The Light and the Dark (15 page)

The same pictures come to mind endlessly, always the ones I don’t want.

I forgot my change in the shop and they came running after me, shouting:

‘Miss, miss! Come back!’

In the tram someone sat down beside me and trapped the edge of my skirt, I had to pull it free.

Then this old couple got in, with their heads shaking – his saying no-no and hers saying yes-yes.

Yanka told me she and her beau went to a restaurant and left small change for a tip, and the waiter flung the change after them as they left.

I’m walking along the street and there’s somebody’s hand in an open window – either beckoning me in or driving a mosquito out.

The newspaper said that up in the North they found a plane with a broken ski prop and the frozen pilot with his fur boots burned – before he died he stuck his frozen feet into the fire to warm them up. But when his watch thawed out, it started working again.

And this scene is from my childhood – Daddy and I have been walking in the park, our shoes are all covered in mud, at the entrance he scrapes his sole against the edge of the pavement and the grass, and just for a moment it seems to me that he’s trying to free himself from his shadow.

And here’s Mummy making me my favourite milksop. She cuts the bread into little cubes and throws them into the bowl of warm milk, then sprinkles them with sugar and my throat suddenly contracts at the thought that she will die some day and this is what I’ll remember – her making me milksop and sprinkling sugar from a teaspoon.

Chartkov invited me to a concert at the home of a female pianist he knows. She’s tall and her legs are so long that she sat at the piano with them splayed out wide. Our seats were almost directly behind her, so we could see the reflection of her hands in the lid of the piano, as if she was playing a four-hand duet with herself. And her cheeks kept shaking all the time.

On our way back there was an accident, someone had been killed and was lying on the pavement with a newspaper over his face.

And now look, it’s back again, the time I worked in an ambulance.

A woman who was trying to hang curtains fell and broke the same leg that she had already broken several times before.

A man who was tending a campfire snagged his foot on a branch and fell – they took the skin off his hands like gloves.

Another man’s trouser leg got caught in the chain of his bike, he fell off and smashed his head against the kerb so hard that his eye was dangling on the nerve like a thread.

A child was eating ice cream on a stick, he started running, tripped and the stick pierced his larynx.

And on and on like that every day.

How can I escape from all this?

I was out walking with Chartkov and his little Sonya, she’s so funny – she took pity on someone’s old shoe that had been thrown out because now it couldn’t walk any more and had to look at the rubbish tip all the time, and she moved it somewhere else so that it would have a view of lilac bushes. Then we reached the studio and she started drawing my portrait in profile: she sat me down sideways-on to the wall, pointed a lamp at me, pressed a piece of paper against the wall and started tracing round the shadow with a pencil.

Something should be done about her squint. I move my finger about in front of her little nose, one eye watches the finger, but the other pupil wanders.

Donka keeps trying to chew on my shoelace. I shook her, and then my hands had that delicious doggy smell too.

The studio always smells of paint, turpentine, charcoal, wood and canvas. The pictures stand facing the wall in the corner, as if they are being punished. Easels, stretchers, boxes of paints, oily brushes, palette-knives. Floors covered with bright splashes of colour. Unwashed dishes in the dirty sink. Mouse droppings in the corners.

The second time I came, he sat me on a splotchy, splattered stool, then took a piece of charcoal and set to work. Looking at me over the top of his spectacles. Sniffing, biting his lip, sticking out his tongue. Humming, moaning, whistling. Whispers, groans, sighs. The rustle of charcoal over heavy paper.

The sudden sound of a bell from the window – his place is opposite a school.

An old man with a broom in the schoolyard – he doesn’t understand a thing, just like me.

It’s so strange to pose. I’m just sitting there, looking out of the window, and the irrelevant and transitory becomes relevant, important.

And then some boys came running into the yard and started playing football with a doll’s head. Lanky beanstalks. They’re probably skipping physics or something – they’ll miss something important, for instance, the Universe stopped expanding a long time ago and it’s contracting at the speed of darkness. The doll’s head somersaults, smacks against the asphalt with a hollow, ringing, joyful sound. And it jerks its plaits perkily as if to say, never mind, we’ll break through, we’re not done for yet, keep your pecker up!

He started telling me how he made sketches of his dying mother.

He says the primary canvas is a person’s face, their expressions. Then the body. And then comes stone.

It’s really the woman who inseminates, and the man who carries and gives birth.

The Houses of Parliament in London were burning, people were dying, but Turner tried to capture the colours of the fire in watercolour. Nero was no artist, but every artist is Nero.

We talked about Job too. He’s not real, because he really didn’t exist. But every living person is real. First everything is given to him, then everything is taken away. And without any explanations.

Yesterday I walked in and he was working in oils. I wanted so much to squeeze a living worm out onto a palette. So I stood there and squeezed one, then felt it with my finger.

Suddenly he said:

‘Yes, paint has to be felt with the skin.’

He ran his palm across the palette and pressed his paint-smeared hand against my face.

My Sashenka!

I don’t know when I’ll be able to send this letter, but I’ll write it anyway. So many different things have happened in recent days and it’s only now that I can have a quiet talk with you. I’ll tell you what’s been happening to me in a moment, but first the most important thing – you are very dear to me. And the longer we are not together, the more powerfully I sense you.

I feel you beside me so strongly, it seems impossible to me that you can’t feel it.

We’re in Tientsin. How long have we been here already? Only three days. But it feels like three years. Or thirty-three.

Now I’ll try to tell you about everything that’s happening here. Our detachment has combined with Colonel Anisimov’s detachment, who managed to hold out until we arrived. They have many casualties. The wounded are a really terrible sight.

The soldiers, absolutely exhausted after their time under siege, were led out from under the bombardment to our bivouac. For the first time since they set out from Port Arthur they were given a chance to catch up on their sleep, have a hot meal and take a wash. You should have seen how happily they washed their own underclothes in the murky waters of the Pei Ho.

We encamped on the left bank of the river, outside the city’s earth wall, on a level, open area, but when grenades started flying in from the Chinese positions in the suburbs of Tientsin, we were
ordered to move the camp further away. Our tents are pitched a verst from the Pei Ho and two versts from the settlement – that’s what they call the European part of the city.

There’s still no news from Seymour’s combined detachment. He took with him to Peking about two thousand Englishmen, Russians, Germans, Americans and Italians. They set off along the railway, repairing the line as they went, but they have been surrounded somewhere, the lines have been cut off and ruined again.

As for the foreign embassies in Peking, it is already known for certain that they have been destroyed and the entire European population, together with the Chinese Christians, has been slaughtered. A Chinese who worked at the German embassy managed to escape by a miracle and told us what happened to the Russian legation in Peking; they burned the church and the church mission with its library, hospital and school. Their hatred is so strong that they even desecrated the Orthodox cemetery, dug up all the graves and scattered the bones about. In front of his very eyes they slit open the stomachs of a Russian family living at the mission and decapitated them.

There are various other rumours going around, each more terrible than the last. Nobody knows anything for certain.

I haven’t been involved in the present battle yet and haven’t seen the enemy from close up, or rather I’ve only seen bodies. The soldiers have a strange uniform – blue jackets, over which they wear sleeveless jerkins with red trimming and gilded buttons. And on their backs and their chests they have circles of white oiled cloth with black hieroglyphs on them that say what unit a soldier belongs to – they take the place of our epaulettes. On their legs and feet they wear breeches and cloth boots with thick felt soles. But it’s rare to see anyone lying in full uniform – more often I
see the corpses semi-naked. And for some reason all their mouths are open. I walk past and clouds of flies shoot up into the air.

The weather is unbearably hot, and everyone is tormented by the shortage of water. The soldiers have started digging wells, but there isn’t enough water, the wounded suffer especially badly.

Yesterday they transferred the Russian infirmary to us from the besieged city. It used to be in the French hospital. Their tents are right beside ours. I can hear someone groaning at this very moment. And the doctor swearing at him. Our surgeon is called Zaremba. He often swears at the patients, but that’s just for show. He tries to seem coarse, but in reality he’s a warm-hearted man – he has shown everybody a photograph of his wife and son. He is simply very tired.

All day long they kept bringing more and more wounded on stretchers, I thought there would never be any end to it. Swarms of flies hovered over every one of them. There were no faces – they had sunk deep into the canvas. And all they could see from there was the sky. Many of them groaned at the jolting and one kept repeating over and over, just like a child:

‘My leg, careful with my leg!’

How terrible that at any moment I could find myself being carried like that.

I’ve spoken with the wounded, they tell me appalling things about what happened here. One officer – Rybakov, both of his feet are crushed – has been here since spring, and he said that even before the start of events, Tientsin was teeming with Yihetuan, or ‘Boxer Rebels’, who organised clamorous meetings and pasted up exhortations to give short shrift to foreigners everywhere. Neither the army nor the police did anything to stop them, although until the allies took the Taku Forts by storm, the government was officially pursuing the rebels. In the Chinese section of the city
marks made in blood appeared on houses in which Europeans or Chinese Christians lived – they slit dogs’ throats, plastered their entrails on the gates and threw them in through the windows. Chinese who worked for foreigners started asking to be allowed into the concessions with their families, but they were not admitted at first. The gates were only opened to them after the Yihetuan started butchering entire families in the night. Sometimes they spared the children, but they cut their hands off. That was probably to intimidate others.

Sashenka, I realise I shouldn’t write to you about all this but I’m sorry, I can’t help it. I saw one boy myself – he had attached himself to the French hospital. They gave him a dry biscuit and he was sucking on it, clutched between his bandaged stumps.

Well then, on the very first night of the disorders, this Rybakov and his men were on duty in the gatehouse, defending the French concession. They heard a loud clamour from the Chinese section of the city and a bright glow filled the air there – that was the Catholic cathedral blazing. Frightened people started running towards their gatehouse. The Yihetuan had started setting fire to the houses of the Chinese Christians, hundreds of people had been killed. The senior priest of the cathedral managed to flee to the French concession. That same night brought the first attempt to storm the settlement, but it was beaten back.

It was already impossible for the European population to leave the city – the railway had been cut off, hundreds of women and children were besieged. In addition to Russians, Tientsin was defended by Germans, Englishmen, Japanese, Frenchmen, Americans, Austrians and Italians. Not even a thousand fighting men in all. This mere handful had to stand against tens of thousands of Yihetuan and a regular army. They couldn’t withdraw, either to retreat or simply to move out of shelling range. The
inhabitants of the concessions who were left in the city had to take up arms and defend themselves. Trenches were dug everywhere, streets that were being bombarded from across the river and from the direction of the Chinese city were barricaded off.

The Russians found themselves defending the railway station on the left bank of the river – the most unfavourable position of all. It had been decided to hold the station at any cost, because if it fell the Chinese would take the entire left bank and would be able to bombard the concessions, hiding behind the mounds of salt that cluttered the approaches, and the defenders wouldn’t have held out even for a day.