The Light and the Dark (44 page)

He’d been clinging to me, and for months I wouldn’t even talk to him on the phone.

After the stroke he said to me:

‘Sashka, if I’m suffering really badly, promise you’ll give me a jab of something? You know what’s needed.’

‘Are you out of your mind?’

He started drinking again, deliberately bringing his own end closer, I couldn’t do anything about it any more. He got drunk while I wasn’t there and then suffered, he said it was indigestion and drank glass after glass of water with bicarbonate of soda. I tried to make him see sense several times, but he only swept all the little bottles and boxes of medicine off the bedside locker.

In late May he suffered a second stroke, from which he never recovered.

He once wrote in his exercise book:

‘
It’s just annoying that on the day of my death nothing will change and nothing will happen, they’ll carry on selling roasted sunflower seeds at the station in the same old way, taking the little heaped glassful out of the sack and pouring them into the pocket that’s held open. They’ll carry on drinking beer at the corner, sucking the foam off their moustaches. A woman will stand in a window, washing the frame. And the most interesting thing of all is – that day already exists, it comes round in the calendar every year, it can be commemorated. It already exists, only it hasn’t been revealed to me yet, like some law or some island.
’

I’ve just read that and thought that Daddy died in early June, on the fifth, that’s the day of his death now. But that means the fifth of June was the day of his death before, it always was. The day existed, but the death didn’t. Only I can’t remember what happened on that day last year. The same as always – sunflower seeds, beer, a woman in a window washing the frame.

I stroked his yellow hands with tarnished nails, they were already leaving.

During the final days we hardly talked at all, just exchanged a few meaningless words, exactly the way it was with Mummy.

I come in from the kitchen. He whispers:

‘Have you been drinking coffee?’

He smelt it.

I pick at my hangnails, that annoys him:

‘Stop it!’

He wanted persimmons, I went to the market for some and cut them in half. I feed him with a spoon, but he doesn’t eat.

‘I don’t want it.’

It’s hot, but if I open the window, it lets in even more sultry heat. He asked me to put my cold hands on his hot forehead. I held my hands under icy water from the tap to make them colder.

The day before, he sensed everything. I could barely make out what he said:

‘I’m dying, childy.’

‘So he’s dying, is he? Well, aren’t we dying? Riding along in a tram?’

He screwed his face up. That was a smile. He whispered:

‘Sashka, how I love you!’

Mummy died without me, and I can’t explain why, but it was very important for me to be holding his hand at the moment when it happened.

I told him:

‘Daddy, I want to hold your hand when you die. Do you promise not to die without me?’

He lowered his eyelids.

Then his final minutes arrived. Daddy breathed so hard that the bed shook about under him. He couldn’t talk any more and he
kept his pleading eyes fixed on me. I knew what he was pleading for.

I wanted to hug him, I lay down beside him on the bed, snuggled up against him, looking into his eyes all the time. The look in his eyes changed. He was looking at me, but his eyes weren’t pleading. There was a kind of astonishment in them.

He was going. He was still with me, but he had already peeped over there. He stopped, lingering for just a moment at the boundary line. He had seen what I couldn’t see from that room.

Daddy was struggling to tell me something.

‘What, Daddy, tell me! What?’

Gurgling sounds poured out of his throat.

And I suddenly realised what he was trying to tell me after he had peeped over there. He was trying to tell me there really were imperishable people and mute cicadas living there.

Daddy told me several times that he already knew what would be the final phrase in his memoir. Somewhere he had found an ending that scribes used to round off their books – about a ship and the depths of the sea. But the final entry in his pamphlet was quite different.

‘
Apparently, according to the latest data, a dead man can hear even after he’s dead – of all the functions, hearing is the last to leave. Sasha, my daughter, say something to me.
’

I’m writing all this to explain an amazing feeling: I held his hand at the moment that is probably the most important one in a person’s life, and I felt happy.

Sashenka!

My darling!

Tell me, could it be that everything around me really doesn’t exist?

Rain again. Falling all day long.

Can all this possibly be reality, and my reality? Of course it can’t.

Well, all right, rain, but it could be a quite different rain, couldn’t it? There are all kinds of rain. Not every one of them is real, is it?

Perhaps it’s that dacha rain. It set in first thing in the morning. And in that place everything’s real. The buzzing of the mosquitoes on the veranda. The leaky roof, the drip-dropping in the basin. Windowpanes covered with dust-spots left by raindrops. The garden rustling through the half-open window. The saturated lilac has a special rainy smell. On the path in front of the porch the puddles are alive.

I recline on the divan with a volume of Shakespeare on my knees and write in this same notebook. Composing things. How good it is to compose things! About love, death and everything in the world. Afterwards I can take everything I’ve written and burn it, can’t I? How wonderful that is!

I’ve just lain down with the notebook and started pondering, then I glance at my watch and it’s already ten to two! You’re waiting for me. Now I’ll slip into my rubber boots, put on my old raincoat and set off – along our path. First to the corner, where
my neighbour cultivates his tea roses behind the fence, then through the forest to the bridge over the ravine, and from there I can already see the roof of your dacha. I’m particularly fond of that path through our forest. I love the way you’re amazed every time I know the names of the plants. What’s so special about that? Anyone can do it.

My love! Wait a little bit longer!

I’m coming!

My love, my dearest, my only one!

I woke early and lay there, thinking about you.

My darling, this will be a very joyful letter.

But to begin with I have to tell you everything in the right order – and first of all that the whole city has been smothered in snow.

I woke up in the middle of the night and remembered that I didn’t have to go to work today and could carry on calmly wallowing in bed. And it was only then I felt how tired I had become over the last days and weeks. And years. But there was a strange glow outside the window. I glanced out – everything was covered in snow. I lay down again, wrapped myself up like a chrysalis, the way you like, and looked out through the hole at the snow outside the window. And then how sweet it was to go back to sleep again!

When I woke up out of habit early in the morning, while it was still dark, I heard the spades scraping outside the window and remembered that snow had fallen, and again I was deluged with
such great happiness! I fell asleep again, this time until midday, I slept to my heart’s content.

I sat down to breakfast facing the falling snow.

Afterwards I just sat there like that in front of the window, as if it was a stage, and watched the wet flakes striking against the glass and slowly slipping down.

I brewed myself some strong tea. No need to run anywhere. That’s so good!

The winter outside the window somehow makes the reddish flush of the tea in the glass especially warm.

I couldn’t wait, I went for a walk. I tumbled out into the falling snow.

I walk along and the fresh clean smell makes me crazy.

The day has gone crazy at the smell too, as if it has forgotten its part and is ad-libbing wildly.

And the entire city is completely out of its mind.

The road junction has snow porridge in its mouth and it’s mumbling something.

The statue used to have dark hair, but now it’s an albino.

They wondered where the Abominable Snowman lives, and here he is in our little garden square.

The heavy branches sag down, trying to grab people by the scruff of the neck, everyone has to stoop.

How wonderful to have winter and snow! Especially the snow! It’s come to create everything anew.

The park was hollow, bare and open for half the winter, but now it’s palatial architecture in snow – arches, towers, domes. The trees hang down so low over the road that the cars seem to be driving in through snowy gates.

And in general the snowfall transforms everything into a single whole. There was everyone in the world all living on their own,
but now every bench and pillar, not to mention the postbox, understands the plenitude and seamless unity of existence.

A passer-by hides from the snow under his umbrella. The only wise guy around. All the others simply dust themselves off and pat themselves down with their mittens, but on their shoulders and caps the snow rises like yeasty flapjacks.

In every courtyard children are rolling big balls of snow and making snowmen.

The snow is wet and sticky. I scooped some up in my fist and couldn’t resist it – I bit off a little chunk.

The snow skips about lightly and impetuously as it falls. It infects the entire city, but especially little boys and dogs. In the school yard the senior pupils fight snowball battles, thrust handfuls of snow into each other’s faces and down each other’s necks. Scarves and caps lie about on the ground. A mongrel dog barks and chases the snowballs, snorting and biting at the snow.

I stood there, watching the dog dash joyfully backwards and forwards, spraying saliva about. Suddenly it stopped right in front of me and glanced up at me in surprise, as if to say: Don’t just stand there, come on! – then it yawned, snapped its jaws together loudly and went dashing off, felling snowflakes with its tail and barking resoundingly in its happiness.

I walk on, without knowing where I’m going. What difference does it make, when it’s tumbling down so thick?

Herringbone prints from shoes on the pavement – like New Year trees.

Black clearings thawed round the manhole covers.

The street name signs have been plastered over.

The snow flies raggedly, on a slant, and builds up unevenly at an oblique angle on the windowsills.

And the wet snow only sticks to the trees on one side, they look like they have white trouser stripes.

Some bush with beetroot-red withies comes creeping towards me out of the snow-swirl. You know what it’s called.

And there’s a cyclist, defying the winter. The sticky snow coils onto the tyres of the bike. Now he’s jumped off to push it by the handlebars.

I walk past a building site – the dirty, wet planks of the boardwalk under the awning spring pleasantly as I walk on them, tossing me up at every step.

A hairdresser has slipped out for a smoke, she catches the snowflakes with the glowing end of her cigarette, and there are white flakes in her hair already. Someone came out and a cloying whiff of hairdressing chemicals escaped through the door. How can anyone breathe that all day long?

Then I walked past a kindergarten and glanced in through the window.

I stand and watch mums and grannies unfolding costumes and dressing up children – rabbits, snowflakes, foxes, bears. One boy has put on a wolf mask and he’s scaring everybody. A little girl pulls on a long white sock, hopping about on one little foot.

In another window there’s a huge festive New Year tree, flaring up brightly, then fading away. In the corner presents are being stuffed into a sack.

And in the last window Grandfather Frost is fastening the hook on the back of Snow Maiden’s dress. She’s gazing into the mirror and putting on her lipstick. Alive, even though she was sculpted out of snow. But nobody’s surprised.

I went home.

I was sorting out papers and started thinking, flapping the pile against my lips. And something really stupid happened – I
cut my lip on the edge of one sheet. A nasty little cut, very painful.