The Light and the Dark (24 page)

You know, Sashenka, I think that was the moment when I really started to grow up. I realised that from somewhere inside me I had to find the courage to do good. And at that moment, ‘good’ most likely meant putting an end to this suffering. I got a spade, told the boy to go into the house, went over to the nestling that had been transformed into a writhing black clump, and sliced it in half with the blade of the spade. Both halves carried on writhing – or it seemed to me that they did, because of the ants. I took the little ant bundles over to the fence and buried them. But that boy saw everything from the terrace window, and he was so upset by what I’d done that he couldn’t forgive me.

Another reason why I liked Victor Sergeevich was that he knew how to make familiar things seem unusual. In the literature class, we laughed at the caustic report written by the young Pushkin when he was sent to deal with a plague of locusts:

Well, it really is funny, isn’t it? But Victor Sergeevich made it into something quite different. Pushkin was an official for special assignments and the energetic, bright young man was sent to deal with an important issue. People had suffered a disaster, they had no means of subsistence, they were expecting help from the government.

I think my teacher simply took offence at such an arrogant attitude to insects, which for him were every bit as complex, important and alive as we are.

Everybody at the grammar school used to laugh at him, even the other teachers, and I resented that very much. But what could I do about it?

I could only love what he loved – the plants and the birds. Later, of course, after he died, my enthusiasm for all these gymnosperms, neognaths and ratites passed off. But the names have remained in my memory – and it was so grand not simply to stroll through the wood, but to know – that’s lovage, that’s costmary, that’s orchis, and that over there is pigweed. You walk along the forest path, and all around you there’s buckthorn, helleborine, codling, field scabious! And there’s marsh marigold, sow-thistle, gentian! And the birds! There’s a chiffchaff, there’s a black woodpecker, and this is a booby!

It really is grand to walk along the forest path and know why the willow herb likes the sites of old fires!

And all this gives you an incredible sense of life that will never end.

After his death I started thinking seriously about my own for the first time.

Of course, you’ll say that every adolescent boy experiences those fits of horror, those paroxysms of fear, and of course you’re right, all this is absolutely normal. I realised that perfectly well myself. But that didn’t make me feel any better.

My mother used to tell me that when I was five years old I heard the grown-ups talking about someone’s death and I asked in a frightened voice: ‘Am I going to die too?’ She answered ‘No’. And I stopped worrying.

When I was little and I played at war with buttons, I used to imagine myself as them on the battlefield, running into the attack, shouting ‘hurrah’ – and flinging my arms out and falling down dead. Then, after lying there for a moment, I jumped up and ran on as if nothing had happened – alive, eager for the hand-to-hand fighting. Slash, kill, stab!

One day I got so carried away with my game that I didn’t notice my mother standing in the doorway and watching me. She said:

‘Do you know that every button that’s killed has a mummy too, and she’s waiting at home, crying?’

I didn’t understand her then.

I remember that after my grandmother died, I tried to imagine myself dead – I lay down on the divan, folded my arms across my chest, relaxed all my muscles, squeezed my eyes shut and tried not to breathe for a long time. Just for a moment I even thought I could stop the beating of my heart. And what happened? I simply felt incredibly alive. Some power in me that I hadn’t been aware of before forced me to breathe. My will didn’t even exist as far as it was concerned. I didn’t move a jot closer to understanding death that time, but I did sense very clearly within myself what life is. It is my breathing. It is my master.

I didn’t love my body and despised it, I think, from that same time in my boyhood when I realised that I was not entirely it, and it was not entirely me. I found it strange, at the conscription commission’s medical examination, that someone was interested in my weight and height and my teeth, like my mother when I was little, and carefully noted down on paper all these figures that
had absolutely nothing to do with me. What is all this for? Who needs it all?

Do you know what made me feel afraid the first time? When I was fourteen or fifteen – it was a realisation that suddenly hit me: My body is dragging me into the grave. Every day, every moment. Every time I breathe in and breathe out.

Isn’t that alone already a good enough reason to hate it?

I remember, I was lying on my divan and running my eyes over the exposed entrails of the steamship on the wall, and the idea came to me that this huge vessel would sink straightaway if it ever sensed the fathomless depths beneath it.

My body sensed those depths.

And time and again new reasons to hate came along. The time to shave arrived. You know what my skin’s like – hideously lumpy, with boils and pimples – when I shave I cut myself all the time, and it bleeds. I tried growing a beard – it didn’t grow properly, a miserable excuse for a beard. And I remember one time I cut myself yet again as I was shaving, and I was paralysed by the thought that right now, this very moment, as I press this scrap of newspaper against the cut, this abhorrent sack of skin stuffed with entrails is already foundering and dragging me down with it. And it will drag all the years of my life under before it finally sinks.

Everything became unbearable. Simple objects seemed to have conspired to hammer home a single idea: here’s a three-kopeck piece – it will still be here when I’m gone; there’s a door handle – people will still take hold of it; there’s an icicle outside the window – in three hundred years’ time an icicle will still be glittering and shimmering in the noonday sunshine of March.

And at daybreak the mirror suddenly changed from an innocuous object into what it really was – the throat of time. Glance into it
after a minute has passed – and it has already gobbled that minute down. And my life has grown shorter by that minute.

And another depressing thing was that everyone around me was so sure of their own existence, but I sometimes seemed so unreal to myself and didn’t know myself at all. And if I wasn’t sure of myself, how could I be sure of anything else? Maybe I didn’t exist at all. Maybe someone had invented me – the way I used to invent the little men on the ship – and now he was torturing me?

I was sinking down into a bottomless black whirlpool, I was disappearing, ceasing to exist. In order to exist, I needed proofs. There weren’t any. The mirror reflected something, but, just like me, it had no notion of what I was. It could only swallow everything down indiscriminately.

I wasn’t able to do anything, everything I started doing – things that in normal times used to amuse me, bring me joy, those books, for instance – couldn’t keep me afloat any longer, everything was overlaid with a clammy layer of pointlessness, like a coating of grease.

And the blind man was especially annoying. I’m lying there in my little room, huddled up in the corner of the divan, hiding under the pillow and trembling in horror at the darkness and emptiness, and he shuffles cheerfully along the corridor, whistling, living a full life that doesn’t seem dark and empty to him at all, despite his blindness! What is it he sees with his blind eyes that I can’t see? What sort of invisible world is it?

My mother got the worst of it. I used to lock myself in my room and not come out, or eat, or talk to anyone.

Of course, it was pointless talking to my mother. She thought I was just having the usual
fits
for my age. I heard her explaining about me to a friend of hers:

‘The painting fad has passed off, now it’s the meaning of life
fad. But that will pass too! At least he hasn’t got himself snared by some goodie-goodie young madam yet. You know what they’re like nowadays!’

I was terribly afraid of girls. Not exactly afraid, but so shy that it amounted to panic. One day I was riding in the tram and a girl with wonderful hair sat in front of me – a whole tubful of wavy chestnut hair! Every now and then she gathered it in from the sides with her hands and tossed it back over her shoulders. And I wanted so badly to touch that hair! I saw no one was looking and I touched it. I thought the touch was too gentle to feel. But she felt it and gave me a mocking sideways glance. And I was so embarrassed, I shot out of the tram like a bullet.

After something like that, you start despising yourself even more.

It seems funny to remember it now, but my mother was so worried about me that she searched my things in secret, in case I might have some poison hidden away – or a revolver.

One day I heard whispering outside the door – it was her begging her blind man:

‘Pavlusha, have a word with him, please, you’re a man, you should understand each other better.’

He shuffles his feet and knocks.

I shout back:

‘Leave me alone, all of you!’

I take a book by some wise hermit or other, hoping to find, if not the answer, then at least the correctly phrased question, and in a single voice all the wise men exhort me to live in the present, delight in the transient moment.

But it’s not that easy!

How can I rejoice in the present, if it’s pointless and worthless? And everything makes me feel sick – the wallpaper, the ceiling, the curtains, the town outside the window, all of it that’s
not me
.
And I make myself feel sick, because I’m
not me
too, like all the rest of it. My short, squalid little past, composed entirely of stupidities and humiliations, makes me feel sick. And the future, in particular, makes me feel sick. Especially the future – after all, it’s the road that leads into that stinking hole in the graveyard shithouse.

And then, before that hole – what’s it all for? What did I choose? The flesh? The time? The place? I didn’t choose anything, and I wasn’t invited anywhere.

And just when it got really bad, when I really was thinking I could take the blind man’s razor from the bathroom, when I was choking on the impossibility of taking another breath in, and then a breath out, then a breath in again, and another breath out, when my skin was covered with perspiration, my heart was aching and I had the shakes – somewhere in the tips of my fingers an incredible vibration would suddenly start up.

An incoherent but confident humming came rising up from somewhere in the depths. Swelling upwards in a wave. Forcing me to run round the room, jerk open the windows that had been glued shut for the winter with a crack and tattering of paper, and breathe in the street. The hum grew louder and stronger, filling me to overflowing. And finally this incomprehensible, overwhelming wave scooped me up from the very bottom and tossed me up to the surface, towards the sky. I was brimming over with words.

Sashenka, this is impossible to explain, it’s something you have to experience.

The fear dissolved, evaporated. The world that had disappeared returned to itself. The invisible became visible.

All of that
not me
began responding, humming back to me, acknowledging me as its own. You understand what I mean, don’t you? Everything around me became mine, delightful, edible! I
wanted to feel it, sniff it into myself, try the taste of the wallpaper and the ceiling, and the curtains, and the town outside the window.
Not me
became me.

I was only alive at those moments. I looked around and couldn’t understand how others could possibly manage without this. How was it possible to live without it?

And then the words went away, the humming disappeared, and the fits of emptiness started again, genuine seizures – I shivered and shook, I spent days sprawling on my divan bed and didn’t go out anywhere – I couldn’t explain to myself why I needed to go out. Who needs to go out? What does that mean – go out? What am I? What is ‘what’?

And the most terrifying thing was: What if the words never come back again?

A moment came when I sensed the connection very intensely: This frozen cosmic void that I simply couldn’t drag myself out of could only be filled by that miraculous humming, rustling, booming, swelling tidal wave of words. It turned out that the present moment, the transient, only becomes joyful and meaningful when it passes through words. And without that, the joy in the present that the wise men exhorted me to experience is simply impossible. The entire present moment is paltry and useless if it does not lead to words and if words do not lead to it. Only words can somehow justify the existence of the existent, give meaning to the momentary, make the unreal real, make me
me
.

You understand, Sashenka, I was living in a state of detachment from life. The letters of the alphabet had grown up like a wall between me and the world. I viewed what was happening to me exclusively from the viewpoint of words: Can I take this onto the page with me, or not? Now I knew what answer to give those wise men who had rotted so long ago: The transient acquires
meaning if you catch it on the wing. Yoo-hoo, wise men, where are you? Where is the world that you can see? Where is your transient moment? You don’t know? But I do.

I thought I had discovered the truth. I suddenly felt strong. Not merely strong, but all-powerful. Yes, Sashka, laugh at me, do – I felt all-powerful. What was hidden from the ignorant had been revealed to me. The power of the word had been revealed to me. At least, that was how it seemed then. I had become the final link in a very important chain, perhaps the most important chain of all, running from that real individual, who may have been sweaty, with bad breath, left-handed or right-handed, suffering from heartburn – that’s not important – but just as real as you and me, who once wrote: ‘In the beginning was the word’. And look, his words are still here, and he is in them, they have become his body. And this is the only true immortality. There is no other. Everything else is down there, in that pit overflowing with graveyard excrement.