The Light and the Dark (10 page)

When I was a little girl I couldn’t possibly have imagined that the day would ever come when I would want to puke my mother up out of myself like vomit.

When there was no one at home, I took her grand-gala photo album and started pulling the photographs out of it, tearing them into little pieces and flushing them down the toilet.

And I started smoking – but only because my mother forbade it.

I come back inside and she runs a check. She knows where to sniff. She doesn’t say: ‘Breathe!’ – no, she realises that after just one sweet there’s no more smell left. She sniffs my hands. Your clothes and your hair get impregnated with smoke if someone smokes beside you. But your hands only smell if you hold a cigarette yourself.

I didn’t try to hide – I smoked openly, to spite her.

Daddy used to say to me on the quiet:

‘Childy, why do you go asking for trouble? Hide the cigarettes, don’t have them brazenly sticking out of your jacket like that!’

My mother rants at me and I say to her:

‘I’m bad? All right, so I’ll be even worse!’

We upset each other so badly, we start crying and get hysterical. I probably needed it all for some reason – the tears, the shouting, the stamping, the tearing of pillowcases. One time I locked myself in and started tugging on the curtains so hard that the curtain rod came down with a crash. She hammers on my door and says that she’s my mother and because of that alone she deserves my respect, and I shout that I didn’t stuff myself into that egg cell and I never asked her to have me anyway, so I don’t owe her anything.

Another time she rants at me because I took her manicure set and didn’t put it back and I wonder what will happen if she finds out I’ve started stealing money from her. I don’t even need it – my father always gave me some for cigarettes or whatever else. But there was some kind of line I had to cross.

It was disgusting to watch her getting dressed, sprucing herself up. I could always guess where she was going from the blowsy, slippery look in her eyes.

I used to imagine her getting undressed in front of her lover, carefully removing one piece of clothing after another, straightening it out, folding it neatly.

I was sixteen then and I felt the change in myself without the slightest transition – one moment I was a child, then suddenly I was a very lonely woman.

I left home then. I shouted that I would never come back to them and slammed the door. But I had nowhere to go. I went to Yanka’s place to spend the night. She only had her mother and grandmother, and she called them her parents.

My father ran round everywhere looking for me until late at night, although he could have guessed straightaway where I was. He came and started demanding that I go home immediately. I felt embarrassed in front of Yanka’s parents. I told him:

‘All right, I’ll come back. But what can I do about the fact that I don’t love her or you any more? I despise you – what can I do about that?’

I thought he was going to hit me. He didn’t. And he didn’t say a thing all the way home, just sniffed as he walked along.

I don’t know why I’ve remembered that now.

My only one, how much I miss you!

I read every letter you write over and over again and put kisses where the full stops are.

I walk past the monument, it’s still there, but where is our date?

And I keep trying all the time to find some justification for you not being here beside me. Not an explanation, a justification. After all, if that’s the way things are, it must be necessary for something. And this is the idea I’ve had. It’s like when you’re a child – if you have something, you have to share it. You’ve been given some sweets, but the others don’t have any. And you have to share. Or else they might simply take everything. So in this life you have to share what is most precious to you. And the more precious it is, the more you have to give away. Share what you love the most – or else it will be taken away completely.

I kiss you, my love! Be well, take care, my happiness! I fall asleep and wake up with the thought of you.

If you weren’t there, I would drown, floundering in the void of myself, unable to find any foothold.

And I’m so afraid that something will happen to you.

Now for some reason I’ve remembered you telling me about some kind of birds that make love on the wing. I can’t remember what they’re called.

Do you know what I want right now more than anything else in the world? To be pregnant all over from you – with my mouth and eyes and navel and hands and every opening, my skin and my hair, everything!

They brought up the railway carriages. Forty men, eight horses, one hamster. How strangely everything in this life is arranged! Men become brutal with other men so quickly, they turn icy cold and cruel – and they thaw out and become human with a little animal that lives in their pocket. They feel compassion for it. They are suddenly transformed when they stroke its back with their finger.

A long day in the carriages.

We’re probably travelling through the kingdom of Prester John.

Telegraph poles, bridges, wooden bunkhouses, brick factory buildings, rubbish dumps, railway sidings, warehouses, grain elevators, fields, forests, more railway sidings, goods depots, water pumps.

The train is barely crawling along. Wagons stand behind a closed boom at a crossing. A pregnant pointswoman scratches the back
of her head with her small, rolled-up green flag. A goat tethered to a stake watches intently.

In open areas the smoke of the locomotive trails low across the ground, clinging to the withered grass.

At some station yesterday there was an accident – I saw a coupler crushed by the buffers.

Now we’re picking up speed again – down below, where the rails are, everything has blurred into a rapid flow.

They looked for proof that the earth turns on its axis – well, there it is, outside the window.

We’ve just passed a half-hamlet with a half-dozen columns of smoke and a half-dozen souls.

I think about my mother a lot. She came to see me off with her blind man, although I asked her not to.

It has suddenly occurred to me that I’ll only be able to love her properly when she’s dead. Who was it who said that blood kinship is the most distant? How cruel and how true!

I remember them walking away – him taking one step for two of her short, little ones.

What a strange word – stepson.

My mother met my stepfather through Grandma. How old was I then, eight? He came to visit us several times, Mum gave him tea and made silent, threatening gestures across the table at me, so that I would sit quietly and behave myself. I found this man disgusting from the very beginning.

He spoke to me in the cheerful, bantering tone that people use with children, all the while watching me with his shaggy ear. I didn’t answer his stupid questions, and Mum said affectionately:

‘Come on, darling, answer when you’re asked a question.’

The falsehood in that affectionate voice was obvious to both of us and it hurt me very much.

To spite him I muttered something even more stupid and his face blossomed into a grimace – that was the way he smiled, it was very hard to get used to that smile.

Sasha, my dearest, is it all right for me to write to you about this? The two of us never spoke about him.

You know, when I tried to imagine his world, it made me feel queasy. The life of a blind man seemed to me like the life of a shrew that burrows its lairs and tunnels through darkness as dense and heavy as damp clay and then runs through them. All of his black space was crisscrossed with these passages. And Mum and I were in one of them. Especially at nights he would steal into my brain with his blindness and I couldn’t scrape him out of my head no matter how hard I tried.

I remember Mum completely flooring me when she said she was going to marry this man and she loved him very much and asked me to learn to love him too. I was astounded by that phrase – ‘learn to love’. Learn to love him? I simply couldn’t get it through my head that she could bring this weirdo with the terrible hollow eyes and greenish, protruding teeth into our home.

Mum asked me to let the blind man touch my face. Even now, after all these years, I remember it with a shudder.

Can you believe that I even made some kind of childish plans to do something that would spoil their wedding – cut Mum’s wedding dress to pieces with the scissors, lace the cake with laxative or something else of the kind – only there wasn’t any wedding as I imagined it. They simply moved into our place and started living there.

I simply couldn’t understand why Mum needed this invalid. And the smell! You would have understood me. He gave off the thick, heavy odour of a large, sweaty body. It puzzled me why
Mum put up with it – could she really not smell it? I simply couldn’t believe that she didn’t notice that odour.

Sometimes he gave me presents. I remember he brought a little box from the cake shop and it had my favourite cakes in it – rum truffles. Two truffles with an intoxicating chocolaty scent. I wanted to eat them so much! But I sneaked the cakes out when I went to the toilet and flushed them away.

He was delighted when he heard we had the special chess set for blind people that my granny had given me, but I flatly refused to play with him, although I would have been happy enough to play with the mirror before that.

When the three of us walked along the street, people turned to look and I felt terribly ashamed. I remember that at the very first opportunity – for instance when they stopped in front of a shop window or went into a shop – I tried to pretend I was simply strolling about on my own. I invented the most impossible excuses in order to avoid appearing in public with them.

When they took me to the cinema, Mum used to whisper in his ear what was happening on the screen and people kept shushing her all the time, and I had to take him to the toilet. He had a problem with his bladder and he went to the toilet almost every hour.

It was the trivial little things that annoyed me most. I couldn’t just leave anything anywhere I liked – every item now had to be in its own set place. I couldn’t leave a door half-open – it had to be closed or opened completely. When he lay down for a rest, everything in the house had to fall silent. He put a box of matches in the toilet and struck a match every time after he went – and demanded that everybody else do the same.

I couldn’t bear to watch his hands fumbling around on the table, searching for the sugar bowl or butter dish.

When he fell into thought, he often used to tilt his head back and press his thumb in under his eyeball.

And I can see him now, shuffling along our corridor, staring hard with his outstretched fingers.

It offended me to see Mum take off his socks and rub his feet in the evening. And it offended me even more – I don’t know why – when she called him Pavlik, like a child.

Sometimes it seemed to me that he wasn’t blind at all and could see everything. One time I accidentally glanced in through an open door – my stepfather had just come in and he was getting changed, taking off his shoes by standing on the heels, and he suddenly shouted at me harshly:

‘Shut the door!’

When Mum couldn’t take him somewhere, she used to ask me. My stepfather held on to my forearm. I was astounded the first time, when he said:

‘Don’t be afraid, it’s not catching!’

Everybody looked at us, and I couldn’t bear those glances of sympathy, those comments with sighs: ‘How terrible!’ or ‘Lord spare us!’ And he had to be led along smoothly, with no sharp movements or jerks, otherwise he would start scolding me angrily and squeezing my arm painfully. You had to know how to help him. He got furious when tender-hearted people wanted to help and grabbed at his hand holding the cane. And what a chore it was leading him past all the puddles when it was raining!

My stepfather always carried around a small iron tablet in a cover with little square windows in it. As we were walking along, he would suddenly get some idea and want to write it down, so we stopped and I waited while he punched holes in thick paper with a blunt awl. People walking by stared and I wanted to disappear, I felt so ashamed.

However, he walked through his familiar tunnels and passages quite confidently on his own, tapping briskly on the pavement with his white cane.

We kept a suitcase full of old things in the cupboard up under the ceiling. Mum sometimes sorted through them, and one day she took out a big sweater, measured it against me and said I could wear it when I grew a bit more. I realised it was left over from my father. And then suddenly I saw my father’s sweater on the blind man. Somehow that made me angrier than anything else.

They used to hire a boat on the pond in the park, my stepfather took the oars and mum would steer. They couldn’t understand why I didn’t like boat rides, when everyone else did. They really enjoyed themselves – he would start catching crabs with the oars and splashing us, Mum squealed and broke into peals of laughter, but I sat there wet and angry. And when I scooped up a handful of black, weedy water and splashed it into his face, Mum shouted at me and slapped me on the cheek. I’d never been slapped by her before that.