The Light and the Dark (37 page)

But when Igoryok was born, Kostik was so delighted by the appearance of a baby in the house that he wasn’t even jealous. One day he asked me to wrap him up in a blanket and carry him around like a newborn infant. I wrapped him up and started walking round the room with him. He stuck his thumb in his mouth and closed his eyes. Then he burst into laughter and started struggling.

‘Let me go! Let me go!’

But I didn’t want to.

Everything had started falling apart in Yanka’s family, and I thought this child might help bring them back together again.

Before the pregnancy I used to hear this:

‘He lies there, saying nothing, with his face turned to the wall, then gets up, comes into the kitchen and throws his supper on the floor!’

She complained about her husband, saying that he was his mother’s only child and now he was acting like a spoilt brat – picking on trifles, yelling, apologising, throwing hysterical fits.

‘And he’s never washed the dishes even once!’

I try to reassure her.

‘But you have such wonderful children!’

She replied:

‘Sashka, believe me, children are no substitute for love.’

Once she said bitterly:

‘I’ve finally understood what a family is – living in hell and hiding it for the sake of the children.’

They had started quarrelling a long time before. After one of their
rows, Yanka came running to me with the children and stayed for the night. In the morning her husband came to apologise: he rang the bell, banged on the door and threatened to break it down, Yanka didn’t want to let him in, but the children started howling. When I unlocked the door, he was already furious again because we’d refused to open up. More yelling. The poor boys! They dashed at their daddy and then at their mummy, waving their little fists. It all concluded with an absolutely farcical scene of reconciliation and the family setting off home, leaving me lying down with a migraine.

And then Yanka started feeling sorry for me.

‘Sashka, I’ll find someone for you! You need to get married!’

‘What for?’

‘You don’t know why people get married?’

‘No.’

‘To fill the void. Look, we quarrel, even in public, we yell and slam doors, smash the dishes, he waves his fists about, I burst into tears. But afterwards, after we’ve let off steam, we both love each other. I couldn’t live without all this frenzy.’

Now that Yanka was expecting another child, they seemed to have settled down. When I went to see them, he hugged his wife, put his hand on her growing stomach and smiled.

‘There now, at last I’m going to have a daughter. We tried really hard, didn’t we?’

Yanka examined her stomach in the mirror, pulling up her blouse, and all of us – me, the children and her husband – looked at it, and we all wanted to run our finger down that vertical brown line and press that protruding belly-button like a doorbell. And we did press it, taking turns.

‘Zing! Zing! We’re waiting for you!’

When the first snow fell and the entire city was smothered, we went out into the yard to make a snow woman and rolled huge
balls of snow. And when the snow woman was ready, Igoryok walked up to her, stroked her bulging snowy belly with his mitten and said:

‘Like Mummy!’

After her second operation, my mummy spent a month at home, and I had to take time off work to look after her.

I made her herb teas and cream soups.

I caught myself feeling afraid of drinking out of her cup, although I realise that cancer isn’t catching, and deliberately made myself try the soup with her spoon.

Gradually, imperceptibly, Mummy had turned into an emaciated, sick old woman. It was painful to watch her get out of bed, grope so long for her slippers with her feet and then slowly shuffle her way to the toilet, holding on to the wall with her withered hand. And when she spoke, her voice was withered too.

I remember her brushing her hair in front of the mirror, picking the hairs that had fled from her out of the brush and sighing.

‘What’s left of me?’

I washed her in the bath and was amazed: this couldn’t be Mummy, surely?

She hadn’t dyed her hair for ages. It was chestnut on top, but all grey at the roots. Huge, monstrous scars instead of breasts. And down below, between her legs, lifeless wisps of grey. Swollen varicose veins protruding from her legs in strings of purple and blue knots.

Now she often remembered things from her childhood and youth that she had never told me about before.

She said that when she was a little girl she dreamed of long, white opera gloves.

‘You know the kind, close-fitting kidskin gloves right up to the elbow?’

Her dream had never come true.

When Daddy was still courting her, they strolled round the streets until late. When the tram they had to take to get home arrived, they took turns saying to each other:

‘Let’s miss another one, shall we?’

And so they missed the last one and had to walk halfway across the city.

Mummy sighed.

‘Well, who could have thought then that life would slip by like all those trams we missed and this would be left?’

She hadn’t told me anything about her parents before, but she started talking about them now – ‘your grandfather’ or ‘your grandmother’ – although I’d never seen them in my life, they died long before I was born.

Mummy started remembering her first child, my older brother, all the time. A photograph I had never seen before suddenly appeared on her table – a pudgy, plump-bottomed little baby smiling with his toothless mouth.

One day in her reverie Mummy started calling out:

‘Sasha! Sashenka!’

I walked over to her.

‘I’m here, Mummy.’

She opened her eyes and gave me a strange kind of look.

I realised it wasn’t me she had been calling.

For her, life had started to contract, everything she had lived through was turning transparent, one thing showed through another.

I was wiping Mummy dry after a bath and she remembered that when I still used to play with dolls, I once told her:

‘When I grow up, I’ll be big and you’ll be little!’

She smiled, as if apologising for something.

‘And that’s just what’s happened. We’ve swapped places.’

I needed to escape from her illness every now and then, and Mummy understood me, she used to drive me out so that I could go somewhere and unwind, not stay with her all the time.

‘But Mummy, you’ll be bored. What will you do?’

‘You know, I’ve got so many things to remember!’

In the evening I used to go to Yanka’s place, where I watched her husband put his hand on her stomach and wink at me:

‘Now this time it’s a little girl! I ordered one!’

But I knew something that he didn’t.

I’m Yanka’s close confidante, I know all her secrets, although sometimes it would be better not to know.

Yanka thought she had got pregnant and when her husband was away, she didn’t bother to take any precautions with her lover. Then afterwards she realised she had got the days mixed up and the date of conception fell during the time when her husband was away.

Yanka was unfaithful to her husband almost from the very beginning. Often, while I sat with her children, she was in someone’s bed, and if her husband asked, I was supposed to tell him some lie. He didn’t ask.

Yanka took her second lover to forget the first. And the third to forget the second.

It seems to me that she was always that way, even in her young days she never loved anyone, but she liked making men fall in love with her, driving them crazy, and then watching them go wild and fight over her.

Her latest lover was a musicologist. Apart from their secret rendezvous, they sometimes ran into each other at parties held by people they both knew.

‘Just imagine, we were sitting beside each other on the sofa and
I got carried away by the conversation and started tousling his hair the way I always do! It was a good thing nobody noticed!’

She laughs at her lover’s absolutely childish jealousy of her husband.

Once, putting on her lipstick in the mirror before she leaves the children with me and goes to her musicologist, she says:

‘My husband doesn’t understand anything about my body! But he does!’

That time she had a head cold with a sore on her lip and a cough.

I asked:

‘Yanka, why all the rush, with your nose running like that? Get well first!’

But she laughed.

‘Ah, but he likes it when he’s inside me and I cough. He says everything in there suddenly tightens right up!’

I asked Yanka how she could go with two men in the same day. She replied that it used to bother her a lot until she learned to separate them, draw a symbolic line between them – take a shower, wash her hair with a different shampoo, shave her legs, put on a different perfume.

‘I don’t know how to explain it. You see, Sashka, it’s the only thing that keeps the family going. I come back home from my lover feeling easy and relaxed. After I’ve been unfaithful, I’m tender and loving with my husband again. I have the strength for the housework and the children again, for his favourite stuffed peppers. And my husband thinks: “What a wonderful wife I have!”’

Her musicologist struck a false chord with me from the very beginning. I couldn’t understand what Yanka saw in him – he always reeked of sweat, with a hint of decay. And I didn’t like the way he looked at me. One day during the summer, they turned
up at my place late in the evening, both hungry, and the table was bare. Yanka went off to the kitchen to cook something, he put on some music he had brought with him and started pestering me to dance with him. Squeezing up close, rubbing himself against me. His hands start wandering. He keeps squinting at the kitchen door in case she comes out.

I dragged him out onto the balcony and there in the darkness I wound my arms round his neck and started kissing him on the lips. And he snuffled as he started kissing me back hard, but all the time he was on his guard. Where was Yanka? Could she see us?

I pushed him away and laughed.

He asked in a frightened voice:

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing, it’s just that I like everything to be light-hearted and jolly, delicious and beautiful. That’s what I was born for! But your nose is too long, your eyes are set too close, you’ve got gap-teeth and your stomach looks as if it’s been buttoned on.’

I didn’t mention the smell.

He probably hates me now.

From Yanka’s place I used to go back to Mummy, to her cancer.

I couldn’t bring myself to do it for a long time, but finally I asked her:

‘Mummy, why were you unfaithful to my father?’

‘Can’t you forgive me?’

‘No, it’s not that. I realised a long time ago that I have no right to accuse you of anything. And I have no right to forgive you. I just think it must have been hard for you, being devious and telling lies all the time.’

‘I didn’t tell lies. It’s not a lie. You just come home, forget one truth and remember another. Change from one woman into another.’

‘Did you fall in love with them? Like with Daddy?’

‘I fell in love before I was married and afterwards – it has nothing at all to do with marriage. Sometimes you can fall in love overnight. You wake up and realise you fell in love while you were asleep. But the way you love your husband is quite different.’

‘Did you hide everything from him?’

‘Why hurt him and torment him? He’s near and dear to me, after all. Why make someone dear to me suffer?’

Afterwards she tried to continue the conversation several times. I felt that she wanted to justify herself to me, and I interrupted.

‘Mummy, you don‘t have to explain anything to me.’

‘No, listen. A man makes a woman different. I saw myself with their eyes and felt the way they felt about me. With one I was tired, lethargic, no good for anything, and with another I was real, I was desired. A woman has a need to be generous, and if you’re not given the opportunity, that generosity looks for a way out.’

One time, after a long silence – I thought she had dozed off, but she was back there, in the past – Mummy said:

‘You know, I always used to cut your daddy’s hair for him. And it wasn’t until I cut the other man’s hair that I really felt I was being unfaithful to my husband.’

She waited for me to say something. I didn’t.

‘And anyway, what a stupid word that is – unfaithful. You’re not taking anything away from anyone. It’s simply something different, something else that you need. And this something else doesn’t take anybody’s place. This something else wasn’t in your life before, it fills a vacuum that would have remained unfilled. Without it, you go around feeling as if someone has taken a huge chunk out of the world and out of you. It helps to make you feel complete, real, alive. With the others I was happy as a woman,
do you understand? And they said all kinds of things to me that your father never said.’

And then she added, embarrassed:

‘I’m an old fool, right? I should just keep quiet?’

‘Mummy, talk to me about everything. You never talked to me about this before, did you? Don’t be ashamed!’

‘I’m not ashamed. And I’m not making excuses, I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of or make excuses about. What’s really terrible is not that it happened, but that it’s impossible to tell the people closest to you – your husband, your daughter – about your inmost feelings, what torments you and what makes you happy.’

And then out of the blue she started telling me, as if it was something very important, about the time in her childhood when she stole a beautiful doll’s blouse from her friend at the dacha. The other girl cried her eyes out and Mummy wanted to give it back, but she knew she couldn’t do that now, and she helped her friend search for the blouse, which she stuffed into her knickers and then threw into a tangle of nettles when nobody could see.

‘Mummy, have you carried that around inside yourself all these years to tell me about it now?’

‘I never took anything that didn’t belong to me ever again.’

‘My mummy, how I love you!’

At moments like that I felt so warm and cosy with her again, as easy as once upon a time long, long ago, when we used to pull our feet up onto the sofa and whisper about everything in the world.