The Light and the Dark Read online

  Mikhail

  SHISHKIN

  Translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

  Quercus

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London

  W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 2010 by Mikhail Shishkin

  2010

  English translation copyright © 2013 by Andrew Bromfield

  The moral right of Mikhail Shishkin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78087 105 9 (HB)

  ISBN 978 1 78087 106 6 (TPB)

  ISBN 978 1 78087 107 3 (EBOOK)

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  I open yesterday’s Evening News, and it’s all about you and me.

  It’s going to be the word in the beginning again, they write. But meanwhile in the schools they rattle on in the same old way, saying first of all there was a big bang, and the whole of existence went flying apart.

  And what’s more, supposedly everything already existed even before the bang – all the galaxies we can see and the ones we can’t. In the same way that the future glass lives in the sand, and the grains of sand are the seeds of this window here, through which I’ve just seen a little boy run past outside with a football stuffed up the front of his T-shirt.

  There was this bundle of intense warmth and light.

  The scientists tell us it was the size of a football. Or a watermelon. And just like in the old riddle about the room full of people, with no doors or windows, we were tiny little seeds inside it. And when everything there inside was ripe and ready, it strained with all its might and burst out.

  The primal watermelon hatched.

  The seeds went flying off and sprouted.

  One little seed put out a shoot and became our tree: there’s the shadow of one of its branches, creeping along the windowsill.

  Another became the memory of a girl who wanted to be a boy – once when she was still little they dressed her up as Puss in Boots for a fancy dress party, and everyone there kept trying to pull her tail, and in the end they tore it right off, and she had to walk around with her tail in her hand.

  A third little seed sprouted many years ago and became a young man who liked me to scratch his back, and hated lies, especially when they started shouting from all the pulpits that there was no death, that words written down were a kind of tram that carried you off into immortality.

  In the Druidic horoscope he was a Carrot.

  Before he burned his diary and all his manuscripts, he wrote one final phrase, a terribly funny one: ‘The gift has abandoned me’ – I managed to read it before you tore that notebook out of my hands.

  We stood by the bonfire and held our open hands up to our faces to block the heat, looking at the bones of our fingers showing through the transparent red flesh. Flakes of ash showered down on us – the warm, burnt-up pages.

  Ah yes, I almost forgot, and afterwards the whole of existence will gather itself back into a single full stop.

  Where are you now, Vovka the Carrot?

  And now what’s going on? Silly little Julie tries so hard, sending him letters, but hard-hearted Saint-Preux fobs her off with facetious little missives, sometimes in verse, rhyming Swedes and centipedes, ammunition and sublimation, shithouse and Mona Lisa (by the way, have you guessed what she’s smiling at? – I think I have), navel and God.

  My love!

  Why did you do that?

  The only thing still left to do was choose myself a war. But naturally, that was no great obstacle. If there’s one thing that’s meat and drink to this unbeaten homeland of ours, that’s it – you can’t even get the newspaper open properly before friendly kingdoms are spiking little infants on their bayonets and raping old women. Somehow you feel especially sorry for the innocent tsarevich murdered in his sailor suit. The women, old men and children just seem to slip in one ear and out the other, as usual, but that sailor suit …

  A rousing tattoo on a tin drum, a murky pall hovering over the bell tower, your motherland is calling you!

  At the conscription centre the prescription was: Everyone needs his own Austerlitz!

  Oh, indeed he does.

  At the medical board the army doctor – a huge cranium, bald and knobbly – looked into my eyes intently. He said:

  ‘You despise everybody. You know, I used to be like that too. I was the same age as you when I did my first hospital internship. And one day they brought in a street bum who’d been knocked down by a car. He was still alive, but he’d been maimed very badly. We didn’t really make much of an effort. It was obvious no one wanted the old man and no one was going to come for him. Stench, filth, lice, pus. Anyway, we put him on one side, where he wouldn’t pollute anything. He was a goner in any case. And when he was gone, I was supposed to tidy up, wash the body and dispatch it to the morgue. Everybody went away and left me on my own. I went out for a smoke and I thought: What do I want with this hassle? What’s this old man to me? What’s he good for? While I was smoking, he passed on. So there I am, wiping off the blood and pus – working sloppily, doing just enough to shunt him off to the freezer as quickly as possible. And then suddenly I thought he could be somebody’s father. I brought a basin of hot water and started bathing him. An old body, neglected and pitiful. Nobody had caressed it in years. And there I am washing his feet, his gruesome gnarled toes, and there are almost no nails – they’ve all been eaten away by fungus. I sponge down all his wounds and scars, and I talk to him quietly: Well then, Dad, life turned out hard for you, did it? It’s not easy when no one loves you. And what were you thinking, at your age, living out on the street, like a stray dog? But it’s all over and done with now. You rest! Everything’s all right now. Nothing hurts, no one’s chasing after you. So I washed him and talked to him like that. I don’t know if it helped him in his death, but it certainly helped me a lot to live.’

  My Sashenka!

  Volodenka!

  I watch the sunset. And I think: What if right now, this very moment, you’re watching this sunset too? And that means we’re together.

  It’s so quiet all around.

  And what a sky!

  That elder tree over there – even it senses the world around it.

  At moments like this, the trees seem to understand everything, only they can’t say it – exactly like us.

  And suddenly I feel very intensely that thoughts and words are really made out of the same essence as this glow, or this glow reflected in the puddle over there, or my hand with the bandaged thumb. How I long for you to see all of this!

  Just imagine, I took the bread knife and somehow managed to slice my thumb right through to the nail. I bandaged it up sloppily, and then drew two eyes and a nose on the bandage. And I had a little Tom Thumb. So I’ve been talking to him about you all evening.

  I reread your first postcard. Yes! Yes! Yes! That’s it exactly! Everything rhymes! Take a look around! It’s all rhymes! There’s the visible
world, and there – if you close your eyes – is the invisible one. There’s the branch of a pine tree darning the sky, and there’s its rhyme – a conch that has become an ashtray in mundane reality. There’s the clock on the wall and there on the shelf is a clump of herbs from the pharmacy for relieving wind. This is my bandaged thumb – the scar will probably stay for ever now – and the rhyme to it is the same thumb, but before I was born and after I’ve gone, which is probably the same thing. Everything in the world is rhymed with everything in the world. These rhymes connect up the world, hold it together, like nails pounded in right up to the head, to stop it falling apart.

  And the most amazing thing is that these rhymes already existed in the beginning – it’s not possible to invent them, just as it’s impossible to invent the very simplest mosquito or that long-distance cloud over there. You understand, no amount of imagination would be enough to invent the very simplest things!

  Who was it that wrote about people greedy for happiness? How well put! That’s me – greedy for happiness.

  And I’ve started noticing myself repeating your gestures, too. I speak in your words. I look with your eyes. I think like you. I write like you.

  All the time I remember our summer.

  Our morning studies in oil, painted with butter on toast.

  Do you remember our table under the lilac, covered with the oilcloth with a brown triangle from a hot iron?

  And here’s something you can’t remember, it’s mine alone: when you walked across the grass in the morning, you seemed to leave a glittering ski-track in the sun.

  And the smells from the garden! So rich and dense, like fine particles saturating the air. You could pour those smells into a cup like strong tea.

  And everything all around has only one thing on its mind – I simply walk through the field or the forest and absolutely everyone tries his very best to pollinate me or inseminate me. My socks are just covered in grass seeds.

  And remember, we found a hare in the grass with its legs cut off by a mowing machine.

  Brown-eyed cows.

  Little goat nuts lying on the path.

  Our pond – murky on the bottom with blooming slush, full of frogspawn. Silver carp butting at the sky. I climb out of the water and pluck the weed off myself.

  I lay down to sunbathe and covered my face with my singlet, the wind rustles like starched linen. And suddenly there’s a ticklish feeling in my navel, and it’s you pouring a thin stream of sand onto my stomach out of your fist.

  We walk home and the wind tests the trees and us to see what kind of sails we would make.

  We collect fallen apples – the first ones, sour, good for compote – and we throw these windfalls at each other.

  At sunset the forest is jagged.

  And in the middle of the night a mousetrap jumps with a snap and wakes us up.

  Sashenka, my dearest!

  Well then, I’ll number my letters to know which one has gone missing.

  I’m sorry my scribblings turn out so short – I have absolutely no time for myself. And I’m terribly short of sleep, I feel like closing my eyes and falling asleep standing up. Descartes was killed by having to get up at five in the morning, when it was still dark, to give lectures on philosophy to Christina, Queen of Sweden. But I’m still holding on.

  I was in the general staff office today and I suddenly saw my reflection in a mirror, in full dress uniform. It was strange, what was I doing in fancy dress? I was amazed at myself: how could I be a soldier?

  You know, there’s something to this life after all, always covering off in line with the cheekbone of the fourth man.

  I’ll tell you a story about a forage cap. A short one. It was filched from me – the forage cap, that is. And falling in without a forage cap is a breach of regulations, in short, it’s a crime.

  Our chief of chiefs and commander of commanders stamped his feet and promised me I’d be washing out the shithouse from now until doomsday.

  ‘You’ll lick it out, you scumbag!’

  That’s what he said.

  Well now, there is something inspiring about military speech. I read somewhere that Stendhal learned to write simply and clearly by studying Napoleon’s field orders.

  But the latrine here, my dear, distant Sashenka, requires some explanation. Picture to yourself holes in a floor covered with filth. No, better not picture it! And everyone tries his very best to dump his heap on the edge of a hole, not in it. And everything’s awash. Actually, the way the stomachs of yours truly and his fellows function is a separate subject in its own right. In these remote parts, for some reason we always have a bellyache. I don’t understand how you can dedicate yourself to Generalissimo Suvorov’s science of victory if you’re always squatting over a yawning abyss with your insides draining out of you.

  Anyway, I say to him:

  ‘Where will I get you a forage cap?’

  And he says:

  ‘They filched yours, you go and filch one!’

  So off I went to filch a forage cap. And that’s not easy. In fact, it’s very hard, because everyone’s at it.

  There I was, wandering hither and thither.

  Suddenly I thought: Who am I? Where am I?

  And I went to wash the latrine. And the whole world suddenly seemed lighter somehow.

  I had to end up here to learn to understand simple things.

  You know, there’s nothing dirty about shit.

  Now look, I’m writing to you at night. I nibbled a crust of bread in bed just now, and the crumbs won’t let me sleep, they’ve scampered all over the sheet and they bite.

  The window above my head is as starry as starry.

  And the Milky Way divides the sky on a slant. You know, it’s like some gigantic fraction. The numerator is one half of the universe, and the denominator is the other half. I always hated those fractions, squared numbers, cubed numbers and all those roots. It’s all so disembodied, impossible to visualise, there’s absolutely nothing to catch hold of. A root is a root – on a tree. It’s strong, it creeps and grabs, it gobbles the soil, it’s clinging, sucking, irrepressible, greedy, alive. But this is twaddle written with a little squiggle, and they call it a root too!

  And what sense does a minus sign make? Minus a window – what’s that? It’s not going to go anywhere. And neither is what’s outside the window.

  Or minus me?

  Things like that don’t happen.

  In general, I’m the kind of person who has to touch everything.

  And sniff.

  Yes, even more – sniff everything. Like in the book Daddy used to read to me at bedtime when I was little. There are different kinds of people. There are people who spend all their time fighting with cranes. There are people with one leg, they dash around on it at high speed, and their foot is so big that they shelter in its vast shadow from the sweltering heat of the sun and rest there, as if they were inside a house. And there’s another kind of people too, who live on nothing but the smells of fruits. When they have to set out on a long journey, they take these fruits with them, and if they catch a whiff of a bad smell, they die. That’s just like me.

  You know, in order to exist, everything alive has to have a smell. At least some kind of smell. And all those fractions and all the other stuff we were taught – it has no smell.

  There’s some kind of night prowler outside the window now, kicking an empty bottle about. The clink of glass on the asphalt of a deserted street.

  Now it’s broken.

  At moments like this at night I feel so lonely and I want so much to be the reason for at least something.

  And I long unbearably to be with you! To hug you and snuggle up against you.

  Do you know what you’ll get if you divide that starry numerator by the denominator? Divide one half of the Universe by the other? You’ll get me. And you with me.

  Today I saw a little girl fall off her bike – she skinned her knee and sat there crying bitterly, and her long white sock was splattered wi
th blood. It was on the embankment, where the lions are – mouths stuffed full of litter, paper wrappers and sticks from ice cream. Then afterwards I was walking home and suddenly the idea came to me that all the great books and pictures aren’t about love at all. They only pretend to be about love, so they’ll be interesting to read. But in actual fact, they’re about death. In books, love is a kind of shield or, rather, a blindfold. So you don’t see. So it’s not so frightening.

  I don’t know what the connection was with that little girl who fell off her bike.

  She cried a bit, and now perhaps she’s forgotten about it ages ago, but in a book her skinned knee would have stayed there until she died and even afterwards.

  So probably all books aren’t really about death, but about eternity, only their eternity isn’t genuine, it’s a kind of fragment, an instant, like a teensy-weensy fly in amber. It just sat down for a moment to rub its back legs together, and it turned out to be for ever. Of course, they choose all sorts of fine moments, but isn’t it a terrifying thought – to stay like that, forever porcelain – like the shepherd boy always reaching out to kiss the shepherd girl!

  But I don’t want anything porcelain. I want everything alive, here and now. You, your warmth, your voice, your body, your smell.

  You’re so far away now that I’m not at all afraid to tell you something. You know, back then at the dacha, I used to go into your room while you weren’t there. And I sniffed everything. Your soap. Your eau de cologne. Your shaving brush. I sniffed the inside of your shoes. I opened your cupboard and sniffed your sweater. The sleeve of your shirt. And the collar. I kissed a button. I leaned down over your bed and put my nose to the pillow. I was so happy! But that wasn’t enough! To be happy, you need witnesses. You can only really feel happy when you get some kind of confirmation, if not from a glance or a touch, or a presence, then at least from an absence. From a pillow, a sleeve, a button. Once you almost caught me – I only just managed to run out onto the porch. And you saw me and started throwing prickly burrs in my hair. I was so angry with you then, but what wouldn’t I give now for that – to have you throw burrs in my hair!