The Light and the Dark (34 page)

Sashenka!

I’m not feeling too well today.

Dysentery is running amuck here, and yesterday typhoid fever was found.

It’s barbarous – they forbid us to drink the water and no one drinks it, but they still wash the cooking pots and crockery with it. There’s a genuine epidemic starting up here – the soldiers are stuck in the latrines all the time.

The most terrible thing is when the wounded have diarrhoea, and to make things worse, there’s nowhere to get any hay or straw.

It’s still as hot as ever here, my head hurts, my thoughts are confused.

You know, it’s a long time since I wrote anything properly, that’s why my letters are such a mess. And the worst thing is, there’s absolutely no way I can be alone. That’s what exasperates me most of all.

And, of course, the heat is wearing me down – in all this time there hasn’t been a single rainy or cloudy day. My head’s buzzing, I can’t gather my thoughts, but I need to think about something real at least sometimes, not just diarrhoea and lists of casualties.

All morning I’ve been writing letters and numbers – that’s what men actually turn into.

I need silence and solitude, but here I’m surrounded by hustle and bustle – noise, crude jokes, stupid laughter, swearing, idiotic conversations, reports, statements, orders.

I want to get as far away as possible from all this and stroll about on my own for a while. The impossibility of being alone is oppressive.

I quarrelled with Glazenap today – he kept pestering me to talk, not realising that sometimes I simply need to think, to listen to the silence, to be alone. Now he’s walking sullenly to and fro across the room, like a pendulum.

Sometimes I have to write a lot – like yesterday. My hand gets
tired and starts hurting, the joints in my wrist ache. I tried writing in smaller letters, in order not to get so tired, but they shout at me to make my writing bigger. And on top of all this, the sweat drips onto the forms, blurring the letters. The papers stick to my hand. If I smudge the letters, I have to start all over again. More swearing.

Another annoying thing is that writing in the dark – and I have to write a lot in the evenings, when it’s dark already – makes my eyes ache really badly. I write by the light of a candle stub, straining my eyes, everything starts flickering and I start seeing double. When I come back I’ll have to go to the doctor, he’ll probably prescribe some spectacles for me.

And I still absolutely cannot get used to these lists. I write out the names and imagine their families, their mothers. No one will be able to explain to them what it was all for.

All that’s left behind from wars are the names of the generals. But no one will ever remember about these men, my men.

I once read the correspondence of Abelard and Héloïse, and it struck me for the first time that there are known victims and unknown victims. Abelard suffered a great misfortune, he was castrated by crude, cruel people. Ever since then, for hundreds of years, the whole world has pitied him. And they’ll go on pitying him for hundreds more. But in the same letter he says that those who mutilated him were caught, and one of them was his servant, who had lived with him for years. Just imagine how swinishly he must have treated his servant for him to take his revenge like that! Well, those men were not only castrated in reprisal, they were blinded too. And no one pities them or remembers about them, although they suffered even more than he did.

I write out these lists and I think – no one will ever pity these men either.

Do you remember what Héloïse and Abelard called their son?

Astrolabius.

And what became of that Astrolabius later? His story would probably have made another whole
Hamlet
. But no one will write it. Who needs him? Who will ever remember him?

I’ve just remembered my grandmother. She always used to get distressed like this about people who died. When she was told that someone she knew, or even someone she didn’t, had died, she always wanted to find out exactly how he died – she wanted him to have had a painless, easy death, she wanted him to have suffered as little as possible. That seemed funny and stupid to me then: the man had already died and now, God knows how long afterwards, here was someone wishing him an easy death.

Glazenap really got my back up today. When you’re drowning in a dysentery-ridden pit and your head could be blown off at any moment, isn’t it ludicrous to be pondering on your own immortality?

He sits there, trying to convince himself.

‘So, I didn’t exist before – and that wasn’t death, but something else. And afterwards I won’t exist either. And that won’t be death either, but that same something else again.’

But I said:

‘A slap round the ears!’

He didn’t understand a thing, of course, and I didn’t try to explain. He wouldn’t understand anyway.

He doesn’t understand that all the religions and philosophies in the world only try to charm away death, the way village women charm away the toothache.

It’s probably like this: the body fights against death with pain, and the brain, the mind, fights it with thought. Neither of them will save you in the end.

And the most important thing, something that I know now, is that Christ and Siddhartha of the line of Gautama both had their mouths open – like all dead men. I can imagine them dead very clearly now. It’s no problem. I can imagine the flies walking about in their mouths too. All their lives these wise men taught that death does not exist, they taught resurrection and reincarnation, and they got slapped round the ears! The Saviour can’t save anyone, because he never rose from the dead and he never will. And Gautama rotted like everybody else, he didn’t become anybody – not any kind of Buddha! And he wasn’t anybody for thousands of years before that. The world is not a dream, and my self is not an illusion. My self exists and it needs to be made happy.

Today there was a scraggy horse standing tethered by the kitchen. Waiting to be slaughtered for meat. It fanned itself with its tail and shook its head about. Its eyes were all flyblown. An animal tied to the door of the kitchen doesn’t know how much longer it has to live. That’s the difference that makes a man a man: we are the only living creature that knows death is inevitable. And that’s why happiness must not be put off for the future, we have to be happy now.

But how can I be happy, my Sashenka?

I shall have to break off at any moment now – we’re going on a reconnaissance mission, the plans for attacking Tientsin have been changed again. They change everything here all the time, we can never be certain of anything. But if the assault has been postponed, it means someone has had the good fortune to live for a day or two longer. If only I knew exactly who. Never mind, we’ll soon find out. And what are they doing anyway – delighting in the two days of life they have been granted? It’s unlikely. Everybody’s hoping for something.

The surgeon and his mate have arrived, they’re going with us too, they want to look at the area from which the wounded will have to be brought back. I can hear Zaremba telling some funny story and everybody laughing.

There, you see, I have no quiet time to do a bit of thinking. But how I long to think about something far away, as far away as possible from all this!

What am I talking about? The fact that there’s no such thing as time.

Oh yes, there are hours and minutes, but time is us. Does time really exist without us? I mean, we are merely the form of time’s existence. Its carriers. Its agents of infection. So time is a kind of disease of the cosmos. The cosmos will eventually overcome the infection, we’ll disappear and the recovery will begin. Time will pass off, like a sore throat.

Death is the cosmos’s way of fighting against time, fighting us. After all, what is the cosmos? In Greek it means order, beauty, harmony. Death is the defence of universal beauty and harmony against us, against our chaos.

But we resist.

For the cosmos time is a disease, but for us it is the tree of life.

Only it’s strange that the cosmos flowers were called that – such mundane flowers, nothing out of the ordinary.

My stomach’s churning, forgive me for these details. I’m afraid I might be coming down with typhoid fever. And my head is splitting.

There now, they’re calling me. I’ll finish writing this evening.

Sasha!

I’m back. It’s night already.

My hands are still shaking, forgive me. I simply can’t pull myself together. And my ears are still ringing from the blasts.

I shouldn’t tell you all this, but I can’t help myself. I’ve been through too much to keep it all in.

There was our new battalion commander Stankevich, deaf Ubri – I told you about him – our surgeon Zaremba, his assistant and another officer, Uspensky, very young, the order for his promotion to warrant officer arrived only today. And several staff officers and privates as well.

That Uspensky prattled away without a break, but he stuttered all the time. A garrulous stutterer. He was bursting with happiness at having been promoted. Even Stankevich ordered him to shut up.

I got a cramp in my belly and moved away from them a bit into a small ravine. I squatted down, and that was when the bombardment began. A shell fell right on the spot where they were standing.

I ran to them. I can’t tell you here what I saw.

Forgive me, I’m starting to shake again.

I see Ubri lying about ten steps away, closest of all to me. His arms and legs seem to have been amputated. They’re not there! A boot with the remainder of a leg is lying beside him, his face is covered with grey soot. I leaned down and he seemed to be still alive. His mouth was open. As I watched, a kind of curtain descended smoothly over his pupils. He died at the very moment that I leaned down over him. I don’t know why, but I realise what I should do – reach out my hand and close his eyes. I do reach out, but I can’t touch them.

I walk on. Around me men are screaming, groaning, writhing about in blood.

I see Stankevich, our commander, lying in the grass. I get the impression that he simply got tired and decided to lie down for a while. I run over to him. His face is calm, his eyes are open
slightly, as if he is peeping. But his hands look as if they have been put through a meat grinder. I take him by the shoulders and try to lift him up. His body yields to me easily, but the back of his head stays on the grass.

A wounded horse is jerking its hind legs close by, behind it is our surgeon’s mate, Mikhal Mikhalich – with no face. A bloody mush of teeth, bones and cartilage.

I hear groans and run towards them – it’s Dr Zaremba. He’s still alive, looking at me, bleating something and gurgling blood. His stomach is ripped open and a pile of intestines has tumbled out onto the dust of the road. Zaremba is lying in a puddle of black blood, groaning, and I can’t understand why he’s still alive and what I can do. I shout at him.

‘What? What shall I do?’

He can only bleat, but eventually I understand what he wants. He wants me to kill him.

I hear more screams, jump up and walk on.

I see one of the staff officers – dead, with his legs doubled up under him like a circus acrobat. And his mouth – again, like all of them – is open. The eyes look, but they don’t see. There are thick gouts of blood on his beard.

Finally I find one person alive – the stutterer Uspensky. I can’t tell where he’s wounded, but blood is gushing out of his throat. The uniform is smoking on him, his eyebrows and hair are scorched, through his tattered breeches I can see bloody abrasions on his legs.

I lost my head completely, I didn’t know what to do. I sat beside him, trying to reassure him.

‘Hold on, everything will be all right!’

Some other soldiers came running up, medical orderlies. I helped them carry Uspensky to the infirmary. On the way he started
choking on his own blood and an orderly stuck his fingers into his mouth so that the blood could flow out feely.

At the infirmary I sat with him for a whole hour, I just couldn’t leave him. He was conscious and I kept repeating over and over:

‘Hold on! Everything will be all right!’

It was very hot in the tent: sultry air, clouds of flies, odours of putrefaction. I fanned him and drove away the flies. There was nothing more I could do for him.

But when he died, I reached out to his face and closed his eyes. It’s not really all that hard, after all.

He had to be moved and I helped to lift him. A dead man is much heavier than when he was alive. I’d heard about that before from the other men.

Sasha, I need to be with you very badly, right now!

I’m very tired.

I need to come and lay my head on your knees. You’ll stroke me and say:

‘It’s all right, my love! Everything’s all right now! It’s all over. Everything will be fine now, now that I’m with you!’