The Light and the Dark (23 page)

That’s the way I should learn to live.

But most of all she likes painting with Daddy’s paints. I put his old shirt on her, so that she can get it messy. He tried to teach her how to do something properly, but it’s too soon, she’s not interested.

Once she sheared off a lock of her hair with the handiwork scissors and stuck it on her chin with glue – like Daddy.

One evening as he’s putting her to bed she cries into her pillow.

‘What’s wrong, my little wonder?’

And through her sobs, she says:

‘Daddy, you’re going to die! I feel so sorry for you!’

She’s only just started becoming really aware of herself. When we were watching the sunset at the pond, she suddenly said:

‘That trail of sunlight there, it’s not the sun, it’s me, isn’t it?’

We went to the children’s theatre to see
The Snow Maiden
. I
walked along, thinking: what a strange thing for them to do, sculpt a little girl out of snow. After all, it’s not like just building a snowman out of big balls of snow – you have to sculpt the hands and the feet, every finger and toe. But Sonechka didn’t see anything unusual about it, the question never even arose for her:

‘But she’s real, isn’t she? Alive!’

He bought her an adult wristwatch. Sonya winds it up, holding it close beside her ear, and says delightedly:

‘Can you hear? It sounds like grasshoppers!’

He cobbled together a kite for her, and we all went to launch it, but the kite only flew as far as the nearest telegraph pole and got tangled in the wires. When we walk past, we wave to it – there’s nothing left but ragged scraps, and it waves back to us with them.

She likes to take my phonendoscope too, and listen to absolutely everything. Herself, Donka, the wall, the chair, the windowsill. She presses it against the glass and tells the world outside the window in a serious voice:

‘Breathe! And now hold your breath!’

I read to her at bedtime, and she listens, spellbound, focusing on something inside herself and licking the little hairs on her arm just above the wrist – first one way, and then the other. She peeps into the book when I turn the page, to see if a picture has popped up.

She has to be checked all the time. She goes to bed, she’s already slipped under the sheet, but her toothbrush is dry. Up we get! Into the bathroom! But she’ll still come up with some bright idea – she holds the brush still and runs her teeth over it, shaking her head from side to side, in a kind of protest.

I feel that she’s afraid to love me, because that will mean she’s betraying her mummy. She’s afraid of treachery and betrayal. I
tried to talk to her and explain that there’s nothing wrong, and if she really loves two people it doesn’t mean she’s betraying one of them.

I think we’re going to manage all right. Sometimes we feel so snug and comfortable together. Just last Sunday I was putting her to bed and she asked me to sit with her for a while in the twilight. She’s afraid to sleep in the dark, she begs me to leave the light on. I leave her the nightlight, covered with a gauze neckerchief. The shadows are different every time. She lies there, imagining who it is up on the ceiling.

And she always asks me to stroke her with a brush – like Daddy.

I run the soft squirrel hair over her arms, her legs, her back, her bottom. It tickles her, she laughs happily and wriggles about.

I kiss her goodnight and whisper:

‘That’s all, now curl up tight and warm!’

My Sashenka!

There is so much death all around! I try not to think about it. But I can’t help myself.

They’ve repaired the road to Taku, and new detachments of allies are arriving from there every day, they’re preparing for an offensive. So there’ll be even more death.

Kirill said a man should die easily, like Louis XVI – when he mounted the scaffold and saw the executioner, the first live human being with whom he could exchange a couple of words after his dungeon, the king asked him:

‘What news of La Pérouse’s expedition, brother?’

Only a few minutes before he died, he was still interested in geographical discoveries.

And I’d like to go like that too – as easily as if I’ve just shown up for breakfast.

But for that you probably have to be very strong.

Am I strong?

Sashenka, I saw an ideal death here. A man, young and handsome, with white teeth – although he’d been complaining about his teeth all day long, walking around, almost howling out loud with the pain of an abscess – disappeared in a single instant. He took a direct hit from a shell. I wasn’t there at the time of the explosion, but afterwards I saw his arm, tossed up into the crown of a tree.

That’s my ideal.

But what if it’s not like that?

Every day I see wounded men, and despite myself the thought comes that tomorrow I’ll be one of them. Unfortunately, the probability of a direct hit on my skull is equal to zero. But being maimed and left writhing in agony is only too probable.

A bullet or piece of shrapnel could hit me in the knee, couldn’t it? Or in the palm of my hand. Get stuck in my kidney – the left one or the right one. Tear open my heart sac. Puncture my bladder. But why list everything? A man is such a vulnerable creature altogether. I’ve seen more than enough here already.

I look at a wounded man and can’t help thinking of his wound in my body.

One soldier was shouting ‘hurrah!’, and that very instant a bullet pierced through both his cheeks and knocked his teeth out. And for some reason I imagine myself in his place. And I can’t stop doing it.

At night I went out, half-asleep, to relieve myself, and heard someone pleading pitifully in the big infirmary tent:

‘I can’t find my bunk. Someone help me find my bunk!’

It was a young man with his eyes swathed in bandages, feeling his way along the aisle between the camp beds. He’d gone out in the middle of the night too, but got lost on the way back.

They’ll bandage me up, operate on me, saw through the bone, amputate the putrefying remains of this right leg of mine. Or my left one?

It would be unbearable for me to hobble about for the rest of my life on one leg, or with no legs at all.

And perhaps tomorrow Lucie will be washing my blood off the white oilcloth on the operating table.

But perhaps, contrariwise, that will be the very time I decide I want to go – easily. When was it, now? The day before yesterday. The surgeon’s mate came out for a smoke and walked over when he saw me. Probably he just wanted to talk to someone, let off a bit of steam. Everyone addresses him formally by his forename and patronymic, as Mikhal Mikhalich. I like him, he always has a genial air, with the grey remnants of a student crew cut on his head – he left university without ever graduating – a respectable moustache, a round pot belly, walks with little old man’s steps. He has a funny, spongy nose, decorated with little blue and red veins. We sat in silence for a while, then he sighed:

‘Lord, all the things you see in this infirmary! This morning they brought in a young fellow just like you, so badly mutilated, he tried do away with himself. I held him until the doctor gave him an injection.’

He finished his smoke, slapped me on the shoulder as if to say: Bear up, we’re not done for yet – and trotted back into the operating tent.

Death. The number of times I’ve heard that word, or spoken it myself and written those five letters, but now I’m not quite sure I really understood what it means.

Now I’ve written that sentence, I’ve started thinking about it.

Do I understand now?

Sashka, the most important thing here is not to think. But I think all the time. And that’s wrong. After all, so many generations have thought about this and come to an immensely wise conclusion – you shouldn’t think. Why do they always give soldiers something to do, any task, even the most meaningless, just in order to keep them busy? So they won’t think. It’s profoundly good sense for a man not to think. He has to be saved from himself, from thoughts about death.

Here you have to know how to forget yourself somehow, do something with your hands – so they make them clean a field gun, or tidy up their uniform, or shovel something about. They invent jobs for them.

And probably that’s why I also invent something for myself to do – writing to you at every single opportunity. That is, making letters on paper. And that’s how you save me, my darling!

Sashenka, my sweet, my dearest, I’m not complaining to you, no, I know you understand that.

I think about death all the time. It’s all around here. From early morning until late at night, and even in my sleep. I sleep terribly badly. I suffer from nightmares and perspiration. Sometimes the way I perspire is really atrocious. Usually I don’t remember my dreams, they evaporate a few moments after I wake up – the way breath on a mirror evaporates in a draught, without a trace. But I remember what I dreamed about today.

In my dream I was back at the conscription centre, standing naked in front of the military medical commission – a rather
humiliating ritual. It was all as real as if I was awake, and I wasn’t at all surprised to be going through the examination again. I stand in the queue, covering myself with my hands, and I can’t help inspecting the scars and bruises of the men standing in front of me, their hairy and smooth buttocks, their pimples and warts. All this is degrading, especially when the doctor feels everyone’s crotch, and then you have to turn round, lean over and spread your buttocks. And then my turn comes, and the doctor turns out to be Victor Sergeevich, my old schoolteacher who died during a lesson. He wipes his spectacles with his tie and looks at me. I start trying to tell him that I looked for those tablets he’d told us about, but I was so nervous, I couldn’t find them.

‘Victor Sergeevich! That time in the classroom, when you were lying on the floor by the blackboard, I rummaged through all the pockets in your jacket, but the tablets weren’t there! Word of honour!’

But he shakes his head and carries on wiping his glasses with his tie.

‘They weren’t there … But then the headmaster came running in and found them straight away! This is where they were, right here! I showed you!’

And he slaps his pocket.

After that I just couldn’t stand any more, and I woke up.

Sashenka, I never told you about that, did I?

When our Shikra had his attack during the lesson, I dashed over to him, to save him, but I couldn’t find those tablets. And when they gave him the medicine, it was too late. I know I’m not to blame, but even so I still have to explain that to myself over and over again, even now.

You know, I really loved him, and it used to offend me when they called him Shikra. And during the breaks I liked to drop in
to see him on any trifling excuse, I really loved all those glass drawers of butterflies, and the old cupboards of nature specimens, filled with huge ostrich eggs, starfish and stuffed animals.

I remember he came to one botany lesson with wax copies of different sorts of apples on cotton wool in boxes. I wanted so desperately to take a bite out of them – they were so beautiful and juicy, so real!

The assignment he set us for summer was to collect a herbarium – how hard I tried! But what I enjoyed even more than picking plants in the ravines and drying them in volumes of the
Brockhaus Encyclopaedia
was writing the labels for them afterwards in neat writing: ‘Dandelion,
Taraxacum
’ or ‘Ribwort,
Plantago
’. It was amazing that a common ribwort could be such a solemn and beautiful word – ‘plantago’. The words probably fascinated me more than the actual dried, boring leaves did.

When Victor Sergeevich started teaching zoology, I developed what I thought of as a serious interest in ornithology, and even at lunch, when I ate my chicken leg, I put the gnawed bones back together to see how the joint worked – the function served by this little bone, or that piece of cartilage.

In fact, to be quite honest, I don’t know if I really loved all of this before him – the plants and the birds. It seems to me that I didn’t notice it at all. But I came to love all these living things with his love.

Or was it so that he would notice my efforts and praise me?

But then, even before the grammar school, there were a few instances of my love for feathered creatures – I remember I found three little jackdaws in a nest in a birch tree and climbed up there several times a day to tip little pieces of meat rissole into their gullets, and I poured water in too, from an old thimble that I’d begged from my grandmother.

But the real test of my love for nature came a couple of years later, also at the dacha and also with a nestling. The neighbour’s boy ran up, bawling his eyes out and choking on his tears, entirely unable to explain to me what had happened. I followed him at a run, and what I saw on the pathway leading to their porch really was no sight for a child’s eyes. A nestling had fallen out of the nest at a bad spot, beside an anthill, it was completely smothered with ants, squirming in silent agony, and I was at a loss, I didn’t know what to do. It was already impossible to save the nestling, but I couldn’t just stand there and watch its suffering either.