The Light and the Dark (4 page)

Do you know why I was given my name?

When I was little I adored all the lovely different little boxes and caskets in the bottom drawers of our sideboard, I spent ages rummaging through the things my mother kept there – bracelets, brooches, playing cards, postcards, everything on earth. And then in one box I found a pair of child’s sandals – all tiny and shrivelled, small enough for a doll.

It turned out that I had an older brother. When he was three, he fell ill and was taken into hospital. And what they said about him was really terrible – they said he was doctored to death.

My parents decided straightaway to have another child. To take his place.

And a little girl was born. Me.

My mother couldn’t accept her child, she wouldn’t feed me and didn’t want to see me. They told me all this afterwards. It was my father who pulled me through. Me and my mother.

In my little cot three of the wooden bars had been sawn out so I could crawl through. But it was his cot, the other child’s. Only I couldn’t understand then that the hole was for him. That he used to crawl through it. I liked scampering through it as well, but I was really only repeating his movements.

For me that boy had been left behind in some unimaginable life before I was born. If it ever existed, then it had faded into some kind of prehistoric age, but for my mother it was right there beside me, all the time, it never went away. One day we were going to
the dacha on the train and a child was sitting opposite us with his grandmother. Just a normal child with a squeaky voice and runny nose who couldn’t pronounce his r’s properly. He kept pestering his grandmother for something. And she kept snapping back:

‘Just calm down, will you!’

And I remember the way my mother flinched and shrank when the old woman said:

‘Sasha! We’re getting off here!’

When we got off the train, my mother turned away and started rummaging desperately in her handbag, and I saw the tears pouring out of her eyes. I started snivelling and she turned round and kissed me with her wet lips, trying to reassure me that everything was all right, that it was just a midge that had flown into her eye.

‘But everything’s all right now!’

She blew her nose, touched up her mascara and snapped her powder compact shut. And off we went to the dacha.

I remember that was when I thought: It’s a good thing that child died. Otherwise, where would I be now? As I walked along, I repeated what my mother had said: ‘But everything’s all right now!’

I couldn’t
not
have been born, could I? Everything around me, everything that was and is and will be, is simple and adequate proof of that, even this small window frame with its mouth wide open, and these flat pancakes of sunshine on the floor, and the cheesy flakes of curdled milk in this mug of coffee, and this faded mirror playing at stares with the window to see who’ll blink first.

As a little girl I used to spend hours gazing into the mirror. Eye to eye. Why these eyes? Why this face? Why this body?

What if it’s not me? And these aren’t my eyes, or my face, or my body?

What if I – with these eyes and face and body that I just glimpsed
– what if all this is just a memory of some old woman I’ll become some day?

Often I used to pretend there were really two of me. Like twin sisters. Me and
her.
Like in the fairy tales: one bad and one good. Me the well-behaved one, and
her
the hooligan.

I used to wear my hair long, my mother was always nagging at me to comb it. And
she
took the scissors and snipped the plait off out of spite.

We used to have theatre shows at the dacha and, of course,
she
played all the leading roles, and I opened and closed the curtain. And then once, in the course of the action, she was supposed to kill herself. Just imagine it, she says her final words with a knife in her hand, then swings and hits her head as hard as she can, and suddenly she’s covered in real blood. Everybody jumped to their feet in horror, and she’s lying there dying – in the play, and from sheer delight as well. Only I knew that she’d grated some beetroot, taken a hen’s egg and sucked it out through a little hole and used a syringe she took from Mummy to squirt the juice into the egg and hidden it in her wig. She jumped up, all covered in beetroot blood, squealing in joy at having fooled everyone:

‘You believed it! You believed it!’

You simply can’t imagine what it’s like having to put up with her all the time! You can’t imagine what it’s like to wear her cast-offs after she’s done with them. They always bought beautiful new things for her, that princess without a pea, and I got the same things, already old and disgusting, to wear out. They deck us out for school after the summer holidays, and she has nice new shoes, but I have to get into her old raincoat with holes in the pockets and a stain on the lapel.

She tormented me all my childhood, whenever she fancied. I remember I drew a white chalk boundary line on the floor, divided
our room in half. She went and rubbed it out and drew the line so that I could only walk round the edge from my bed to the table and the door. It was pointless complaining to Mummy, because with Mummy she was an absolute angel, but when we were left alone, she started pinching me and pulling my hair until it really hurt, so that I wouldn’t snitch on her.

I’ll never forget the time I was given a wonderful doll, a huge talking doll that closed and opened its eyes and could even walk. Just as soon as I turned away for a moment, my tormentor stripped her naked, saw there was something missing, and drew it on. I started crying and went running to my parents – they just laughed.

It was impossible to come to terms with her! I suggest something, and she stamps her little foot and declares:

‘Things will be the way I say round here, or else there won’t be anything at all!’

Her eyes narrow, looking daggers at me, and her upper lip twitches too, exposing her sharp little teeth. She’s going to grab me any moment …

I remember how scared I was when Mummy asked me who I was talking to. I lied:

‘Myself.’

I realise that it used to happen when I wanted to be loved. She appeared when I had to fight for other people’s love. That is, almost all the time – even when I was on my own. But never with Daddy. With Daddy everything was different.

He called Mummy and me the same name – we were both bunnies. He probably enjoyed shouting: ‘Bunny!’ – and we would both answer, one from the kitchen and one from the nursery.

When he came home, in order not to let any strangers in, before I opened the door I had to ask:

‘Who’s there?’

He used to answer: ‘A sower and mower and tin-whistle blower.’

Even when he wiped his feet on the mat in the hallway it came out like a dance.

He liked to bring me strange presents. He used to say:

‘Guess what!’

But it was absolutely impossible to guess. It could be a fan, or a tea bowl, or a lorgnette, a tea caddy, an empty scent bottle or a broken camera. Once he brought a Japanese Noh theatre mask. He even brought home a genuine elephant’s foot from somewhere, hollowed out for umbrellas and canes. Mummy used to rant at him, but his presents made me feel absolutely happy.

He could suddenly say, out of the blue:

‘Forget that homework!’

And then we would put on a concert. We loved humming on combs wrapped in tissue paper – it tickled my lips terribly. An empty cake box became a tambourine. He used to turn up the corner of the carpet and rattle out a tap dance on the floor, until the neighbours started banging. Or grab the box of chess pieces and start shaking it rhythmically, so that everything inside it rattled about.

He made me play chess with him and he always won, and when he got me in checkmate, he was as delighted as a little child.

He knew all the dances in the world and he taught me to dance. I don’t know why, but I really loved the Hawaiian dance – we used to keep our hands in our pockets when we did it.

One day at the table he told me to stop being so silly and stubborn or he’d pour a glass of kefir over my head.

I said:

‘No you won’t!’

And suddenly I was covered in white kefir goo. Mummy was horrified, but I was cock-a-hoop.

I never had to fight for his love.

But when Daddy wasn’t there, that other me persecuted me incessantly.

I always suffered agonies with my skin, but hers was smooth and clear. Skin isn’t just a sack for your insides, it’s what the world uses to touch us. The world’s feeler. And skin problems are just a way of protecting yourself from being touched. You sit there, hidden away, like inside a cocoon. But she – the other me – didn’t understand any of this. She didn’t understand that I was afraid of everything, and above all of being with other people. She didn’t understand how, when we went visiting and everybody was enjoying themselves, I could lock myself in the toilet and just sit there without even taking my knickers off. She didn’t understand how I could learn the theorems of Pythagoras off by heart, but freeze up in terror beside the blackboard, leave my body and float round in the air, watching myself from the outside – helpless, pitiful, desolate. The only fact about Pythagoras that remained in my head was how when he was a child and his parents showed him the basic forms through which the invisible manifests itself to human beings on a little table – globe, pyramid, cube, scraps of wool, apples, honey cakes and a little pitcher of wine – and named them all, Pythagoras listened to their explanations and then knocked the table over.

I always wrote her compositions for her. And I always got ‘D’. And even worse, the teacher used to read them out in class and sigh:

‘Sashenka, life is going to be hard for you.’

She gave me a D, because I always wrote about the wrong thing. We were given three subjects to choose from, we had to write about the first one, the second one or the third one – but I always wrote about God knows what. God knows what was more important to me.

I was a monster from a species of gill-winged, brachiopod moss animals. But she was the Dance of Mahanaim, with eyes like the pools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim. I remember how shocked I was by the way our PT teacher looked at her during class.

One day I was getting changed after school and I noticed someone spying on me through binoculars from behind the curtain in a window of the house opposite. I squatted down below the windowsill in horror, but she started putting on a full-scale performance.

When I was little, to frighten me at night she used to tell me she was a witch and she had power over people. And her proof for that was her eyes – the left one was blue, and the right one was brown. And she told me she used to have warts, and when we stayed the night at someone else’s place, she washed herself with the sponge in that house, and her warts disappeared, but they appeared on the child who lived there. But the main argument, of course, was her eyes. She told me she could put the evil eye on anyone she wanted. The other girls weren’t exactly afraid of her, but they were wary. She could definitely charm blood – she only had to lick a cut and whisper something, and the bleeding stopped.

Even now she won’t leave me in peace. And you can never tell when she’ll appear again. She can disappear and be gone for months, then suddenly – Here I am, surprise, surprise!

She mocks me because in the library, out of pity for the dead authors nobody wants, I take the most neglected books – otherwise no one will even remember about these writers. Such a slovenly trollop, she says, but you underline the ideas you like so neatly with a comb. She strikes a pose and lectures me, like an older sister: You can’t live your life like a wishy-washy dishrag, you
have to learn to be pushier than a lamb and louder than a mouse. Remember the seventeenth rule of Thales of Miletus, my little sister: It is better to arouse envy than pity!

And how viciously she used to tease you!

Remember, we were sitting on the veranda, eating strawberries – sour and unappetising, we were dipping them in sugar. And she got the idea of dipping them in honey. She pours some honey out of the jar into her saucer and licks the spoon. And she looks at you. And checks her expression in the mirror. I know that expression only too well, with the gleeful malice blazing in that odd pair of eyes.

She licked the spoon, took the end of it between her finger and thumb and flung it through the open veranda window behind her.

And she looks at you.

‘Fetch!’

I tried to shout out to you: ‘Stop! Don’t you dare do that!’ But I couldn’t force out a single word.

You got up and went to look for the spoon – and there were thickets of brambles and wild raspberry bushes out there. You came back all scratched, with beads of blood on your hands. Without saying a word, you put the spoon on the table – with the earth and dry grass sticking to it – and turned and walked away.

She simply pulls a wry face at the dirty spoon. Then, as if nothing has happened, she carries on dipping strawberries in honey and biting them with her little teeth.

I couldn’t stand it, I dashed after you, grabbed hold of your arm, tried to lick your scratches the way she did, to stop the bleeding, but you shoved me away.

‘Go to hell!’

And you looked at me with such contempt.

You got on your bike and rode off.

How I hated you then!

That is, I hated her.

Both of you!

And I really, really wanted something to happen to you, something bad, terrible, evil.

I told myself I wouldn’t go to you.

And I went running to you the very next day.

I see it all again, as if it’s happening right now, feel it on my skin: It’s been drizzling since morning, the mist has clambered up the fence, all the paths are drowned in puddles. I’m walking to your place with an umbrella over my head, and on the bridge across the ravine the rain starts coming down even harder.

There’s a small stretch of forest between our dachas, all the footpaths there have dissolved into mud, and all the greenery sprouting there is nameless – it was only you who gave the plants their names.