The Light and the Dark (25 page)

There was something that extended through the word from that man to me, something that is stronger than life and death, especially when you realise that they are the same thing.

Imagine the amazement with which I watched the people around me. How can they exist? Why, if they aren’t suspended on this chain above death, don’t they fall? What’s holding them up?

To me it was obvious that the most ancient primary substance was ink.

The silver tongues of all ages and all peoples had affirmed that writing knows no death, and I believed them – after all, it was the only means of communication between the dead, the living and those yet to be born.

I was convinced that my words were what would be left after the fleeting present of today had been dumped in the cesspit at
my grandmother’s cemetery, and therefore what I had written was the most important part, the primary part of myself.

I believed that words were my body, for when I didn’t exist.

Probably no one could have loved words more than I did. I loved them to distraction. But they were winking at each other behind my back.

They were mocking me.

The more of myself I transferred into words, the more obvious it became that words were powerless to express anything. Or, rather, it’s like this – words can create something of their own, but you can’t become words. Words are cheats. They promise to carry you off on the voyage into eternity, and then they set out in secret under full sail, stranding you on the shoreline.

But the most important point is that reality doesn’t fit into any words. Reality strikes you dumb. Everything important that happens in life is beyond words.

There comes a point when you understand that if what you have experienced can be expressed in words, it means you haven’t experienced anything.

The way I’m saying all this is probably very muddled, Sashenka, but never mind, I have to get it all out. And I know that however confused I might get, you’ll understand me.

I mean the futility of words. If you don’t sense the futility of words, then you don’t understand anything about them.

Let me try to explain it like this: remember I wrote to you about the time, during a break between lessons, after I’d been reading about the way medieval jesters used to bait their bone-headed liege lords with trick questions, I tried to mock my tormentor from the senior class in the same way, but he just slapped me round the ears as usual, without waiting for me to complete my flowery phrase. Well then, all the silver tongues, with their
confident hope of extending themselves through time, are the same kind of stupid, bookish boys as I was, spending their whole lives trying to get the best of death with flowery disputations, but in the end it just slaps them round the ears anyway, without bothering to hear them out.

Remember, there was no way I could convince you that any book is lies, if only because it has a beginning and an end. It’s dishonest to put in the final full stop, write ‘The End’, and not die. I used to think that words were the supreme truth. But they turned out to be a kind of sleight of hand, a fraud, unreal, a despicable surrogate.

I vowed to myself that I would never write again. I thought that was a worthy response.

And Sashenka, no one explains, do they, until it’s suddenly revealed in some inappropriate place, that there is no answer to the question: Who am I? – because it’s impossible to know the answer to that question, you can only be it.

You see, I started wanting to be.

I was not myself. The words came – and I felt strong, but I couldn’t tell them: Come! And they left me empty, useless, used up, they tossed me out onto the rubbish tip.

I hated myself when I was weak, and I wanted to be strong, but it was words that decided the way I would be.

Sashenka, understand me, I couldn’t carry on like that! You always thought it was something to do with you – no!

I had to liberate myself from them. To feel free. Simply alive, without any reason. I had to prove that I exist in my own right, without words. I needed proofs of my existence.

I burned everything I’d written – and I don’t regret it for a moment. You scolded me, but you were wrong. My dearest, don’t scold me, please! I needed to change, to be different, to understand
what everyone apart from me understood, and see what any blind man can see!

I can’t die and be born different – I have only been given this life. And I have to become real in the time I’ve been granted.

And you know, it’s strange – those notebooks were reduced to ashes ages ago, but only here and now am I beginning to burn the old self that I used to be.

You know, I was the one who was blind. I saw words, but I didn’t see through the words. It’s like looking at the glass in the window, not the street outside. Everything that exists and is transient reflects light. This light passes through words like glass. Words exist to let the light pass through them.

You’ll smile: of course, it’s so typical of me – I swore never to write anything again, but now I’m thinking that when I come back, perhaps I’ll write a book – or perhaps I won’t. It doesn’t matter.

What I am experiencing right now is far more important than hundreds or thousands of words. Tell me, how is it possible to express in words this readiness to live that fills me to overflowing?

My Sashenka! I’ve never felt so alive before!

I glanced outside for a moment – a moonlit night, a clear sky, starry and looking very much like happiness. I went for a little stroll, rubbing my tired fingers.

A magnificent night. A moon so bright you could read by it. It glints on the bayonets. The tents are aglow with moonlight.

The silence is wonderful, not a sound.

No – there are sounds from all sides, but such peaceful, marvellous sounds – a horse clopping its hoof, snoring from the next tent, someone yawning in the infirmary, the cicadas chirring in the poplar trees.

I stand there, gazing at the Milky Way. Now all of a sudden I see that it divides creation on a slant.

I stand there under this universe, breathing and thinking: Look at that, it turns out that the moon is enough to make a man happy. And I spent so many years searching for proofs of my own existence!

What an impossible fool I am, Sashka!

To hell with the moon! To hell with proofs!

Sashka, my darling! What other proofs do I need of my existence if I’m happy because you exist, and you love me, and you’re reading these lines right now!

I know that once a letter has been written, it will reach you somehow, no matter what, but if it’s not written, it will disappear for ever. And so I’m writing this to you, my Sashenka!

Yesterday as I’m walking away from the tram stop, I see her – coming towards me.

I cross over to the other side – and so does she.

She comes straight towards me. We halt face to face.

Well-groomed, with her hair styled, she looks a lot younger. Like a different woman. Her hair is brushed back and up and I can see her ears – with attached earlobes.

She doesn’t say anything. One of her eyelids suddenly starts fluttering nervously.

I say:

‘Hello, Ada Lvovna.’

The eyelid twitches.

‘Alexandra, I need to talk to you. You have to listen to me. I have to tell you.’

But I say to her:

‘Don’t.’

Don’t tell me anything, Ada Lvovna!

I know everything.

Husband trouble.

And many years before all this, this husband’s wife used to think: Who needs me like this?

When the swelling started around your nipples, you were delighted, after all, you had shot right up already and there was still nothing. You looked like an eight-year-old female Gulliver.

You started thinking about Gulliver – how did he defecate? And what did the poor Lilliputians do with all that stuff? He pissed once, and it was enough to extinguish a major conflagration. What mountains all those bulls, cows and sheep every morning must have been transformed into! You suddenly sensed some big lie, but not because there aren’t any people that big.

Your mum’s second husband was a failure. Failures always marry a widow with a child.

Once, in the distant days of his youth, he had sent his symphony to a famous composer and got no reply. Later, at a concert, he recognised his own music in the master’s new work. After that he took his revenge on mankind by doing nothing. He earned a bit of money as an accompanist at a dance class, warming his chilly fingers on the radiator.

He always used to read out intriguing facts from the newspapers and he loved figures. Say, for instance, in the last five thousand years a certain number of people have killed themselves. No one knows exactly how many. But in actual fact the figure is real. It exists. It’s alive. Objective and independent. The way undiscovered America used to exist once upon a time before Columbus.
If we don’t know something, if we can’t feel it or hear it and we can’t taste it, that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

According to the statistics, suicide occurs most often at two or three in the afternoon and eleven or twelve at night.

The failure thought that by getting married he had acted nobly and in return had received only ingratitude. When he fell in love, he said to his beloved:

‘I’m so glad that you appeared in my life – my salvation.’

But many years later he thought:

‘Can a woman really be your salvation? If you’re swimming, she’ll help you keep on swimming – if you’re drowning, she’ll only help you to drown.’

You kept expecting your mum’s husband to start looking at you in a non-fatherly way, but he never did.

Your mother tapped away the whole day on a typewriter. Calluses on her fingers, hard fingertips. Wills, letters of attorney, bills of sale, legal inventories, notarised translations. Every time she lost her job when the boss, glancing into the neckline of her blouse, kept her behind after work, locked the door, took out a bottle of wine and two glasses and assured her unctuously:

‘I know you love your husband and things are hard for you, I could help.’

She declined help, twisting a sheet of paper into the carriage with a single deft movement.

She started working from home. With her head aching all the time, stupefied by tapping away like that hour after hour. She put the typewriter on a cushion. A ribbon tattered and full of holes. Carbon paper shot through and through. When she stuck her head out of the window to have a smoke, the starry sky looked like used carbon paper to her.

Immediately after your mother died you moved out to live with
your grandmother and grandfather, in order not to be left alone in the flat with the drunken failure.

Granny said to you at the funeral:

‘Don’t spoil the grief – cry!’

They said your mother died of a weak heart. Her heart couldn’t take the strain.

It wasn’t until you were sixteen that you were told your mother had killed herself. They showed you the brief suicide note: ‘Adochka, without true grief the soul doesn’t mature. A human being grows through grief.’

In actual fact the way your mother died was this: she tipped her remaining sleeping tablets out of the little bottle onto her palm – no one counted them, but that number exists somewhere, it’s real, alive – and tossed them into the kitchen mortar. Ground them up with the pestle. Poured rowanberry liqueur over them. It made a kind of wet paste. She stirred it with a spoon. Poured in a bit more, to make it thinner. Drained it into a glass. Drank it down in one and listened closely to how she felt. Then she shook the box of medicines out onto the table and started swallowing all of it, one thing after another: out-of-date pills for the heart and indigestion, for asthma and the liver.

Your mum’s husband came home late, saw his wife sleeping and didn’t wake her up, although he was surprised that she had gone to bed without getting undressed.

Your mum didn’t want to die at all, she wanted to be saved and loved.

Three years later you wrote a postcard to the old folks: ‘Dear Grandma and Granddad! I’ve got married. Ada.’ And although you didn’t write it, you thought: ‘There’s just one thing I can’t understand – what have I, who know myself as I really am, from the inside, done to deserve such happiness?’

A young husband, still unknown, a fire-breather with tender hands.

He told you about being gifted: it doesn’t come from the parents, it’s an awakening.

You had nothing to live on, he refused any help from his father, the professor. In fact, he didn’t even talk to him. You sold your only treasure, your mum’s wedding ring, and he went out at night to work as a dock labourer, on Sundays he washed the windows in empty offices and institutions, sometimes even shop windows.

You learned to weave a nest in rented rooms, succeeded in loving other people’s scuffed furniture.

You went to work so that he could study. Living on your money was a torment to him. But you told him:

‘Don’t be a fool, saying things like that! We’re husband and wife, aren’t we?’

When you were on the second shift, you made his breakfast and brought it to him in bed, in order to lie beside him a bit longer and snuggle up to him. You heard what his mum used to cook for him and entered into secret competition with her, but his mum’s pies were still always best.