Read Online The Light and the Dark by Mikhail Shishkin - Free Book Online

their fur too.
    That’s me – a water monkey. Sitting here and dreaming that you’ll come back and we’ll get into the bath together.
    I look at myself and feel worried because I’ve got so much hair in the wrong places. You said you liked it, but now I think you simply didn’t want to upset me. Tell me, how can you possibly like it if I have hair here, and here, and there, and even down there?
    I sit here pulling the hairs out with tweezers. It hurts!
    Then I start imagining some cave girl pulling out her hairs with two seashells instead of tweezers. And she scrapes away the hairs under her arms and on her legs with blades made from flint or animal horns.
    Yanka’s lucky, her hairs are light-coloured and small everywhere.
    My love, what am I talking about? Why am I saying this? Here I am talking nonsense, and you put up with it all.
    Yanka sends you her greetings, she called in yesterday.
    She told me about her new beau, it was very funny. Can you imagine, an old man has fallen in love with her and proposed!
    He tells her:
    ‘My dear child, I was falling in love with women before your parents were even born.’
    Yanka showed me the way he went down on his knees in front of her and asked her to marry him, grabbing hold of her legs and pressing himself up against her, and she looked down on his bald head: one side of her felt so sorry for him she could have cried, but the other side really wanted to give him a flick with her fingerand she only just managed to stop herself!
    She refused him, naturally, but she’s beaming as brightly as if she’d won a medal.
    He worked all his life as an engraver and he entertained her with stories about all the inscriptions he had made on watches and cigarette cases.
    Just imagine what he gave her as a present! He hands her this little case, like one for a ring. She opens it – and there’s a grain of rice inside! He’d written something on that grain for her. He said:
    ‘Yanochka, my dear! This is for you, the most precious thing that I have!’
    Afterwards at home, she took a magnifying glass to read what he’d written, but the grain of rice slipped out of her fingers and skipped off out of sight. She searched and searched but couldn’t find it. So she still doesn’t know what he scratched on it.
    What do they all see in Yanka? She has an overbite like a rabbit. And jug ears. She hides them under her hair.
    I’m writing this to you now in the room, I’ve wrapped myself in a blanket and I’m sitting on the divan.
    You were the first to tell me I was beautiful. Well, apart from Daddy, of course. But I didn’t believe him. I believed Mummy. She called me her ‘fright-face’.
    She used to wear her rippling, shimmering Chinese silk gown with the sky-blue dragons. We would pull our feet up on the old, deep sofa, make ourselves comfortable and whisper together. We talked about everything in the world, she told me about everything. How I was born, for instance – I didn’t want to come out, and they had to do a Caesarean section. I touched the hard scar on her stomach with my fingers and it was strange to think that was where I’d come from. It still feels strange even now.
    And we talked about the first time too.
    ‘It has to happen beautifully,’ she said. ‘And only with someone who is worthy of it. The most important thing is you mustn’t regret that it happened. Perhaps you won’t marry him, perhaps you won’t stay together afterwards – anything can happen, but you mustn’t regret that night.’
    I believed in ‘fright-face’ more than what Daddy said, even though she was always constantly abusing me and kept saying I had no taste, I dressed badly, I made conversation badly, even laughed badly. I always felt guilty with her. I could never even imagine that she was being too strict or unfair with me. He saw the virtues in me and she saw the shortcomings.
    Daddy never even slapped me once, but I got the belt and slaps from her right through my childhood. One