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

about.
    He used to bring back little figures carved out of walrus tusks, jewellery made of teeth strung on twine, jars of cloudberries, a reindeer skin.
    As he put me to bed, he would tell me how as a child he had dreamed of being a flier – one day he had seen a plane make a forced landing in a field beside their village.
    As an ordinary village boy, it wasn’t easy for him to achieve his goal – he had to study a lot. And in general life in the flying school – he used to call it the ‘boot camp’ – wasn’t easy. There was an infantry college there too, and there were always terrible fights between them in the town when they had leave. They used to fight with their belts and Daddy almost had his eye put out by a buckle – he used to show me the scar on his forehead and I pitied him and stroked the white bump with my finger.
    One day in his boot camp he was placed under arrest – put in choky, he said. And this is what for. In the winter he was supposedto stand watch with his combat weapon and guard the planes. He was walking round the hangar and he thought he caught a glimpse of someone in the darkness. But there was no one around, just darkness, with everything dripping and breathing in the thaw. He put his finger on the trigger, peeped out cautiously round the corner and was immediately struck a heavy blow to the head. The trigger squeezed itself. There was the crash of a shot, everything was thrown into turmoil, the officers were woken up and came running – and it turned out the wet snow on the roof of the hangar was melting, and at the very moment when Daddy stuck his head out, a big chunk had fallen on it.
    He taught me to fly – we were playing, but it all felt as if it was real to me. We’re not on the sofa, we’re in the cockpit. The technician takes hold of one of the propeller’s blades and spins it hard.
    ‘Contact!’ he shouts and jumps back from the engine.
    I shout back briskly:
    ‘We have contact!’
    The engine sneezes several times, coughs out a cloud of blue smoke and picks up revs. They pull the chocks out from under the wheels. We taxi to the start. A wave of the starter’s white flag. Daddy gives it full throttle. The swirling eddies driven by the propeller set the plane quivering and it starts to move. A furious, headlong run-up, faster and faster. On the uneven field the plane waggles its wings over the small tussocks, like a tightrope-walker waving his arms to keep his balance.
    Daddy draws the joystick smoothly towards himself and the tail lifts off the ground, levelling up. He pulls the joystick towards himself more firmly, the plane is already hanging in the air, and I can feel us gaining height with all my body. The ground slips away from under my feet and I get a cold feeling in my chest.
    Down below I can see the plane’s shadow chasing after us. The roar of the engine becomes softer, the hangars and garages on the airfield below us get smaller and smaller until they look like children’s bricks scattered across the field, like little houses from my construction kit.
    Daddy presses on the pedal, pulls the joystick right or left and the plane promptly gyrates, flipping into a right or left roll. It’s as if the plane isn’t spinning, but the earth and the sky are spinning round it.
    We climb up above the clouds and fly under a glittering sun and our shadow, diving into the holes in the clouds, can barely keep up with us.
    I look at Daddy as he shifts his intent gaze from dial to dial and confidently steers our plane into the breaks between the colossal, shapeless masses of clouds and I realise I love him more than anything else in the world, more than Mummy, more than myself.
    Daddy used to tell me about his comrades who had been killed.
    He said:
    ‘Everyone wants to live, but not everyone comes back from a flight.’
    His friends’ engine cut out on a steep turn and they heard the silence that airmen fear so much. In front of their eyes the glittering disc of the