The Light and the Dark (12 page)

I walk along with an oar and someone passing by asks:

‘What’s that spade you’re carrying?’

Just imagine, my Sashenka, first there was the Brazil tree, and only afterwards was there Brazil.

I went out on deck, there was no one in the bow, I sheltered from the wind behind the windlass. It’s cosy in behind the canvas cover, I can smoke up my sleeve.

The sea and the sky – how strange that somewhere they can exist apart.

It will start soon. Sashenka, perhaps I’ll be killed. That’s still better than coming back a cripple. And God forbid that I myself should have to kill.

You know, I’m ready for anything.

I look at the waves, at the dark clouds. There’s a vague jolting under my feet. The rumbling of the engine room.

The wind seems to be trying to stuff the smoke back into the funnel. It’s wasting its damn time, though.

A seagull froze, motionless, in the sky – lost in thought. Then suddenly it remembered something important, perhaps that life is as short as a blink, and went dashing off at full pelt.

Why am I lying to you and myself? I’m not ready for anything at all!

They’ve thrown a vat of waste overboard – the seagulls are going wild.

You know, Sashka, the way it is is probably this: the corporeal,
visible shell of the world – the material – gets stretched and greasy, chafed and worn into holes, and then the essence pokes out, like a toe sticking through a hole in a sock.

My darling, dearest, only precious one!

Listen to what happened.

I rode my bike to that forest of ours, then walked to the abandoned aerodrome. Do you remember?

Everything was overgrown with grass, there was a rubbish dump on the landing area, the hangars were empty, with piles of shit inside them. Thickets of rusty barbed wire everywhere.

I think: Why did I come out here? All I’ve done is get my legs stung by nettles. And my socks are covered in grass seeds.

And the sun is going down.

Then I go back to my bicycle and I see a bundle of barbed wire as tall as I am that is grown through with goosefoot. Lit up by the sunset, it starts glowing red, burning like a bush.

And suddenly it says:

‘Stop!’

I stop.

It doesn’t say anything else.

I ask it:

‘Who are you?’

The blazing bundle says:

‘Why, can’t you see? I am Alpha and Omega, Gog and Magog, Eldad and Medad, dexter and sinister, apex and root, inbreath and outbreath, seed and weed, udder and rudder, if I knew where the
ace was, I’d scoop the pot. I am that I am. Sower, mower and tin-whistle blower. Do not fear me. It is simply that I talk differently to different people. For we live in a world where every snowflake is different from another, mirrors do not really reflect anything and every mole and freckle has its own person unlike all the others. Speak!’

I ask:

‘What should I say?’

‘Say: Everything around me is message and messenger at the same time.’

I say:

‘Everything around me is message and messenger at the same time.’

The blazing bundle asks:

‘Well, so what’s the problem?’

I say:

‘Everybody tries to explain to me that you don’t need anyone else for love. They tell me Plato said: Love is present in the one who loves, not in the beloved.’

It says:

‘What’s that got to do with anything? What does it matter who said what? Why do you listen to them all?’

I ask:

‘What should I do?’

It says:

‘Take a look at yourself!’

I ask:

‘Do I look terrible?’

It says:

‘That’s not what I mean. Those grass seeds on your socks. They’re the messenger and the message too. A special dispatch. About life.
About victory. It’s the same thing. In this life there are no vanquished, everyone’s a victor.’

I say:

‘But I want to be with him!’

It says:

‘Say the words!’

I ask:

‘What words?’

It says:

‘You know.’

I ask:

‘I do? How would I know them?’

It says:

‘Think!’

I ask:

‘What then, is the servant of God Vovka the Carrot getting married to this woman? And shall I step on his foot too, to be the boss in the kitchen?’

It says:

‘No, no, not that!’

I say:

‘But I can’t guess!’

It says:

‘No need to guess. You already know everything. Look, there’s a mosquito. There’s a cloud. There are your fingers with the hangnails and the scar right beside the nail on your thumb.’

I say:

‘I think I’m beginning to understand.’

It says:

‘There’s the visible world. And there – close your eyes – is the invisible one.’

I say:

‘I understand!’

It says:

‘Well then?’

I say:

‘I understand everything.’

I understand everything. We are already husband and wife. We always were. You are my husband. I am your wife. And that is the most wonderful rhyme in the world.

Dear Such-and-Such!

I greatly regret to inform you that your son.

Well anyway, you understand the whole thing already.

Bear up.

I understand how you feel at this moment. There are no words that will help or console here.

Believe me, it’s not easy for me to write all this either. But that’s life. Duty to be done. No such thing as ‘I don’t want’, only ‘you have to’.

May it serve as at least some consolation to you that he did not die for no particular reason, but for something good and great. For what exactly? Well, let’s say at least for that Motherland of ours.

I understand. That’s no help at all.

In short, he was killed in battle.

In what battle?

Suffice it to say that your son did not return from a certain undistinguished war, as the poet T. put it. So what difference does
it make? For the Whites, for the Reds, for the Hellenes, for the Hebrews.

What difference does it make which undistinguished war you die in?

I understand, it’s important to you to know exactly which hostile empire’s fields will be fertilised by a drop of your blood. But does that really matter? The Celestial Empire is as good as any.

Kutuzov came to beat the French and your son, as our lower ranks joke, came to kick the Chinese in the bollocks. Well, here’s the result. Sign on receipt.

By the way, they’ve written about our prodigious heroes in the newspapers too! Look here, in yesterday’s
Evening News
, on the third page: ‘Hard is the soldier’s path to the Order of St George’.

I enclose herewith.

‘It is a sad fact,’ our special correspondent reports from the theatre of military operations, ‘that the experience of the first days of war has demonstrated that no other way is possible: we have tried being merciful and received volleys of gunfire from thickets of kaoliang – Chinese sorghum – in our rear. And take a look at their proclamations, nailed up on every joss house!

‘The foreign devils, dear reader,’ the reporter continued in his report, ‘are subhuman heathens with dogs’ heads.
We
are the foreign devils.

‘We have disrupted the universal harmony. We are like holes in a perfect universe, through which warmth and meaning escape and an icy cosmic draught blows in. Call the universal harmony feng shui if you wish, call it the general service regulations, it makes no difference, the important thing is that it contains everything in plenty: life and death and – most important of all – human warmth.

‘Let me try to put this more simply. The universal harmony is the general service regulations, which are intended to teach new recruits that everything rhymes. Kasha and Masha, love and blood, snow and water, some such-and-such and her son.

‘The Celestial Empire is celestial because people there die, but they carry on living. Here everyone carries on living in the same houses, speaking the same words that are too inadequate to express anything, watching the sunset in the same old way as it tries so hard to please, trimming their toenails in the same old way after soaking their feet in a basin of hot water. Everyone is still where they were before. And their houses, their roads, their land, their sunset, their toenails must not be taken away from them.

‘In these regulations it is written: you must understand that you live on their land and walk their roads. And if you wish to hammer a nail into their wall, you must first ask permission. And
when you build a house, you do not build it for yourself, but for everyone. For everyone living and not-living. For all the sunsets and toenails.

‘It is not even a matter of the sleepers and the rails, but that it was done without so much as a by-your-leave. It touches a raw nerve. A celestial nerve.

‘The foreign devils have disrupted the universal harmony, it must be restored. Therefore the foreign devils must be annihilated. We must be annihilated. We are the dog-headed ones, we must be put down like mad dogs. We are the ones ruining life for everyone.

‘The heavens themselves are outraged and have sent a celestial army to fight against our sons.

‘We are fighting against the heavens.

‘You should see them, dear reader, these celestial warriors!

‘They are mere children!

‘And all little girls.

‘They believe that uttering special words, celestial incantations, will make them invulnerable. They believe that a transparent golden bell will manifest itself around their maidenly bodies and protect them like armour against a bullet or a bayonet. And they also believe that they can set fire to houses with a single touch or glance, disappear and reappear in the most unexpected place, become invisible, hide under the ground and fly through the air. And in their hands even a kaoliang stalk becomes a weapon. They need only point it at a foreign devil for him instantly to be torn apart by invisible claws.

‘And they take no prisoners. The cruelty with which they treat their victims is distinctly unmaidenlike and they feel obliged to abuse the lifeless bodies. They dismember them, feed them to pigs and eat the hearts themselves. But this is not simple barbarity, it
contains a profound meaning. These little girls who can fly cannot imagine that even without all this someone’s son will not be resurrected anyway, that he will never come again – neither on the third day nor the one hundred thousand and third.’

But let us return to our sheep, as the French say.

I return.

According to an instruction from Somebody-or-Other appended to the Letter-Writing Manual for General Staff Clerks, the present death notification should recount in brief the circumstances and causes of your son’s death, such as that he died, faithful to his oath, in the performance of a combat mission assigned by a boneheaded commanding officer, having demonstrated fortitude and courage or – if you prefer: Faithful to his oath, in the performance of a combat mission assigned by a boneheaded commanding officer, after having demonstrated fortitude and courage, he was seriously wounded and died. Another version is also possible if your boy died as a result of the careless handling of a weapon, illness or other causes, for instance, if he expired as a result of bloody diarrhoea – as you understand, we can’t write that to you, so it becomes: In the performance of a combat mission assigned by that same bonehead, faithful to his oath, he was taken seriously ill and died.

I recount herewith.

Your son was killed near Tongzhou on the banks of the Pei Ho river.

Or, rather:

Your son was killed, but he is alive and well.