The Light and the Dark by Mikhail Shishkin

Author:Mikhail Shishkin [Shishkin, Mikhail]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2013-03-27T23:00:00+00:00

Yesterday as I’m walking away from the tram stop, I see her – coming towards me.

I cross over to the other side – and so does she.

She comes straight towards me. We halt face to face.

Well-groomed, with her hair styled, she looks a lot younger. Like a different woman. Her hair is brushed back and up and I can see her ears – with attached earlobes.

She doesn’t say anything. One of her eyelids suddenly starts fluttering nervously.

I say:

‘Hello, Ada Lvovna.’

The eyelid twitches.

‘Alexandra, I need to talk to you. You have to listen to me. I have to tell you.’

But I say to her:

‘Don’t.’

Don’t tell me anything, Ada Lvovna!

I know everything.

Husband trouble.

And many years before all this, this husband’s wife used to think: Who needs me like this?

When the swelling started around your nipples, you were delighted, after all, you had shot right up already and there was still nothing. You looked like an eight-year-old female Gulliver.

You started thinking about Gulliver – how did he defecate? And what did the poor Lilliputians do with all that stuff? He pissed once, and it was enough to extinguish a major conflagration. What mountains all those bulls, cows and sheep every morning must have been transformed into! You suddenly sensed some big lie, but not because there aren’t any people that big.

Your mum’s second husband was a failure. Failures always marry a widow with a child.

Once, in the distant days of his youth, he had sent his symphony to a famous composer and got no reply. Later, at a concert, he recognised his own music in the master’s new work. After that he took his revenge on mankind by doing nothing. He earned a bit of money as an accompanist at a dance class, warming his chilly fingers on the radiator.

He always used to read out intriguing facts from the newspapers and he loved figures. Say, for instance, in the last five thousand years a certain number of people have killed themselves. No one knows exactly how many. But in actual fact the figure is real. It exists. It’s alive. Objective and independent. The way undiscovered America used to exist once upon a time before Columbus. If we don’t know something, if we can’t feel it or hear it and we can’t taste it, that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

According to the statistics, suicide occurs most often at two or three in the afternoon and eleven or twelve at night.

The failure thought that by getting married he had acted nobly and in return had received only ingratitude. When he fell in love, he said to his beloved:

‘I’m so glad that you appeared in my life – my salvation.’

But many years later he thought:

‘Can a woman really be your salvation? If you’re swimming, she’ll help you keep on swimming – if you’re drowning, she’ll only help you to drown.’

You kept expecting your mum’s husband to start looking at you in a non-fatherly way, but he never did.

Your mother tapped away the whole day on a typewriter.

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