The Light and the Dark (33 page)

At night I toss and turn on the battered old divan bed and it mutters something in Old Divanic, full of sibilants. The tap in the kitchen is a scatterbrain. I bought a new pillow and I’m tormented with it – it smells of something chickeny. Nocturnal cries, strange and foreign, drift in through the window – I live opposite the zoo now. By the time I gather myself to go there for a walk, it’s winter again already. The cages are empty.

Once I go, and no proper snow has really fallen yet, nothing but dandruff. They’ve drained the water out of the pond, there’s lots of rubbish on the bottom.

I went into the monkey-house, it’s overheated and it stinks. I watch them rubbing urine on their palms and fur. It’s their words.

Then I tagged on to some school children, and they led us all off to the far end of the zoo, where there’s nothing but chickens. Perfectly ordinary, domesticated chickens. A whiff of my pillow. And that’s where they started telling us that when a chicken is incubating her eggs, she keeps turning them all the time so that
the life-giving maternal warmth of her body reaches all the parts of her child, and therefore, when a healthy brood hatches out it’s the result of her persistence and concern. But then it turns out that this is not an example of conscientious motherhood at all. What actually happens is the following. The chicken’s stomach gets hot. Driven by her discomfort, she looks around for a suitable object to cool her own inner heat. The chicken sits on the eggs because they are cool. After a while they warm up, so she turns them over to position the cool side uppermost. After she has repeated this for a sufficient number of times, the young hatch out and, to her great surprise, she finds herself faced with a clutch of chicks. There, children, see how nature has thought of everything for us!

I left the chicken house and saw a wintry she-elephant, a solitary lost soul. Freezing outside while her non-home is being cleaned. Swaying to and fro in the early December twilight. Stepping from one foot to another. Feeling the chill. Steam coming out of her trunk.

Suddenly I feel like the same kind of wintry elephant. I stand there and sway to and fro with her. How did I end up here? Why is it so cold? What am I doing here? I need to go home! I need warmth!

After Daddy left, Mummy was lonely and she got a cat that had kittens regularly every year and Mummy gave them away for free to the dealers at the pet market, anything so that they didn’t have to die. Her health had deteriorated very seriously in the last few years, and every time I came to see her, all she ever talked about was the cat and her kittens. Every time she tried to persuade me to take one, and I kept refusing. But now, after the she-elephant, I’ve agreed. I live opposite the zoo now anyway, I’ll set up something like a local branch.

I didn’t spend a long time choosing, I took the one who crawled over to me. I called her Thumbtack – for her nose.

I carried the kitten home inside my coat and she kept trying to crawl out. I blew in her face, she crinkled it up and hid away again.

Thumbtack played all the time and it was so wonderful to watch her. The first time she saw herself in the mirror she started attacking her reflection, with her fur bristling and her claws thrust out. After banging her nose a few times, she lost any interest in the mirror once and for all, but she could hunt a piece of string for hours. Or after she’d had a good sleep, she could tear round the room for hours like lightning – from the bed to the armchair, from there to the curtains, from there to the sofa and round and round like that until she knocked something over. Then she would hide under the sofa, and had to be lured out with a skipping, dancing piece of paper.

I decided to teach Thumbtack to use the toilet, but she fell into it and after that she was desperately afraid of water.

For some reason she didn’t want to go in sand, but she liked a box with rustling scraps of newspaper.

She wasn’t ashamed of anything, a child of nature. There I am eating, and she could sit herself down on the table in front of me, knot herself into a pretzel with her back leg pointing up at the ceiling and lick her little pink anal orifice. It really is strange that for the Egyptians my Thumbtack enjoyed the status of a god.

She scratched the armchair to ribbons until I got the idea of dragging an entire log back home for her. She loved to sharpen her claws on it. It was impossible to imagine that my Thumbtack was an animal, that she could tear someone apart with those claws.

Somehow Thumbtack grew up without me noticing and became Button.

I heard somewhere that it’s all the same to cats whether their owner is at home or not. Rubbish. Button was always delighted when I arrived. When she saw me, she got up, arched her back, stretched sweetly and came to be fondled. I would take a shower, put on my warm towelling bathrobe, plaster cream on my face and settle down on the sofa with a book, putting my feet on the cat like a hot water bottle. I read and stroke Button with my foot. She purrs deliciously.

The only horrible thing was when she came into heat. Poor Button rubbed herself against the furniture, rolled around the floor, crept along on her belly, started wailing desperately. Mummy told me to take the cat to the vet and have her spayed. But I felt sorry for her.

Poor Button, I wanted to comfort her, to fondle her, but when I started stroking her, she immediately assumed the mating position. She kept trying to run outside into the street, I had to lock her in.

At night it was impossible to get to sleep, watching the way she writhed and wailed for attention. I lie there with my eyes open, covered in moonlight, and think that my cat is part of some gigantic mechanism that includes the moon and spring, high tides and low tides, days and nights, a wintry elephant, and in general all the cats and non-cats who have ever been born or not been born yet. And I started feeling that I, like her, was a part of this mechanism, this order, established in some incomprehensible fashion, that required touching. I felt like howling too. Over all the millions of years, how many there have been like me and Button, with or without a coat of fur or scales, who have suffered the same torment and could think of only one thing – how they long to be caressed!

During the day I assist nature, rummaging in other people’s
reproductive organs, but at night Button and I will shrink down to a single body and wail together.

After all, moonlit nights were specially made to torment us.

And someone yells in the open window, so loud the entire Universe can hear it:

‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’

Then Button disappeared, she couldn’t bear it any more.

I dashed outside without my coat, ran round all the nearby courtyards, called, shouted, asked chance passers-by. She didn’t come back. Perhaps someone took her in. Perhaps she got run over. My little Thumbtack.

At work they consoled me, told me that some people they knew were always getting a cat, but it always ran away, then they got a new one and gave it the same name. So they had the same Pussy in a new skin. Feline immortality.

Mummy suggested I should get a new kitten too.

But I didn’t want to do that again. I get used to a cat and then the parting hurts. And I decided I’d rather get myself a wintry she-elephant. She wouldn’t run away.

I always agree to work on holidays, so I won’t be left alone with myself so much. It’s not so bad during the day, but in the evening I come back to this strange place where my bed is and drink a little glass of liqueur before I get into it in order to get to sleep quicker and escape from myself.

And I’m glad when Yanka asks me to go round on Saturdays and sit with her children.

I like going to them. Before I can even take my coat off at the door Kostik, their eldest, is dragging me into his room by the hand. He takes toys out of a huge basket and presents them to me. And I stand there with my outstretched hands piled high with
little cars and animals, and they’re already tumbling onto the floor, but he keeps piling more on.

I once talked to him with the nutcracker – now every time I come, the child shoves the nutcracker into my hand and asks me to make it talk to him again.

And now they’ve had Igoryok.

Yanka didn’t want to know in advance what she was going to have, and she was hoping for a girl, but it was a boy. She was upset. The midwife joked about it, clicking the scissors she had just used to cut the umbilical cord and asking:

‘Well then, shall we snip it off?’

After the birth the entire flat was turned into a child factory all over again, everything scattered all over the place, baby weighing-scales on the writing desk, piles of clean nappies everywhere, reeking of lavender, heaps of baby jackets, the kitchen muggy with steam, like a bathhouse – the rubber teats are boiling in a saucepan.

Yanka in a bathrobe over her nightdress that is wet with milk, talking to me and knitting a tiny little sock, just like a doll’s. And so quickly. She knitted one and started on another. Her husband dropped in – he put the finished sock on his finger and started walking it, skipping across the table on one leg, he jumped across onto his wife, skipped along her arm, onto her shoulder, onto her head. Yanka laughed, took it from him, drove him out, said go on, you’re stopping us talking.

Yanka is upset because after the second birth her figure has changed, she’s blown up, her face has turned plainer. Her milk is boiling over, her breasts are covered in lumps, her nipples are cracked.

She said the only reason she liked being pregnant was because she could indulge any whim she fancied. She invented a desire, and it was accepted that her husband would set out in the middle of the night to look for a pineapple.

She can do anything she likes with him. That’s what everyone calls him – Yanka’s husband.

But if anything serious needs to be done around the home, Yanka tackles everything herself, he’s a dental technician, he takes good care of his hands.

He has the annoying habit of sticking out his lower lip and plucking at it with his fingertips.

In general he’s a wonderful father, always fussing over the children. But he’s funny. When the older boy was still in his cradle, he talked to him, repeating a single word:

‘Daddy! Daddy!’

He wanted his son’s first word to be ‘Daddy’, not ‘Mummy’.

But the child said quite clearly: ‘Give!’

Yanka’s first birth was very difficult and I remember her saying then:

‘Never again! Sashka, never have a child!’

But later, when she got pregnant again, she said something quite different, that you forget all the terrible parts, with all the pain, and you start wanting to live and have children again:

‘What a clever idea that is of nature’s – forgetting! You know, the horror is forgotten, but how can you forget holding a newborn baby in your arms? The back that fits in the palm of your hand, the velvety skin, the little pot belly that bulges out at the sides.’

When the three of us went out walking with the pram, Yanka’s husband pompously explained that the agony of birth is necessary to arouse the maternal instinct. He’d read somewhere that experiments had been carried out and monkeys who gave birth under anaesthetic bit through the umbilical cord afterwards and ate the afterbirth, but they refused to feed their children.

‘So pain is necessary. It’s been proved scientifically. There is no life without pain.’

I feel good with my Yanochka. We’re always reminiscing about something or other.

Once she spent the night at our dacha. How old were we then? Thirteen? Fourteen? Mummy sent us to hang out the washing on the line between the birch trees and we started slapping each other on our bare legs with the wet towels for a joke. First for a joke, as a game. Then viciously, until the tears came.

How lucky I am to have Yanka! And her Kostik. And now Igoryok as well.

The baby’s chest measures two centimetres more than his head – a sign of good health. He sucks eagerly.

There’s more than enough milk. Yanka doesn’t know what to do with it all, she lets her husband suck it out.

When I stay to sit with the children for the evening, Yanka expresses a bottle of it.

As she leaves, she stuffs cotton wool into her bra.

‘It’s a nightmare. I’m soaking wet every time. Why couldn’t woman have been created with a built-in tap?’

They go, and I love feeding the baby so much. While his older brother plays with his bricks on the floor, I warm up the cold bottle in water on the cooker. I settle down in an armchair with the hungry little miracle. I sprinkle a few drops on the inside of my elbow, lick it off myself, then start feeding him carefully. He pulls touching little faces, blows bubbles and I feel completely happy. Something’s wrong, he’s whimpering. It’s not flowing out of the bottle properly. I go to the kitchen and try to widen the hole with a hot needle. Now it flows too freely. I have to change the teat. Then I walk round the room with him over my shoulder, patting him on the back to make him burp. I fondle this tiny creature with its pungent scent of milk and urine.

Then I put Kostik to bed and read to him before he falls asleep.

The last time I was reading I lay down beside Kostik, put my arm round him and felt him move away from me.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Your breath smells bad.’

I know. There’s something wrong with my stomach. I should go for a check-up, but I’m afraid. What if they find something?

And then I go back home at night. I blow a kiss of greeting out of the window to the invisible she-elephant, climb into a cold bed, wake up in the morning several minutes before the alarm clock rings, look at the ceiling and it’s covered in blotchy yellow patterns. It looks like a newborn baby’s nappy.

There is no life without pain.

What a clever idea that is of nature’s – forgetting!

But this Sunday I slept to my heart’s content and was woken by bright sunlight. And coming in through the open window from across the street were the cries of the animals – squawking, roaring, lowing. The squealing of life.

I stretch sweetly and listen to the unintelligible voices. Piercing screams, someone screeching gleefully, perhaps birds of paradise? As if I’ve woken up in a tropical forest. Or in paradise. And they’re all clamouring in rapturous delight at this sunny morning. They can’t contain themselves. And those who couldn’t howl with happiness, they simply froze, dumbstruck in their rapture – the tree, the window, the glint of sunlight on the ceiling.