The Light and the Dark (27 page)

The blood just wouldn’t stop, neither would the hate.

When the words ran out, he smeared the blood from his hand across the chest of your blouse and left, stepping fastidiously over the broken glass.

You collapsed on your bed and broke down in tears, regretting everything but the broken jar. You regretted waiting so many years before you threw it.

You spent half the night clearing up, then took your daughter into your bed. Sonechka tossed and turned, and by morning ended up sleeping crosswise, squeezing you out to the very edge.

The centuries had ended.

The evenings when they collect Sonya are the hardest. You wander round the empty flat, thinking.

Suddenly you realised that you had no women-friends. Over the years they had disappeared, only his friends were left. They spoke to you quite differently now. No one had the time any more. And anyway, you didn’t want to look into the eyes of those who had already known everything for ages.

You used to take off your stockings and Donka wagged her tail and licked your toes, but now she licked that other one’s feet.

You tried to get drunk, bought a bottle of wine – it was sour and nasty, you couldn’t make yourself drink it, poured it down the sink.

Sometimes you try to pull yourself together, sometimes you don’t want to. You come across one of his old socks, and the tears are back again.

No one snoring beside you, kicking you in the night, twisting the sheets into ropes.

He has stomach problems. Will that other, young one, make sure he has oat porridge for breakfast and eats less salty food?

You realised what was lacking for him in your life together. A different life was lacking.

But what if he phoned you, drunk and miserable, repentant, and you weren’t at home? He will want to tell you that he behaved like a total idiot and ask you to forgive him, won’t he? That he loves you and is coming back. He’s tired and wants to come and lay his head on your knees. After all, everything in the world has to end like that – after all his trials and suffering, the man comes back to his beloved and lays his head on her knees.

You tried not to go out anywhere, and there was nowhere for you to go to anyway, you drank rowanberry liqueur and kept watch, waiting for the phone to ring. Every now and then you picked up the receiver – a dial tone, the phone’s working. One day you flew out of the shower naked in your rush to get to the phone. It was Sonya, wanting to talk about her presents from Daddy.

Sonya came back every time loaded with presents, and you thought that in time he would win the child over to his side entirely.

You lectured him when he brought your daughter back on Sunday.

‘So now it turns out that I’m a killjoy all week long, I nag, I forbid, I find fault, I demand, I use discipline – but you’re so nice and kind, you’re corrupting the child, the word “no” doesn’t even exist, you’re spoiling her, getting her used to things I can’t afford to give her!’

You noticed he still wore the sweater that you knitted for him.

Sonya dances on the bed, boasting:

‘Look at the watch Daddy gave me. Can you hear it? Like grasshoppers!’

You shouted at her:

‘Go to sleep straightaway!’

She falls asleep with her moulting tiger cub, not her new toys.

He also started sending Sonya postcards with drawings – foxes, bunny rabbits, monsters with two heads, three eyes, one leg, all smiling, waving their paws, calling to her. At first you threw them away, then you stopped when you saw the postcards were numbered. Sonya pins them up on the wall above her bed with thumbtacks. Talks to them before she falls asleep.

Cooking Sonya buckwheat for her supper, you got distracted, gazing out of the window at the dingy colouring of the people walking by. Hurrying along, not realising that they are happy. The buckwheat burned. You sat down at the table, put your head on your bent arm and started bawling your eyes out. Just then Sonya came in.

‘Mummy, what’s that smell? What’s wrong? Are you crying?’

She started consoling her mother like a grown-up, stroking your head.

‘Come on, Mummy, it’s just silly old buckwheat!’

Sonechka had almost stopped wetting the bed at night but now, since he left, it had started all over again.

You’re reading some children’s book, and in it a girl is on her way to a flea market where they sell old dolls and suddenly you realise the dolls are little girls who have died. How can anyone write things like that for children?

You were on your way to the children’s clinic and Sonechka suddenly asked out loud, so the whole tram could hear:

‘Mummy, did Daddy leave us because of me?’

During the school holidays they took Sonya for a week. You almost stopped going outside altogether, didn’t throw the rubbish out, didn’t wash the dishes, didn’t change the bed sheets, didn’t iron your clothes. You didn’t battle the fluffy little creatures with a rag, you surrendered. It felt to you like revenge. You went off your diet and onto chocolate. That was revenge too.

Your hair hangs down in filthy, tangled ropes and it’s so grey, it’s frightening.

You looked in the mirror at the wrinkles round your eyes, the dry skin on your cheeks, your withering neck. A woman withers inside first, in her soul, and then on the outside.

You thought: how could it happen – the veins have spread right across my legs like tiny rivulets, my pubic hair is turning grey. And this parting from my body started a long time ago.

You looked at your portraits hung across the walls and remembered how you posed naked and he used to break off to kiss you all over and now you asked yourself:

‘Who is that on the canvas? Then who am I?’

You started talking to yourself.

‘You have to go into the kitchen, open the little window and put the kettle on. Do you hear?’

‘Why?’

‘Because. To do that you have to love yourself at least for a moment.’

‘Love myself? What for?’

You struck a bargain with fate – if you took a shower now, tidied yourself up, put on nice clothes and makeup and spent your last money on a bouquet of flowers for yourself, then something would happen.

It did.

‘Ada!’

The vet you used to take Donka to. Sonechka called him Doctor Doolittle. Doctor Doolittle’s the man, he can cure you, yes he can! No one had explained to the little girl that people brought him healthy cats and dogs and took them away castrated, with their claws torn out.

‘Adochka, freedom suits you. Just look at you!’

Everyone knows everything. He hugged you round the waist, although he had never permitted himself any familiarity like that before. He grinned brazenly.

‘Why don’t we have dinner together, now that we’ve met like this?’

You thought: This is it, the miracle.

‘Why not? Take me to a restaurant and order something expensive!’

You sat in a corner, surrounded by mirrors.

The waiter stood beside you all the time, looking at his own reflection, adjusting his bow-tie, tugging down his cuffs.

Doolittle told you funny stories from his practice. You laughed out loud.

The waitress collecting the empty plates leaned down low over the table, offering him a glance into her cleavage. He took a glance and smiled, as if he was apologising and saying: What’s a man to do – we’re slaves of instinct.

‘When you spend your entire life mating animals and putting them down, you can’t help becoming a romantic.’

After draining your champagne and putting your glass down for him to pour you more, you asked:

‘If you love one person all your life, is it really possible to love another?’

‘Why, that’s the third time you’ve asked that!’

‘The third time?’

That was when you realised you had been drunk for ages already.

It seemed like everyone there could tell where you were going to go now and what for.

As you were leaving, you saw the waiter lick a plate in the mirror.

When you came out of the restaurant, Doolittle started kissing you on the lips. You hung on his neck and told him:

‘Only not back to my place!’

You arrived at his place and as he put on his slippers in the dark, he whispered:

‘Don’t worry, my wife and kids are at the dacha.’

When Doolittle started pulling off your knickers, you started bawling and told him through your tears that you hadn’t slept with any men for years. He thought: ‘Good, that means I won’t catch anything.’

He heaved away, puffing and panting, but it was all a waste of time.

He went off to the bathroom and locked himself in.

You waited and waited, then got dressed in a hurry and slipped out of the flat.

A thought flashed through your mind – it was winter, you could drink yourself absolutely blotto and freeze to death in the street.

What frightened you was not death, but what would come afterwards. They would inspect you, naked, and slit open your
stomach to make sure of something that was obvious anyway.

All you needed was a little dose of powder.

The thought came to you that you were flushing water down the toilet for the last time in your life. You flushed it again.

You gathered up a handful of tablets and started swallowing them. You had forgotten to take something to wash them down with – you went to the bathroom and tried washing them down with water straight from the tap.

But the tablets were so big they wouldn’t go down – you had to break them. You sat on the edge of the bath, breaking them.

You remembered that you had locked the front door, you had to open it. While you were walking across the room, you felt yourself staggering already.

You lay down on the bed.

A droning started up in your head. The room started flickering and creeping round in a circle.

You moved the telephone closer. Dialled the number.

She answered, that other one. She was too sleepy to understand.

‘Call him, I want to talk to my husband!’

‘Do you know what time it is?’

‘No.’

He took the phone.

‘What’s happened? Have you gone crazy? You’ve woken Sonya!’

‘I swallowed a lot of tablets. I’m afraid. I don’t want to die. Please come!’

Your speech was already slurring.

‘Call yourself an ambulance!’

‘Come!’

‘Let me call you an ambulance.’

‘Please, please!’

‘How I hate you! I’ll be there straightaway.’

‘Only without her!’

‘All right. I’ll be straight there. And you try to make yourself sick.’

‘Wait!’

‘What else?’

‘I love you.’

‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’

She, that other one, wanted to sleep. She had to go to work early in the morning.

My Sashenka!

Again I have a sheet of paper in front of me – my link with you. But on the other hand, how can some stupid sheet of paper connect us when everything that separates us seems so insignificant and paltry! How can there possibly be any barriers separating you from me? And you feel that too, don’t you?

My dearest darling! If only you knew how much I want to come home!

Probably that’s why it’s so important for me to write to you. When I write, it’s as if I’m on my way back.

Today Kirill asked me to make sure his mother gets his bag if anything happens to him. Then he laughed.

‘She won’t understand anything in it, of course.’

He talks about her so tenderly all the time.

From here, at this distance, I’m beginning to understand that all my lack of understanding with Mum, my failure to love her, is bunk.

Now I would forgive every time she ever hurt me and ask her forgiveness for everything she had to put up with from me.

And I would start by admitting something that has been tormenting me for all these years, something I simply couldn’t confess to her at the time. You see, Sashenka, it’s a very stupid story. I was playing with coins on the windowsill. Do you remember our huge, wide windowsill? Or is that just how it seemed to me back then? Well, anyway, I was playing with coins, standing them on edge and flicking one side so that they spun round, turning into small, transparent, ringing spheres. And then my eye fell on a wide crystal bowl with Mum’s jewellery lying in it – brooches, bracelets, earrings – and I saw her ring there. The wedding ring the blind man had given her. And I suddenly wanted really badly to set that spinning on the windowsill, like a coin!

The first few times it didn’t work, the ring skipped away and hopped onto the parquet floor, but it did work once! It was very beautiful – the airy, transparent little golden sphere jingled as it traced out circles on the windowsill. I especially liked the sound when the ring was spinning on one side and tapping out a rhythm just before it froze. But the next time I flicked the ring with my fingernail, it jumped out of the window.

I ran out into the street and searched and searched, but I didn’t find it. Perhaps someone picked it up and took it away.

At first I was going to tell Mum everything, but I didn’t, and she didn’t even ask. And afterwards, when she did ask, it was too late to own up and I said I didn’t know anything. Mum was terribly upset and couldn’t stop thinking about who could have stolen her ring. She suspected completely innocent people. I heard her telling her blind man it must have been the woman from the next-door flat, and then she decided it was the doctor she had called when my stepfather had a cold.