The Light and the Dark (21 page)

I had to break off. I’m writing to you the next day.

Yesterday I went into the city to carry out an assignment. I was glad to go, I’m stuck in the camp all the time otherwise. At least it’s some kind of change, although there is the risk of getting caught in the shelling, but I tell you straightaway, Sashenka, that not a single shell fell in those districts where I was while I was in the city. Don’t worry!

You know, on the way to the city there’s a small swamp. In general there are lots of ponds and pools around here, but they seem to have died in the drought and now they’re putrefying in the heat. Well, several times I saw snakes tracing out the letter S. It’s the first time I’ve seen these creeping reptiles that everyone here talks about.

Tientsin and the entire valley, bisected by the mustard-coloured ribbon of the Pei Ho, appear quite picturesque from a distance, until you see all the signs of devastation.

The railway station and its buildings are in a terrible state – platforms pitted by shells, heaps of rubbish and broken brick. The iron roofs of the goods shed seem to be made out of metal lace-work, they have been riddled so badly by bullets and shrapnel. The burnt-out carriages still haven’t been cleared away.

Our sappers have reinforced the bridge with new decking. There are no longer as many bodies as accumulated here a couple of days ago, but they are still arriving on the current. While I was there the soldiers were trying to push something blue and bloated between the barges.

I was there with an officer from Anisimov’s detachment, who has the strange surname of Ubri. He first saw the city before it was devastated and now he laments continually as he looks at what Tientsin has been transformed into during the siege. Ubri has shell shock and his hearing is poor, when I talk to him I have to shout.

He showed me the settlement. Immediately after the bridge comes the English concession. The main thoroughfare is called Victoria Road. It stretches along the river and runs straight to the Chinese forts, so the grenades fly unhindered along the street, which is now pitted with craters.

All the walls have been scratched and scraped by shrapnel, many of the buildings have been destroyed – charred ruins, broken windows. At the crossroads on all the streets there are barricades made of bales of wool, lampposts and bricks. Everywhere is littered with furniture, rubbish, roof tiles. The streets are silent, there are no pedestrians to be seen, only patrols of various nationalities in front of buildings that have been converted into staff headquarters, infirmaries, storage depots.

Just imagine, there are still posters on the advertising columns, urging people to go to a circus. An international troupe pasted up posters all over the town before the siege, but instead of the anticipated takings from the public, the artistes had to settle for the relief of managing to escape on the last train that broke through to Taku.

Ubri and I went into Gordon Hall, the town hall of the English concession. He told me that during the siege women and children
took shelter in the basements here and food was cooked for them in the neighbouring Astor House hotel. The Russian consul Shuisky and his family also spent the siege in those basements. His seven-year-old son was killed in the bombardment.

The hotel was damaged too, although it is still obvious what a magnificent building it is, with balconies, verandas and a tower. The large, beautiful windows with sun-awnings are now blocked off with sandbags. Ubri told me that inside there are marble baths, electric bells, luxury and every possible convenience. But all that is in the past – from the very beginning of the siege neither the electricity nor the water supply have worked in the concessions.

In general even now it is clear what a beautiful, even foppish city this was! How very comfortably the Europeans had arranged their lives! A beautiful riverside embankment, immaculate broad streets planted with poplars and acacias, gardens, the picturesque Victoria Park, elegant houses in the English style, clubs, post office, telegraph, telephone, drainage system, lighting. Several large, brilliant shops, now ruined and burnt out.

But now this European city in the centre of Asia is an appalling sight. Not a single building or villa has been spared by the flames or the shells. Nor was it only the Chinese who demolished them. In the outermost concession, the French, Ubri showed me a huge city district populated by Chinese Christians, right beside the hospital, that had been totally destroyed – the French consul ordered it to be burned to the ground because he was afraid of arson and an attack from the direction of the Chinese city.

For a distance of two versts there is nothing to be seen except charred walls, solitary chimneys, heaps of stones, rubble and charcoal. The Chinese houses that survived the fire have been looted. The yards are littered with heaps of plain or expensive silk clothing, all sorts of furniture and tableware, junk, sumptuous Chinese
embroidery work, porcelain vases, pictures with magnificent inlay-work, clocks – everything smashed and trampled.

The soldiers of the allied nations have already run riot in all the abandoned houses. Unfortunately, there was not a single detachment whose soldiers did not rummage through these mixed heaps of valuable possessions and garbage. There was no supervision in the Chinese quarter, and in any case it was quite impossible to protect the Chinese property lying about in the yards and the streets, nor was there any need to do so.

Ubri showed me the place where the shell exploded when he got his concussion. His comrade, who was standing beside him and took the full force of the blast, had both his legs torn off and died a few hours later in terrible agony.

A regiment of Indian Sepoys has set up camp in the garden of the International Club – when we walked by, there were fires burning there, they were cooking food, playing on their little fifes and bagpipes. Streams of the stinking contents of human stomachs were flowing out into the streets but that didn’t bother the soldiers in turbans, although Ubri and I had to pinch our noses shut and slip by as quickly as possible.

While we were there the English forces caught a Chinese spy. He was a mere boy. The Sepoys led him from their headquarters to the square in front of the Astor House hotel, to execute him. We spoke with an English officer who said they had seen the lad waving a handkerchief to someone after climbing up on a roof. The Chinese, of course, know all about everything that is going on in the concessions.

The lad was very thin, nothing but skin and bone. And his head had been completely shorn. As he walked past me our eyes met. His eyes were full of horror and despair. He kept hiccupping, probably out of fear. I can still feel that gaze on me even now.

Sashenka, I thought they would shoot him, but the Sepoys cut his head off. There was a photographer there too, with his camera, some American. Someone will look at those photographs, examine them. The Sepoys posed proudly, smiling.

I tried to make myself watch it, but I couldn’t, I closed my eyes at the crucial moment. I only heard the sound. You know, it’s like the sound of secateurs. Then I opened my eyes and saw his head on the ground. How many times I have seen severed heads in various different pictures, for instance, on a dish, that favourite subject of artists – there was something horrible in that, but also something exalted and beautiful. But here the thing lying in front of me was small, smeared with black blood and caked with sand. A distorted mouth with a bitten tongue, one eye rolled up and back. The body without a head looked impossible somehow, docked short. A dark trickle flowed out of its neck.

How strange it is. It turns out that it is possible to see all this and not go insane.

And it is even possible to eat the same day. And talk about something else, something not here, far away, human. For instance, today I told Glazenap I had been at an execution and it only served as a pretext for a conversation about the transmigration of souls.

How could anyone here be surprised by someone being executed if everyone knows why it is happening and what for! By killing them, we save our own lives. It’s all as simple as that.

Kirill believes in the transmigration of souls. Or at least he says that he does.

I asked why in that case we aren’t surprised not to be Napoleon or Marcus Aurelius any more, or even an executed Chinese if it comes to that, but instead some provincial Dobchinskys or Bobchinskys out of Gogol’s
Inspector General
, who fear dying more than anything else in the world. But he replied that we are not
surprised by anything in a dream when we find ourselves in some absolutely impossible situation, surrounded by people who died long ago.

‘You see,’ Kirill declared, ‘we lived before in a different world and a different time, and we woke up here and carry on living without being surprised by anything, accepting everything as given. And afterwards we’ll wake up again somewhere else.’

He really is quite impossible, that Glazenap.

But though I may laugh at him, that Chinese boy – if not his soul, then at least his head – has found a temporary refuge in me. I don’t even have to close my eyes in order to see it there on the ground, surrounded by the trampled mud – caked with blood and sand, the white of an eye with no pupil, a black tongue bitten by brown teeth.

Forgive me, my dearest, forgive me!

But I won’t cross anything out.

You can simply skip over these lines, not read them.

I want so much to write to you about good things!

My Sashenka, I broke off again for a short while, but I’m continuing now. And do you know why I broke off? It’s so stupid, but I’ll explain anyway, after all, I want to talk to you about everything. The Cossacks and the artillerymen were cleaning their horses at the tethering-rail and swapping obscenities. It’s quiet now, the wind is blowing from that direction, bringing the smell of horses, their sweat and urine, but these are all really such human, heart-warming smells! It’s the people here who give off repulsive animal odours, but with the animals, it’s just the opposite. Anyway, they were telling each other dirty stories, laughing loudly and coarsely. I tried writing my letter to you with that conversation in my ears, and gave up. I felt as if their words could besmirch my letter simply by being spoken over this sheet of paper.

I went for a short walk. I looked at the horses, standing so sweet and clean in their stalls. Breathing out their delicious animal aroma on me. Twitching their muscles as they tried to drive the flies off them, snorting and shaking their muzzles about. Squinting sideways at me with their sad, docile eyes. They’re chaste and virtuous somehow. How good I feel with them!

I am continuing after the soldiers have already gone. What else can I write to you about?

Today Lucie told me the miraculous way she managed to escape when the Catholic mission somewhere to the north of Tientsin, where she had found herself a year ago, was sacked. In general the story of how she came to be in China remains a mystery to everyone, but Kirill told me in the strictest confidence that she told him she came to China for love – she abandoned everything at home and set out to the end of the world to find the man she loved. But he proved to be a scoundrel – the usual business. She couldn’t go back home and she found herself a job in the Catholic mission. Well anyway, let me get back to her story.

The things that little woman has been through!

The crowd broke into the grounds of the mission and no one had time to get away. The peasant rebels found glass jars of pickled onions in the kitchen buffet. They started showing them to the entire village as proof of the foreigners’ perfidious treachery – they had mistaken the onions for Chinese eyes. It was already impossible to stop them and a massacre started.

They tore out the Catholic priest’s eyes with a fork. They decapitated his housekeeper – she was holding her son’s hand at the time and they killed him immediately after her. Lucie told me all this without any agitation in her voice, in a strange, dry manner, as if all of it had not happened to her, as if she had died and this was all about the sufferings of some other woman.

Lucie had a small revolver, but she couldn’t bring herself to use it. She says that at first she tried to shoot the attackers, but she couldn’t take aim at a human being. Then she decided to shoot herself so as not to fall into their hands, but when she saw what these people had done to people dear to her, she started firing at them. And she says she had only one desire – to kill as many of them as possible.

She survived by a miracle – she locked herself in a shed and fired to keep them away, killing several people. And she was saved by a small detachment of the Chinese regular army – at that time they were still punishing the outrages committed by the Yihetuan and the governor of Chili province had even introduced rewards for the capture of insurgents.

After her story everyone sat there in silence for a while. I couldn’t raise my eyes to her face – I was watching her hands. It was amazing that those same hands, which pitied, caressed and cured, had also killed.

Afterwards Lucie said that she was willing to kill again. She hates them.

Sashenka, how incredible, incomprehensible and barbaric all this is.

I feel such pain for her. And I start to hate them too.

When the two of us are left alone, Kirill talks about her with great tenderness. You know, he told me that he loved a woman in Petersburg, but she laughed at his feelings and left him for some worthless nonentity. And now it seems to him that he has found something real in life.

Sashenka, it’s so wonderful to watch their feelings maturing right in front of our eyes – in the midst of blood and death and wounds and pain and pus and filth. Everyone notices the way they are reaching out to each other and watches them with a smile. Of
course, people envy them. No, that’s the wrong word. People are glad for them. So much brutality all around, so much cruelty – and it is such a joy that tenderness is still alive at least in these two.

People probably look at them and remember their own loved ones.

My distant Sashenka! You are so close to me now, as if you are standing beside me, leaning over my shoulder and looking at my skipping lines of words.