Read Online The Light and the Dark by Mikhail Shishkin - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Mikhail Shishkin
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day they were arguing, and I came up to her from behind to put my arms round her, but she was taking a drink to wash down a tablet and I accidentally jogged her elbow. She spilt the water on herself, then went for me and started beating me and couldn’t stop. Daddy pulled me away.
They used to argue because of me.
Daddy shouted:
‘Why are you always picking on her?’
She answered:
‘What will she grow up like otherwise?’
She went away somewhere for a few days and when she got back she kicked up a fuss because everything was a mess. The next time I tidied everything up before she got back, made everything all bright and shiny, but she was still dissatisfied, in fact even more. Maybe she sensed that Daddy and I could get on perfectly well without her, that when she was away life at home carried on quite normally.
She always kept repeating something she’d read somewhere about life not being a novel, that it wasn’t all a bowl of cherries, in life you couldn’t just do what you wanted and, in general, we weren’t put on earth just to have a good time.
She didn’t like it when I went out, she didn’t like my girlfriends, she hated Yanka. She thought everything bad about me came from her.
Daddy always stood up for me:
‘But she needs friends!’
It all ended with Mummy crying and saying:
‘You always take her side!’
She could feel that there was more between me and Daddy than there was between them. Probably both of us felt that I meant more to my father than she did.
One day I realised exactly what it was I didn’t like about her. She was a woman who had everything right in her life – everything exactly as she wanted it – and it simply couldn’t be any other way. She had always known what she wanted and how to get it. It was the same with furniture and with people. In school she was a star pupil. Her women friends were all miserable, she was always telling them how to live their lives. And inside she despised them because they couldn’t live the right way, because everything about their lives was wrong. And she always stuck photos of our holidays in albums that were logbooks of happiness. She wanted to make me and my father fit her photo-albums. But it didn’t work.
Offers for my father to play parts in films became less and less frequent. He took it hard and went on binges. He didn’t drink at home, but he came home drunk more and more often.
I ask him:
‘Daddy, are you drunk?’
And he answers:
‘No, bunny, I’m pretending.’
They quarrelled as if they didn’t know that angry words can never be taken back and forgotten. They didn’t know that people quarrel with all their strength but only make up half-heartedly, so every time some love is sliced away and there’s less and less of it. Or they did know, but they couldn’t help themselves.
I used to lock myself away from them and simply die from this non-love.
The worst thing of all was the mirror. That non-face, those non-hands. Those non-breasts, untouched even by a suntan, promising to exist, but still not arriving.
And I couldn’t understand how it could have happened that Mummy was a beauty and I was like this.
I used to think how strange it was that this thing was called me.
And what a misfortune it was to be this.
Yanka had already had her first love ages ago, and her second, and her third, and I already believed that I would never have anything. I used to howl silently, staring at the wallpaper.
And then he appeared in our home. He and Daddy were friends from their young days. And now he was a film director and he took Daddy to play a part in his film.
He had ginger hair, and his eyelashes were fiery-red, long and thick. Like ginger pine needles. His hair was monstrously thick in general. If it was hot at the table, he unbuttoned his shirt and rolled up his sleeves, and I could see powerful biceps, covered in freckles. And red wisps stuck out through the open shirt collar on his chest.
I remember he said he’d
They used to argue because of me.
Daddy shouted:
‘Why are you always picking on her?’
She answered:
‘What will she grow up like otherwise?’
She went away somewhere for a few days and when she got back she kicked up a fuss because everything was a mess. The next time I tidied everything up before she got back, made everything all bright and shiny, but she was still dissatisfied, in fact even more. Maybe she sensed that Daddy and I could get on perfectly well without her, that when she was away life at home carried on quite normally.
She always kept repeating something she’d read somewhere about life not being a novel, that it wasn’t all a bowl of cherries, in life you couldn’t just do what you wanted and, in general, we weren’t put on earth just to have a good time.
She didn’t like it when I went out, she didn’t like my girlfriends, she hated Yanka. She thought everything bad about me came from her.
Daddy always stood up for me:
‘But she needs friends!’
It all ended with Mummy crying and saying:
‘You always take her side!’
She could feel that there was more between me and Daddy than there was between them. Probably both of us felt that I meant more to my father than she did.
One day I realised exactly what it was I didn’t like about her. She was a woman who had everything right in her life – everything exactly as she wanted it – and it simply couldn’t be any other way. She had always known what she wanted and how to get it. It was the same with furniture and with people. In school she was a star pupil. Her women friends were all miserable, she was always telling them how to live their lives. And inside she despised them because they couldn’t live the right way, because everything about their lives was wrong. And she always stuck photos of our holidays in albums that were logbooks of happiness. She wanted to make me and my father fit her photo-albums. But it didn’t work.
Offers for my father to play parts in films became less and less frequent. He took it hard and went on binges. He didn’t drink at home, but he came home drunk more and more often.
I ask him:
‘Daddy, are you drunk?’
And he answers:
‘No, bunny, I’m pretending.’
They quarrelled as if they didn’t know that angry words can never be taken back and forgotten. They didn’t know that people quarrel with all their strength but only make up half-heartedly, so every time some love is sliced away and there’s less and less of it. Or they did know, but they couldn’t help themselves.
I used to lock myself away from them and simply die from this non-love.
The worst thing of all was the mirror. That non-face, those non-hands. Those non-breasts, untouched even by a suntan, promising to exist, but still not arriving.
And I couldn’t understand how it could have happened that Mummy was a beauty and I was like this.
I used to think how strange it was that this thing was called me.
And what a misfortune it was to be this.
Yanka had already had her first love ages ago, and her second, and her third, and I already believed that I would never have anything. I used to howl silently, staring at the wallpaper.
And then he appeared in our home. He and Daddy were friends from their young days. And now he was a film director and he took Daddy to play a part in his film.
He had ginger hair, and his eyelashes were fiery-red, long and thick. Like ginger pine needles. His hair was monstrously thick in general. If it was hot at the table, he unbuttoned his shirt and rolled up his sleeves, and I could see powerful biceps, covered in freckles. And red wisps stuck out through the open shirt collar on his chest.
I remember he said he’d
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