Read Online The Light and the Dark by Mikhail Shishkin - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Mikhail Shishkin
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just got back from the seaside, but his fair skin didn’t tan, it only turned pink.
He started coming often.
Daddy showed me a photograph of them fooling about, hanging upside down on a crossbar, I looked at those little boys and even then I thought: before he became a father, was my daddy already my daddy? And was that ginger-haired boy already
him
? And who was that?
He was an old bachelor, and Mummy and Daddy were always joking that they ought to marry him off. Once he said:
‘Once you’ve seen one woman’s breasts, you’ve seen them all.’
But Mummy objected that, far from it, women’s breasts were like snowflakes, no pair was like any other, and they laughed. I found all this strange and unpleasant.
He used to call me Sasha-the-smasher. I felt terribly self-conscious when he was there. Or rather, I divided in two again with him, but the one who was afraid was here and the other one, who wasn’t afraid of anything, used to disappear at the most inconvenient moments.
He would drop into my room, glance at the cover of my book and ask:
‘How’s Troy getting on? Still holding out? Or have they taken it already?’
I plucked up my courage and asked what he wanted to make a film about. He answered:
‘Well, for instance, you’ve been drinking kefir and you’ve got a little white kefir moustache left on your face, and outside in the street – they’ve just written about it in the
Evening News
– a bus has run into the stop where a lot of people were waiting for it, and they’ve been killed. And there’s a direct connection between the little kefir moustache and these deaths. And between everything else in the world too.’
I fell head over heels in love with him.
When he was visiting I used to creep out surreptitiously into the hallway to take a sniff at his long coat, white scarf and hat. He used some eau de cologne that I didn’t know and the smell was ravishing – astringent and manly.
I couldn’t sleep. Now I was dying of love. I wept into my pillow all night, night after night. Every day I wrote in my diary: ‘I love you, I love you, I love you …’ – I covered pages and pages.
It was so painful. I didn’t know what to do with it all.
Mummy saw everything and she suffered with me. She didn’t know how to help. She hugged me and comforted me, stroked my head as if I was a little girl and tried to bring me to my senses.
‘You’re still nothing but a child. You have an intense need to be loved and to give love. This is all wonderful. But who can you love? Your boyfriends have only just stopped playing with toy soldiers. That’s the reason for all these tears cried into the pillow, the envy, the fantasy, the daydreams, the resentment against life, the anger with the whole world, with the people dearest of all to you. As if the people dearest to you are to blame for everything. And then you start inventing everything for yourself.’
She tried to convince me that it was too early for love, that none of it was real yet. I blubbered and asked:
‘And what is real?’
She said:
‘Well, like me and Daddy.’
Daddy used to come into my room, sit on the edge of the bed and smile guiltily for some reason. As if he was to blame. As if it was some serious illness and there was nothing he could do to help me. He sighed and said:
‘Bunny, I love you very much. So why isn’t that enough?’
It used to make me feel so sorry for them!
I started writing him letters. I sent them every day. I didn’tknow what to write, I just sent whatever was a part of me that day in the envelope – a tram ticket, a little feather, a shopping list, a piece of thread, a blade of grass, a fireman beetle.
He answered several times. He wrote something humorous and polite. And then he started sending me stupid things too: a broken shoelace, offcuts of cinema film. Once I took a paper napkin out of the envelope, and wrapped inside it was his tooth that had been pulled out the day before. On the napkin he
He started coming often.
Daddy showed me a photograph of them fooling about, hanging upside down on a crossbar, I looked at those little boys and even then I thought: before he became a father, was my daddy already my daddy? And was that ginger-haired boy already
him
? And who was that?
He was an old bachelor, and Mummy and Daddy were always joking that they ought to marry him off. Once he said:
‘Once you’ve seen one woman’s breasts, you’ve seen them all.’
But Mummy objected that, far from it, women’s breasts were like snowflakes, no pair was like any other, and they laughed. I found all this strange and unpleasant.
He used to call me Sasha-the-smasher. I felt terribly self-conscious when he was there. Or rather, I divided in two again with him, but the one who was afraid was here and the other one, who wasn’t afraid of anything, used to disappear at the most inconvenient moments.
He would drop into my room, glance at the cover of my book and ask:
‘How’s Troy getting on? Still holding out? Or have they taken it already?’
I plucked up my courage and asked what he wanted to make a film about. He answered:
‘Well, for instance, you’ve been drinking kefir and you’ve got a little white kefir moustache left on your face, and outside in the street – they’ve just written about it in the
Evening News
– a bus has run into the stop where a lot of people were waiting for it, and they’ve been killed. And there’s a direct connection between the little kefir moustache and these deaths. And between everything else in the world too.’
I fell head over heels in love with him.
When he was visiting I used to creep out surreptitiously into the hallway to take a sniff at his long coat, white scarf and hat. He used some eau de cologne that I didn’t know and the smell was ravishing – astringent and manly.
I couldn’t sleep. Now I was dying of love. I wept into my pillow all night, night after night. Every day I wrote in my diary: ‘I love you, I love you, I love you …’ – I covered pages and pages.
It was so painful. I didn’t know what to do with it all.
Mummy saw everything and she suffered with me. She didn’t know how to help. She hugged me and comforted me, stroked my head as if I was a little girl and tried to bring me to my senses.
‘You’re still nothing but a child. You have an intense need to be loved and to give love. This is all wonderful. But who can you love? Your boyfriends have only just stopped playing with toy soldiers. That’s the reason for all these tears cried into the pillow, the envy, the fantasy, the daydreams, the resentment against life, the anger with the whole world, with the people dearest of all to you. As if the people dearest to you are to blame for everything. And then you start inventing everything for yourself.’
She tried to convince me that it was too early for love, that none of it was real yet. I blubbered and asked:
‘And what is real?’
She said:
‘Well, like me and Daddy.’
Daddy used to come into my room, sit on the edge of the bed and smile guiltily for some reason. As if he was to blame. As if it was some serious illness and there was nothing he could do to help me. He sighed and said:
‘Bunny, I love you very much. So why isn’t that enough?’
It used to make me feel so sorry for them!
I started writing him letters. I sent them every day. I didn’tknow what to write, I just sent whatever was a part of me that day in the envelope – a tram ticket, a little feather, a shopping list, a piece of thread, a blade of grass, a fireman beetle.
He answered several times. He wrote something humorous and polite. And then he started sending me stupid things too: a broken shoelace, offcuts of cinema film. Once I took a paper napkin out of the envelope, and wrapped inside it was his tooth that had been pulled out the day before. On the napkin he
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