The Light and the Dark (43 page)

‘
I read about reincarnation, then decided to have a shave. I look at my grey stubble and realise that the transmigration of souls goes on all the time, we simply migrate into ourselves. There was a boy who became an old man, and his soul migrated from body to body a countless number of times
– every morning. The body becomes a different one overnight without our noticing.
’

I remember my father young and strong, doing his exercises. We used to play at swings – he held out his arm and I clung to his wrist and swung on it. But now, after the stroke, it was terrible to look at him. He expressed himself in half-words, his right arm didn’t work, he’d lost weight, the skin on his neck had sagged.

Daddy had been ill earlier, but he had never told me. He was probably afraid of appearing weak to me. Once he even went into hospital for an operation on a stomach ulcer without saying anything to me. He didn’t phone. He only told me he had been ill after he recovered.

But this time he had to accept his own weakness.

The first few days were especially hard. I’d only just finished with all the worry and strain of Mummy’s illness, and now I had to go to see my father every day.

He lived in a complete mess, without any household things at all. There was no trivet, so he put the frying pan on an ashtray. He wiped his hands on the curtains. I had to buy everything or bring it from home.

Back to the bedpan, the massages, the bedsores, the spoon-feeding. Immediately after the stroke he was incontinent. I put nappies under him, as if he was a small child.

Afterwards, on the contrary, he developed constipation, and I had to give him enemas regularly.

Once, when I cleared up the contents of his stomach that had flooded across the sheet and changed the bed, wrinkling up my face at the stink, he mumbled something.

I don’t understand.

‘What, Daddy? What do you want?’

He was apologising to me.

‘Oh, don’t be silly, Daddy! You wiped my bottom, didn’t you?’

And at the same time he acts like a child. While I’m washing him, he starts acting up – the water’s either too hot or too cold. I lather him up with children’s soap on a sponge and he starts whingeing – the sponge is scraping his skin. I have to lather him with my hands. His skin dangles flabbily, as if it’s slipping off his body. I wash all his folds and wrinkles.

I massage his disabled arm and wonder what happened to the strong, muscular arm I once used to swing on like a monkey. Arms must be reincarnated too, if it has taken up residence in this length of limp, paralysed rope, covered with flabby fibrous veins and brown spots.

I cut his hair and his nails. I soaked his feet in hot water, steaming the calluses, the yellow nails that had grown into his toes, the gnarled excrescences on his bumpy heels. In his old age the second and third toes on his left foot had crossed. He joked, saying that was for good luck.

I washed him everywhere – his skinny thighs with dangling buttocks and his crotch. Could I really have been in there once upon a time – in that crumpled, wrinkled thing lost among the tufts of grey hair?

He was afraid that he had cancer too – of the prostate. I felt his prostatic gland.

‘Daddy! You’ll recover and give me brothers and sisters yet!’

My father started reading medical books and arguing with the doctors, explaining to them how they ought to treat him.

They told him not to smoke – he carried on puffing away as if nothing had happened. I gave that up as a bad job.

I cook him semolina – he turns sulky, clatters his spoon resentfully, sniffs, prods feebly at his plate, clears his throat, wrinkles up his face.

‘A bit of herring and some onion would be good!’

‘Eat it, or I’ll tip it over your head!’

He remembered how he once poured kefir over me and started chewing his semolina obediently. I sat by his bed, and enjoyed remembering my childhood with him. It was strange that he didn’t remember at all some things that stood out so clearly for me.

But he did remember the Hawaiian dance – with our hands in our pockets.

Once he brought me a Japanese print as a present. Before I could even get a proper look at it, Mummy saw it, flushed scarlet and took it away from me. So I never did see what was in it.

I remembered the wonderful smell of leather when he was an Arctic pilot and he put his helmet with the huge goggles on me and I climbed into his high fur boots.

When I watched that film afterwards I was surprised or, rather, very upset. Not because the film was rubbish, but because I realised for the first time that Daddy was a bad actor. Not real.

But when he tied a turban round his head and sat with his legs crossed and the kingdom of Prester John stretched out all around, as far as the eye could see – he was real then.

And just what were all those white and black lions, gryphons, metagalarinariae and lamias?

And there was something I remembered and told him that he couldn’t have known.

‘I went into your room, and you were asleep. Curled up tight and warm, like a child. I was so amazed then that my daddy slept like a child!’

And I also asked him to forgive me for the years when I spurned him and humiliated him, as if I was taking my revenge for something. Why was I taking my revenge? Because he turned out not to be the Ruler of Rulers or King of the Naked-Wise or Lord of All
Lords? Because he didn’t live in the Capital of all Capitals, the paramount city of all lands, inhabited and uninhabited? Because he didn’t travel across his lands in a small tower on the back of a she-elephant?

Why did I say that I despised him and Mummy? Could it really be true that I despised them?

‘Daddy, forgive me for the way I behaved then! And for everything I said that hurt you! I’d ask Mummy to forgive me, but there’s no one to ask now.’

Daddy answered:

‘Oh come on, Sashka! I forgave you then already. It’s just a way people have of growing up.’

I took a book to leaf through off the shelves, opened it, and there were clippings of hair between the pages. I realised it was probably from when Mummy was cutting Daddy’s hair all those years ago and he was sitting there reading.

Among all the clutter on the cupboard I found a box of chess pieces.

‘How would you like to play, the way we did back then? We haven’t played for a thousand years!’

We started playing, and I suddenly won.

‘Did you lose on purpose?’

He smiled, but I realised that he hadn’t lost on purpose, he’d simply lost. He was a poor chess player.

‘You know, I started recognising my father in myself a long time ago. I can feel his movements in me, his wry smiles, his gestures. How did he get inside me? There was a time when what I wanted more than anything in the world was not to be like him, then suddenly bang – take that! He outwitted me, even in this I lost to him.’

Daddy had never told me anything about his parents. He only said that they had gone somewhere far away and died there. So I grew up without any grandmothers and grandfathers.

One day he said:

‘What actually happened then, nobody knew at the time. It only became an event when someone wrote it down in his memoirs. And you know what’s most important about memoirs? What you don’t tell!’

He threatened to take revenge on his enemies and those who had done him wrong by not mentioning them at all.

‘Not a single word! As if they never existed! Cross them out of life! Tell me now, Sashka, isn’t that just the perfect murder?’

On the day he first went outside with me and we walked slowly round the building, step by little step, he noted down in his exercise book:

‘How much I’ve shrunk! The collar of my shirt is too big for my tortoise neck. I just couldn’t understand about Achilles and the tortoise back then. But now I understand. I’m the tortoise and Achilles will never catch up with me.’

And here are some old entries:

‘
Wisdom should accumulate with the advancing years of life, but what have I accumulated, old fool that I am? I’ve accumulated answers to all the questions that were so important once upon a time, but have now become absolutely unimportant. Even the incontestable fact that soon I won’t exist is something that I’m only vaguely aware of.
’

‘
They were talking on the radio about plants and birds that are threatened with extinction. Some unfortunate animals are on the point of disappearing. But that’s me, I’m an animal on the point of disappearing!
’

And then this, when he started going outside on his own:

‘
I went down in the evening to take a stroll round the block. How good it is, simply to take a stroll on my own! Get shafted by a stroke and you soon wise up to what’s good. I stopped to catch my breath and saw something on the asphalt, reflecting the light of the streetlamp. A worm or a slug had crawled across and left its mark in life, only not in its own, but
mine. It even got onto this page. And it will never find out about it. For some reason that really cheered me up. I felt like springing up onto a bench and doing a tap dance the way I used to. What a young dope, how old was I then?
’

I thought I would find something in his exercise book about Mummy, but there’s nothing about her. I only found one phrase on the family, which seemed to have been copied from somewhere:

‘
A family is the hatred of people who can’t manage without each other.
’

I once asked Daddy if he regretted leaving Mummy when he did.

He answered:

‘No. We were like two wild animals grappling, tearing each other to pieces. Once you lose your dignity as a human being, it’s time to say goodbye. Can you believe that after one quarrel she leaned out of the window to get her breath back, I was walking past on my way to the kitchen, and I could hardly stop myself grabbing her by the legs and shoving her out!’

One time my father asked:

‘Do you want to know why your mother and I separated?’

‘No.’

And another time, out of the blue, he started telling me about how he once assured Mummy that it was all over with some other woman, and she believed him, but it wasn’t over at all.

‘I looked her straight in the eye and felt terrible, like some kind of executioner!’

‘Why are you telling me this? You ought to have told Mummy.’

‘That’s exactly why I’m telling you, because I didn’t tell her.’

‘So what do you want?’

‘I don’t know. For her to forgive me?’

‘For that especially?’

‘For that and for all the rest. But above all, yes, especially for that.’

‘It’s all right. Everything’s all right. She would have forgiven you for that. And for all the rest too. What a thick-headed couple you are, even after death you can’t agree about anything without me!’

‘
I woke up in the morning, but forgot why. Then I remembered. I’d started wondering what death really looks like. Not a skeleton with a scythe, is he? Once upon a time I asked my father why he lied. He answered: “When you’re grown up, we’ll talk about it.” But now that I’ve been all grown up for a long time, and I’m even growing backwards already, I’d ask him something quite different: “Father, what does death look like? Tell me; you know!” Death probably looks very simple – a ceiling or a window. A pattern on the wallpaper. The face that you see last.
’

He joked with me and tried to be cheerful, but in the exercise book he was talking to himself, preparing.

‘
After death people probably simply go back, become what they always were – nothing.
’

‘
Somewhere I read a description of how when they burn someone on a funeral pyre in India, the skull cracks like a chestnut. Somehow I don’t believe it. But then an acquaintance of mine told me that his mother was one of the first to be burned in a new crematorium that had just been opened. And back then the relatives could watch the body burning through a window. I don’t really understand why – to make sure it hadn’t been swapped with something, or what? And he saw his mother sit up a bit in the flames.
’

Daddy often told me he didn’t want to be buried in the ground.

‘Where’s the pleasure in knowing I haven’t disappeared completely, but I’m lying somewhere under two metres of sand and rotting bit by bit? And with a stone on top of me! They used to put stones on graves so the dead wouldn’t climb out!’

He didn’t go to Mummy’s grave with me even once, he said he couldn’t stand cemeteries. But I discovered from his exercise book that he had been there in spring after all.

‘
I wanted to buy flowers for my bunny, they’re selling tulips everywhere and I never gave her any bouquets when she was alive. But then I thought they would only get stolen from the grave anyway. Our daughter ordered a stupid stone. But then gravestones are probably never very smart. I sat down and remembered. It was good – quiet and sad. Almost no snow left. The smell of last year’s leaves. I ought to put up a little railing, but that’s terribly expensive these days. I got there late and I was the last one back out, they closed the gates behind me. As I walked along the fence I saw some old men and women climbing out over it. That’s funny – runaways from a cemetery.
’

He asked to be cremated and have his ashes scattered somewhere in the countryside.

‘Daddy, what are you saying?’

‘What’s wrong with that? I’m not asking to be buried standing upright, like Nostradamus! I just want them to cremate me and scatter the ashes. I want to disappear, dissolve. Sprinkle me somewhere on a vegetable patch! Do you promise?’

‘All right.’

‘
Who was the bright spark who said that suffering is uplifting? What bullshit. Suffering is degrading.
’

He often used to tell me that he didn’t want to go as painfully as Mummy. He wanted to do it himself.

‘
After all, I’ve thought about this so many times before. What’s wrong with it? Only not in the flat – there’ll be other people living here, it would be upsetting for them. One fine day simply tell the woman next door that I’m going on holiday – and disappear. The only thing that stopped me was the thought that I’d have to say something to my daughter. And what could I tell her?
’