The Light and the Dark (2 page)

And the most amazing thing is that these rhymes already existed in the beginning – it’s not possible to invent them, just as it’s impossible to invent the very simplest mosquito or that long-distance cloud over there. You understand, no amount of imagination would be enough to invent the very simplest things!

Who was it that wrote about people greedy for happiness? How well put! That’s me – greedy for happiness.

And I’ve started noticing myself repeating your gestures, too. I speak in your words. I look with your eyes. I think like you. I write like you.

All the time I remember our summer.

Our morning studies in oil, painted with butter on toast.

Do you remember our table under the lilac, covered with the oilcloth with a brown triangle from a hot iron?

And here’s something you can’t remember, it’s mine alone: when you walked across the grass in the morning, you seemed to leave a glittering ski-track in the sun.

And the smells from the garden! So rich and dense, like fine particles saturating the air. You could pour those smells into a cup like strong tea.

And everything all around has only one thing on its mind – I simply walk through the field or the forest and absolutely everyone tries his very best to pollinate me or inseminate me. My socks are just covered in grass seeds.

And remember, we found a hare in the grass with its legs cut off by a mowing machine.

Brown-eyed cows.

Little goat nuts lying on the path.

Our pond – murky on the bottom with blooming slush, full of frogspawn. Silver carp butting at the sky. I climb out of the water and pluck the weed off myself.

I lay down to sunbathe and covered my face with my singlet, the wind rustles like starched linen. And suddenly there’s a ticklish feeling in my navel, and it’s you pouring a thin stream of sand onto my stomach out of your fist.

We walk home and the wind tests the trees and us to see what kind of sails we would make.

We collect fallen apples – the first ones, sour, good for compote – and we throw these windfalls at each other.

At sunset the forest is jagged.

And in the middle of the night a mousetrap jumps with a snap and wakes us up.

Sashenka, my dearest!

Well then, I’ll number my letters to know which one has gone missing.

I’m sorry my scribblings turn out so short – I have absolutely no time for myself. And I’m terribly short of sleep, I feel like closing my eyes and falling asleep standing up. Descartes was killed by having to get up at five in the morning, when it was still dark, to give lectures on philosophy to Christina, Queen of Sweden. But I’m still holding on.

I was in the general staff office today and I suddenly saw my reflection in a mirror, in full dress uniform. It was strange, what was I doing in fancy dress? I was amazed at myself: how could I be a soldier?

You know, there’s something to this life after all, always covering off in line with the cheekbone of the fourth man.

I’ll tell you a story about a forage cap. A short one. It was filched from me – the forage cap, that is. And falling in without a forage cap is a breach of regulations, in short, it’s a crime.

Our chief of chiefs and commander of commanders stamped his feet and promised me I’d be washing out the shithouse from now until doomsday.

‘You’ll lick it out, you scumbag!’

That’s what he said.

Well now, there is something inspiring about military speech.
I read somewhere that Stendhal learned to write simply and clearly by studying Napoleon’s field orders.

But the latrine here, my dear, distant Sashenka, requires some explanation. Picture to yourself holes in a floor covered with filth. No, better not picture it! And everyone tries his very best to dump his heap on the edge of a hole, not in it. And everything’s awash. Actually, the way the stomachs of yours truly and his fellows function is a separate subject in its own right. In these remote parts, for some reason we always have a bellyache. I don’t understand how you can dedicate yourself to Generalissimo Suvorov’s science of victory if you’re always squatting over a yawning abyss with your insides draining out of you.

Anyway, I say to him:

‘Where will I get you a forage cap?’

And he says:

‘They filched yours, you go and filch one!’

So off I went to filch a forage cap. And that’s not easy. In fact, it’s very hard, because everyone’s at it.

There I was, wandering hither and thither.

Suddenly I thought: Who am I? Where am I?

And I went to wash the latrine. And the whole world suddenly seemed lighter somehow.

I had to end up here to learn to understand simple things.

You know, there’s nothing dirty about shit.

Now look, I’m writing to you at night. I nibbled a crust of bread in bed just now, and the crumbs won’t let me sleep, they’ve scampered all over the sheet and they bite.

The window above my head is as starry as starry.

And the Milky Way divides the sky on a slant. You know, it’s like some gigantic fraction. The numerator is one half of the universe, and the denominator is the other half. I always hated those fractions, squared numbers, cubed numbers and all those roots. It’s all so disembodied, impossible to visualise, there’s absolutely nothing to catch hold of. A root is a root – on a tree. It’s strong, it creeps and grabs, it gobbles the soil, it’s clinging, sucking, irrepressible, greedy, alive. But this is twaddle written with a little squiggle, and they call it a root too!

And what sense does a minus sign make? Minus a window – what’s that? It’s not going to go anywhere. And neither is what’s outside the window.

Or minus me?

Things like that don’t happen.

In general, I’m the kind of person who has to touch everything.

And sniff.

Yes, even more – sniff everything. Like in the book Daddy used to read to me at bedtime when I was little. There are different kinds of people. There are people who spend all their time fighting with cranes. There are people with one leg, they dash around on it at high speed, and their foot is so big that they shelter in its vast shadow from the sweltering heat of the sun and rest there, as if they were inside a house. And there’s another kind of people too, who live on nothing but the smells of fruits. When they have to set out on a long journey, they take these fruits with them, and if they catch a whiff of a bad smell, they die. That’s just like me.

You know, in order to exist, everything alive has to have a smell. At least some kind of smell. And all those fractions and all the other stuff we were taught – it has no smell.

There’s some kind of night prowler outside the window now, kicking an empty bottle about. The clink of glass on the asphalt of a deserted street.

Now it’s broken.

At moments like this at night I feel so lonely and I want so much to be the reason for at least something.

And I long unbearably to be with you! To hug you and snuggle up against you.

Do you know what you’ll get if you divide that starry numerator by the denominator? Divide one half of the Universe by the other? You’ll get me. And you with me.

Today I saw a little girl fall off her bike – she skinned her knee and sat there crying bitterly, and her long white sock was splattered with blood. It was on the embankment, where the lions are – mouths stuffed full of litter, paper wrappers and sticks from ice cream. Then afterwards I was walking home and suddenly the idea came to me that all the great books and pictures aren’t about love at all. They only pretend to be about love, so they’ll be interesting to read. But in actual fact, they’re about death. In books, love is a kind of shield or, rather, a blindfold. So you don’t see. So it’s not so frightening.

I don’t know what the connection was with that little girl who fell off her bike.

She cried a bit, and now perhaps she’s forgotten about it ages ago, but in a book her skinned knee would have stayed there until she died and even afterwards.

So probably all books aren’t really about death, but about eternity, only their eternity isn’t genuine, it’s a kind of fragment, an instant, like a teensy-weensy fly in amber. It just sat down for a moment to rub its back legs together, and it turned out to be for ever. Of course, they choose all sorts of fine moments, but isn’t
it a terrifying thought – to stay like that, forever porcelain – like the shepherd boy always reaching out to kiss the shepherd girl!

But I don’t want anything porcelain. I want everything alive, here and now. You, your warmth, your voice, your body, your smell.

You’re so far away now that I’m not at all afraid to tell you something. You know, back then at the dacha, I used to go into your room while you weren’t there. And I sniffed everything. Your soap. Your eau de cologne. Your shaving brush. I sniffed the inside of your shoes. I opened your cupboard and sniffed your sweater. The sleeve of your shirt. And the collar. I kissed a button. I leaned down over your bed and put my nose to the pillow. I was so happy! But that wasn’t enough! To be happy, you need witnesses. You can only really feel happy when you get some kind of confirmation, if not from a glance or a touch, or a presence, then at least from an absence. From a pillow, a sleeve, a button. Once you almost caught me – I only just managed to run out onto the porch. And you saw me and started throwing prickly burrs in my hair. I was so angry with you then, but what wouldn’t I give now for that – to have you throw burrs in my hair!

I remember you, and the world is divided into before the first time and after.

Meeting for a date at the monument.

I peeled an orange and my palm stuck to yours.

You came straight from the clinic, with a fresh filling in your tooth and the smell of the dentist’s surgery coming out of your mouth. You let me touch the filling with my finger.

And here we are at the dacha, whitewashing the ceiling, after we’ve covered the furniture and the floor with old newspapers. We walked around barefoot, with the newspapers sticking to our feet, and got whitewash smeared all over us. We scrape the white
out of each other’s hair. And our tongues and teeth are all black from bird cherries.

Then when we were hanging the net curtains, we ended up on different sides, and I wanted so much for you to kiss me through the netting!

And then there you sit, drinking tea, scalding your tongue on it and blowing to get it to cool down, taking little sips and slurping so loudly, not at all worried about it being impolite, as they impressed on me when I was little. And I start slurping too. Because I’m not little any longer. And everything’s allowed.

Then there was the lake.

We walk down the steep slope towards the waterlogged bank, feeling the damp, spongy path under our bare feet.

We waded out into open water, free of duckweed. The water’s murky and full of sunlight. And cold, from the springs that feed it from below.

And then, in the water, our bodies touched for the first time. On the shore I was afraid to touch you, but here I pounced on you and wrapped my legs round your thighs, trying to pull you under. When I was little I used to play like that with Daddy at the seaside. You try to break free, you try to pull my hands apart, but I won’t give in. I kept trying to duck your head right under the water. Your eyelashes stick together, you swallow lots of water, you laugh and splutter and bellow and snort.

Afterwards we sit in the sun.

Your nose is peeling, the skin is flaking off the sunburn.

We watch the bell tower on the opposite shore rinsing its ragged image in the water.

I sit there in front of you almost naked, but somehow I only feel shy about my feet and my toes – I buried them in the sand.

I singed an ant with my cigarette, and you came to its defence.

We walk home the short way, straight across the field. Grasshoppers jumping about in the tall grass molest my skirt.

On the veranda you sat me in a wicker chair and started brushing the sand off my feet. Like Daddy. When we came back from the beach, he used to wipe my feet down just like that, so there wouldn’t be any sand left between my toes.

And everything was suddenly so clear. So simple. So inevitable. So welcome.