The Light and the Dark (36 page)

One charred body astounded me – either the person had shrivelled up like that in the fire, or it was a child.

We came across that American with the camera again.

The surviving part of the city has been taken by the Japanese. There are Japanese flags on the houses and shops. The prudent Japanese had laid in a huge supply of flags and, on taking Tientsin, they handed them out to the inhabitants straightaway.

The Chinese city itself is hideous. The Chinese pave and sweep their courtyards, but for them the streets are cesspits. They are narrow and dusty, probably impassable with mud in the rain. We walked along winding laneways, sometimes completely deserted, which made me feel uneasy. All the doors of the houses smashed in and things tossed out into the street everywhere.

The Chinese had fled or hidden, and the ones we came across went down on their knees at the sight of Europeans, holding out pieces of white material with some kind of hieroglyphs on them, shaking them at us. There were the same hieroglyphs on the walls. Kirill explained that they said ‘shun man’ – ‘peaceful people’.

The banks and shops have been plundered and gutted. There is smashed furniture underfoot. Every now and then we met soldiers and officers of the allied forces, loaded down with plundered property. The city is being completely devastated. What cannot be carried away is torn, trampled and smashed.

We saw our men too – a soldier walks along with a bundle, gathering up furs, silk, figurines. He goes into the next courtyard. Finds something much better there. Shakes everything out into the dust and stuffs new things in.

Screams and shots on all sides.

We heard a woman’s shriek, wild and bloodcurdling, very close by. We dashed into the yard, but met several Sepoys already on their way out, loaded down with sacks, and one of them was
pulling up his trousers as he walked. They gestured to indicate that there was no point in going into that house any more. There was no one screaming now, anyway.

When a crippled beggar sitting in the middle of the street saw us, he started bowing and repeating:

‘Katoliko – shanga, katoliko – shanga!’

Teams of allied soldiers are searching for Yihetuan and Chinese soldiers who have changed their clothes and mingled with the local population. A brief investigation is followed by an execution. The investigation consists of tearing the man’s clothes off – the mark left on a shoulder by the recoil of a rifle butt is sufficient reason for the execution. The men are shot on the spot. Several Chinese were executed in our presence. First they cut off their pigtails, then beat them to a pulp with rifle butts. And only after that did they shoot them.

I have read this over again and asked myself: Why am I writing down all these horrors?

In actual fact the only thing I want is to forget them as soon as possible. But I shall still write down everything that happens here anyway. Someone has to preserve it, don’t they? Perhaps that is why I am here, to see everything and write it down.

If I don’t write down what I’ve seen today, there will be nothing left. As if it never happened.

Or perhaps I shouldn’t write anything down? What for? Who needs it?

My heads aches terribly now. It’s splitting apart.

Sashenka, I don’t understand who I am and what I’m doing here any longer.

I had a dream. I’m at the seaside with Mummy and Daddy. The beach. Mummy’s going to swim. She puts on her rubber cap, tucks her hair into it. I suddenly realise that she’s naked and I shout:

‘Mummy!’

She laughs.

‘There’s no one here!’

I look around and the beach really is empty, there’s no one apart from us. She walks into the sea and calls us to follow her into the deep water. Daddy and I stay in the breakers. She swims easily, cutting through the water with powerful movements, with only her white cap bobbing on the surface of the waves.

I was woken by a strange, dry sort of sound. Lying there in the remains of my dream, I can’t understand what it was. A glass sphere has fallen off the dried-up New Year tree.

I come to my senses and remember – Mummy is dead.

At night everything’s quiet – I can even hear the dry fir needles showering onto the floor.

There’s a tickle in my throat. I’m falling ill. It hurts to swallow. My nose is blocked, I can’t smell anything. My head’s full of thick mush.

The third time already this winter.

And I’m tired of getting up in the dark.

I’m tired in general.

Mummy was celebrating her birthday then, I just dropped in for a minute, she had guests and I didn’t want to stay for long. In recent years she had been working at the opera house, selling
programmes, she had acquired new friends, I didn’t know them. She asked me to go into the bathroom with her.

‘Take a look at what I’ve got here! Do you feel that lump? Sashenka, my daughter, I’m afraid!’

She had a nodule in her breast.

‘Mummy, people get all sorts of lumps.’

‘At first it was small, like a carbuncle. But now it’s started growing. Or am I just imagining it? And the glands have swollen up under my arms. Can you feel the bump? And on my head behind my ears.’

‘Mummy, we all have any number of little tumours from the day we’re born. It’s nothing to worry about. All women have the same sort of thing. You just need to get a check-up. Does it hurt?’

‘No, not really.’

‘Don’t worry, everything will be fine!’

It wasn’t. She turned out to have a malignant tumour and her ovary was affected. The disease generally develops very rapidly.

Mummy’s round of hospitals and operations began.

I went to see her almost every day.

She found it hard being in hospital, she wanted to go home, she said the walls in the ward were coated with sickness, like the soot and grime in a kitchen.

At the first clinic she shared a ward with an old woman who was completely withered. She had clumps of hair sticking up on her bald cranium. She was always putting on makeup. The worse her condition got, the brighter her makeup became. She had almost no lips of her own left, and she drew huge fat circles round her sunken mouth. Her groaning prevented Mummy from getting to sleep all night long. When I came to see her, she begged me:

‘Sashenka! Take me away from here! I can’t get a wink of sleep. I won’t survive this!’

‘Mummy! You have to be patient! They’re treating you here!’

She started shouting at me, saying I wasn’t interested in her and I didn’t give a damn that she was going crazy there. Mummy always used to be so restrained, but the illness has changed her completely. She thought the doctors were all incompetent specialists, or they were prescribing the wrong tests and the wrong diet. The nurses got the worst of it. Mummy complained that they never came when she called, that they were all rude and couldn’t care less about the patients’ suffering. She expressed her outrage so loudly, she could be heard out in the corridor.

‘They don’t do anything but take money! All they think about is running off home as soon as possible and enjoying life!’

But the nurses complained to me about my mother, saying she wouldn’t let them do their job. The moment they walked out of the ward, she pressed the bell to call them and when they came back, she’d already forgotten what she wanted and abused them for not giving her a moment’s peace.

It hurt me and made me feel ashamed every time I heard all this.

Her exasperation and rage were vented on me. As if she waited for my arrival to pour out all the bitterness and resentment, as if I was to blame because she was the one with cancer, and not the nurses, or the man walking by outside the window, or me.

After that she would calm down and then we would sit there in silence, I would stroke her hand and she would suddenly start to cry.

‘I lie here and think: there’s that old woman washing the floors, so strong and wiry, she’ll be washing floors for another twenty years. Why me and not her? And I’m surprised at myself: how could I get ideas like that into my head? Forgive me! Sometimes
I get the feeling that I’m not me any longer. I’m turning into someone else here.’

Mummy was suffering serious pain already, and she was always asking for injections to relieve it.

‘They can’t even give injections properly! I’m black and blue all over!’

And she would show me her arms and legs, covered with needle pricks.

I gave her the next injection myself and she calmed down.

‘Sashenka, you do a jab properly, it doesn’t hurt at all.’

Then she sank into unconsciousness.

I got terribly tired – I used to come after work and care for Mummy, help her get washed, brush her hair, trim her nails, massage her back to prevent bedsores, apply cream to her legs, push the bed over to the window so that she could look at the trees. But it wasn’t the work that tired me most – it was hard for me to be there with her thoughts, her words, her silence. Her fear at the end.

After the first operation the surgeon told me:

‘We haven’t got it all out.’

But I tried to convince her that she was on the way to recovery.

Sometimes instead of Mummy’s hospital I stayed at Yanka’s place with her children, that was my lifeline, I seemed to become myself again, restore what Mummy and her cancer took out of me.

I call them that – Yanka’s children. They like it.

And I’m constantly amazed at how quickly they grow – only yesterday Kostik was standing in an upended stool, then he kept wanting to go to the bridge to watch the choo-choo, and now he’s gone to school already! It’s terrible! I went to buy him exercise books, a pencil case, pens, pencils, a satchel. Yanka was glad to be spared all that.

They love me. One time Kostik gave me a matchbox.

‘Only be careful opening it!’

‘What’s in there?’

He held it up to my ear. Something was scrabbling about inside. He had caught a beetle for me.

‘Aunty Sasha, take him home with you, he can live with you, so you won’t get bored on your own!’

My little wonder! He’s concerned about me being lonely.

While I was with them I forgot about everything: Mummy’s illness, the clinic, the very fact that cancer exists in the world. I take the groceries out of my bag, put the milk, juice and biscuits on the table, and they shout:

‘Hooray! Milk! Hooray, juice! Hooray, biscuits!’

And I start shouting with them:

‘Hooray! Ryazhenka! Hooray! Condensed milk! Hooray! Bagels!’

And we are simply happy, for no reason at all.

I set up a little bench in the toilet for the older boy, so he didn’t have to pee in the potty. He was terribly proud of peeing in the toilet, like a grown-up, going up on his toes and flooding the floor for me. Now the little bench has been handed down to the younger brother. Apart from all the other childhood ailments he has phimosis – a tight foreskin. For a long time we hoped no surgery would be needed, but it’s impossible to watch the child going through that agony every time.

I love to wash them, especially in summer, when they come running in from the street all dirty and sweaty. I rinse them off in the bathroom, sponge the dirt off their feet – sunburned, with white strap marks from their sandals. They fool about, throwing foam all around the bathroom and splashing. I’m wet through. We laugh. I wash their hair with shampoo, they squeal, their hair is silky under my fingers. I rinse it with the shower.

After the bath I scrub them with the towel and we laugh at the way their clean hair squeaks between my fingers.

When I get tired, I lie down for a rest and then Igoryok settles in beside me and drives a little car around on me – up and down the mountains. He growls, making the sound of the motor. It’s really lovely!

Of course, there are arguments and tears and shouting. They quarrel and fight over any little thing. It always ends with victory for the older boy. One day they both wanted the same toy, I said Kostik should let his younger brother have it, but a minute later the little boy came running to me in tears.

‘Igoryok, what’s happened?’

He’s choking, he can’t say anything.

I call Kostik, who spreads his arms wide in amazement:

‘You told me to let him have it, so I did!’

And Igoryok says:

‘Yes, but first he dipped it in the toilet!’

One time I caught them playing doctors – taking each other’s temperature with a finger up the bottom. Now what am I supposed to do about that?

Yanka has got pregnant again too, although she said she didn’t want to have any more children. She complained:

‘What sort of breast is this? Like a soft-boiled egg! But it used to be a hard-boiled one! And the skin on my legs is like a map! Look, rivers running all over it!’

I looked at her breasts – transparent, covered in blue veins, with dark-brown nipples – alive, working, needed – and I envied her.

Yanka was thinking seriously about having her tubes tied.

‘Why would I want any more?’

I remembered what Yanka told me about Kostik when he was told he was going to have a little brother – his childish horror at not being unique in the Universe.

‘Why do you want a boy? You’ve already got a boy!’