Letter-Book (Письмовник)
by Mikhail Shishkin
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***
Sample translation by Andrew Bromfield
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 before the bang – all the words that still hadn’t been said, 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 tee-shirt.
There was this bundle of intense warmth and light.
And 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 to 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 hanging 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 despatch 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 quick 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 want 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 forever 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 plastic tablecloth 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 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. It’s 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 Generalissimus 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 a forage cap for you?”
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.
And I suddenly 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 grab 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 with 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.
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 forever. 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, than 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!
I remember you, and the world is divided into before the first time and after.
Our meetings by the monument.
I peeled an orange and my palm stuck to yours.
You came straight from the clinic, with a fresh filling in your tooth and the smell of the dentist’s surgery coming out of your mouth. You let me touch the filling with my finger.
And here we are at the dacha, whitewashing the ceiling, after we’ve covered the furniture and the floor with old newspapers. We walked around barefoot, with the newspapers sticking to our feet, and got whitewash smeared all over us. We scrape the white out of each other’s hair. And our tongues and teeth are all black from bird cherries.
Then when we were hanging the net curtains up, we ended up on different sides, and I wanted so much for you to kiss me through the netting!
And then there you sit, drinking tea, burning your tongue on it and blowing to get it to cool down, taking little sips and slurping so loudly, not at all worried about it being impolite, as they impressed on me when I was little. And I start slurping too. Because I’m not little any longer. And everything’s allowed.
Then there was the lake.
We walk down the steep slope towards the waterlogged bank, feeling the damp, spongy path under our bare feet.
We waded out into open water, free of duckweed. The water’s murky and full of sunlight. And cold, from the springs that feed it from below.
And then, in the water, our bodies touched for the first time. On the shore I was afraid to touch you, but here I pounced on you and wrapped my legs round your thighs, trying to pull you under. When I was little I used to play like that with daddy at the seaside. You try to break free, you try to pull my hands apart, but I won’t give in. I kept trying to duck your head right under the water. Your eyelashes stick together, you swallow lots of water, you laugh and splutter and bellow and snort.
Afterwards we sit in the sun.
Your nose is peeling, the skin is flaking off the sunburn.
We watch the bell tower on the opposite shore rinsing its ragged image in the water.
I sit there in front of you almost naked, but somehow I only feel shy about my feet and my toes – I buried them in the sand.
I singed an ant with my cigarette, and you came to its defence.
We walk home the short way, straight across the field. Grasshoppers jumping about in the tall grass molest my skirt.
On the veranda you sat me in a wicker chair and started brushing the sand off my feet. Like daddy. When we came back from the beach, he used to wipe my feet down just like that, so there wouldn’t be any sand left between my toes.
And everything was suddenly so clear. So simple. So inevitable. So welcome.
I stand there facing you – in my wet swimsuit, with my arms lowered. I look into your eyes. You took hold of the straps and pulled the swimsuit off.
I’d been ready for this for a long time, I was waiting, but I was afraid, and you were even more afraid, and everything would have happened much sooner, but that time, back in spring, remember, I took your hand and pulled it down there, but you jerked it away. You were quite different now.
Do you know what I was afraid of? Pain? No. There wasn’t any pain. And there wasn’t any blood either. I thought, what if you thought you weren’t my first?
It was evening before I remembered I’d forgotten to hang my swimsuit up to dry. It was lying there abandoned, clumped up, wet and cold. It smelled of pond scum.
I snuggled against you and kissed your peeling nose. There was no one in the house, but we whispered anyway. And for the first time I could look right into your eyes, without being afraid or embarrassed about anything – brown, with hazel and green flecks on the iris.
Absolutely everything suddenly changed – I could touch everything that only a moment ago was untouchable, not mine. A moment ago it was someone else’s, but now it was mine, as if my body had expanded and melded with yours. And now I couldn’t feel myself except through you. My skin only existed where you touched it.
That night you slept, but I couldn’t. I wanted so much to cry, but I was afraid I’d wake you. I got up and went to the bathroom, and cried to my heart’s content.
And in the morning, at the washbasin – a sudden surge of foolish happiness at the sight of our two toothbrushes in the same glass. Remember, back in town already – you locked yourself in the toilet, and I was walking by to the kitchen and I couldn’t resist it, I squatted down by the door and started whispering into the keyhole:
“I love you!”
I whispered it really quietly. Then louder. And you didn’t realise what I was whispering to you, and you muttered back:
“Just a moment, just a moment.”
As if I needed the bathroom.
It’s you I need, you!
And then there you are, sitting in front of the oven with a spoon in one hand and an open cookery book in the other. Something suddenly came over you – you said you’d cook everything yourself and I mustn’t interfere. And I kept coming into the kitchen on purpose, as if I needed something, but really only to look at you. Remember? You were kneading minced meat, and I couldn’t help myself, I stuck my hands in the saucepan too – it was so wonderful to knead that fragrant, beefy pulp together, and the mince oozed out between our fingers!
On the whole, you didn’t get along too well with ladles, oven mitts and frying pans – everything came to life in your hands and tried its very best to wriggle free or pop up in the air or slither away.
I remember every single little thing.
We lay there clasped together and couldn’t let go – and that semicircle my teeth left on your shoulder.
Our legs intertwine, our feet nestle against each other, sweet-talking, and our cream-slippery fingers slither into each other.
In the tram people turn to look at us: your left fist is up beside my nose, and I’m kissing the first knuckle on the forefinger – the one that’s July.
On the way up to your place, the lift seems to creep along so unbearably slowly.
Your shoes under a chair, with the socks stuffed into them.
That was when you kissed me there for the first time, and I just couldn’t relax. When you’re growing up you know you mustn’t touch that place. It’s only little boys who think little girls have a secret between their legs, but that place is full of slimy discharges, noxious vapours and bacteria.
In the morning I couldn’t find my knickers, they’d disappeared. I searched through everything and couldn’t find them. I still think you pinched them and hid them somewhere. I left without them. I’m walking along the street, the wind’s creeping up under my skirt, and I have the incredible feeling that it’s you all around me.
I know I exist, but I need proofs all the time, I need to be touched. Without you I’m an empty pair of pyjamas, thrown across a chair.
My own arms and legs, my own body, have only become dear to me because of you – because you have kissed it, because you love it.
I look in the mirror and catch myself thinking: that’s the one he loves, isn’t it? And I like myself. But I never used to like myself before.
I close my eyes and imagine that you’re here.
I can touch you and hug you.
I kiss your eyes, and suddenly my lips can see.
And I want so much, like I did then, to run the end of my tongue from one end to the other of the little seam you have down there, as if you were a bare-naked little boy who’d been stuck together out of two separate halves.
I read somewhere that the smelliest parts of the body are closest to the soul.
Now I’ve turned the light out so I can finally curl up into a tight little ball and fall asleep, and while I was writing to you, clouds have covered over the sky. As if someone has wiped everything off the school blackboard with a dirty rag and there’s nothing left but white streaks.
I have a feeling everything’s going to be all right. Destiny is just trying to frighten us, but it will preserve and protect us against genuine misfortune.
***
Sashka, my dear one!
I bluff and bluster, but in reality without you, without your letters, I would have died ages ago, or at least stopped being myself – I don’t know which is worse.
I wrote to you about our tormentor, the one I dubbed “Commodus”, after the infamously bloody son of Marcus Aurelius – the nickname has stuck, but the soldiers have shortened it to “Commode”. No doubt because of his obsession with shit. Today he made a special effort to explain to me exactly how life works. I don’t want to write about it. I want to forget, think about something else for a while, about Marcus Aurelius, for instance.
I don’t understand what connection there can be between Marcus Aurelius, who died a million years ago, who everyone has heard about, and me, who no one has heard about, sitting here in my prickly official-issue underpants.
But on the other hand, here’s what he wrote: No man is happy until he considers himself happy.
Probably that’s what we have in common – we’re two happy men. And what difference does it make that he died one day, and I’m still here? Compared to our happiness, death seems like a mere trifle. He stepped straight through it to me, as if it was a doorway.
This feeling of happiness comes from the realisation that none of all this around me is real. What is real is that first time I was at your place and I went into the bathroom to wash my hands and saw your sponge there and felt so intensely aware that it had touched your breasts.
My Sashenka! We were together, but I’ve only really begun to understand that here.
And now I remember it all and I’m astonished I didn’t appreciate it all properly then.
Remember, the fuses blew at your dacha, you held the candle for me and I stood on a chair, fiddling with my makeshift repair. I glanced at you, and you looked so incredible in the semi-darkness, with the light from the candle flame washing over your face! And the spark of the candle was reflected in your eyes.
Or look at this, we’re walking through our park, and you keep running off the asphalt strip of the path, tearing up bunches of grass and bringing different kinds of seed heads to show me.
“What’s this? And what’s this called?”
You walk on, and your heels are smeared with mud.
Your poor toe is all blue – someone trod on it and crushed it in the tram, and you’re wearing open-toed shoes.
Then I see the lake.
The water has turned thick, overgrown with duckweed and clouds.
You walked right up to the edge, lifted your skirt and stepped into the water, up to your ankles – to try it. You shouted:
“It’s cold!”
You pulled one foot out and ran it across the surface, as if you were ironing out creases.
I see it all as if it was happening right now, not then.
You got undressed, tied up your long, loose hair, and you walk into the water, checking the bun on your head several times.
You turn over on your back and flail at the lake with your legs, and your heels twinkle pink in the foamy spray.
Then you throw out your arms and legs, lying there like a star, the bun on your head comes undone and your long hair spreads out in all directions.
Later, on the shore, I glanced stealthily – so you wouldn’t notice – at the place between your legs where the wet curls were peeping out from under the elastic of your swimsuit.
And now I see your room.
You take off your shoes, leaning down one shoulder, then the other.
I kiss the palms of your hands, and you say:
“Don’t, they’re dirty!”
You clasp my neck in your arms and kiss me, biting my lips.
Suddenly you yelped.
I was really frightened.
“What’s wrong?”
“You caught my hair under your elbow.”
You leaned down over me, touched my eyelids and lashes with your nipple. You pulled your hair over both of us like a tent.
I pull off your knickers, they’re like a child’s – cream-coloured with little bows – and you help me, you raise your knees.
I kiss you on the spot where the skin is most tender and sensitive – on the inside of the thighs.
I bury my nose in the dense, warm undergrowth.
The bed creaks so desperately that we move to the floor.
You groaned under me and arched up in a bridge.
We lie there and the draught feels good on our sweaty legs.
Your back is covered with delicate fluff and patterns from the coarse ribs of the Chinese straw mat. I run my finger along your sharp vertebrae.
I take a pen off the table and start joining up the moles on your back with an inky line. It tickles you. Afterwards you twist and turn in front of the mirror, looking over your shoulder to see how it turned out. I want to wash it off, but you say:
“Leave it!”
“Are you going to walk about like that?”
“Yes.”
You flung your feet up on the wall and suddenly started running across the wallpaper in little steps, you arched up, braced your elbows on the straw mat and froze with your legs up like that. I couldn’t resist it, I wanted to kiss you there – you folded up straightaway, collapsed.
I’m leaving, and you’ve come out to show me to the door – in just a little singlet, with nothing underneath it. You suddenly start feeling embarrassed and pull down the hem at the front with your hand.
On our last night I woke up and listened to your snuffling.
You were used to sleeping like a chrysalis, you wrapped the blanket round your head and only left a little air hole for breathing. I lie there, looking into that hole. And you’re so funny – you’ve gone to sleep with a chocolate sweet stuffed in your cheek, and there’s chocolate dribbling out of your mouth.
I lie there, keeping watch over your breathing.
I listen closely to your rhythm. And I try to breath together with you. In – out , in – out. In – out.
Slowly – slowly. Like this.
In.
Out.
You know, I’d never felt so light and easy as at that moment. I looked at you, so beautiful, so serene and sleepy, I touched the hairs peeping out from your blanket cocoon, and I wanted so much to protect you from that night, from any drunken night-time yelling outside the window, from the whole world.
My Sashenka! Sleep! Sleep well! I’m here, I’m breathing with you.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
***
I peeped into the letter box – again nothing from you.
I have to prepare for a seminar tomorrow, and my head’s empty. I don’t care. I’m going to brew some coffee, pull my feet up on the armchair and talk to you right now. Listen.
Remember how good it felt telling each other things about our childhood? You know, there’s so much I still haven’t told you yet.
But now I’m chewing on my pen and I don’t know where to start.
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, post cards, 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 immediately decided to have another child. To take his place.
And a little girl was born. Me.
My mother couldn’t accept her child, she didn’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 baby bed three of the wooden bars had been sawn out so I could crawl through. But it was his bed, 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 a 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 fine 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 fine 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 fairytales: 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 off my plait 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 the fancy took her. 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 it 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 sewer 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, desolated. 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 a “D”. And even worse, the teacher used to read them out in class and sigh:
“Sashenka, life is going to be hard for you.”
And she gave me a D, because I always wrote about the wrong thing. They gave us 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 that didn’t mean much. 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 longest-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!” And 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 pulled 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 scratch 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 over 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.
I walk past your neighbours on the corner, peep over the fence at the roses – huge and heavy, like heads of cabbage. They’re even more fragrant in the rain.
I felt afraid to walk up the steps onto the porch, I folded the umbrella and sneaked across to the veranda windows. I went up on tiptoe and saw you there inside the rainy windows. You’re lying on the divan, with your bandaged foot up on its back, reading some thick volume
You see, I wished you ill, and you fell off your bike into the ditch.
Now you know why you twisted your ankle that evening and ended up lounging about in bed.
I stood there in the rain and looked at you. You sensed something, looked up, saw me, smiled.