The Light and the Dark (7 page)

He taught me to fly – we were playing, but it all felt as if it was real to me. We’re not on the sofa, we’re in the cockpit. The technician takes hold of one of the propeller’s blades and spins it hard.

‘Contact!’ he shouts and jumps back from the engine.

I shout back briskly:

‘We have contact!’

The engine sneezes several times, coughs out a cloud of blue smoke and picks up revs. They pull the chocks out from under the wheels. We taxi to the start. A wave of the starter’s white flag. Daddy gives it full throttle. The swirling eddies driven by the propeller set the plane quivering and it starts to move. A furious, headlong run-up, faster and faster. On the uneven field the plane waggles its wings over the small tussocks, like a tightrope-walker waving his arms to keep his balance.

Daddy draws the joystick smoothly towards himself and the tail lifts off the ground, levelling up. He pulls the joystick towards himself more firmly, the plane is already hanging in the air, and I can feel us gaining height with all my body. The ground slips away from under my feet and I get a cold feeling in my chest.

Down below I can see the plane’s shadow chasing after us. The roar of the engine becomes softer, the hangars and garages on the airfield below us get smaller and smaller until they look like children’s bricks scattered across the field, like little houses from my construction kit.

Daddy presses on the pedal, pulls the joystick right or left and the plane promptly gyrates, flipping into a right or left roll. It’s as if the plane isn’t spinning, but the earth and the sky are spinning round it.

We climb up above the clouds and fly under a glittering sun and our shadow, diving into the holes in the clouds, can barely keep up with us.

I look at Daddy as he shifts his intent gaze from dial to dial and confidently steers our plane into the breaks between the colossal, shapeless masses of clouds and I realise I love him more than anything else in the world, more than Mummy, more than myself.

Daddy used to tell me about his comrades who had been killed.

He said:

‘Everyone wants to live, but not everyone comes back from a flight.’

His friends’ engine cut out on a steep turn and they heard the silence that airmen fear so much. In front of their eyes the glittering disc of the propeller disappeared and its three blades stuck out like sticks. The fliers couldn’t hold on as far as the airfield and they started trying to spot a suitable landing place. The pilot asked the navigator:

‘What do you think, old chap, will we make it?’

The navigator answered:

‘We’ve got to! Otherwise my theatre tickets will go to waste.’

There was nowhere to land, they had to jump with their parachutes. But there were villages all around, with people living in
them. The airmen could save themselves, but where would the abandoned plane crash and what damage would it cause?

The pilot ordered the navigator to jump, but he didn’t abandon his friend. They didn’t jump and tried to steer the plane as far away from the houses as possible.

The shattered plane and its dead crew were only found the next day. Scattered wreckage, twisted wings, bent propeller blades, a tail pointing up at the sky. Something had obviously gone wrong with their elevation rudder. They had both grabbed hold of the joystick in a vain attempt to straighten the plane up.

Daddy took me to the cemetery, there were lots of graves there marked with propellers instead of crosses. Handsome young faces looked out from the photographs in their hubs.

One day Daddy was given a special assignment. He had to pick up a woman who was expecting a difficult birth from a remote weather station and deliver her to hospital. A snowstorm blew up and he had to make a forced landing on the ice of a frozen river. And one of his plane’s ski props was broken too. Daddy showed me with his hand how he landed on just one ski. The aircraft skidded across the ice as if it was performing an arabesque. As it lost speed, it stopped responding to the controls, the wing with no support dipped down and scraped on the ice, the plane swung round sharply, like the leg of a compass, and stopped dead. The blizzard started covering them over with snow, Daddy made something like a cave under the wing and they sat there for two days until they were found. The woman kept screaming all the time, and then she started giving birth and Daddy had to deliver the baby.

Every time Daddy flew away, he stuffed my old mitten into his pocket, that was his good luck charm. He told me that on that flight when they were waiting for help on the river and didn’t
know if anyone would come or not, it was my mitten that saved him.

When he flew away, if I saw a plane in the sky I always thought: What if that’s him? And I used to wave to him. But the plane was way up high, like a spider in an invisible web.

I was never afraid for him – what was there to be afraid of, if he had my mitten? It would preserve and protect him.

He used to tell very interesting stories about the life of the Evenks. They call themselves ‘chavchiv’ – the reindeer people. Several times he had to stay in genuine
yaranga
tents and he was amazed at the way these reindeer people could build themselves a warm, comfortable house of whale ribs and reindeer skins anywhere at all in just a few minutes.

I remember, when my father was telling me about how he had to spend the night in one of these
yarangas
in the tundra and he was offered a marrow bone to gnaw as a special treat, Mummy looked out of the kitchen and asked if it was true that according to the reindeer people’s laws of hospitality, the host offered a guest his wife for the night. I thought I heard a strange note in her voice, as if she doubted the truth of his stories, and I felt terribly offended. But Daddy laughed and said of course the host had offered him his wife, but she was old and covered in sores, her hair was matted together into felt and it was teeming with parasites, which is hardly surprising, since the reindeer people never wash even once from the cradle to the grave.

Sometimes Daddy flew away for a long time, but when he stayed at home he used to read me something every evening at bedtime. I had my favourite books about various amazing countries, but my most favourite was about the kingdom of Prester John. I could listen to it over and over again.

When he read, he was transformed, as if he wasn’t reading a printed book, but runes on palm fronds and sheep’s shoulder blades. He tied my pullover round his head like a turban, sat there cross-legged and spoke in a voice that wasn’t his.

‘It is I, Prester John, Ruler of Rulers, King of the Naked-Wise, Lord of all Lords. I dwell in the Capital of all Capitals, the paramount city of all lands, inhabited and uninhabited, and my palace is an immensely high tower that astrologers ascend at night in order to learn the future. I travel across my lands in a small tower on the back of a she-elephant. And the rivers here flow one way during the day and the other way during the night.’

He didn’t even need the book, he already knew everything off by heart, and he made up even more – and every time I listened to those strange and amazing words with my heart in my mouth.

‘In my country there are born and do live camels with two humps and with one, hippopotami, crocodiles, metagalarinariae, giraffes, panthers, onagers, lions both white and black, mute cicadas, gryphons and lamias. Here also are born imperishable people, the unicorn beast, the parrot bird, the ebony tree, cinnamon, pepper and the fragrant reed. And I have a daughter, the Queen of Queens, the Empress of Life. And my kingdom is her kingdom.’

When he spoke these words, everything around me – our room, and the chandelier with the bulb that was always burned out, and the pile of newspapers on the windowsill, and the noisy town outside the window – all of that became unreal, but Prester John’s country was real, and Prester John himself was real, he wasn’t sitting on the edge of my little bed any more, he was in a small tower on the back of a she-elephant, surveying his domains with a regal gaze.

And the kingdom of Prester John really did stretch out on all sides as far as the eye could see and in it there lived imperishable people and mute cicadas.

My Sashenka!

Don’t be angry, there was absolutely no time to write.

So, at last nobody wants anything from me. I have a moment all to myself.

Why are kisses always saved until the end of a letter?

I kiss you immediately, and everywhere, all over!

All right, I’m pulling myself together.

Yesterday there was shooting practice, and you can’t possibly imagine what a long face our Commode pulled when the flagmen signalled that three of the five bullets I fired had hit the ‘head target’ from four hundred paces!

In a case like that, how can I help thinking about chance?

After all, everything in the world consists of chance events. Why were we born in this century and not, say, in the thirty-fourth? Why in the best of all possible worlds and not in the worst? And perhaps right now, at this very moment, there’s a man sitting somewhere, reading a book about bell-ringing. Why didn’t the bullets go flying into the past or the future, instead of into that unfortunate target’s head, already full of holes? After all, if

There, you see, Sashka my dear, they didn’t give me a chance to finish, and now I have to hurry to let you know that I’m not just anybody any more! See what a high-flier I am! From now on
I’ll be polishing the seat of my pants in staff headquarters, writing out orders and death notices. The old man dumbfounded me completely. He summoned me and appointed me general staff clerk, since I’m schooled in reading and writing. I draw myself erect, raise my elbow so it juts into that sunset of ours in the dusty little window, with the tips of the fingers in the side-lock of my wig:

‘Your commandership!’

‘Well, what do you want?’

‘I won’t cope. My writing’s incomprehensible.’

But he says:

‘Well now, Sonny Jim, you don’t need to write comprehensibly, just sincerely! Do you understand?’

He pours a glass of vodka.

Hands it to me.

‘To your new appointment!’

I drink it.

He gives me a piece of black bread with some herring and onion.

‘When I was your age, Sonny Jim, that was when I suddenly understood everything. And ever since I’ve spent my whole life trying to understand what it was I understood then. Take some of the fatty bacon, it’s superb! And remember: any word is smarter than the pen. And don’t let the death notices upset you. The clerk before you kept getting upset all the time. When he drank a lot, he used to slump on my shoulder and cry like a little kid: “Kolya, I’m sorry I haven’t been killed, I haven’t been on the front line even once in the whole war …” He was asking me to forgive him, but it was more like he was talking to everyone whose death notice he’d ever had to write.’

Guess where I am right now.

In the bathroom.

Remember how King David arrived in the bathhouse and suddenly saw that he was naked and there wasn’t anything there.

Well, now I’m naked too and there isn’t anything there.

I’m lying here contemplating my own navel.

What a wonderful occupation!

Your belly button’s a knot, I remember.

But mine’s a ring.

Mummy’s is a ring too.

A ring in an endless chain. And it turns out that I’m suspended on this chain of people by this ring. Or, rather, this chain carries on further, doesn’t it? In both directions. And everything is suspended from it.

It’s so strange that this little ring in my belly really is the navel of the world. And the chain that runs through it is the axis of the Universe, with all of creation moving round it – right now, at a speed of millions of dark years.

No, he might have been naked and there wasn’t anything, but I’ve got the whole of creation from beginning to end in just my belly button!

And another thing I’ve remembered is, when I had chickenpox as a child and my whole body was covered with little pimples, Daddy said:

‘Just look at all the stars that have come out on you!’

And I played a game that the rash on my stomach was a constellation
and my belly button was the moon. Many years later I saw that was the way the ancient Egyptians used to represent the sky goddess, Nut, who had obviously come down with my starry chickenpox.