The Light and the Dark (26 page)

Leafing through an illustrated book from the library, he jabbed with his finger:

‘Ada, look, that’s us.’

A bald lady with a tame unicorn.

You asked:

‘When did you realise we would be together?’

‘When you took off your glasses. If was as if you took off your clothes. Strange – you simply took off your glasses, and I realised I loved you.’

He used to trim his fingernails with a pocket knife before, but now you did it for him with a little pair of crooked scissors.

You accepted money in secret from the professor. Scruffy and unkempt, with bad breath – complete absorbed in his scholarship. Already sick, with patches of moribund skin on his hands. Every time he told you:

‘Only don’t tell him this money is from me. He’ll be hurt.’

Buildings were being demolished all around, your husband brought home things that had been thrown away: chairs, framed photographs, bronze window catches. Once someone died on the next stairwell in your building, the flat was cleared out, everything was thrown onto the dump, and he brought back a bundle of letters. You found all the terms of endearment repulsive: Kitten! My darling! My sweet! My precious Tanechka! That was because the letters were someone else’s.

He explained to you why it was all right to read other people’s letters:

‘Because we’re going to die too. And from the letters’ point of view we’re already dead. There are no letters that are someone else’s.’

Every time you were amazed that he shared his thoughts with you, who couldn’t even understand them properly. You simply remembered things.

‘In the beginning was not the word, but the drawing – alphabetical characters are a derivative, abbreviated form.’

Or:

‘In his own image and likeness – everyone can do that. Even a cat, even a cloud. The way to paint a forest is not the way the trees see it.’

He hugged you with his hands smeared with pastel and you went out like that, spotted with colour.

During the day you were strong and prepared to defend him against the whole world, but at night you needed to have a good cry in his arms.

All you needed for happiness was to wash the dirty foam from his razor off the sink after him.

You didn’t have any children, and he didn’t want any.

You fried eggs, breaking the shells against the edge of the frying pan, and a hundred years went by.

You developed an irritation on your upper lip, but he had stopped kissing you a long time ago anyway.

He has others, you don’t believe it. As long as it’s still possible not to know anything, you need not to know.

The slim, invisible wavy hairgrip suddenly becomes visible.

Someone else’s smells.

Lipstick that isn’t yours on the coffee table.

‘Whose is it?’

‘What do you mean, whose? You scatter things all over the flat!’

How does he caress the other one? The same way he used to caress you, or differently?

What words does he say to the other one, as he clasps her in his embrace at their meetings and partings? With you he’s broken glass, but with the other one he’s a fire-breather with tender hands.

Scrubbing a stain off the floor, you noticed little dents in the parquet. You imagined the other one clattering her sharp heels on the parquet and the drum tattoo excited him.

During your rare caresses in the night, how could you tell if it was really you he wanted in the darkness and not the other one, so inexhaustibly creative at playing ‘let’s be different’?

In bed you felt frightened that it wasn’t you he was holding with his eyes closed like that. You told him:

‘Look at me!’

The most hurtful thing was that he brought the other one back to your home. The other one picked up your things, touched everything, grinned contemptuously as if to say: What strange taste your wife has!

You started feeling afraid to go to bed – as if it wasn’t your bed any longer. Who had spread out the blanket, fluffed up the pillow?

Your nails are short and scruffy.

You try to imagine his feelings when he comes home, hugs you and feels your stomach pressing against him after he has been smooching with that other, slim one.

He had unhooked the other one’s bra and kissed her breasts. What were they like?

When he went out somewhere, you thought it was to see the other one. No matter where he was really going, it was to the other one.

He would phone you to say everything was all right and not to expect him for dinner – while the other one was taking a shower.

You saw every woman he knew as the other one.

You look at what the other one is wearing and think perhaps it’s the very dress that he unbuttoned.

You were afraid the other one would say to you:

‘You wore him down without love, but I can give him what you can’t. He has secrets from you, but he tells me everything.’

What could you say, if that was the way it was?

It was your own fault, after all, you forgot how to be different, didn’t you?

He conceals his infidelities, so you have to forgive him, because he’s concerned for your feelings, he spares you. That means he needs you, that he values you, he’s afraid of offending or insulting you.

A confession isn’t honesty, it’s cruelty. He doesn’t want to be cruel to someone dear to him.

Infidelity isn’t the body, the body is always just itself. When people are together, it doesn’t matter where their bodies are.

You can’t lose him, because you only lose what you don’t have.

No one can manage without tenderness and you will never have enough, because the need for tenderness is always greater than any tenderness.

If he has opened a window to get some air, then he was suffocating.

And how can others resist him, if you couldn’t?

You said nothing, pretending not to notice anything, that everything was all right. You were afraid of words – words can only destroy. What if he said:

‘When the other one touches me, it makes me tremble. But when you touch me it doesn’t. I’m unfaithful to her with you.’

Not a single word, reproach or question. It was painful, but you forgave him.

And no bitterness for him – after all, he’s in torment too. The feeling of guilt has made him kinder.

When the other one phoned, you called him to the telephone, went into the bathroom and turned on the water so as not to hear.

You were afraid to sniff his things, afraid of finding something in them before the wash – you asked him to look and see if he had left anything in the pockets.

You tried to be light and easy with him – like a sister giving her brother a morning kiss.

‘See you!’

Live as if the world isn’t falling apart. Don’t walk round the place in tears. Wash and iron, because if he goes to the other one in an unironed shirt, she’ll take pity on him and iron it.

When the studio appeared, it was easier, he spent the night there on the divan bed.

In the morning, when you don’t want to get up and live, smile. Smile again. And again.

Speak words of gratitude to the ceiling that hasn’t been whitewashed for so long.

After all, children are not from the seed.

A daughter was born, a late child, long-awaited, the answer to a prayer. With a big bruised head – during the birth she tore her mother’s flesh to tatters.

A little monkey is born and instantly clutches at its mother’s fur, but a child is born and there’s isn’t even anything for it to hang on to – it’s naked, defenceless.

The surge of warmth rising from the infant brought you back together again, in a different way. It became clear again why you were together.

There wasn’t enough milk and you felt jealous of the bottle.

He loved changing his daughter himself. He used to say her toes were like little boiled sweets.

After Sonechka was born, you weren’t interested in tender caresses, and he didn’t insist, and another hundred years went by.

Your little daughter’s illnesses consumed you, body and soul, and it became easier to explain his lack of love to yourself. Now you could blame yourself for paying less attention to him because of the child. Your husband had started feeling lonely and abandoned, hadn’t he? When the child was ill, that was all you thought about, nothing else existed for you.

When your daughter’s eardrum was punctured for otitis, your husband couldn’t stand it and left the doctor’s office to get away from the screaming. You put your daughter’s head on your knees and squeezed it tight in your hands like in a vice. Sonya looked up at you with frightened eyes, unable to understand why the two
of you had brought her to this pain, and screamed submissively, without trying to break free.

In front of the mirror you pulled down the skin under your eye with your finger and couldn’t believe there were so many wrinkles! You started losing your hair, the plughole in the bath got blocked – you pulled out the wet, matted clumps. You stopped smiling, so as not to show your teeth, eaten away by caries – but that other one yawned deliciously, revealing everything fresh, young and healthy in her voracious jaws.

Behind your back his friends laughed at you, they all knew of course, didn’t they?

Sometimes he left a note saying he might not be back for the night. Once he added: ‘Once upon a time you married a genius, but now you live with a conceited, aging void. My dear, put up with me for a little bit longer!’

After that you loved him even more.

You often remembered how one day, when you felt you just couldn’t go on, you closed your eyes and suddenly felt happy. That was probably the way happiness had to be, momentary, like the prick of a needle: the child is whining, the oilcloth smells of urine, there’s no money, the weather’s abominable, the milk has boiled over, now you have to scrub the cooker, they’re broadcasting an earthquake on the radio, there’s a war somewhere, and all of this together is happiness.

Another rainy century. And another.

For a long time already you had shared your table more than your bed, not husband and wife, but tablemates.

You got undressed without looking at each other and each lay down on your own side – a big bed and a rift between you. Your head no longer rested on his shoulder. The distance dividing two frozen creatures on a winter night is negligible, but insuperable.

Suddenly waking up from loneliness in the family bed, you looked at how he was sleeping – his face was really old.

A new sound moved into the home – the slamming of a door.

He was shouting at his life, but you took the brunt, realising that you were his life.

Blazing rows. Long and drawn-out, gruelling, in front of a desperately whimpering child.

One time he was holding a kettle of boiling water and you were scared he would pour it on you, but he restrained himself and poured it in the flowerpot with the aloe vera plant on the windowsill. Afterwards you dumped it in the rubbish, pot and all, and took out the bucket, but the smell of scalded aloe still lingered in the kitchen.

Once when he was drunk he started shouting at you:

‘Don’t bring me my slippers in your teeth!’

In the bathroom he still hadn’t learned to pull the shower curtain completely closed, you had to mop up after him with a rag every time.

And he never cleaned off the streaks in the toilet bowl after himself with the brush.

He despised his friends who had achieved something, and again you took the brunt of it. One day the thought came that your life was blotting paper for his. Destiny wrote something for him and immediately blotted it with you – and then snatches of his life showed through yours.

Clumps of dust gather in the corners, fleeing from the brush like fluffy little animals. You wondered what they fed on and suddenly realised it was your years.

He always threw his socks about. An apple core on the bookshelf. Nail clippings on the table. But the socks were the most important thing. They weren’t insignificant or accidental, they
were territorial markers. People behave like animals, only they can’t remember why. People mark their territory with the smell of their feet, leaving a trail. All animals understand this and they walk barefoot. See how Donka loves to rest her muzzle on feet or slippers and let the smells of her owners tickle her nostrils.

The more difficult it is for people to live together, the more emphatically they mark their territory.

You were always afraid he would say:

‘I love someone else. And I’m leaving you for her.’

And then he said it.

He had prepared the words in advance. If you begged him (and you did beg him) to stay for the child’s sake, he would say (and he did say):

‘The only thing parents are obliged to do for their child is be happy. I’m not happy with you. But I am with her. Unhappy people can’t give a child happiness.’

You yourself understood that ‘for the child’s sake’ was only an excuse. You were simply afraid of being left alone. After all, no one would ever love you again.

You told him, not believing it yourself:

‘Don’t rush things! Let’s put it off until summer! Wait a bit! You both need to be sure of yourselves, test your feelings. What if it’s just a sudden impulse and it cools off as time passes? Why ruin our life for that? If you really still want to go then, I won’t try to stop you.’

He didn’t believe it either.

‘It’s only with her that I’ve realised what love is.’

‘And what about me?

‘What do you want me to tell you?’

‘That it’s a mistake.’

‘But it’s you, you who are the mistake!’

You grabbed a glass jar of murky water left on the table after Sonya had been using water paints and flung it into the crockery cupboard. Everything is smashed to smithereens, the room is covered in shards of china and dirty water. The child jumped up off her little bed but halted, barefoot, in the doorway.

‘Stop! Don’t come in here!’

You both went dashing to Sonya. He slipped and hurt his hand on the glass. You grabbed your daughter up in your arms and carried her back to bed. Laid her down, reassured her, walked out, closed the door. Then you started haranguing each other in a whisper.