to think that was where I’d come from. It still feels strange even now.

And we talked about the first time too.

‘It has to happen beautifully,’ she said. ‘And only with someone who is worthy of it. The most important thing is you mustn’t regret that it happened. Perhaps you won’t marry him, perhaps you won’t stay together afterwards – anything can happen, but you mustn’t regret that night.’

I believed in ‘fright-face’ more than what Daddy said, even though she was always constantly abusing me and kept saying I had no taste, I dressed badly, I made conversation badly, even laughed badly. I always felt guilty with her. I could never even imagine that she was being too strict or unfair with me. He saw the virtues in me and she saw the shortcomings.

Daddy never even slapped me once, but I got the belt and slaps from her right through my childhood. One day they were arguing, and I came up to her from behind to put my arms round her, but she was taking a drink to wash down a tablet and I accidentally jogged her elbow. She spilt the water on herself, then went for me and started beating me and couldn’t stop. Daddy pulled me away.

They used to argue because of me.

Daddy shouted:

‘Why are you always picking on her?’

She answered:

‘What will she grow up like otherwise?’

She went away somewhere for a few days and when she got back she kicked up a fuss because everything was a mess. The next time I tidied everything up before she got back, made everything all bright and shiny, but she was still dissatisfied, in fact even more. Maybe she sensed that Daddy and I could get on perfectly well without her, that when she was away life at home carried on quite normally.

She always kept repeating something she’d read somewhere about life not being a novel, that it wasn’t all a bowl of cherries, in life you couldn’t just do what you wanted and, in general, we weren’t put on earth just to have a good time.

She didn’t like it when I went out, she didn’t like my girlfriends, she hated Yanka. She thought everything bad about me came from her.

Daddy always stood up for me:

‘But she needs friends!’

It all ended with Mummy crying and saying:

‘You always take her side!’

She could feel that there was more between me and Daddy than there was between them. Probably both of us felt that I meant more to my father than she did.

One day I realised exactly what it was I didn’t like about her. She was a woman who had everything right in her life – everything exactly as she wanted it – and it simply couldn’t be any other way. She had always known what she wanted and how to get it. It was the same with furniture and with people. In school she was a star pupil. Her women friends were all miserable, she was always telling them how to live their lives. And inside she despised them because they couldn’t live the right way, because everything about their lives was wrong. And she always stuck photos of our holidays in albums that were logbooks of happiness. She wanted to make me and my father fit her photo-albums. But it didn’t work.

Offers for my father to play parts in films became less and less frequent. He took it hard and went on binges. He didn’t drink at home, but he came home drunk more and more often.

I ask him:

‘Daddy, are you drunk?’

And he answers:

‘No, bunny, I’m pretending.’

They quarrelled as if they didn’t know that angry words can never be taken back and forgotten. They didn’t know that people quarrel with all their strength but only make up half-heartedly, so every time some love is sliced away and there’s less and less of it. Or they did know, but they couldn’t help themselves.

I used to lock myself away from them and simply die from this non-love.

The worst thing of all was the mirror. That non-face, those non-hands. Those non-breasts, untouched even by a suntan, promising to exist, but still not arriving.

And I couldn’t understand how it could have happened that Mummy was a beauty and I was like this.

I used to think how strange it was that this thing was called me.

And what a misfortune it was to be this.

Yanka had already had her first love ages ago, and her second, and her third, and I already believed that I would never have anything. I used to howl silently, staring at the wallpaper.

And then he appeared in our home. He and Daddy were friends from their young days. And now he was a film director and he took Daddy to play a part in his film.

He had ginger hair, and his eyelashes were fiery-red, long and thick. Like ginger pine needles. His hair was monstrously thick in general. If it was hot at the table, he unbuttoned his shirt and rolled up his sleeves, and I could see powerful biceps, covered in freckles. And red wisps stuck out through the open shirt collar on his chest.

I remember he said he’d just got back from the seaside, but his fair skin didn’t tan, it only turned pink.

He started coming often.

Daddy showed me a photograph of them fooling about, hanging upside down on a crossbar, I looked at those little boys and even then I thought: before he became a father, was my daddy already my daddy? And was that ginger-haired boy already
him
? And who was that?

He was an old bachelor, and Mummy and Daddy were always joking that they ought to marry him off. Once he said:

‘Once you’ve seen one woman’s breasts, you’ve seen them all.’

But Mummy objected that, far from it, women’s breasts were like snowflakes, no pair was like any other, and they laughed. I found all this strange and unpleasant.

He used to call me Sasha-the-smasher. I felt terribly self-conscious when he was there. Or rather, I divided in two again with him, but the one who was afraid was here and the other one, who wasn’t afraid of anything, used to disappear at the most inconvenient moments.

He would drop into my room, glance at the cover of my book and ask:

‘How’s Troy getting on? Still holding out? Or have they taken it already?’

I plucked up my courage and asked what he wanted to make a film about. He answered:

‘Well, for instance, you’ve been drinking kefir and you’ve got a little white kefir moustache left on your face, and outside in the street – they’ve just written about it in the
Evening News
– a bus has run into the stop where a lot of people were waiting for it, and they’ve been killed. And there’s a direct connection between the little kefir moustache and these deaths. And between everything else in the world too.’

I fell head over heels in love with him.

When he was visiting I used to creep out surreptitiously into the hallway to take a sniff at his long coat, white scarf and hat. He used some eau de cologne that I didn’t know and the smell was ravishing – astringent and manly.

I couldn’t sleep. Now I was dying of love. I wept into my pillow all night, night after night. Every day I wrote in my diary: ‘I love you, I love you, I love you …’ – I covered pages and pages.

It was so painful. I didn’t know what to do with it all.

Mummy saw everything and she suffered with me. She didn’t know how to help. She hugged me and comforted me, stroked my head as if I was a little girl and tried to bring me to my senses.

‘You’re still nothing but a child. You have an intense need to be loved and to give love. This is all wonderful. But who can you love? Your boyfriends have only just stopped playing with toy soldiers. That’s the reason for all these tears cried into the pillow, the envy, the fantasy, the daydreams, the resentment against life, the anger with the whole world, with the people dearest of all to you. As if the people dearest to you are to blame for everything. And then you start inventing everything for yourself.’

She tried to convince me that it was too early for love, that none of it was real yet. I blubbered and asked:

‘And what is real?’

She said:

‘Well, like me and Daddy.’

Daddy used to come into my room, sit on the edge of the bed and smile guiltily for some reason. As if he was to blame. As if it was some serious illness and there was nothing he could do to help me. He sighed and said:

‘Bunny, I love you very much. So why isn’t that enough?’

It used to make me feel so sorry for them!

I started writing him letters. I sent them every day. I didn’t
know what to write, I just sent whatever was a part of me that day in the envelope – a tram ticket, a little feather, a shopping list, a piece of thread, a blade of grass, a fireman beetle.

He answered several times. He wrote something humorous and polite. And then he started sending me stupid things too: a broken shoelace, offcuts of cinema film. Once I took a paper napkin out of the envelope, and wrapped inside it was his tooth that had been pulled out the day before. On the napkin he wrote that if it had really been love on my side, he hoped that now it would definitely pass off. The tooth really was horrible. But I took it and stuck it in my cheek.

One time he came and spoke about something for ages with Mummy and Daddy behind a closed door, then came into my room. I stood at the window as if I was paralysed. He wanted to come closer, but I pulled the curtain shut and hid behind it.

He said: ‘Sasha-the-smasher! My poor little lovesick girl! How can you possibly fall in love with such a monster? Listen, there’s something important I have to explain to you, although I’m sure you already understand everything anyway behind that curtain. You don’t love me at all, you simply love. These are two quite different things.’