The Light and the Dark (28 page)

I felt terribly ashamed, but I didn’t say anything.

But now I would tell her everything.

I think about her and I remember silly little things. For instance, that Mum always slept with a black bandage over her eyes, she couldn’t get to sleep if there was any light coming into the room.

When I was little I used to love the smoky smell of her clothes. She smoked a special, fragrant kind of cigarettes. When she was in a good mood she gave in to my pleading and let the smoke out through her lips in rings that passed through each other, and even figures-of-eight.

When the blind man moved in with us, he forbade her to smoke, but she sometimes smoked behind his back, breathing out through the window, and she asked me to keep it our little secret.

I remember once I was ill and she came in from the cold and frost and before she touched me she warmed her hands under her armpits and put her fingers against her neck to check that they were already warm.

Later, when we started doing maths, I thought she was funny, demanding that I do all my homework when she couldn’t solve a single one of the problems.

And then, even later, I found a few old photographs in which she was with some man, but not my father, and for the first time I felt surprised at how little I really knew about her. But to ask her about the man with whom she had been recorded for posterity under a palm tree – such a simple thing – was absolutely impossible somehow.

And now I’m amazed at what all our conversations were like. She shouted:

‘A great lanky brute and he lazes about all day long!’

‘I’m not lazing about, I’m thinking.’

And I used to slam the door in her face.

One day she came into my room late in the evening, she probably wanted to talk about something important. I was lying on the divan, pretending to be asleep. She just covered me with the blanket, stood there for a while and went away.

But the main thing for which I would ask her forgiveness now is the blind man.

One day I came running back from school and found him in my room – he was feeling everything in there. I threw a hysterical fit with Mum, to make sure he wouldn’t dare come into my room and touch my things again. And she burst into tears and started shouting at me. Became hysterical too. So we shouted at each other, without listening.

It’s only now that I realise how difficult it was for her with the two of us.

The fact that her husband was blind didn’t bother her at all. A waiter in a cafe asks her what she wants to order for him – for people who are used to eye contact, it’s only natural to ask the guide. But she has learned to laugh and answer:

‘Ask my husband, he won’t eat you!’

I think, on the contrary, that it made her feel important, being associated with a blind man. I remember the daughter of one of her friends coming to see us, I had seen her before as a very beautiful girl, but then there was a terrible accident. When she was visiting someone, she sat down in an armchair with her hosts’ dog and started playing with it, but it wasn’t domesticated, it had been picked up in the street. Probably there was some kind of awkward movement, the dog reacted nervously and bit her right in the face. She was beautiful and she became ugly. She came to Mum to ask her to arrange an introduction to some young blind man.

I did my best to spoil their life, but they probably just loved each other and couldn’t understand why I was so cruel.

Now I’m trying to recall if he ever shouted at her even once – I can’t remember it. On the contrary, in fact, when my mother turned her ankle and sprained her ligaments, my stepfather cared for her very tenderly and brought her food to the bed. I can see it now – her hopping clumsily along the corridor on crutches and him walking beside her, ready to catch her and support her.

I remember Mum was always upset when she looked in the mirror, but he would come up, put his arms round her from behind, kiss her and smile his crooked smile, demonstrating the advantage of being blind – being yourself, just as you are, and not as the mirror wants you to be.

I also remember I was preparing for a physics exam, mumbling something or other, and he suddenly said:

‘Light travels hundreds of thousands of miles in a second – just so that someone can adjust his hat in a mirror!’

At that moment it became quite obvious to me too that light didn’t really need to be in such a great hurry.

He read a lot. I go into his room, it looks dark and empty, I switch on the light and there he is, sitting in the armchair with a thick book on his knees. He used to take those embossed books for the blind from the library and feel indignant that the pages had been read to tatters. The Braille script letters were all worn away by people’s fingers.

And my stepfather used to write poetry too. In the middle of the night he would walk out into the kitchen in order not to disturb my mum’s sleep, sit there in the dark and prick holes in paper really quickly with his awl.

Mum often used to repeat his favourite lines.

‘Your warmth has become my light in the darkness …’

Thick paper pricked all over lay around in heaps in their room.

He tried to inculcate a love of numismatics in me. My stepfather
collected old coins, he could spend hours on end sorting through them. He had a few rare favourites – he loved the feel of them.

I look at his sunken eye sockets and he tells me about Panticapaeum, the capital of the Bosporan kingdom. I remember those coins with the relief images – a drawn bow with an arrow on one side, a gryphon on the other.

After his hands the coins gave off a sourish metallic smell. I held these light, irregular discs on the palm of my hand and couldn’t believe that they were contemporaries of Archimedes and Hannibal.

A little copper coin had an image of King Riscuporidus I – I remember the strange name – and on the reverse side the profile of the Roman emperor Tiberius. My stepfather explained that the Bosporan kings bore the title ‘Friend of the Caesars and Friend of the Romans’ and minted their coins with images of the emperors of Rome on them.

He especially prized a coin from Utrecht that had no head on it.

He told me that before, when people died, they used to put a coin in their teeth as payment for their journey. And he once joked that when he died they’d have to stick that Utrecht coin with no heads in his cheek.

‘I don’t want to dodge the fare!’

Just imagine, Sashenka, when I was a child, coins were paper money’s little children.

My stepfather sorted endlessly through his worn, flattened treasures with their little bobbles and remnants of Arabic script, and I watched in amazement – it was as if he could see the coins and the past, and who had minted these coins, and what these emperors who had disappeared long ago looked like, but at the same time
the cobweb in the corner and the factory chimney outside the window didn’t exist for him at all.

Back then I used to feel a kind of superiority over him – there he was, blind, but I, being sighted, could see things that he couldn’t. Only now it seems to me that that keen-eyed juvenile observed everything, but didn’t see a thing. A blind man should be weak and defenceless by definition. But he was strong, hungry for life, and that was why Mum clung to him. My stepfather didn’t seem to feel that he was crippled or deprived in any way. The way he didn’t see the light was nothing like when our eyes are blindfolded. He didn’t see the light in the same way a sighted person doesn’t see it with his knee or his elbow.

My stepfather also had a highly original sense of humour. For instance, he’s eating an apple with a knife, paring off the skin, and he holds up a piece he has sliced off on the end of the knife and laughs as he tells us about a young woman out in the street who led him to the post office and when they parted said in a mournfully compassionate voice: ‘Better not to live at all than live like that!’ My stepfather lost control and hit her with his cane. He told us this story as if he wanted everybody to laugh merrily at it.

And now for some reason I’ve remembered us living at the dacha in summer, and him walking about in the garden, bending down the branches of the apple trees and touching them. He remembered where each apple was hanging and then every day he felt them to find out how they were growing.

And here’s another memory – he was robbed in a shop. He was about to pay and some soft-hearted lady offered to help. All his money was filched out of his wallet. He made a scene and the poor young salesgirl sobbed and protested that she had nothing to do with it.

When I shaved for the first time, my stepfather gave me his eau de cologne. Probably that was the moment when a simple idea first came into my head: he didn’t have any children of his own, and all those years he had wanted to feel that I was his son, but I had done everything I could to prevent it from happening.

By the way, I learned that trick from him – if you nick yourself while shaving, tear off a small scrap of newspaper and press it onto the cut.

All those years I used to think about my father too. Why did he leave Mum and me? What happened back then? I dreamed that he and I would meet. For some reason I thought that some day he would simply come to meet me in the school yard after my lessons.

Once I saw a grown-up teaching his son to ride a bicycle – running behind and holding on to the saddle. And I wanted so badly for my father to teach me to ride a bicycle!

And at the end of the school year I remember the entire hall applauding at the gala assembly when the headmaster handed me a certificate of merit. I stand there with my hair already trimmed short for the summer, and I look for my father in the crowd of parents, although I know he can’t be here. But what if he has suddenly come back right now? And he’s observing my triumph? Feeling proud of me?

Sometimes I used to find things left over from him that Mum hadn’t thrown out for some reason. For instance, when I was little I used to play with his slide rule. His old textbooks were still up in the attic, dusty and incredibly boring, full of calculations and formulas. She had thrown out all his photographs and cut the ones where they were together so that even in the photo that showed her sitting there pregnant with me, all that was left of my father were his severed fingers on her plump shoulder.

I once asked Mum about my dad, but the only answer I got was that she didn’t want to talk to me about that man now.

‘You’ll find out everything when you grow up.’

I was afraid to ask about him after that.

It seems to have been this unspent love, reinforced by hate for my stepfather, that my teacher Victor Sergeevich inherited. I’m not really sure if that old crank deserved it.

In class he used to show us the very simplest organisms, protozoa, in the microscope. He tossed his tie back over his shoulder so that it wouldn’t get in the way, but it kept falling back down. We couldn’t make anything out properly, just some vague blotches, but our teacher assured us that what we were seeing was real-life immortality. And then, to make the point to us, he took me as an example, which delighted the entire class no end, but I felt really hurt, I could have cried, because he didn’t understand that he was making fun of me. He started amusing my classmates with the idea of me dividing in two, only both halves are still me, each is a young individual, although it remains old at the same time, and life starts from the beginning – and this carries on for millions of years.

‘Just imagine!’ he almost shouted in his excitement. ‘This infusorian that we are looking at here through the eyepiece of this microscope saw the dinosaurs!’

At the time I was astounded that there was real immortality in the world and that for these protozoa death was not natural, only accidental. But I was even more astounded that Victor Sergeevich, my favourite teacher, had thrown me to the untender mercies of those beasts. I cried bitterly into my pillow at night and decided that he didn’t love me any more. Well, then I ought not to love him any more.

Shikra.

But a week after that he had the seizure in our class.

Sasha! I write to you, my little girl, and I forget about everything around me! How good it is!

Here everything is permeated with death and pain and it’s absolutely impossible to imagine that somewhere life is carrying on as if nothing has happened. Streets, newspapers, shops, trams. The zoo. Restaurants. People can just drop into the post office. Or call into the confectioner’s to buy a little cake.

From here the very simplest things seem strange. Well, isn’t it strange that my city is living its own life without me? It has just become invisible to me. It’s summer there where you are too. But surely it isn’t as airless and sweltering?

How I long for the winter!

To gulp in the frosty air with my mouth. To hear my footsteps crunching across a crust of ice, as if I’m gnawing on dry biscuits as I walk along. To see the icy glacier under a drainpipe. And the early morning snow falling unhurriedly and thoughtfully.

You know, I remember the forest in March, the snow has already gone, but where people walked step-for-step through the snowdrifts in winter, there are still little stumps of ice on the dry leaves. A strange track of dirty, unmelted stumps running through the forest. What did I remember that for?

And I also remember that we left a bottle of water on the balcony – in the frosty night the glass shattered, but the water carried on standing there in a bottle shape.

All this is because we are dying of thirst here.

Sashenka, how many times I have imagined the way I will come back home! And everything there is still in its right place. My room. Books everywhere – on the windowsill, piles on the bookcase reaching up to the ceiling, a stack like firewood on the floor. My old sagging divan bed. My table lamp. No shooting. No death.
Everything in its usual place. The clock ticks, but time has stopped. It’s all real, it’s home, it’s mine.

You know, I dream that I’ll get back and simply sprawl there, gazing tenderly at the wallpaper for half a day. It would never even have entered my head before that such a trifle could make a man happy.