Two Captains

TWO CAPTAINS

By

VENIAMIN KAVERIN

Translation from the Russian

Translated by Bernard Isaacs

/Abridged by the Author/

THE FOREIGN LANGUAGES PUBLISHING HOUSE

MOSCOW

1945

Two captains by Veniamin Kaverin , translated by Bernard Isaacs

BOOK ONE

PART ONE.

Childhood

AUTHOR 'S PREFACE

I recall a spring day in 1921, when Maxim Gorky first invited to his

home a group of young Leningrad writers, myself among them. He lived

in Kronwerk Street and the windows of his flat overlooked

Alexandrovsky Park. We trooped in, so many of us that we took quite a

time getting seated, the bolder ones closer to the host, the more timid

on the ottoman, from which it was a job getting up afterwards—it was so

soft and sagged almost to the floor. I shall always remember that

ottoman of Gorky's. When I lowered myself on to it I saw my

outstretched feet encased in shabby soldier's boots. I couldn't hide them

away. As for getting up-it was not to be thought of. Those boots worried

me until I noticed a pair just as bad, if not worse, on Vsevolod Ivanov,

who was sitting next to Gorky.

Alice in her wonderland underwent strange transformations on

almost every page of Carroll’s book. At one moment she becomes so

small that she freely goes down a rabbit's hole, the next so tall that she

can speak only with birds living in the tree-tops. Something like that

was happening to me at Gorky's place. At one moment I thought I ought

to put in a word of my own in the conversation that had started between

Gorky and my older companions, a word so profound that it would

make them all sit up. The next minute I shrank so small on that low

uncomfortable ottoman that I felt a sort of Tom Thumb, not that brave

little fellow we all know, but a somewhat timorous Tom Thumb, at once

timorous and proud.

Gorky began to speak with approval about Ivanov's latest short story

"The Brazier of Archangel Gabriel". It was this that started me on my

transformations. Ivanov's story was far removed from anything that

interested me in literature, and I took Gorky's high opinion of it as a

harsh verdict on all my hopes and dreams. Gorky read the story out

aloud. His face softened, his eyes grew tender and his gestures betrayed

that benign mood so familiar to everyone who had seen Gorky in

moments of pure rapture.

He dabbed his eyes with his handkerchief and began to speak about

the story. His admiration for it did not prevent him from seeing its

shortcomings. Some of his remarks applied even to the choice of words.

"What is the work of a writer?" he asked, and for the first time I heard

some very curious things. The work of a writer, it appeared, was simply

work, the daily, maybe hourly work of writing, writing on paper or in

one's mind. It meant piles of rough copies, dozens of crossed-out

versions. It meant patience, because talent imposed upon the writer a

peculiar pattern of life in which patience was the most important thing

of all. It was the life of Zola, who used to strap himself to his chair; of

Goncharov, who took about twenty years writing his novel Obryv

(Precipice); of Jack London, who died of fatigue, whatever his doctors

may have said. It was hard life of self-dedication, full of trials and

disappointments. "Don't you believe those who say that it is easy bread,"

Gorky said.

To describe a writer's work in all its diversity is no light task. I may

get nearest to doing this by simply answering the numerous letters I

have received in connection with my novel Two Captains and thus

telling the story of how this one novel at least came to be written.

5

The questions my correspondents ask chiefly concern the two heroes

of my novel—Sanya Grigoriev and Captain Tatarinov. Many of them ask

whether it was my own life that I described in Two Captains. Some

want to know whether the story of Captain Tatarinov was invented by

me. Others search for the name in books of geography and

encyclopaedias and are surprised to find that the activities of Captain

Tatarinov have left no visible traces in the history of Arctic exploration.

Some want to know where Sanya Grigoriev and Katya Tatarinova are

living at present and what rank Sanya was promoted to after the war.

Others ask the author's advice as to what job they should devote their

lives. The mother of a boy, known as the terror of the town, whose

pranks often verged on hooliganism, wrote me that after reading my

novel her son had become a different person, and shortly afterwards I

received a letter from Alexander Rokotov himself which showed that the

boy was intelligent and talented as well as mischievous. Some years

have passed since then, and student Rokotov of the Aviation Institute

has acquired expert knowledge in aircraft construction.

It took me about five years to write this novel. When the first book

was finished the war started, and it was not until 1944 that I returned to

my work. The idea of writing this novel originated in 1937, after I had

met a man whom I have portrayed in Two Captains under the name of

Sanya Grigoriev. This man told me the story of his life-a life filled with

hard work, self-dedication and love of his country. I made it a rule from

the very first page not to invent anything, or hardly anything. In fact,

even such a curious detail as the muteness of little Sanya has not been

invented by me. His mother and father, his sister and friends have been

described exactly as they first appeared to me in the narrative of my

chance acquaintance, who afterwards became my friend. Of some of the

personages of my future book I learned from him very little. Korablev,

for example, was sketchily described in his narrative as a man with a

quick searching eye, which invariably made the schoolchildren speak the

truth; other characteristics were a moustache and a walking stick and a

habit of sitting over a book late into the night. This outline had to be

filled in by the author's imagination in order to create a character study

of a Soviet schoolteacher.

The story, as told to me, was really a very simple one. It was the story

of a boy who had had a cheerless childhood and was brought up by

Soviet society, by people who had taken the place of his dead parents

and had sustained in him the dream he had cherished in his ardent and

honest heart since early childhood.

Nearly all the circumstances of this boy's life, and later of his youth

and manhood, have been retained in the novel. His childhood years,

however, were spent on the Volga and his school years in Tashkent-

places with which I am not very familiar. I have therefore transferred

the early scene of my book to my own hometown, which I have named

Ensk. No wonder my fellow townsmen have so easily deciphered the

town's real name. My school years (the senior forms) were spent in

Moscow, and I have been able to describe in my book a Moscow school

of the early twenties with greater authenticity than I could have

achieved with a Tashkent school.

I might mention another question which my correspondents ask me,

namely, to what extent the novel Two Captains is autobiographical. To

a considerable extent everything, from the first to the last page, that

Sanya Grigoriev has seen has been seen by the author with his own eyes.

6

Our two lives ran parallel, so to speak. But when Sanya Grigoriev's

profession came into the book I had to drop the "personal" material and

make a study of the life of pilots, of which I had known very little until

then.

Invaluable assistance in studying aeronautics was given me by Senior

Lieutenant S. Y. Klebanov, who died the death of a hero in 1943. He was

a talented pilot, a brave officer and a fine, upright man. I was proud of

his friendship. During my work on the second volume I came across

(among the materials of the War Study Commission) testimonials of

Klebanov's brother-officers showing that my high opinion of him was

shared by his comrades.

It is difficult, well nigh impossible, to give any complete answer to the

question of how one or another character of a literary work is created,

especially if the narrative is in the first person. Apart from those

observations, reminiscences, and impressions which I have mentioned,

my book contains thousands of others which had no direct bearings on

the story as told to me and which served as the groundwork for Two

Captains. Imagination, as everyone knows, plays a tremendous role in a

writer's work. And it is on this that one must speak before passing to the

story of my second principal character Captain Tatarinov.

Don't look for his name in encyclopaedias or handbooks. Don't try to

prove, as one pupil did at a geography lesson, that it was Tatarinov and

not Vilkitsky who discovered Novaya Zemlya. For the older of my two

captains I used the story of two brave explorers of the Arctic. One of

them supplied me with the courageous character of a man pure in

thought and clear in aim-qualities that bespeak a noble soul. This was

Sedan. From the other I took the actual story of his voyage. This was

Brusilov. The drift of my St. Maria repeats exactly the drift of Brusilov's

St. Anne. The diaries of Navigating Officer Klimov quoted in my novel

are based on the diary of Albanov, Navigating Officer of the St. Anne,

one of the two surviving members of that tragic expedition. The

historical material alone, however, did not seem enough to me. I knew

that there lived in Leningrad a painter and writer by the name of Nikolai

Pinegin, a friend of Sedov's and one of those who had brought his

schooner the St. Phocas back to the mainland after the death of Sedov.

We met, and Pinegin not only told me a lot more about Sedov and gave

me a vivid picture of the man, but explained the tragedy of his life, the

life of a great explorer slandered and refused recognition by reactionary

circles of society in tsarist Russia. Incidentally, during one of my

meetings with Pinegin the latter treated me to some tinned food which

he had picked up at Cape Flora in 1914, and to my amazement I found it

excellent. I mention this trivial detail because it is characteristic of

Pinegin and of the range of interests into which I was drawn during my

visits to this "Arctic home".

Later, when the first volume had already appeared, Sedov's widow

gave me a lot of interesting information. The summer of 1941 found me

working hard on the second volume, in which I intended to make wide

use of the story of the famous airman Levanevsky. My plan was thought

out, the materials were studied and the first chapters written. V. Y. Vize,

the well-known scientist and Arctic explorer, approved the contents of

the future "Arctic" chapters and told me many interesting things about

the work of search parties. But the war broke out and I had to dismiss

for a long time the very idea of finishing the novel. I wrote front-line

7

reportage, war sketches and short stories. However, the hope of being

able to take up the novel again apparently did not leave me, otherwise I

would not have found myself asking the editor of Izvestia to send me to

the Northern Front. It was there, among the airmen and submarines of

the Northern Fleet that I realised that the characters of my book would

appear blurred and sketchy if I did not describe how, together with all

the Soviet people, they had borne the dreadful ordeals of the war and

won it.

I had known from books, reports and personal impressions what

peacetime life was like among those people, who had worked to turn the

Northern Country into a smiling hospitable land, who had tapped the

incalculable resources that lay within the Arctic Circle, who had built

towns, docks, mines and factories there. Now, during the war, I saw all

this prodigious energy dedicated to the defence of this land and of these

gains. I might be told that the same thing happened in every corner of

our land. Of course it did, but the severe conditions of the North gave to

it a special, expressive touch.

I don't think I have been able to answer all the questions of my

correspondents. Who served as the prototype of Nikolai Antonich?

Where did I get Nina Kapitonovna? What truth is there in the story of

Sanya's and Katya's love?

To answer these questions I would have to ascertain, if only

approximately, to what extent one or another figure was an actor in real

life. As regards Nikolai Antonich, for instance, no such effort on my part

would be needed. I have changed only a few outward features in my

portrait of the real headmaster of the Moscow school which I finished in

1919. The same applies to Nina Kapitonovna, who could but recently be

met in Sivtsev Vrazhek, wearing the same green jacket and carrying the

same shopping bag. As for the love of Sanya and Katya, I had had only

the youthful period of this story told to me. Exercising the prerogative of

the novelist, I drew from this story my own conclusions, which seemed

to me only natural for the hero of my book.

One schoolboy, by the way, wrote telling me that exactly the same

thing had happened to him-he had fallen in love with a girl and kissed

her in the school grounds. "So that now that your book Two Captains is

finished, you can write about me," the boy suggested.

Here is another incident which, indirectly, answers the question as to

what truth there is in the love of Sanya and Katya. One day I received a

letter from Ordzhonikidze (Northern Caucasus) from a lady named

Irina N. who wrote, "After reading your novel I feel certain that you are

the man I have been looking for these last eighteen years. I am

persuaded of this not only by the details of my life given in the novel,

which could be known to you alone, but also by the places and even the

dates of our meetings in Triumfalnaya Square and outside the Bolshoi

Theatre..." I replied that I had never made any dates with my

correspondent in Triumfalnaya Square or outside the Bolshoi Theatre,

and that I would have to make inquiries of the Arctic pilot who had

served as the prototype for my hero. But the war started and this

strange correspondence broke off.

Irina N.'s letter reminds me of another incident, which equated

literature, as it were, with real life. During the blockade of Leningrad, in

the grim, forever memorable days of late autumn of 1941, the Leningrad

Radio Broadcasting Committee asked me to convey a message to the

8

young Communists of the Baltic in the name of Sanya Grigoriev. I

pointed out that although I had portrayed in Sanya Grigoriev a definite

person, a bomber pilot, who was fighting at the time on the Central

Front, he was nevertheless only a literary character.

"So what of it," was the answer. "It makes no difference. Write as if

the name of your literary hero could be found in the telephone book."

I consented, of course. In the name of Sanya Grigoriev I wrote a

message to the Komsomol boys and girls of Leningrad and the Baltic,

and in response letters addressed to my literary hero came pouring in,

expressing confidence in victory.

I remember myself a boy of nine entering my first library; it was quite

a small one, but seemed very big to me then. Behind a tall barrier, under

paraffin lamp, stood a smooth-haired woman in spectacles wearing a

black dress with a white collar. The barrier was so high-at least to me-

and the lady in black so forbidding that I all but turned tail. In a voice

overloud through shyness I reported that I had already turned nine and

was therefore entitled to become a card holder. The forbidding lady

laughed and bending over the barrier the better to see the new reader

retorted that she had heard of no such rule.

In the end, though, I managed to join the library, and the time flew so

quickly in reading that one day I discovered with surprise that the

barrier was not all that high, nor the lady as forbidding as I had first

thought.

This was the first library in which I felt at home, and ever since then I

have always had this feeling when coming into a house, large or small,

in which there are bookshelves along the walls and people standing by

them thinking only one thing-that these books were there to be read. So

it was in childhood. And so it was in youth, with long hours spent in the

vast Shchedrin public library in Leningrad. Working in the Archives

Department, I penetrated into the very heart of the temple of temples.

Raising my eyes-tired, because reading manuscripts makes them tire

quickly-I watched the noiseless work of the librarians and experienced

again and again a feeling of gratitude. That feeling has remained for a

lifetime. Wherever I go, to whatever place fate brings me, I always ask

first thing, "Is there a library here?" And when I am told, "There is," that

town or township, farm or village, becomes closer, as if irradiating a

warm, unexpected light.

In Schwarz's play "The Snow Queen", the privy councillor, a dour

individual who deals in ice, asks the storyteller whether there are any

children in the house, and on learning that there are, he shudders,

because at the sound of children's voices the ice of the blackest soul

melts. So does a house in which there are books differ from those in

which there are none.

The best writers can be compared to scouts into the future, to those

brave explorers of new and unknown spaces, of whom Fridtjof Nansen,

the famous Norwegian explorer, wrote: "Let us follow the narrow tracks

of the sled runners and those little black dots laying a railway, as it were,

into the heart of the unknown. The wind howls and sweeps across these

tracks leading into the snowy wastes. Soon they will disappear, but a

trail has been blazed, we have acquired a new banner, and this deed will

shine forever through the ages."

V. Kaverin

9

BOOK ONE

10

PART ONE

CHILDHOOD

CHAPTER ONE

THE LETTER. IN SEARCH OF THE BLUE CRAB

I remember the big dirty yard and the squat little houses with the

fence round them. The yard stood on the edge of the river, and in the

spring, when the flood-water subsided, it was littered with bits of wood

and shells, and sometimes with things far more interesting. On one

occasion, for instance, we found a postman's bag full of letters, and

afterwards the waters brought down the postman himself and deposited

him carefully on the bank. He was lying on his back, quite a young man,

fair-haired, in postman's uniform with shining buttons; he must have

polished them up before setting out on this last round.

A policeman took the bag, but Aunt Dasha kept the letters-they were

soaking wet and of no further use to anybody. Not all of them were

soaked though. The bag had been a new one, made of leather, and was

closed tight. Every evening Aunt Dasha used to read one of the letters

out, sometimes to me alone, sometimes to the whole yard. It was so

interesting that even the old women, who used to go to Skovorodnikov's

to play cards, would drop the game and join us. There was one letter

which Aunt Dasha used to read more often than any other, so often, in

fact, that I soon got to know it by heart. Many years have passed since

then, but I can still remember it from the first word to the last. "Dear

Maria Vasilievna,

"I hasten to inform you that Ivan Lvovich is alive and well. Four

months ago, on his orders, I left the schooner along with thirteen of the

crew. I hope to see you soon, so I shall not describe our difficult journey

across the pack-ice to Franz Josef Land. We suffered terrible hardships

and privations. I will only say that I was the only one of our party to

reach Cape Flora safely (not counting a pair of frostbitten feet). I was

picked up by the St. Phocas, of Lieutenant Sedov's Expedition, and

taken to Archangel. Although I have survived, I have little reason to

rejoice, as I shall soon be undergoing an operation, after which I can

11

only trust in God's mercy, for God alone knows how I'm going to live

without feet. What I have to tell you is this.

The St. Maria became icebound in the Kara Sea and since October 1912

has been drifting steadily north with the Arctic icefields. When we left

the schooner she was in latitude 82° 55'. She is standing in the middle of

an icefield, or rather that was where she was from the autumn of 1912

until the day I left her. She may be free of the ice this year, but I think

this is more likely to happen next year, when she will be round about the

spot where the Fram broke free. The men who have remained in her

have enough victuals to last until October or November of next year. In

any case, I hasten to assure you that we did not leave the ship because

she was in a hopeless plight. I had to carry out Captain's orders, of

course, but I must admit that they fell in with my own wishes. When I

was leaving the ship with the thirteen men, Ivan Lvovich gave me a

packet addressed to the Head of the Hydrographical Board—who has

since died-and a letter for you. I dare not risk mailing them, because,

being the only survivor, I am anxious to preserve all evidence of my

honourable conduct. I therefore ask you to send for them or come to

Archangel yourself, as I shall be spending at least three months in

hospital.

"Awaiting your reply, I remain your obedient servant.

"I. Klimov, Navigating Officer."

The address had been washed away, but had obviously been written in

the same bold upright hand on the thick yellowed envelope.

This letter must have become for me something in the nature of a

prayer, for I used to repeat it every evening while waiting for my father

to come home.

He used to come in late from the wharf. The steamers arrived now

every day and took on cargoes, not of flax and grain as they used to do,

but of heavy cases containing cartridges and gun parts. Burly, thickset

and moustached, he used to come in wearing a cloth cap and tarpaulin

trousers. Mother would talk and talk, while he ate in silence, once in a

while clearing his throat or wiping his moustache. Then he would take

us children-my sister and me—and lie down to sleep. He smelt of hemp,

sometimes of apples or grain, and sometimes of rancid machine-oil, and

I remember what a depressing effect that smell had on me.

It must have been on one such cheerless evening, as I lay beside my

father, that I first became aware of my surroundings. The squalid little

room With its low ceiling, its walls pasted over with newspapers, and a

big crack under the window through which drew cold air and the tang of

the river-such was our home. The dark, beautiful woman with her hair

let down, sleeping on the floor on two sacks filled with straw, was my

mother. The little feet sticking out from under the patchwork quilt

belonged to my sister. The dark skinny boy in the outsize trousers who

crept shivering out of bed and stole into the yard was me.

A likely spot had been selected long ago, string had been prepared and

even dry twigs piled up at the Gap; all I needed now to go out after the

blue crabs was a piece of rotting meat. The bed of our river was all

different colours, and so were the crabs in it—black, green, and yellow.

These were baited with frogs and lured with a bonfire. But the blue crab,

as all of us boys firmly believed, could only be taken with rotting meat.

The day before I had had a stroke of luck at last: I had managed to steal

12

a piece of meat from Mother and kept it in the sun all day. It was putrid

now—one did not have to take it into one's hand to find that out.

I ran down to the Gap along the river bank: here brushwood had been

piled up for a fire. In the distance one could see the towers, Pokrovsky

Tower on one bank, Spassky on the other. When the war broke out they

were used as army leather goods depots. Pyotr Skovorodnikov used to

say that devils once dwelt in Spassky Tower and that he had actually

seen them ferrying over to our side, after which they had scuttled their

boat and made their home Pokrovsky Tower. He said the devils were

fond of smoking and drinking, they had bullet-heads, and many of them

were lame, having hurt themselves when they dropped from the sky. In

Pokrovsky Tower they raised families and in fine weather went down to

the river to steal the tobacco which the fishermen tied to their nets to

appease the water-sprites.

So I was not really surprised when, as I was blowing up my little fire, I

saw a thin black shape in the gap of the old ramparts.

"What are you doing here, shaver?" the devil said, just like any

ordinary human being.

I couldn't have answered him even if I had wanted to. All I could do

was just stare and shake.

At that moment the moon sailed out from behind the clouds, and I

could make out the figure of the watchman across the river, walking

round the leather depot—a burly man with a rifle sticking up behind his

back.

"Catching crabs?"

He sprang down lightly and squatted by the fire.

"What's the matter with you, swallowed your tongue, silly?"

No, it wasn't a devil. It was a skinny hatless man with a walking stick

which he kept slapping against his leg. I couldn't make out his face, but I

noticed he had nothing on under his jacket and was wearing a scarf in

place of a shirt.

"Don't want to speak, you rascal, eh?" He prodded me with his stick.

"Come on, answer me! Answer! Or I'll-"

Without getting up, he grabbed my leg and pulled me towards him. I

gave a sort of croaky sound.

"Ah, you're a deaf mute, I see!"

He let go of me and sat there for quite a while, poking among the

embers with his stick.

"Fine town, this," he said disgustedly. "A dog in every blessed yard;

brutes of policemen. Damned crab-eaters!"

And he started to swear.

Had I known what was to happen within the hour, I should have tried

to remember what he said, although just the same I could not have

repeated his words to anybody. He went on swearing for quite a time,

and even spat in the fire and gnashed his teeth. Then he fell silent, his

head thrown back and knees clasped in his hands. I stole a glance at him

and could have felt sorry for him had he not been so unpleasant.

Suddenly the man sprang to his feet. In a few minutes he was on the

pontoon bridge, which the soldiers had recently put across the river, and

I caught a last glimpse of him on the opposite bank before he

disappeared.

My fire had gone out, but even without it I could see clearly that there

wasn't a single blue crab among my catch, and a pretty good catch it

13

was. Just ordinary black crabs, none too big either—they went for a

kopeck a pair at the local pub.

A cold wind began to draw from somewhere behind me. My trousers

billowed out and I began to feel cold. It was time to go home. I was

casting my line, baited with meat, for the last time when I saw the

watchman on the opposite bank running down the slope. Spassky Tower

stood high above the river and the hillside leading down to the river

bank was littered with stones. There was no sign of anybody on the

hillside, which was lit up brightly by the moon, yet for some reason the

watchman unslung this rifle as he ran.

"Halt!"

He did not fire, but just clicked the bolt, and, at that very moment I

saw the man he was after on the pontoon bridge. I am choosing my

words carefully, because even now I am not quite certain it was the man,

who, an hour ago, had been sitting by my fire. But I can still see the

scene before my eyes: the quiet banks, the widening moon path on the

water running straight from where I was to the barges of the pontoon

bridge, and on the bridge the long shadows of two running figures.

The watchman ran heavily and once he even stopped to take breath.

But the one who was running ahead seemed to find the going still

harder, for he suddenly stopped and crouched down by the handrail.

The watchman ran up to him, shouting, then suddenly reeled back, as if

he had been struck from below. He hung on the handrail, slowly

slipping down, while the murderer was already disappearing behind the

rampart.

I don't know why, but that night no one was guarding the pontoon

bridge. The sentry-box stood empty, and except for the watchman, who

was lying on his side with his arms stretched forward, there was not a

soul in sight. A large undressed hide lay beside him, and when, shaking

with terror, I went up to him, he started to yawn slowly. Years

afterwards I learned that many people yawn just before they die. Then

he heaved a deep sigh, as though with relief, and grew still.

Not knowing what to do, I bent over him, then ran to the sentry-box—

that was when I saw it was empty—and back again to the watchman. I

couldn't even shout, not only because I was a mute at the time, but from

sheer terror. Now voices could be heard from the bank, and I rushed

back to the place where I had been fishing for crabs. Never again in my

life did I run so fast; my heart hammered wildly and I could scarcely

breathe. I had no time to cover up the crabs with grass and I lost half of

them by the time I got home. But who cared about crabs then!

With a thumping heart I opened the door noiselessly. In the single

room of our home it was dark, all were fast asleep and no one had seen

me go and come. In a moment I was lying in my old place beside my

father, but I could not fall asleep for a long time. Before my eyes was the

moonlit bridge and on it the two long running shadows.

14

CHAPTER TWO

FATHER

Two vexations awaited me the next morning. For one thing, Mother

had found the crabs and cooked them. There went my twenty kopeks

and with them the hope of new hooks and spoonbait for catching pike.

Secondly, I had lost my penknife. It was Father's knife, really, but as the

blade was broken he had given it to me. I searched for it everywhere,

inside the house and in the yard, but it seemed to have vanished into

thin air.

The search kept me occupied till twelve o'clock when I had to go down

to the wharf with Father's lunch. This was my duty, and very proud of it

I was.

The men were still at work when I arrived. One wheelbarrow had got

stuck between the planks and all traffic between the ship's side and the

bank was stopped. The men behind were shouting and swearing, and

two men were leaning their weight on a crowbar, trying to lift the

barrow back into the wheel-track. Father passed round them in his

leisurely way. He bent over and said something to them. That is how I

have remembered him-a big man with a round, moustached face, broad-

shouldered, lifting the heavily-laden wheelbarrow with ease. I was never

to see him like that again.

He kept looking at me as he ate, as much as to say, "What's wrong,

Sanya?" when a stout police-officer and three policemen appeared at the

waterside. One of them shouted "Gaffer! "-that was what they called the

ganger-and said something to him. The ganger gasped and crossed

himself, and they all came towards us.

"Are you Ivan Grigoriev?" the officer asked, slipping his sword round

behind him.

"Yes."

"Take him!" the police-officer cried, reddening. "He's arrested." Voices

were raised in astonishment. Father stood up, and all fell silent.

"What for?" "None o' your lip! Grab him!"

The policemen went up to Father and laid hold of him. Father shook

his shoulder, and they fell back, one of them drawing his sword.

"What is this, sir?" Father said. "Why are you arresting me? I'm not

just anybody, everyone here knows me."

"Oh no they don't, my lad," the officer answered. "You're a criminal.

Grab him!"

Again the policemen stepped towards Father. "Don't wave that herring

about, you fool," Father said quietly through clenched teeth to the one

who had drawn his sword. "I'm a family man, sir," he said, addressing

the officer. "I've been working on this wharf for twenty years. What have

I done? You tell'em all, so's they know what I'm being taken for.

Otherwise people will really think I am a criminal."

"Playing the saint, eh?" the officer shouted. "Don't I know your kind!

Come along!"

The policemen seemed to be hesitating. "Well?"

15

"Wait a minute, sir, I'll go myself," Father said. "Sanya," he bent down

to me, "run along to your mother and tell her—Oh, you can't, of course,

you're..."

He wanted to say that I was dumb, but checked himself. He never

uttered that word, as though he hoped that one day I'd start speaking.

He looked around in silence.

"I'll go with him, Ivan," said the ganger. "Don't worry." "Yes, do, Uncle

Misha. And another thing..." Father got three rubles out of his pocket

and handed them to the ganger. "Give them to her. Well, goodbye."

They answered him in chorus.

He patted me on the head, saying: "Don't cry, Sanya." I didn't even

know I was crying.

Even now I shudder at the memory of how Mother took on when she

heard that Father had been arrested. She did not cry, but as soon as the

ganger had gone, she sat down on the bed, and clenching her teeth,

banged her head violently against the wall. My sister and I started

howling, but she did not as much as glance at us. She kept beating her

head against the wall, muttering something to herself. Then she got up,

put on her shawl and went out.

Aunt Dasha managed the house for us all that day. We slept, or rather,

my sister slept while I lay with open eyes, thinking, first about my

father, how he had said goodbye to them all, then about the fat

police-officer, then about his little boy in a sailor suit whom I had seen

in the Governor's garden, then about the three-wheeler this boy had

been riding (if only I had one like that!) and finally about nothing at all

until mother came back. She looked dark and haggard, and Aunt Dasha

ran up to her.

I don't know why, but it suddenly occurred to me that the policemen

had hacked Father to pieces, and for several minutes I lay without

stirring, beside myself with grief, hearing nothing. Then I realised that I

was wrong: he was alive, but they wouldn't let Mother see him. Three

times she repeated that they had arrested him for murder—the

watchman had been killed in the night on the pontoon bridge-before I

grasped that the night was last night, and the watchman was that very

watchman, and the pontoon bridge was that very same bridge on which

he had lain with outstretched arms. I jumped up, rushed to my mother

and cried out. She took me in her arms. She must have thought I had

taken fright. But I was already "speaking"...

If only I had been able to speak then!

I wanted to tell her everything, absolutely everything—how I had

stolen away to the Sands to catch crabs and how the dark man with the

walking stick had appeared in the gap in the ramparts and how he had

sworn and ground his teeth and then spat in the fire and gone off. No

easy thing for a boy of eight who could barely utter two or three

inarticulate words.

"The children are upset too," Aunt Dasha said with a sigh when I had

stopped, thinking I had made myself clear, and looked at Mother.

"It isn't that. He wants to tell me something. Is there something you

know, Sanya?"

Oh, if only I could speak! I started again, describing what I had seen.

Mother understood me better than anyone else, but this time I saw with

despair that she did not understand a word. How could she? How far

removed from that scene on the pontoon bridge were the attempts of

16

that thin, dark little boy to describe it, as he flung himself about the

room, clad in nothing but his shirt. At one moment he threw himself

upon the bed to show how soundly his father had slept that night, the

next he jumped on to a chair and raised tightly clenched fists over a

puzzled-looking Aunt Dasha.

After a while she made the sign of the cross over me. "The boys must

have been beating him."

I shook my head vigorously.

"He's telling how they arrested his father," said Mother. "How the

policeman threatened him. Isn't that right, Sanya?"

I started to cry, my face buried in her lap. She carried me to the bed

and I lay there for a long time, listening to them talking and thinking

how to communicate to them my amazing secret.

CHAPTER THREE

THE PETITION

I am sure that in the long run I would have managed it somehow, if

Mother hadn't taken ill the next morning. She had always seemed a bit

queer to me, but I had never seen her so queer before.

Previously, when she would suddenly start standing at the window for

hours on end, or jumping up in the middle of the night and sitting at the

table in her nightdress until the morning. Father would take her back to

the home village for a few days, and she would come back recovered.

But Father wasn't there any more, and, besides, it was doubtful whether

the trip would have helped her now.

She stood in the passage, bareheaded and barefooted, and did not

even turn her head when somebody came into the house. She was silent

all the time, except when she uttered two or three words in a distracted

manner.

What's more, she seemed to be afraid of me, somehow. When I started

to "speak", she stopped up her ears with a tortured expression. She

passed a hand over her eyes and forehead as if trying to recollect

something. She was so queer that even Aunt Dasha crossed herself

furtively when Mother, in answer to her pleadings, turned and fixed her

with a dreadful stare.

It must have been a fortnight before she came round. She still had fits

of absent-mindedness, but little by little she began to talk, go outside

into the yard and work. Ever more often now the word "petition" was on

her lips. The first to utter it was old Skovorodnikov, then Aunt Dasha

picked it up, and after her the whole yard. A petition must be lodged!

That day Mother went out and took us with her-me and my sister. We

were going to the "Chambers" to hand in a petition. The "Chambers"

were a dark building behind tall iron railings in Market Square.

My sister and I waited for a long time, sitting on an iron seat in the

dimly lit high-ceilinged corridor. Messengers hurried to and fro with

17

papers, doors slammed. Then Mother came back, seized my sister's

hand, and we all started off at a run. The room we went into was

barriered off, and I couldn't see the person to whom Mother was

speaking and bowing humbly. But I heard a cold indifferent voice, and

this voice, to my horror, was saying something which I alone in all the

world could disprove.

"Ivan Grigoriev..." I heard the rustle of pages being turned over.

"Article 1454 of the Criminal Code. Premeditated murder. What do you

want, my dear woman?"

"Your Honour," my mother said in a tense unfamiliar voice, "he's not

guilty. He never killed anyone."

"The court will go into that."

I had been standing all the time on tiptoes, my head thrown back so

far that it bade fair to drop off, but all I could see across the barrier was

a hand with long dry fingers, in which a pair of spectacles was being

slowly dangled.

"Your Honour," Mother said again, "I want to hand in a petition to the

court. Our whole yard has signed it."

"You may lodge a petition on payment of one ruble stamp duty."

18

"It's been paid. It wasn't his knife they found, Your Honour."

Knife? Had I heard aright?

"On that point we have the evidence of the accused himself."

"Maybe it was a week since he lost it."

Looking up, I could see Mother's lips trembling.

"Someone would have picked it up, my dear woman. Anyway, the

court will go into that."

I heard nothing more. At that moment it dawned on me why my

father had been arrested. It wasn't he, it was me who had lost that

knife—an old clasp-knife with a wooden handle. The knife I had

searched for the morning after the murder. The knife which could have

dropped out of my pocket when I bent over the watchman on the

pontoon bridge. The knife on whose handle Pyotr Skovorodnikov had

burned out my name with a magnifying glass.

Looking back on it now I begin to realise that the officials who sat

behind high barriers in dimly-lit halls would not have believed my story

anyway. But at the time! The more I thought about it the heavier it

weighed on my mind. It was my fault, then, that they had arrested

Father. It was my fault that we were now going hungry. It was my fault

that Mother had had to sell the new cloth coat for which she had been

saving a whole year, my fault that she had had to go to the "Chambers"

and speak in such an unfamiliar voice and bow so humbly to that

unseen person with the long, horrible, dry fingers in which there slowly

dangled a pair of spectacles.

Never before had I felt my dumbness so strongly.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE VILLAGE

The last of the rafts had passed down the river. The lights in the

rafters' drifting huts were no longer visible at night when I woke up.

There was emptiness on the river, emptiness in the yard and emptiness

in the house.

Mother did washing in the hospital. She left the house first thing in

the morning while we were still asleep, and I went to the

Skovorodnikovs and listened to the old man swearing to himself.

Grey and unkempt, in steel-rimmed glasses, he sat on a low leather-

covered stool in the little dark kitchen, stitching boots. When he was not

stitching boots he was making nets or carving figures of birds and

horses out of aspen wood. He had brought this trade with him from the

Volga, where he had been born.

He was fond of me, probably because I was the only person he could

talk to without being answered back. He cursed doctors, officials,

tradesmen, and, with especial virulence, priests.

"If a man be dying, dare he murmur against it? The priests say no. But

I say yes! What is murmuring?"

I didn't know what murmuring meant.

19

"Murmuring is discontent. And what is discontent? It's wanting more

than's been allotted to you. The priests say you mustn't. Why?"

I didn't know why.

"Because 'dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return'. To the earth,

that is."

He gave a bitter laugh.

"And what does the earth need? No more than is allotted to it."

So it was autumn now, and even the crabs, which had lately become a

staple item in our domestic fare, had hidden themselves away in their

holes and refused to be enticed out by my frogs. We were going hungry,

and Mother finally decided to send me and my sister to the village.

I had never been in the country, but I knew that my father had a farm

there. A farm! How disappointed I was on discovering that this was

simply a cottage with a household plot, a little, overgrown vegetable

garden in the middle of which stood a few aged apple trees.

The house was a small one, which having once slumped on its side,

remained leaning sideways. The roof was tilted, the window-panes were

smashed and the base logs were bent. The Russian stove seemed to be

all right until we started a fire in it. Smoke-blackened benches were

ranged around the walls, and in one corner hung an icon, on whose

grimy panels a face could just be made out.

Whatever its faults, it was our house, and we undid our bundles,

stuffed out mattresses with straw, glazed the windows and settled down

to live in it.

Mother stayed with us only about three weeks, then went back to

town. Grandma Petrovna agreed to take her place. She was Father's

aunt, and that made her a sort of grandmother to us. She was a kind-

hearted old woman, even though it was hard to get used to her grey

beard and moustache. The only drawback was that she herself needed

looking after. In fact, my sister and I looked after her all the winter,

carrying water and heating her stove, since her cottage, which was little

better than ours, was quite close.

That winter I grew attached to my sister. She was getting on for eight.

Everyone in our family was dark, but she was fair, with fuzzy little

pigtails and blue eyes. We were all rather taciturn, especially Mother,

but my sister would start off talking the moment she opened her eyes. I

never saw her cry, and it was the easiest thing in the world to make her

laugh. Her name was Sanya, too, the same as mine—1 being Alexander

and she Alexandra. Aunt Dasha had taught her to sing, and every

evening she sang long songs in such a serious, thin little voice that you

couldn't help laughing.

And how handy she was at housekeeping, and she only seven, mind

you! Of course, running the house was a simple affair—in one corner of

the attic lay potatoes, in another beets, cabbages, onions and salt. For

bread we went to Petrovna's.

So there we were, two children in an empty house, in a remote

snowed-up village. Every morning we used to tread a path in the snow

to Petrovna's cottage. Only in the evenings did we feel a bit scared. It

was so quiet you could almost hear the soft sound of the falling snow,

and amidst this stillness the wind would suddenly start moaning in the

chimney.

20

CHAPTER FIVE

DOCTOR IVAN IVANOVICH.

I LEARN TO SPEAK

Then one evening, when we had just gone to bed and my sister had

just fallen silent, dropping off to sleep as she always did with the last

uttered word, and that saddening hush fell upon the world, with the

wind beginning to moan in the chimney, I heard a tap on the window.

A tall bearded man in a sheepskin coat and cap with ear-flaps stood

there; he was so stiff with cold that when I lit the lamp and let him in he

could not even close the door behind him. Screening the light with my

hand, I noticed that his nose was quite white—frost-nipped. He bent to

take off his knapsack and suddenly sat down on the floor.

That was how he first appeared before me, the man I am indebted to

for being able to write this story—frozen almost to death, crawling

towards me on all fours. He tried to put his trembling fingers into his

mouth, and sat on the floor breathing heavily. I started to help him off

with his coat. He muttered something and slumped over on his side in a

dead faint.

I had once seen Mother lying in a faint and Aunt Dasha had breathed

into her mouth. I did exactly the same now. My visitor was lying by the

warm stove and I don't know what it was in the end that brought him

round; I only knew that I blew like mad till I felt dizzy. However that

may be, he came to, sat up and began warming himself up vigorously.

The colour returned to his nose. He even attempted a smile when I

poured him out a mug of hot water.

"Are you children alone here?"

Before Sanya could answer "Yes," the man was asleep. He dropped off

so suddenly that I was afraid he had died. But as though in answer to my

thoughts he started to snore.

He came round properly the next day. I woke up to find him sitting on

the stove ledge with my sister and they were talking. She already knew

that his name was Ivan Ivanovich, that he had lost his way, and that we

were not to say a word about him to anyone, otherwise they'd put him in

irons. I remember that my sister and I grasped at once that our visitor

was in some sort of danger and we tacitly decided never to breathe a

word about him to anyone. It was easier for me, of course, to keep quiet,

than it was for Sanya.

Ivan Ivanovich sat on the stove ledge with his hands tucked under him,

listening while she chattered away. He had been told everything: that

Father had been put in prison, that we handed in a petition, that Mother

had brought us here and gone back to town, that I was dumb, that

Grandma Petrovna lived here—second house from the well—and that

she, too, had a beard, only it was smaller and grey.

"Ah, you little darlings," said Ivan Ivanovich, jumping down from the

stove.

He had light-coloured eyes, but his beard was black and smooth. At

first I thought it strange that he made so many unnecessary gestures; it

seemed as if at any moment he would reach for his ear round the back of

his head or scratch the sole of his foot. But I soon got used to him. When

21

talking, he would suddenly pick something up and begin tossing it in the

air or balancing it on his hand like a juggler.

"I say, children, I'm a doctor, you know," he said one day. "You just

tell me if there's anything wrong with you. I'll put you right in a tick."

We were both well, but for some reason he refused to go and see the

village elder, whose daughter was sick.

But in such a position

I'm in a terrible funk

In case the Inquisition

Is tipped off by the monk,

he said with a laugh,

It was from him that I first heard poetry. He often quoted verses,

sometimes even sang them or muttered them, his eyebrows raised as he

squatted before the fire Turkish fashion.

At first he seemed pleased that I couldn't ask him anything, especially

when he woke up in the night at the slightest sound of steps outside the

window and lay for a long time leaning on his elbow, listening. Or when

he hid himself in the attic and sat there till dark—he spent a whole day

there once, I remember. St. George's Day it was. Or when he refused to

meet Petrovna.

But after two or three days he became interested in my dumbness.

"Why don't you speak? Don't you want to?"

I looked at him in silence.

"I tell you, you must speak. You can hear, so you ought to be able to

speak. It's a very rare case yours—I mean being dumb but not deaf.

Maybe you're deaf and dumb?"

I shook my head.

"In that case we're going to make you speak."

He took some instruments from his knapsack, complained about the

light being poor, though it was a bright sunny day, and started fiddling

about with my ear.

"Ear vulgaris," he remarked with satisfaction. "An ordinary ear."

He withdrew to a corner and whispered: "Sap."

"Did you hear that?"

I laughed.

"You've got a good ear, like a dog's." He winked at Sanya who was

staring at us open-mouthed. "You can hear splendidly. Why the dickens

don't you speak then?"

He took my tongue between his finger and thumb and pulled it out so

far that I got frightened and made a croaky sound.

"What a throat you have, my dear chap! A regular Chaliapin. Well,

well!"

He looked at me for a minute, then said gravely: "You'll have to learn,

old chap. Can you talk to yourself at all? In your mind?"

He tapped my forehead.

"In your head—get me?"

I mumbled an affirmative.

"What about saying it aloud then? Say out loud whatever you can.'

Now, then, say 'yes'."

I could hardly say anything. Nevertheless I did bring out a "yes".

22

"Fine! Try again."

I said it again.

"Now whistle."

I whistled.

"Now say 'oo'."

I said "oo".

"You're a lazybones, that's what the matter with you! Now, then,

repeat after me..."

He did not know that I spoke everything in my mind. I'm sure that's

the reason why I have remembered my earliest years so distinctly. But

my dumb mental speech fell far short of all those "ees", '"os" and "yoos",

of all those unfamiliar movements of lips, tongue and throat in which

the simplest words got stuck. I managed to repeat after him separate

sounds, chiefly vowel sounds, but putting them together and uttering

them smoothly, without "barking", the way he bade me, was some job.

Three words I coped with at once: they were "ear", "mamma" and

"stove". It was as if I had pronounced them before and merely had to

recall them. As a matter of fact that's how it was. Mother told that I had

begun to speak at the age of two and then had suddenly gone dumb after

an illness.

My teacher slept on the floor, slipping some shiny metallic object

under his mattress and using his sheepskin coat as a blanket, but I kept

tossing about, drinking water, sitting up in bed and gazing at the

frostwork on the window. I was thinking of how I would go home and

start talking to Mother and Aunt Dasha. I recollected the moment when

I first realised that I couldn't speak: it was in the evening, and Mother

thought I was asleep; pale, erect, with black plaits hanging down in

front, she gazed at me for a long time. It was then that there first

occurred to me the bitter thought that was to poison my early years:

"I'm not as good as others, and she's ashamed of me."

I kept repeating "ее", "о", "уоо" all night, too happy to go to sleep I did

not doze off until dawn. Sanya woke me when the day was full.

"I've been over to Grandma's, and you're still asleep," she rattled off.

"Grandma's kitten has got lost. Where's Ivan Ivanovich?"

His mattress lay on the floor and you could still see the depressions

where his head, shoulders and legs had been. But Ivan Ivanovich

himself was not there. He used to put his knapsack under his head, but

that too was missing. He used to cover himself with his sheepskin coat,

but that too was gone.

"Ivan Ivanovich!"

We ran up into the attic, but there was nobody there.

"I swear to God he was asleep when I went to Grandma's. I remember

looking at him and thinking: while he's asleep I'll run over to

Grandma's. Oh, Sanya, look!"

On the table lay a little black tube with two round knobs at the ends,

one of them flat and slightly bigger, the other small and deeper. We

remembered that Ivan Ivanovich had taken this from his knapsack

together with other instruments when he had looked into my ear.

Where had he gone? Ivan Ivanovich!

He had vanished, gone without saying a word to anyone!

23

CHAPTER SIX

FATHER 'S DEATH.

I REFUSE TO SPEAК

All through the winter I practised speaking. First thing in the

morning, barely awake, I uttered loudly six words which Ivan Ivanovich

had instructed me to say every day: "hen", "saddle", "box", "snow",

"drink" and "Abraham". How difficult it was! And how well, how

differently my sister pronounced these words.

But I kept at it. I repeated them a thousand times a day, like an

incantation that was to help me somehow. I even dreamed them. I

dreamed of some mysterious Abraham putting a hen in a box or going

out of the house in a hat, carrying a saddle on his shoulder.

My tongue would not obey me, my lips barely stirred. Many a time I

felt like hitting Sanya, who could not help laughing at me. In the night I

woke up, heavy with misery, feeling that II would never learn to speak

and would always remain a freak, as my Mother had once called me. The

next moment I was trying to pronounce that word too—"freak". I

remember succeeding at last and falling asleep happy.

The day when, on waking up, I did not utter my six magic words, was

one of the saddest in my life.

Petrovna woke us early that day, which was odd in itself, because it

was we who usually went to her in the mornings to light the fire and put

on the kettle. She came in, tapping her stick and stopped in front of the

icon. She stood there for some time, muttering and crossing herself.

Then she called to my sister and bade her light the lamp.

Years later, a grown-up man, I saw a picture of Baba-Yaga in a fairy-

tale book. She was the image of Petrovna—the same bent, bearded

figure leaning on a gnarled stick. But Petrovna was a kind Baba-Yaga,

and that day ... that day she sat down on a bench with a heavy sigh, and

I even thought I saw tears rolling down her beard. "Get down, Sanya!"

she said. "Come to me." I went up to her.

"You're a big boy now, Sanya," she went on, patting me on the head.

"Yesterday a letter came from your mother saying that Ivan is ill."

She wept.

"He was taken very bad in prison. His head and legs have swollen up.

She writes that she doesn't know whether he's still alive or not." My

sister started crying.

"Ah well, it's God's will," Petrovna said. "God's will," she repeated

with angry vehemence and looked up at the icon again.

She had only told us that Father had fallen ill, but that evening, in

church, I realised that he was dead. Grandma had taken us to church to

"pray for his health", as she said.

Oddly enough, after three months spent in the village, I hardly knew

anybody except two or three boys with whom I went: skiing. I never

went anywhere because I was ashamed of my handicap. And now, in

church, I saw our whole village-a crowd of women and old men, poorly

dressed, silent and as cheerless as we were. They stood in darkness;

candles were burning only in the front, where the priest was reading

24

prayers in a long-drawn-out manner. Many people were sighing and

crossing themselves.

They were doing this because he was dead, and my sister and I were

standing in the darkness of the church because he had died. And we

were standing and "praying for his health" because he was dead.

Petrovna took my sister back with her, and I went home and sat on for

a long time without lighting the lamp. The cockroaches, which Grandma

had brought to us on purpose-for good luck—rustled on the cold stove. I

ate potatoes and wept.

Dead, and I would never see him again! There they were, carrying him

out of the Chambers, out of that room where Mother and I had handed

in the petition... I stopped eating and clenched my teeth at the memory

of that cold voice and the hand with the long dry fingers slowly dangling

a pair of spectacles. You wait! I'll pay you back for this! Some day you'll

be bowing to me, and I'll tell you: "My dear man, the court will go into

this..." There they were, bearing the coffin down the corridor, while

messengers hurried past with papers and nobody sees or cares to see

him being carried out. Only Aunt Dasha comes forward to meet it in a

black shawl, like a nun. She comes forward, weeping. Then we stop,

someone stands at the door, the coffin sways in the men's hands and is

lowered to the floor. Mother bows, and looking up, I can see her lips

quivering.

I came to myself at the sound of my own voice. I must have been

feverish, because I was uttering some incoherent nonsense, cursing

myself and also, for some reason, my mother, and carrying on a

conversation with Ivan Ivanovich, although I knew perfectly well that he

had left long ago and that even his tracks in the field had kept for only

two days until the snow had covered them up.

But I had spoken-spoken loudly and clearly! I could now speak and

explain what had happened that night on the pontoon bridge;

I could show that knife was mine, that I had lost it when I bent over the

murdered man. Too late! A whole lifetime too late; he was now beyond

any help of mine.

I lay in the dark with my head in my hands. It was cold indoors, my

feet were chilled, but I stayed like that till morning. I decided that I

would not speak any more. Why should I? All the same he was dead and

I would never see him again. It did not matter any more.

CHAPTER SEVEN

MOTHER

I have no very clear memory of the February Revolution, and until our

return to town I did not understand that word. But I do remember

associating all the strange excitement and puzzling talk around me with

my nocturnal visitor who had taught me to speak.

25

Spring passed before I was aware of it. But summer began on the day

when the Neptune, hooting and backing in a menacing way, moored

alongside the wharf where Mother and us two had been waiting for it

since the morning. We were going back to town. Mother was taking us

home. She looked thinner and younger, and was wearing a new coat and

a new brightly coloured shawl.

I had often thought, during the winter, of how astonished she would

be to hear me speak. But she only embraced me and laughed. She had

changed a lot during the winter. All the time she was thinking about

something—I could tell that by the quick changes of expression in her

face: at one moment she looked anxious and was silent, the next she

smiled, all to herself. Petrovna decided that she was going mad, and one

day she asked her about it. Mother smiled and said she wasn't. In our

presence she rarely mentioned Father, but whenever she spoke kindly to

me I knew she was thinking of him. My sister she had always loved.

On the boat her mind was busy all the time. She kept raising her

eyebrows and shaking her head, as if arguing with somebody mentally.

How poor and neglected our yard seemed to me when we got home!

That year nobody had seen to the drain ditches, and the muddy water

with bits of wood floating on it, had remained standing under every

porch. The low sheds looked more ramshackle than ever, and the gaps

in the fence were wide enough to drive a cart through, while back of the

Skovorodnikovs' house a mountain of stinking bones, hoofs and scraps

of hides lay piled up.

The old man was making glue. "Everybody thinks this is just ordinary

glue," he said to me. "It's an all-purpose glue. It'll fix anything—iron,

glass, even bricks, if anyone's fool enough to want to glue bricks

together. I invented it myself. Skovorodnikov's Skin Glue. And the

stronger it stinks the stronger it sticks."

He regarded me suspiciously over the top of his glasses.

"Well, let's hear you say something."

I spoke. He nodded approvingly.

"Ah, that's too bad about Ivan!"

Aunt Dasha was away, and did not come back before a couple of

weeks. If there was anyone I gladdened-and frightened too-it was she!

We were sitting in the kitchen in the evening, and she kept asking me

how we had lived in the village, and answered her own questions.

"Poor things, you must have felt pretty lonesome out there, all on your

own. Who cooked for you? Petrovna? Petrovna."

"No, not Petrovna," I said suddenly. "We did our own cooking."

I shall never forget the look on Aunt Dasha's face when I uttered those

words. Her mouth fell open and she shook her head and hiccupped.

"And we weren't lonely," I added, laughing heartily. "We missed you,

though, Aunt Dasha. Why didn't you come to see us?"

She hugged me.

"My darling, what's this? You can speak? You're able to speak? And he

keeps quiet, pretending, the young rascal! Well, tell me all about it."

And I told her about the freezing doctor who had knocked at our

cottage one night, how we had hidden him for three days and nights,

how he had taught me to say "ее", "о" and "yoo" and the word ‘ear'

26

CHAPTER EIGHT

PYOTR SKOVORODNIKOV

Aunt Dasha said that I had changed a lot since I had begun to speak. I

felt this myself too. The previous summer I had shunned the other boys,

restrained by a painful sense of my own deficiency. I was morbidly shy,

sullen, and very sad. Now I was so different it was hard to believe.

In two or three months I had caught up with the boys of my own age.

Pyotr Skovorodnikov, who was twelve, became my best friend. He was a

lanky, ginger boy with a will of his own.

It was at Pyotr's that I saw books for the first time in my life. They

were Tales of Derringdo in Previous Wars, Yuri Miloslavsky and A

Guide to Letter Writing on the cover of which was a picture of a

bewhiskered young man in a red shirt with a pen in his hand, and above

him, in a pale-blue oval frame, young woman.

It was over this Guide to Letter Writing which we read together, that

we became friends. There was something mysterious about those

different modes of address: "My dear friend", or "Dear Sir". I was

reminded of the navigating officer's letter and recited it aloud for the

first time.

We were sitting in Cathedral Gardens. Across the river we could see

OUT yard and the houses, looking very small, much smaller than they

really were. There was tiny Aunt Dasha coming out onto her doorstep

and sitting down there to clean fish. I could almost see the silvery scales

flying about and falling glistening at her feet. And there was Karlusha,

the town's madman, always scowling or grinning, walking along the

bank and stopping at our gate-to talk to Aunt Dasha, probably.

I kept looking at them all the time I was reciting the letter. Pyotr

listened attentively.

"Gee, isn't that smashing!" he said. "What a memory. I knew it, too, but

I'd forgotten it." Unfortunately, we rarely spent our time together so

well. Pyotr was busy; he was employed "selling cigarettes for the

Chinese". The Chinese, who lived in the Pokrovsky quarter, made

cigarettes and employed boys to sell them. I can see one of them as if he

were before me now, a man named Li-small, sallow, with a weazened

face, but fairly good-natured: he was considered more generous with the

"treat" allowance than the other Chinese. This allowance formed our

clear wage (later I, too, took up this trade). We were allowed to treat

everyone-"Please, have a smoke"-but the customer who was naive

enough to accept the invitation always paid cash down for it. This

money was ours. The cigarettes were packed in boxes of two hundred

and fifty, labelled "Katyk", "Alexander III", and we sold them at the

railway station, alongside the trains, and on the boulevards.

The autumn of 1917 was drawing near, and I should not be telling the

truth if I tried to make out that I saw, felt or in the least understood the

profound significance of those days for me, for the entire country and

the world at large. I saw nothing and understood nothing. I had even

forgotten the vague excitement which I had experienced in the spring,

when we were living in the country. I simply lived from day to day,

27

trading in cigarettes and catching crabs—yellow, green and grey crabs,

with never any luck for a blue one.

This easy life was to end all too soon, however.

CHAPTER NINE

STROKE, STROKE, STROKE, FIVE, TWENTY, A HUNDRED...

He must have been coming to our place before we got back to town,

because everyone in the yard knew him, and that attitude of faint

amusement towards him on the part of the Skovorodnikovs and Aunt

Dasha had already taken shape. But now he began to call nearly every

day. Sometimes he brought something, but, honestly, I never ate a

single of his plums, or his pods, or his caramels.

He had curly hair—even his moustache was curly—and he was pie-

faced, but fairly well-built. He had a deep voice, which I found very

unpleasant. He was taking treatment for black-heads, which were very

noticeable on his swarthy skin. But for all his pimples and curls, for all

his deep repulsive voice, Mother, unfortunately, had taken a fancy to

him. Why else should he be visiting us almost every day? Yes, she liked

him. She became quite a different woman when he was there, laughing

and almost as talkative as he was. Once I found her sitting by herself,

smiling, and I guessed from her face that she was thinking of him. On

another occasion, when talking to Aunt Dasha, she said of someone:

"Ever so many abnormalities." Those words were his.

His name was Timoshkin, but for some reason he called himself

Scaramouch—to this day I can't make out what he meant by it. I only

remember that he liked to tell my mother that "life had tossed him

about like a twig". In saying this he would put on a meaningful look and

gaze at Mother with an air of fatuous profundity.

And this Scaramouch now visited us every evening. Here is one such

evening.

The kitchen lamp hangs on the wall and my shock-headed shadow

covers the exercise book, ink-well and my hand as it moves the squeaky

pen laboriously across the paper.

I am sitting at the table, my tongue pushing out my cheek with the

effort of concentration, and tracing strokes with my pen-one stroke, a

second, a third, a hundredth, a thousandth. I must have made a million

strokes, because my teacher had declared that until they are

"popindicular", I cannot make any further progress. He is sitting beside

me, teaching me, with now and again an indulgent glance at Mother. He

teaches me not only how to write, but how to live, too, and those endless

stupid moralisings make me feel dizzy. The strokes come out wonky,

pot-bellied, anything but straight and "popindicular".

"Every man's keen to snatch his titbit from life," he said. "And that's

what everyone should go after, it's only natural, man is made that way.

But will such a titbit guarantee security-that's another matter."

Stroke, stroke, stroke, five, twenty, a hundred...

"Now take me. I got into a difficult atmosphere from a child, and I

could never count on my mother's labour power. That was out of the

28

question. On the contrary, when our domestic affairs went to wrack and

ruin and my father, accused of horse-stealing, was sentenced to

imprisonment, it was I, and no other, who was obliged to become the

breadwinner."

Stroke, stroke, fat one, thin one, crooked one, five, twenty, a

hundred...

"The saddest thing of all was that my father, on coming out of prison,

took to drink, and when a man indulges in liquor his house goes to

wrack and ruin. Then death struck him down, most sudden and

untimely, being the result of his skinning the carcass of a horse."

I know exactly what happened afterwards to my teacher's father. He

became bloated and "the coffin they'd started to make had to be altered

in a hurry, because the figure of the dead man was three times its living

size". I once dreamt of this horrid death.

Stroke, stroke, stroke... The pen squeaks, stroke, blot...

"And so our family hearth became desolated. But I did not lose heart

and did not become a burden to my mother at the age of eleven."

My teacher looks at me. Though I'm only ten, I begin to fidget

uneasily on my stool.

"I entered the employ of a restaurant, and became a servant and

errand-boy, but was no longer an extra mouth living on my mother's

earnings."

My mother is sitting at the same table, listening to him spellbound.

She is mending shirts-Father's shirts-and I know who she is mending

them for. It is with presentiment of ill that I look up at my mother's pale

face, at her black hair parted in the middle, at her slim hands—and turn

back to my strokes. I feel like drawing one long line through the strokes,

they would make a lovely fence-but I mustn't. The strokes must be

"popindicular".

"Meanwhile," Scaramouch goes on, "my mother became noticeably

addicted to acts of charity. What do I do? Seeing that this tendency was

adversely affecting my development I turned to my uncle Nikita Zuyev

of never-to-be-forgotten memory, and asked him to influence my

mother."

This was the hundredth time I was hearing about that uncle of never-

to-be-forgotten memory, and I pictured a fat old man with the same

pimply face arriving in the village in a wide country sledge, taking off his

yellow sheepskin coat as he comes in, and crossing himself in front of

the icon. He beats the mother, while little Scaramouch stands by and

calmly watches his mother being beaten.

Strokes, strokes... But the fence is there already-done long ago, and

though I know very well what I am in for, I quickly draw the sun, some

birds and clouds above the fence. Scaramouch glances at me as he talks,

and I hastily cover up the sun and the birds with my sleeve. Too late! He

picks up my exercise book. His eyebrows go up. I stand up.

"Now just have a look, Aksinya Fyodorovna, what your dear little son

has been doing!"

And my mother, who had never beaten us children while Father was

alive, seizes my ear and bangs my head on the table.

My lessons came to an end the day that Scaramouch moved into our

house. The day before that there had been the wedding, which Aunt

Dasha, pleading illness, did not attend. I remember how smart Mother

looked at the wedding. She wore a jacket of white velvet, a gift from the

bridegroom, and had her hair done like a girl's, with braids wound

29

crosswise round her head. She talked and drank and smiled, but every

now and then she passed her hand across her face with a strange

expression. Scaramouch made a speech in which he drew attention to

the service he was rendering the poor family, which was "definitely

heading for ruin inasmuch as its erstwhile breadwinner had left behind

him a scene of devastation", and mentioned, among other things, that

he had opened to me the door of "general education", by which he

evidently meant those "popindicular" strokes of his.

I don't think Mother heard the speech at all. She sat with lowered

head at her bridegroom's side, and then, with a sudden frown, stared in

front of her with a look of perplexity.

Skovorodnikov, who had been drinking heavily, went up to her and

slapped her on the shoulder.

"Ah, Aksinya, you've given a lark to catch a..."

She smiled weakly, hastily.

For about two months after the wedding my stepfather worked in the

wharf office, and though it was very painful to see him come in and

sprawl in the place where my father used to sit, and eat with his spoon

from his plate, life was bearable so long as I kept to myself, ran away

and did not return home until he was asleep. But shortly he was kicked

out of the office for some shady business, and then life became

unbearable. The unhappy idea of taking in hand our upbringing, my and

my sister's, entered that muddled head of his, and from then on I did

not have a moment to myself.

Looking back, I realise that he had been employed in his youth as a

servant. Obviously, he must have seen somewhere all those absurd and

queer things he was making me and my sister perform.

First of all, he demanded that we come and greet him in the morning,

though we slept on the floor within two paces of his bed. And we did so.

But no power on earth could force me to say: "Good morning. Daddy!"

It wasn't a good morning, and he wasn't Daddy. We dare not sit down at

the table before him, and we had to ask permission to get up. We had to

thank him, though Mother still did the washing at the hospital, and my

sister cooked the dinner, which was bought with Mother's money and

mine. I remember the despair that seized me when poor Sanya rose

from the table and with the clumsy curtsy he had taught her, said for the

first time: "Thank you, Daddy." I felt like throwing my plate with the

unfinished porridge into that fat face! But I did not do it, and regret it to

this day.

CHAPTER TEN

AUNT DASHA

I would not, perhaps, be recalling this period of my life were it not for

the dear figure that rises before me—that of Aunt Dasha, whom, for the

first time, I then came consciously to appreciate and love.

I used to go to her and just sit there, saying nothing—she knew

everything as it was. To comfort me she used to tell me the story of her

life. At twenty-five she was already a widow. Her husband had been

30

killed at the very beginning of the Russo-Japanese War. I learnt with

surprise that she was not yet forty. I had thought her an old woman,

especially when she put on her spectacles of an evening and read to us

those letters which the flood-water had brought to our yard (she was

still reading them). She read one letter every evening. It had become for

her a sort of ritual. The ritual began with her trying to guess the

contents of a letter from its envelope and from the address, which in

most cases had been entirely washed away.

And then would come the reading, performed unhurriedly, with long

sighs and grumblings when any words were illegible. Aunt Dasha

rejoiced with the strangers in their joys and shared with them their

sorrows; some she scolded, others she praised. In short, these letters

might have been addressed to her personally, the way she took them.

She read books in just the same way. She dealt with the family and love

affairs of dukes and counts, heroes of the supplements to the Homeland

magazine, as though all those dukes and counts lived in the yard next

door.

"That Baron L., now," she would say animatedly, "I knew he would jilt

Madame de Sans-le-Sou. My love, my love-and then this! A fine fellow, I

must say!"

When, escaping from the presence of Scaramouch I spent the

evenings with her, she was already finishing her mail, with only some

fifteen letters left to read. Among them was one which I must quote

here. Aunt Dasha could not understand it, but it seemed to me, already

at that time, that it had some bearing on the letter of the navigating

officer.

31

Here it is (the opening lines Aunt Dasha was unable to decipher):

"One thing I beg of you: do not trust that man! It can positively be

said that we owe all our misfortunes to him alone. Suffice it to say that

most of the sixty dogs he sold to us at Archangel had had to be shot

while we were still at Novaya Zemlya. That's the price we had to pay for

that good office. Not I alone, but the whole expedition send him our

curses. We were taking a chance, we knew that we were running a risk,

but we did not expect such a blow. It remains for us to do all we can.

There is so much I could tell you about our voyage! Stories enough to

last Katya a whole winter. But what a price we are having to pay, good

God! I don't want you to think that our plight is hopeless. Still, you

shouldn't look forward too much-"

Aunt Dasha read it hesitatingly, glancing at me over her spectacles

with a schoolteacherish expression. I did not realise, listening to her,

that within several years I would be making painful efforts to recall

every word of this letter.

The letter was a long one, on seven or eight sheets—giving a detailed

account of life on an icebound ship that was slowly drifting northwards.

I was particularly amused to find out that there was ice even in the

cabins and every morning it had to be hacked away with an axe.

32

I could recount in my own words how sailor Skachkov, while hunting a

bear, had fallen to his death in a crevasse, or how everyone was worn

out looking after sick engineer Tisse. But the only words I remember

from the original were the few lines I have quoted here. Aunt Dasha

went on with her reading and sighing, and shifting scenes rose before

me as through a mist: white tents on white snow; panting dogs hauling

sledges; a huge man, a giant in fur boots and a tall fur cap striding

towards the sledges like a priest in a fur surplice.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A TALK WITH PYOTR

It was while hunched over my "popindicular" strokes that the idea of

running away first occurred to me. I had not been drawing those birds

and clouds above the fence for nothing! Afterwards I forgot this idea.

But with each passing day I found it harder to return home.

I saw very little of my mother. She left the house while I was still

asleep. Sometimes, when I woke up in the night, I would see her at the

table. White as chalk from fatigue, she was eating slowly, and even

Scaramouch quailed a little when he met her dark scowling gaze.

I was very fond of my sister. Sometimes I wished I wasn't. I remember

that beast Scaramouch beating her cruelly because she had spilt a

wineglassful of vegetable oil. He sent her from the table, but I secretly

brought her some potatoes. She wept bitterly while she ate, then

suddenly reminded herself of the coloured glass beads which she feared

she had lost when he was beating her. The beads were found. She

laughed, finished her potato and started crying again.

I suppose autumn was drawing near, because Pyotr and I, strolling in

Cathedral Gardens, were kicking up dead leaves with our bare feet.

Pyotr was making up a story about the old excavation under the hillside

being a tunnel that ran under the river to the opposite bank. He even

claimed to have walked through it halfway.

"I walked all night," Pyotr said in a casual way. "Skeletons all over the

place. Rats too."

From the hill we could see the Pokrovsky Monastery on the high bluff

of the river-a white building surrounded by low walls, beyond which

stretched meadows, now pale green, now yellow, changing colours in

the wind like a sea.

"There are no rats in Turkestan," Pyotr added thoughtfully. "They

have jumping rabbits there, and field rats out in the steppe. But they're

different-they eat grass, like rabbits."

He often talked about Turkestan. According to him, it was a city

where pears, apples and oranges grew right in the streets, so that you

could pick as many as you liked and nobody would plug you with a

charge of salt in your backside the way the watchmen did in our

orchards. People there slept on carpets in the open air, as there was no

winter there, and went about in oriental robes—no boots or overcoats

for you.

33

"Turks live there. All armed to the teeth. Curved swords with silver

trimmings, knives in their girdles and cartridge belts across their chests.

Let's go there, eh?"

I decided that he was joking. But he wasn't. Paling slightly, he

suddenly turned away and gazed at the distant bank, where an old

fisherman of our acquaintance was dozing over his fishing rods, which

were mounted in the shingle at the water's edge. We said nothing for

awhile.

"What about your Dad? Will he let you go?"

"Catch me asking him! He's got other things on his mind."

"What things?"

"He's going to marry," Pyotr said with contempt.

I was astounded.

"Who?"

"Aunt Dasha."

"Tell me another one."

"He told her that if she didn't marry him he'd sell the house and go

round the villages tinning pots and pans. She refused at first, then she

consented. Must be in love, I suppose," Pyotr added contemptuously

and spat.

I couldn't believe it. Aunt Dasha! Marrying old Skovorodnikov?

Pyotr scowled and changed the subject. Two years ago his mother had

died, and he, sobbing, beside himself, had wandered out of the yard and

off such a long way that they found him with difficulty. I remembered

how the boys used to tease him about it.

We talked a little more, then lay down on our backs with outspread

arms and stared up into the sky. Pyotr said that if you lay like that for

twenty minutes without blinking you could see the stars and the moon

in broad daylight. So there we were, lying and gazing. The sky was clear

and spacious: somewhere high up the clouds were chasing each other.

My eyes had filled with tears, but I was trying with all my might not to

blink. There was no sign of any moon, and as for the stars I guessed at

once that Pyotr was fibbing.

Somewhere a motor started throbbing. I thought at first that it was an

army truck revving at the wharf (the wharf was below us, under the

ramparts). But the sound drew nearer. "It's an aeroplane," Pyotr said.

It was lit up by the sun, a grey shape resembling a beautiful winged

fish. The clouds advanced towards it; it was flying against the wind. I

was amazed to see how easily it avoided the clouds. Now it was already

beyond the Pokrovsky Monastery, and a black cross-shaped shadow ran

after it over the meadows on the other side of the river. Long after it had

disappeared I fancied I could still see its tiny grey wings way out in the

distance.

34

CHAPTER TWELVE

SCARAMOUCH JOINS THE DEATH BATTALION

Pyotr had an uncle in Moscow and our entire plan was built upon this

uncle of his. The uncle worked on the railway-Pyotr would have me

believe as engine-driver, but I suspected as fireman. At any rate, Pyotr

had always called him a fireman. Five years before this engine-driver-

cum-fireman had worked on Moscow-Tashkent trains. I am so exact

about those five years because there had been no letters from this uncle

now for five years. But Pyotr said this did not signify, because his uncle

had always written very rarely; he was sure that he was still working on

the same trains, all the more so since his last letter had come from

Samara. We looked at the map together and found that Samara did

indeed lie between Moscow and Tashkent.

In short, all we had to do was to find this uncle. Pyotr knew his

address, but even if he didn't, one could always find a man by his name.

We did not have the slightest doubt about the name-it was

Skovorodnikov, the same as Pyotr's.

We envisaged the second stage of our journey as a simple matter of

Pyotr's uncle taking us from Moscow to Tashkent on his locomotive. But

how were we to get to Moscow?

Pyotr did not try to persuade me. He listened stony faced to my timid

objections. He did not answer me: all was clear to him. The only thing

clear to me was that but for Scaramouch I would not be going anywhere.

And suddenly it turned out that Scaramouch himself was going away.

He was going and I was staying.

It was a memorable day. He turned up in army uniform, in brand-

new, shiny, squeaky boots, his cap tilted to one side and a cowlick of

curls protruding from under it, and placed two hundred rubles on the

table.

In those days this was an unheard of sum of money and Mother

covered it with her hands in an involuntary gesture of greed.

But it was not the money that staggered me and Pyotr and all the boys

in our yard—oh, no! It was a different thing altogether. On the sleeve of

his army tunic were embroidered a skull and crossbones. My stepfather

had joined a Death Battalion.

A man with a drum would suddenly appear at a public gathering or

outdoor fete-wherever a crowd assembled. He would beat his drum to

command silence. Then another man, usually an officer with the same

skull and crossbones on his sleeve, would begin to speak. In the name of

the Provisional Government he called upon all to join the Death

Battalion. But though he declared that everyone who signed on would

receive sixty rubles a month plus officer's kit and dislocation allowance,

nobody cared to die for the Provisional Government and only rogues of

my stepfather's type joined the death battalions.

But that day, when he came home solemn and grim in his new

uniform, bringing two hundred rubles, nobody thought him a rogue.

Even Aunt Dasha, who loathed him, came out and bowed to him in a

stiff, unnatural way.

In the evening he invited guests and made a speech.

35

"All these procedures carried out by the authorities," he said, "are

designed to safeguard the liberty of the revolution against the paupers,

the absolute majority of whom consists of Jews. The paupers and the

Bolsheviks are scheming a vile adventure, which is bound to jeopardise

all the fruits of the existing regime. For us, champions of freedom, this

tragedy is dealt with very simply. We are taking arms into our hands,

and woe to him who, for the sake of gratifying his personal ambition,

shall make an attempt upon the revolution and freedom! We have paid a

high price for freedom. We will not surrender it cheaply. Such in general

outline is the situation of the moment!"

Mother was very gay that evening. In her white velvet jacket, which

became her so well, she moved round the guests with a bottle of wine

and kept refilling each glass. Stepfather's friend, an amiable little fat

man, who was also in the Death Battalion, stood up and respectfully

proposed her health. He had laughed heartily during my stepfather's

speech, but was now very grave. Raising his glass aloft, he clinked

glasses with Mother and said briefly, "Hurrah!"

Everyone shouted "Hurrah". Mother was embarrassed. Slightly

flushed, she stepped into the middle of the room and bowed low in the

old-fashioned way.

"What a beauty!" the fat little man said aloud.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

JOURNEY'S END

It must have been some time past two; I had been asleep for quite a

while and was awakened by a cry. Tobacco smoke hung motionless over

the table; everyone had left long ago, and my stepfather lay asleep on

the floor, his arms and legs spread wide. The cry was repeated. I

recognised Aunt Dasha's voice and went to the window. A woman was

lying in the yard and Aunt Dasha was blowing noisily into her mouth.

"Aunt Dasha!"

Not seeming to hear me, Aunt Dasha jumped up, ran round our house

and knocked on the window.

"Water! Pyotr Ivanovich! Aksinya's lying out here!"

I opened the door. She came in and started to rouse my stepfather.

"Pyotr Ivanich! Oh, my God!" My stepfather did nothing but mumble.

"Aksinya-she must be carried in - she must have fallen in the yard and

hurt herself. Pyotr Ivanich!"

My stepfather sat up with closed eyes, then lay down again. We

couldn't wake him and had to give it up.

We spent the whole night trying to bring Mother round and she did

not come to herself until dawn. It had been an ordinary fainting fit, but

in falling she had struck her head on the stones. Unfortunately we learnt

of this from the doctor only the following evening. The doctor ordered

36

ice to be applied. But we all thought it odd to buy ice, and Aunt Dasha

decided to apply a wet towel instead.

I remember Sanya running out into the yard to wet the towel in a

bucket, and coming back wiping the tears away with the flat of her hand.

Mother lay still, as pale as she always was. Not once did she ask about

my stepfather, who the next day had joined his battalion, but she would

not let me or my sister out other sight. She was racked by fits of nausea

and kept screwing up her eyes every minute as though trying to make

something out. This, for some reason, upset Aunt Dasha very much. She

was laid up for three weeks and seemed to be on the mend. And then

suddenly it "came over" her.

One morning I woke up towards daybreak to find her sitting on the

bed, her bare feet lowered to the floor.

"Mum!"

She looked at me sullenly, and it dawned on me that she could not see

me.

"Mum! Mamma!"

Still with the same intent, stern expression, she pushed my hands

aside when I tried to get her back into bed.

From that day she stopped eating and the doctor ordered her to be fed

forcibly with eggs and butter. It was excellent advice, but we had no

money and there were neither eggs nor butter to be had in the town.

Aunt Dasha scolded her and wept, but Mother lay brooding, her black

plaits lying across her breast, and not uttering a word. Only once, when

Aunt Dasha announced in despair that she knew why Mother wasn't

eating—it was because she did not want to live-Mother muttered

something, frowned and turned away.

She had become very affectionate towards me since she was taken ill

and even seemed to love me as much as she did my sister. Very often she

looked at me steadily for a long time with a sort of surprise. She had

never wept before her illness, but now she cried every day and I guess

why. She was sorry she hadn't loved me before this and was remorseful

at having forgotten Father, and maybe begging forgiveness for

Scaramouch and for all that he had done to us. But a sort of stupefaction

came over me. I couldn't put my hand to anything and my mind was a

blank. Our last conversation together was like that too-neither I nor she

had uttered a word. She only beckoned me and took my hand, shaking

her head and trying hard to control her quivering lips. I realised that she

wanted to say goodbye. But I stood there like a block of wood with my

head lowered, staring doggedly down at the floor.

The next day she died.

My stepfather, in full dress uniform, with a rifle slung over his

shoulder and a hand grenade at his belt, stood in the passage weeping,

but no one paid any attention to him.

On the day of the funeral my sister had a headache and was made to

stay at home. My stepfather, who had been called out to his battalion

that morning, was late for the carrying-out, and after waiting a good two

hours for him, we set out behind the coffin on our own— "we" being

Skovorodnikov, Aunt Dasha and myself.

They walked. Aunt Dasha holding on to an iron ring to keep from

lagging behind, while me they sat in the hearse.

As we were passing through Market Square I saw a sentry standing at

the gates of the "Chambers" and some men in civilian clothes bustling

37

about in the garden behind the railings, one of them dragging a machine

gun. The shops were closed, the streets deserted, and after Sergievsky

Street we did not meet a soul. What was the matter?

The hearse driver in his dirty robe was in a hurry and kept whipping

up the horse. It was all Aunt Dasha and Skovorodnikov could do to keep

up with it. We came out onto Posadsky Common-a muddy patch of

wasteland between the town and Posad suburb leading down to the

river across Mill Bridge. A short sharp crackle rang out in the distance;

the driver cast a frightened glance over his shoulder and hesitantly

raised his whip. Aunt Dasha caught up with us and started to scold.

"Man alive! Are you crazy? You're not carting firewood!" "There's

shooting over there," the driver growled. A path was dug out in the

hillside leading down to the river, and we drove down it for several

minutes without seeing anything on the sides. They were shooting

somewhere, but less and less frequently. Mill Bridge, from which I had

often fished for gudgeon, came into view. Suddenly the driver stood up

and lashed out at the horse; it dashed off and we raced along the bank,

leaving Skovorodnikov and Aunt Dasha far behind.

It must have been bullets, because chips of wood flew from the hearse

and one of them hit me in the face. The carved wooden upright I was

gripping for support creaked, shook loose and fell into the roadway as

the hearse jolted. I heard Skovorodnikov shouting somewhere behind

us, and Aunt Dasha scolding in a tearful voice.

Pulling his cap down lower and twirling his whip over his head, the

driver drove the horse straight towards the bridge, as though he couldn't

see that the approach to it was blocked with logs, planks and bricks. The

horse reared, and stopped dead in its tracks.

Among the men who ran out from behind this barrier I recognised the

compositor who had rented a room the previous summer at the fortune-

teller's in the next yard to ours. He was carrying a rifle and inside the

leather belt, which looked so odd over an ordinary overcoat, he wore a

service revolver. They were all armed, some even with swords.

The driver clambered down, hitched up the skirt of Us robe, stuck his

whip into his high boot and began to swear.

"What the hell-couldn't you see it's a funeral? You nearly shot my

horse!"

"We weren't shooting, you came under the cadets' fire," the

compositor said. "And couldn't you see there was a barricade here, you

dolt?"

"What's your name?" the driver shouted. "You'll answer for this!

Who's going to pay for repairs?" He walked round the hearse, touching

the damaged places. "You've smashed one o' the spokes!"

"Fool!" the compositor said again. "Didn't I tell you it wasn't us! Why

should we fire on coffins! Fathead!"

"Who are you burying, lad?" an elderly man in a tall fur cap, on which

hung a piece of red ribbon in place of a cockade, asked me quietly.

"My mother," I brought out with difficulty.

He took off his cap.

"Quiet there, comrades," he said. "This is a funeral. This boy here is

burying his mother. You ought to know better."

They all stared at me. I must have looked pretty wretched because,

when everything was patched up and Aunt Dasha, weeping, had caught

38

up with us, and we had driven onto the bridge through the mill, I found

in the pocket of my coat two lumps of sugar and a white biscuit.

Tired out, we returned home after the funeral by way of the opposite

bank.

There was a glow in the sky over the town: the barracks of the

Krasnoyarsk Regiment were on fire. At the pontoon bridge

Skovorodnikov hailed a man of his acquaintance who was on point-

duty, and they started a long conversation, from which I understood

nothing: someone somewhere had pulled up the track, a cavalry corps

was making for Petrograd, and the Death Battalion was holding the

railway station. The name "Kerensky" kept cropping up all the time with

various additions. I could hardly stand on my feet, and Aunt Dasha

moaned and sighed.

My sister was asleep when we returned. Without undressing, I sat

down next to her on the bed.

I don't know why, but Aunt Dasha did not spend that night with us,

the first night we were left alone. She brought me some porridge, but I

did not feel like eating, and she put the plate on the window-sill. On the

window-sill, not on the table where Mother had lain that morning. That

morning. And now it was night. Sanya was sleeping in her bed, in the

place where she had been lying with that little wreath on her brow.

I got up and went over to the window. It was dark outside, and a fiery

glow hung over the river, where bands of black smoke flared up with

yellow streaks and died down.

The barracks were on fire they said, but it was beyond the railway, a

long way off and in quite a different direction. I recalled how she had

taken my hand, shaking her head and fighting back her tears. Why

hadn't I said anything to her? She had so wanted me to say something,

even if it was a single word.

I could hear the pebbles rolling up on the shore; the wind had

probably risen and it started raining. For a long time, thinking of

nothing, I watched the big heavy raindrops rolling down the window-

pane, first slowly, then faster and faster.

I dreamt that someone pulled the door open, ran into the room and

flung his wet army coat on the floor. It was some time before I realised

that this was no dream. It was my stepfather, dashing about the house,

pulling off his tunic as he ran. He tugged away at it, gnashing his teeth,

but it clung to his back. At last, clad only in his trousers, he rushed over

to his box and pulled a haversack out of it.

"Pyotr Ivanich!"

He glanced at me but did not answer. With matted hair, his face

glistening with sweat, he was hastily thrusting linen into the haversack

from the box. He rolled up a blanket, pressed it down with his knee and

strapped it. All the time his mouth worked with vicious fury, and I could

see his clenched teeth—the big, long teeth of a wolf.

He put on three shirts and shoved a fourth into his haversack. He

must have forgotten that I was not asleep, or he would not have had the

nerve to snatch Mother's velvet jacket from the nail on which it hung

and thrust it into the haversack along with the rest.

"Pyotr Ivanich!"

"Shut up!" he said, looking up. "Go to hell, all of you!"

He changed his boots and put on his coat, then suddenly noticed the

skull and crossbones on the sleeve. With an oath he threw the coat off

39

again and started ripping off the emblem with his teeth. He flung his

haversack on his back and was gone—gone out of my life. All that

remained were his muddy footmarks of the floor and the empty tin box

of Katyk cigarettes in which he kept his studs and ' tiepins.

Everything became clear the next day. The Military Revolutionary

Committee proclaimed Soviet power in the town. The Death Battalion

and the volunteers who had come out against the Soviets had been

defeated.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

WE RUN AWAY.

I PRETEND TO BE ASLEEP

Where did Pyotr get the idea that you could travel free now on all the

railways? The rumour about free tramcars must have reached him in

this exaggerated form.

"Grown-ups have to have official travel papers," he said with

assurance. "But we don't need anything."

He was no longer silent. He remonstrated with me, teased me,

accused me of cowardice, and sneered. Everything that was happening

on Earth, merely went to prove, in his view, that we had to make tracks

for Turkestan without a moment's delay. Old Skovorodnikov proclaimed

himself a Bolshevik and made Aunt Dasha take down the icons. Pyotr

cashed in on this situation by arguing that life in the yard would now be

impossible.

I don't know whether he would have succeeded in the end in taking

me into the venture had not Aunt Dasha and Skovorodnikov

decided in family council to place Sanya and me into an orphanage.

With tears in her eyes Aunt Dasha declared that she would visit us at the

orphanage every day, that she would put us in there only for the winter,

and we would return for sure in the summer. In the orphanage we

would be fed, taught and clothed. They would give us new boots, two

shirts each, an overcoat and cap, stockings and drawers. I remember

asking her, "What are drawers?"

We knew the orphanage children. They were sickly looking kids in

grey jackets and crumpled grey trousers. They were ever so smart at

shooting birds with their catapults; they afterwards roasted and ate the

birds in their garden. That's how they were fed in the orphanage!

Altogether they were a "bad lot", and we had scraps with them, and now

I was to become one of them!

I went to Pyotr the same day and told him I was willing. We had very

little money—only ten rubles. We sold Mother's boots in the second-

hand market for another ten. That made it twenty. With the utmost

precautions we removed a blanket from the house; with equal

precaution we returned it; nobody had wanted to buy it, though we

asked very little for it—four fifty, I believe. That was just the amount we

had spent on food as we hawked our blanket round the market. Total:

fifteen rubles fifty kopecks.

Pyotr wanted to flog his books, but luckily nobody bought them. I say

"luckily", because those books now occupy a place of honour in my

40

library. On second thought, we did manage to sell one of them-Yuri

Miloslavsky, I believe. Total: sixteen rubles.

We figured that this money would get us to Pyotr's uncle, and once

there we had the thrilling prospect of life aboard a railway engine to

look forward to. I remember the question whether we should carry arms

or not caused no little argument. Pyotr had a knife; which he called a

dagger. We made a sheath for it out of an old boot. Everything else was

in order: stout boots, overcoats in good condition (Pyotr's even had a fur

collar) and a pair of trousers apiece.

I was very gloomy that day and Aunt Dasha made several attempts to

cheer me up. Poor Aunt Dasha! If she only knew that we had put off our

departure because we were counting on her cookies. The next day she

was to take Sanya and me down to the orphanage, and she spent the day

baking cookies "for the road". She was baking them all day and kept

taking off her glasses and blowing her nose.

She made me give a solemn promise not to steal, not to smoke, not to

be rude, not to be lazy, not to get drunk, not to swear or fight—more

taboos than there were in the Ten Commandments. To my little sister,

who was very sad, she gave a magnificent ribbon of pre-war

manufacture.

Of course, we could have simply slipped out of the house and

disappeared. But Pyotr decided that this was too tame, and he drew up a

rather intricate plan which had an air of fascinating mystery about it.

In the first place, we were to swear to each other a "blood-oath of

friendship". It ran like this:

"Whoever breaks this oath shall receive no mercy until he has counted

all the sand grains in the sea, all the leaves in the forest, all the

raindrops falling from the sky. When he tries to go forward, he will go

back, when he wants to go left he will go right. The moment I fling my

cap to the ground thunderbolts shall strike him who breaks this oath. To

strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

We had to utter this oath in turn, then shake hands and fling our caps

down together. This was performed in Cathedral Gardens on the eve of

our departure. I recited the oath by heart, while Pyotr read it "off the

cuff. After that he pricked his finger with a pin and wrote "P.S." on the

paper in blood, the letters standing for Pyotr Skovorodnikov. I scrawled

with some difficulty the initials "A.G.", standing for Alexander

Grigoriev.

Secondly, I was to go to bed at ten and pretend to be asleep, though

nobody was curious to know whether I was asleep or only pretending. At

three in the morning Pyotr was to give three whistles outside the

window—the prearranged signal that all was in order, the coast was

clear and we could decamp.

This was far more dangerous than it would have been in the daytime,

when things really were in order, the coast clear, and nobody would

have noticed that we had run away. In the night we risked being grabbed

by the patrols—the town was under martial law—and the dogs were let

loose at night all along the river bank. But Pyotr commanded and I

obeyed. And then came the crucial night, my last night in the paternal

home.

Aunt Dasha was sitting at the table, mending my shirt. Though they

provided you with linen at the orphanage, here was one shirt more, to

be on the safe side. In front of her was the lamp with the blue shade

41

which had been Aunt Dasha's wedding presence Mother. It looked sort

of abashed now, as though it felt ill at ease in our deserted house. It was

dark in the corners. The kettle hung over the stove, but its shadow

looked more like a huge upturned nose than a kettle. From a crack

under the window came whiffs of cool air and the tang of the river. Aunt

Dasha was sewing and talking. She took something from the table and

the circle of light on the ceiling began to quiver. It was ten o'clock. I

pretended to be asleep.

"Now mind, Sanya, you must always do as your brother tells you,"

Aunt Dasha was telling my sister. "Being a girl, you must lean on him.

We womenfolk always lean on the men. He'll stand up for you."

My heart was wrung, but I tried not think of Sanya. "And you, too,

Sanya," Aunt Dasha said to me, and I could see a tear creep down from

under her glasses and fall on my shirt, "take care of your sister. You'll be

in different sections, but I'll ask them to allow you to visit her every

day."

"All right, Aunt Dasha."

"Ah, my God, if only Aksinya were alive..."

She turned up the wick, threaded her needle and took up her work

again with a sigh.

I am not asleep, I am pretending to be asleep. Half past eleven.

Twelve. Aunt Dasha gets up. For the last, the very last time I see her

kind face above the lamp, lit up from below. She places her hand over

the rim of the glass and blows. Darkness. She makes the sign of the

cross over us in the dark and lies down. She is spending that night with

us.

It's all very well to pretend you're asleep when you're not sleepy! I

open my eyes with an effort. What's the time? Three o'clock is still a

long way off. A sound of drunken singing comes from the river. The

pebbles roll on the bank. But still there is no signal. Just the wall clock

ticking and Aunt Dasha sighing as she tosses from side to side.

To keep awake, I sit up and rest my head on my knees. I am

pretending to be asleep. I hear a whistle, but I can't wake up.

Afterwards Pyotr told me he had whistled himself as hoarse as a gypsy

until he wakened me. But he kept whistling all the time I was putting on

my boots and my overcoat and stuffing the cookings into the haversack.

Was he cross! He ordered me to turn up the collar of my overcoat and

we made off.

Everything went well. Nobody touched us—neither dogs nor men. To

be on the safe side, though, we made a detour of about two miles round

the town. On the way I tried to find out from Pyotr whether he was sure

that travelling on the railways these days was free of charge. He told me

he was sure; if the worst came to the worst we could hide under the

seats. It was two nights' travel to Moscow. The passenger train was due

to leave at 5.40.

But when, to avoid the patrols, we jumped the fence some half a mile

from the station we found that there was no 5.40 train. The wet, black

rails glinted dully, and yellow lanterns burned dimly at the points. What

were we to do? Wait at the station till morning? Impossible: the patrols

might catch us. Return home?

At that moment a bearded coupler all covered with grease, crawled

out from under a freight train and came towards us, stepping over the

sleepers.

42

"Please, mister," Pyotr accosted him boldly, "how do we get to

Moscow from here-on the right or on the left!"

The man looked at him, then at me. I turned cold. "Now he'll hand us

over to the commandant's."

"It's three hundred miles to Moscow, my lads."

"Please, mister, we only want to know-is it on the right or on the left?"

The coupler laughed.

"On the left."

"Thank you. Come along to the left, Sanya!"

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

TO STRIVE. TO SEEK, TO FIND AND NOT TO YIELD

All journeys are much alike when the travellers are eleven or twelve

years old, when they travel under the carriages and do not wash for

months. You only have to scan a few books dealing with the life of waifs

to see this for yourself. That is why I am not going to describe our

journey from our town of Ensk to Moscow.

Aunt Dasha's commandments were soon forgotten. We swore, fought

and smoked (sometimes dried dung, to keep warm); sometimes it was

an aunt travelling to Orenburg for salt who had lost us on the way; at

other times we were refugees who were going to join our grandma in

Moscow. We gave ourselves out to be brothers—this made a touching

impression. As we couldn't sing, I recited on the trains the letter from

the navigating officer. I remember how, at Vyshny Volochok station, a

young-looking though grey-haired naval man made me repeat the letter

twice.

"Very strange," he said, looking at me closely with his stern grey eyes.

"Lieutenant Sedov's expedition? Very strange."

We were not waifs, though. Like Captain Hatteras (Pyotr told me

about him with a wealth of detail which Jules Verne himself had never

suspected), we were going forward, forever forward. Not only because in

Turkestan there was bread, while here there were none. We were going

out to discover a new land of sunny cities and rich orchards. We had

sworn an oath to each other.

What a help that oath was to us!

Once at Staraya Russa we strayed from the road and lost our way in

the forest. I lay down in the snow and closed my eyes. Pyotr tried to

scare me with talk about wolves, he swore and even hit me, but all in

vain. I couldn't take another step. So then he took off his cap and flung

it down in the snow.

"You swore an oath, Sanya," he said, "to strive, to seek, to find and not

to yield. D'you mean to say you've sworn falsely? Didn't you say

yourself-no mercy for whoever breaks the oath?"

I started to cry, but I got up. Late that night we arrived at a village. It

was a village of Old Believers, but one old woman nevertheless took us

in, fed us and even washed us in the bathhouse.

And so, passing from village to village, from station to station, we at

last reached Moscow.

43

On the way we had sold or bartered for food nearly everything that we

had brought with us. Even Pyotr's knife and its sheath, I remember, was

sold for two pieces of meat-jelly.

The only things that remained unsold were the papers with the oath

written on them in blood "P.S." and "A.G." and the address of Pyotr's

uncle.

That uncle! How often we had talked about him! In the end I -came to

see him as a sort of Grand Patriarch of Steam Engines-beard streaming

in the wind, funnel belching smoke, boiler ejecting steam...

And then, at last, Moscow! One frosty February night we clambered

out through the window of the lavatory in which we had been travelling

during the last stage of our journey, and jumped down on to the track.

We couldn't see Moscow, it was hidden in the dark, and besides, we

weren't interested in it. This was just Moscow, whereas that Uncle lived

at Moscow Freight Yard, Depot 7, Repair Shop. For two hours we

blundered amidst the maze of diverging tracks. Day began to break by

the time we reached Depot 7, a bleak building with dark oval windows

and a tall oval door on which hung a padlock. The uncle wasn't there.

And there wasn't anybody you could ask about him. Later in the

morning we learned at the Depot Committee that Uncle had gone off to

the front.

So that was that! We went out and sat down on the platform.. It was

goodbye to the streets where oranges grew, goodbye to the nights under

the open sky, goodbye to the knife under the girdle and the curved

sword ornamented in silver!

Just to make sure, Pyotr went back to the committee to ask whether

his uncle was married. No, Uncle was a single man. He lived, it

transpired, in a railway truck and had gone off to the front in the same

truck.

It was quite light by this time and we could now see Moscow-houses

upon houses (they all looked like railway stations to me), great heaps of

snow, an occasional tramcar, then again houses and houses.

What was to be done! The weeks that followed were about the

toughest we had known. The things we did for a living! We took up

queues for people. We did jobs for ex-bourgeois, shovelling snow off the

pavements in front of the houses when "compulsory labour service" was

introduced. We cleaned the stables at the circus. We slept on landings,

in cemeteries and in attics.

Then, suddenly, everything changed.

We were walking, I remember, down Bozhedomka Street, yearning

only for one thing—to come across a bonfire somewhere; in those days

bonfires were sometimes lighted in the centre of the city. But there was

nothing doing. Snow, darkness, silence! It was a cold night. All house

entrances were locked. We walked along in silence, shivering. It looked

as if Pyotr would have to fling his cap down again, but at that very

moment, tipsy voices reached us from one of the gateways we had just

passed. Pyotr went into the yard. I sat on a curb stone, my teeth

chattering with cold and my freezing fingers thrust into my mouth.

Pyotr came back.

"Come on!" he said joyfully. "They'll let us in!"

44

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

MY FIRST FLIGHT

It's good to sleep when you have a roof over your head! It's good, in a

bitter frost, to sit around an iron stove, chopping and feeding bits of

wood into it, until the tin smoke pipes begin to roar! But better still,

while weighing out salt and flour, is it to think that Turkestan itself had

been promised us in return for our work. We had stumbled upon a den

of black-marketeering war cripples. Their boss, a lame Pole with a

scalded face, promised to take us with him to Turkestan. We learned

that it was not a city, but a country, whose capital was Tashkent, that

same Tashkent to which our cripples used to go every two or three

weeks.

Those crooks employed us to pack food products. We got no wages,

only board and lodging. But we were glad to have that.

But for the boss's wife, life wouldn't have been at all bad. But the

woman got on our nerves.

Fat, with bulging eyes, her belly shaking, she would come running

into the shed where we were packaging the food to see whether

everything was safe.

"Pfef A pfef Jak smiesz tak rоbiс?” "How dare you work like this?"

I don't know about robic, but it was a sore temptation while weighing

out salted pork fat not to nip off at least a tiny bit for yourself. Lump

sugar just got itself stuck into your sleeve or pocket. But we put up with

her. Had we known that we should no more see Turkestan than our own

ears, that old hag might have really found herself short of quite a few

things.

One day, when we had been working for over two months with this

gang, she came rushing into the shed clad only in a dressing gown. In

her hand was the padlock with which she locked up the shed at night.

Eyes popping, she stopped in the doorway, looked over the shoulder and

went very pale.

"No knocking, no banging," she whispered, clutching her head. "No

shouting! Keep quiet!"

Before we knew where we were, she shot home to bolt, breathing

heavily, then hung up the padlock and went away.

It was so unexpected that for a minute or so we really kept quiet. Then

Pyotr swore and lay down on the floor. I followed suit, and we both put

an eye to the crack under the door to see what was going on.

At first all was quiet—the empty yard, the thawing snow with yellow

footprints filled with water. Then there appeared strange legs in a pair

of black high boots: after that another pair of legs, then a third. The legs

were making for the annex across the yard. Two pairs disappeared, the

third remaining on the doorstep. The butt of a rifle came to rest beside

them.

"A round-up," Pyotr whispered and sprang to his feet.

In the dark he bumped his head against mine and I bit my tongue. But

this was no time to think of bitten tongues.

"We must run for it!"

Who knows—my life might have taken quite a different turn if we had

taken some rope with us. There was plenty of rope in the shed. But we

45

didn't think of it until we were up in the loft. The shed was brick-built,

with a loft, a lean-to roof, and a round opening in the rear wall which

gave on to the yard next door.

Pyotr poked his head through this opening and took a look round. He

had scratched a cheek when we had removed a plank from the ceiling in

the darkness, and now he kept wiping the blood away with his fist every

minute.

"Let's jump, eh?"

But it was no easy thing, jumping through a small opening in a sheer

wall from a height of fifteen or eighteen feet, unless you took a dive,

head foremost. You had to crawl through this opening feet foremost,

sitting bent up almost double, then push free from the wall and drop to

the ground. That's what Pyotr did. I had half a mind to go back for some

rope, when he was already sitting in the hole. He couldn't turn round.

He just said, "Come on, Sanya. Don't be afraid." And he was gone. I

looked out, my heart in my mouth. He was all right. He had dropped on

to a heap of wet snow on the other side of the fence, which at this point

came close up to our shed.

"Come on!"

I crawled out and sat down, knees drawn up to my chin. I could now

see the whole of the next-door yard. A little girl there was playing with a

hand sled outside an old house with columns, and a crow was sitting on

a drainpipe. The girl stopped and looked at us with curiosity. The crow

glanced at us incuriously, then turned away and drew its head between

its wings.

"Come on!"

Besides the girl and the crow, there was a man in the yard, a man in a

leather overcoat. He was standing at the point where our annex

adjoined the next yard. I saw him finish his cigarette, throw away the fag

end and coolly walk towards us.

"Come on!" Pyotr cried desperately.

As I started feebly to push off from the wall with my hands everything

suddenly came into motion. The crow took wing, the girl backed away in

fright. Pyotr made a dash for the gateway, and the leathered man gave

chase. At that moment I understood everything. But it was too late—I

was hurtling down.

Such was my first flight—down in a straight line from a height of

fifteen feet, without a parachute; I shouldn't call it a successful flight. I

struck the fence with my chest, jumped up and fell again. The last thing

I saw was Pyotr dashing out into the street and slamming the gate in the

face of the man in the leather coat.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CLAY MODELLING

It was very silly, of course, to run away when you hadn't done

anything wrong. After all, we weren't blackmarketeers, we had been

only working for them. Our captors wouldn't do anything to us, they'd

simply question us and let us go. But it was too late now for regrets. The

46

man in the leather coat gripped my arm and marched me off—to jail

probably. I had been caught, while Pyotr had got away. I was alone now.

It was already evening, the sun was going down, and the daws were

circling slowly over the trees along the Strastnoi Boulevard. I wasn't

crying, but I must have looked pretty miserable, because the man in the

leather coat looked at me closely and let go of my arm. He realised that I

wouldn't run away.

He brought me into a large well-lighted room on the fifth floor of a

huge building at Nikitsky Gate. It was a children's reception centre of

the Education Department, where I was to spend three memorable days.

My heart sank when I saw all those ugly customers. Some were

playing cards, squatting around a clay-built stove, some were taking

down the wooden valance rods from the high windows and feeding them

straight into the stove, while others were sleeping or building a house

out of old frames and canvases stacked haphazardly in a corner. At

night, when it got colder inside the reception centre than outside, these

house owners lighted a primus-stove and exacted payment for

admission into their house at the rate of a couple of cigarettes or a piece

of bread. And gazing incuriously with the sightless white eyes upon all

this chaos there stood on tall pedestals plaster figures of Hercules, of

Apollo, Diana and other Greek gods.

The only human faces there were those of the gods. Waking up from

the cold towards morning with chattering teeth, I glanced at them

fearfully. They were probably thinking: "You poor mutt, you! What

made you run away from home? That orphanage? You'd be back in the

spring and find some job helping the old folks. And now what? Now

you're all alone. If you die no one will remember you. Only Pyotr will be

running around Moscow, looking for you, and Aunt Dasha will heave a

sigh. Ask for some clothes, my lad, and hotfoot it home!" They changed

your clothes at the Education Department, they burned your old ones

and gave you trousers and a shirt instead. Many waifs deliberately let

themselves be rounded up in order to change their ragged clothes.

All those three days I kept silent. For a boy who had only recently

learned to speak that was not at all difficult. Who was there to talk to

anyway! Every time they brought in a new batch of waifs I caught myself

looking to see if Pyotr was among them. But he wasn't, and that was just

as well. I sat apart and kept silent.

What with hunger, cold and misery, I started modelling. There were

lots of white sculptor's clay in this former art studio. I picked up a lump,

soaked it in hot water and started to knead it between my fingers.

Almost without realising what I was doing, I had made a toad. I gave it

big nostrils and goggle-eyes, then tried my hand on a hare. It was all

pretty poor, of course. But at the sight of the familiar features of Frisky

emerging from the shapeless lump of clay something stirred within me.

I was to remember that moment. Nobody had seen me modelling: an

old thief, who had by some miracle landed in the reception centre for

homeless children, was describing how they worked at the railway

stations in "two-men teams". I stood apart by the window, holding my

breath as I gazed at the little lump of clay with long ears sticking out of

it, and I couldn't make out why it stirred me so.

After that I modelled a horse with a thick-combed mane. Then it

struck me—why, old Skovorodnikov's horses—that's what it was! The

figures he used to carve out of wood!

47

I don't know why, but the discovery bucked me up. I fell asleep in a

cheerful mood. I had a feeling as though these figurines were going to be

my salvation. They would enable me to get out of this place, help me to

find Pyotr, help me to return home and him to reach Turkestan. They

would help my sister at the orphanage, Pyotr's uncle at the front, and

everybody who roamed the streets at night in cold and hungry Moscow.

That's how I prayed-not to God, no! to the toad, the horse and the hare,

which were drying on the window-sill, covered with scraps of

newspaper.

I daresay some other boy in my place would have become an idol

worshipper and I have had everlasting faith in the toad, the horse and

the hare. Because they did help me!

The next day a commission from the Education Department came to

the reception centre and that place was done away with from now on

and for aye. The thieves were packed off to jail, the waifs to orphanages,

and the beggars to their homes. All that remained in the spacious art

studio were the Greek gods Apollo and Diana and Hercules.

"What's this?" said one of the commission members, a tousled

unshaven youth, whom everybody called simply Alee. "Ivan

Andreyevich, look at this sculpture!"

Ivan Andreyevich, no less unkempt and unshaven, but older put on

his pince-nez and studied the figures.

"Typical Russian figure work from Sergiev Posad," he said.

"Interesting. Who did this? You?"

"Yes."

"What's your name?"

"Alexander Grigoriev."

"Would you like to study?"

I looked at him and said nothing. I must have had a pretty rough time

of it during those months of hungry street life, because all of a sudden

my face twisted and the floodgates opened everywhere— from eyes to

nose.

"He'd like to," said commissioner Alee. "Where shall we send him,

Ivan Andreyevich?"

"To Nikolai Antonich's, I think," the other answered, carefully

replacing my hare on the window-sill.

"Why, of course! Nikolai Antonich has just that bent in art. Well,

Alexander Grigoriev, do you want to go to Nikolai Antonich's?"

"He doesn't know him, Alee. Better write it down. Alexander

Grigoriev... How old are you?"

"Eleven."

I had added six months to my age.

"Eleven. Have you put that down? To Tatarinov, Commune School No.

4."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

NIKOLAI ANTONICH

The fat girl from the Education Department, who somehow resembled

Aunt Dasha, left me in a long dimly-lit corridor of a room, saying that

48

she would soon be back. It was in the cloakroom. Empty racks, looking

like skinny people with horns, stood in open cupboards. All along the

wall—doors and doors. One of them was of glass. I saw myself in it for

the first time since I had left home. What a sight! A pale-faced boy with

a round cropped head looked at me despondently; he was very small,

smaller than I thought. A peaked nose, down-drawn mouth.

The fat girl returned and we went to see Nikolai Antonich. He was a

stout pale man with scant hair combed back over his balding head. A

gold tooth gleamed in his mouth, and I, in my usual stupid way, stared

at that tooth and could not keep my eyes off it.

Nikolai Antonich was talking to a group of boys of about sixteen who

crowded round him arguing and interrupting each other. He heard them

out, twiddling his stubby fingers, which reminded me of hairy

caterpillars-cabbage-worms I believe they're called. He was unhurried,

condescending, dignified.

We came forward.

"A waif?"

"No."

"From the Education Department," the fat girl explained and placed a

paper on the desk.

"Where do you come from, Grigoriev?" Nikolai Antonich demanded

after reading the paper.

I told him.

"And what are you doing here, in Moscow?"

"Passing through," I said.

"Oh, I see. Where were you going?"

I took a deep breath and said nothing. I had been asked all these

questions a hundred times.

"All right, we'll discuss that some other time," Nikolai Antonich said.

He wrote something on the back of the paper. "You won't run away, will

you?"

I was quite sure that I would, but to be on the safe side I said, "No."

We went out. In the doorway I looked back. Nikolai Antonich was

gazing after me with a thoughtful air. What was he thinking? One thing

he was definitely not thinking was that Fate itself had appeared to him

that day in the shape of a half-starved ragamuffin in outsize boots and

regulation jacket from which protruded a skinny neck.

________

49

PART TWO

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

CHAPTER ONE

I LISTEN TO FAIRY-TALES

"I'll stick it till the first warm day," I had firmly decided. As soon as

the frosts let go, it was goodbye for me at the children's home. They'd

never see me again. But things worked out differently. I didn't run away

at all. What kept me there were the reading sessions.

First thing in the morning we went to the bakery for bread, then

lessons began. We were counted as Form I, though some of us were old

enough to be studying in Form 6.

Our teacher was an old lady by the name of Serafima Petrovna, who

came to school with a rucksack on her back. I really couldn't say what

she taught us exactly.

I remember the Duck lesson. It was three lessons in one—geography,

nature study and Russian. At the nature study lesson we studied the

duck as such: what sort of wings it had, what sort of feet, how it swam,

and so on. At the geography lesson the same duck was studied as a

denizen of the Earth: you had to point out on the map where it lived and

where it didn't. At the Russian lesson Serafima Petrovna taught us to

write "d-u-c-k" and read to us something from Brehm about ducks. She

mentioned, in passing, that the German for duck was so-and-so, and the

French so-and-so. This, I believe, was called at the time the "complex

method". It was all sort of "incidental". It is quite likely that Serafima

Petrovna got this method mixed up a bit. She was an old lady and wore a

mother-of-pearl watch pinned to her breast, so that in answering her we

always looked to see what time it was.

In the evening she read to us. It was from her that I first heard the

fairy-tale about Sister Alyonushka and Brother Ivanushka.

50

Sister, dear sister, Swim out, swim out to me. Fires are burning high,

Pots are boiling, Knives are ringing, And I am going to die.

All Baba and the Forty Thieves made a particularly strong impression

upon me. "Open Sesame!" It grieved me to learn, years later, upon

reading the Thousand and One Nights in a new translation, that the

word should be Simsim and not Sesame, which was a plant, something

like hemp. Sesame had magic, it was a wonder-working word. I was

terribly disappointed to learn that it was just ordinary hemp.

Without exaggeration it can be said that these tales simply knocked

me flat. More than anything else in the world now I wanted to learn to

read, like Serafima Petrovna.

On the whole, I liked the life in the children's home. It was snug and

warm there, and they fed and taught you in the bargain. It wasn't dull,

at least not very. The other boys treated me well—probably because I

was a small chap.

At the very outset I made friends with two boys and we did not waste

a minute of our spare time.

One of my new chums was Romashov whom we nicknamed

Romashka which means "a daisy". He was a skinny lad with a big head

on which grew yellow matted hair. He had a flattened nose, unnaturally

round eyes and a square chin—altogether a wicked-looking piece of

work for a face. We became friends over some picture puzzles. I was

good at guessing them and this won his admiration.

The other one was Valya Zhukov, a lazy boy with a head full of plans.

At one moment he was all for getting a job at the Zoo, learning to tame

lions, the next he was raving to join the fire brigade. After a visit to the

bakery he wanted to become a baker; he would come away from the

theatre with the firm intention of becoming an actor. Valya was fond of

dogs. All the dogs in the neighbourhood treated him with great respect.

But all the same, Valya was just Valya, and Romashka was just

Romashka. Neither of them came anywhere near Pyotr.

I can't describe how I missed him.

I went round all the places we had roamed together, inquired about

him from all the street waifs and strays, and hung round the reception

centres and children's homes. He was nowhere to be found. Had he

gone to Turkestan, travelling in some box under an International

Sleeping Car, I wondered. Or had he returned home on foot from

hungry Moscow? Who could say?

It was then, during my daily wanderings, that I came to know Moscow

and to love it. It was mysterious, vast, snowed-up, preoccupied with

hunger and war. Maps were hung up in public places, and the red thread

held by little flags passed somewhere between Kursk and Kharkov and

was nearing Moscow. Okhotny Ryad, the old shopping centre, was a

long, low row of painted wooden stalls and shops. Futurist artists had

daubed strange pictures on its walls-people with green faces, churches

with falling cupolas. Similar pictures decorated the tall fence on

Tverskaya. ROSTA placards (Caricatures, often with verse, put on the walls in the

street for propaganda purposes in the '20s.) hung in the shop windows, saying:

Munch your pineapples,

Chew your grouse,

Your last day is coming, Bourgeois louse!

These were the first verses I learned to read by myself.

51

CHAPTER TWO

SCHOOL

I believe I have already mentioned that the Education Department

regarded our children's home as a sort of hatchery for budding talent.

The Department considered that we were distinguished by having gifts

for music, painting or literature. Therefore, after lessons we were

allowed to do as we pleased. We were supposed to be freely developing

our talents. And so we were. Some of us ran down to the Moskva River

to help the firemen catch fish in the ice-holes, while others loitered

about the Sukharevka Market, helping themselves to anything that lay

in temptation's way.

I spent most of my time indoors, however. We lived on the floor below

the school rooms and all school life passed before my eyes. It was an

odd, puzzling, complex life. I hung around groups of senior pupils,

giving an ear to their conversation. New attitudes, new ideas, new

people. All this was as unlike life in Ensk, my home town, as Ensk was

unlike Moscow. For a long time it all baffled me and kept me wondering.

One day I happened upon a meeting of fifth-formers, who were

discussing the question of whether or not to study. One scruffy-looking

schoolboy, who was greeted with cries of "Go it, Shrimpy!", argued that

on no account should they be forced to study. Attendance at school

should be voluntary, and marks given only by a majority vote.

"Bravo, Shrimpy!"

"Hear, hear!"

"Generally speaking, comrades, it's just a question of teaching staff.

Now take those teachers whose lessons are attended by an absolute

minority. I suggest that we set them a limit of five pupils. If less than

five come to the lesson, the teacher should get no rations that day."

"Hear, hear!"

"Sap!"

"Go and eat coke!"

"Bravo!"

Evidently they had in mind not all the teachers, but only one of them,

because they all suddenly turned their heads, whispering and nudging

one another, at the sight of a tall man with walrus moustache who

appeared in the doorway, and stood with folded arms, listening

attentively to the speaker.

"Who's that?" I asked Varya, a fat girl with thick plaits.

"That's Whiskers, my boy," Varya answered.

"What do you mean, whiskers?"

"Fancy not knowing that!"

I was soon to discover who it was that everyone in School 4 called

"Whiskers".

52

He was the geography teacher, Korablev, whom the whole school

heartily disliked. For one thing, the consensus of opinion was that he

was a fool and an ignorant one at that. Secondly, he turned up for his

lesson every blessed day and sat it out, even though there might be only

three pupils in his class. This simply got everyone's goat.

I looked at Korablev. I must have been staring, because all of a sudden

he stared back at me, ever so faintly aping my goggled look. I even

fancied that he smiled into his moustache. But Shrimpy was holding

forth again, and Korablev, turning his twinkling eye away from me,

listened to him with close attention.

CHAPTER THREE

THE OLD LADY FROM ENSK

I remember that day distinctly—a sunny day, with spring rain that

kept coming and going-the day I met the thin old lady in the green

velvet coat in Kudrinskaya Square. She was carrying a shopping bag full

of all kinds of things-potatoes, sorrel leaves, onions-and in her other

hand a big umbrella. Though she obviously found the bag heavy, she

walked along briskly with an air of preoccupation, and I could hear her

counting to herself in a whisper: "Mushrooms-half a pound-five

hundred rubles; washing blue-a hundred and fifty; beetroot-a hundred

and fifty; milk-a pint-a hundred and fifty; prayer for the dead-seven

hundred and sixty rubles; three eggs-three hundred rubles; confession—

five hundred rubles." Prices were like that in those days.

Finally, she drew a light sigh and put the bag down on a dry stone to

recover her breath.

"Let me help you, Grandma," I said.

"Go away, you rascal! I know your kind!"

She shook a threatening finger at me and picked up her bag.

I walked on. But we were both going in the same direction and

presently drew level with each other again. The old lady was obviously

anxious to get rid of me, but her burden made it difficult for her to get

away.

"Look here. Grandma, if you think I'm going to steal anything, then

I'll help you for nothing," I said. "Cross my heart I will, I just can't see

you dragging that load."

The old lady got angry. She clutched her bag to her with one arm and

began to wave her umbrella at me with the other as though fighting off a

bee.

"Get along with you! I've had three lemons* stolen already. I know

you."

"Just as you like. It was the street boys who stole them from you, but

I'm from a children's home."

"You're just as bad a lot as the others."

She looked at me and I at her. Her nose was slightly tilted and had a

purposeful look about it. She seemed a kind old soul. Maybe she took a

fancy to me too, because she suddenly stopped brandishing her

umbrella and demanded: "Who are your parents?"

53

"I haven't any."

"Where d'you come from? Moscow?"

I realised at once that if I said I was a Muscovite, she would chase me

away. She probably thought it was Moscow boys who had stolen her

money.

"No," I said, "I'm from Ensk."

Would you believe it, she was from Ensk too! Her eyes lit up and her

face grew kinder still.

"You're fibbing, you little liar," she said sternly. "The one who stole

the lemon from me said he wasn't from Moscow either. If you're from

Ensk, where did you live there?"

"On the Peshchinka, back of the Market Square."

"I don't believe you." This without conviction. "Peshchinka, you say?

There may be Peshchinkas in other places too. I don't remember you."

"You must have left the town a long time ago, when I was still little."

"It wasn't long ago, it was only recently. Come on, take the bag by one

handle, I'll take the other. Don't jerk it."

We carried the bag and chatted. I told her how Pyotr and I had

headed for Turkestan and got stranded in Moscow. She listened with

interest.

"Hoity-toity! What cleverdicks! Globe-trotters, eh? Of all the crazy

ideas!"

As we passed our street I pointed out our school to her.

"We do belong to the same places, I see," the old lady said

enigmatically.

She lived in the Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya, in a little brick-built

house. I knew it by sight.

"That's where our headmaster lives," I said. "Maybe you know him—

Nikolai Antonich."

(*In those days of inflation a million ruble treasury note was

popularly called a "lemon". –Tr.).

"Is that so!" the old lady said. "And what's he like? Is he a good

Head?"

"Rather!"

I couldn't make out why she laughed. We went upstairs and stopped

in front of a door upholstered in clean oilcloth. There was a name on the

doorplate written in fanciful lettering which I hadn't time to read.

Whispering to herself, the old woman drew a key from her coat. I

turned to go, but she stopped me.

"I did it for nothing. Grandma."

"Then sit with me a bit for nothing."

She tiptoed into the little entrance hall and began to take her coat off

without putting on the light. She removed the coat, a tasselled shawl, a

sleeveless jacket, then another smaller shawl, a kerchief and so on. Then

she opened her umbrella and after that she disappeared. The next

moment the kitchen door opened and a little girl appeared in the

doorway. I was almost ready to believe that this was my old lady who

had magically turned into a little girl. But the next moment the old lady

herself reappeared. She stepped out of a cupboard in which she had

been hanging up her shawls and things.

"And this is Katerina Ivanovna," she said.

54

Katerina Ivanovna was about twelve, no older than I. But what a

difference! I wish I had the same poise she had, the same proud set of

the head, the same way of looking one straight in the face with her dark

bright eyes. She was rosy, but demure and had the same purposeful

nose as the old lady. All in all, she was pretty, but gave herself airs-you

could tell that at once.

"You can congratulate me, Katerina Ivanovna," the old lady said,

peeling off more clothes. "They've pinched a lemon again."

"Didn't I tell you to keep your money in your coat pocket," Katerina

Ivanovna said with annoyance.

"Coat pocket, you say? That's just where they pinched it from."

"Then you've been counting again. Grandma."

"No I wasn't! I had this young man here escorting me."

The girl looked at me. Till then she hadn't seemed to notice me.

"He carried my bag for me. How's your mother?"

"We're taking her temperature now," the girl said, regarding me

coolly.

"Tut, tut!" the old lady said, thrown into a flutter. "Why so late? You

know the doctor said she was to have it taken at noon."

She hurried out and the girl and I were left by ourselves. For two

minutes or so we said nothing. Then frowning, she asked me gravely:

"Have you read Helen Robinson'!"

"No."

"Robinson Crusoe?

"No."

"Why not?"

I was about to tell her that it was only six months since I had learned

to read properly, but checked myself in time.

"I haven't got them."

"What form are you in?"

"I'm not in any form."

"He's a traveller," said the old lady, coming back. "Ninety-eight point

seven. He was footing it to Turkestan. Treat him nicely, Katya."

"Footing it? What d'you mean?"

"What I say. He hoofed it all the way."

In the hall, under the mirror, stood a little table, and Katya drew a

chair up to it, settled herself in it with her head resting on her hand and

said, "Well, tell me about it."

I had no desire to tell her anything-she gave herself such airs. If we

had made it and got to Turkestan that would be a different matter. I

therefore answered politely, "Oh, I don't feel like it. Some other time

perhaps."

The old lady put bread and jam in front of me, but I declined it,

saying, "I told you I did it for nothing."

I don't know why, but I got upset. I was even pleased that Katya had

reddened when I refused to tell her my story and made for the door.

"Come, come, don't be angry," the old lady said as she saw me out.

"What's your name?"

"Grigoriev, Alexander."

"Well, Alexander Grigoriev, goodbye, and thank you."

I stood for a while on the landing, trying to make out the name on the

doorplate. Kazarinov ... no, it wasn't Kazarinov...

55

"N. A. Tatarinov," I read it out suddenly.

Gosh! Tatarinov, Nikolai Antonich. Our Head. This was his flat.

CHAPTER FOUR

MORE FOOD FOR THOUGHT

We spent the summer at Silver Woods, just outside Moscow, in an old

deserted house which had lots of little passage steps, carved wooden

ceilings and corridors that unexpectedly ended in blank walls. The

whole place creaked-the doors in one key, the shutters in another. One

large room was boarded up, but even in there something creaked and

rustled, and suddenly there would come a measured rattling sound like

that of a little hammer in a striking clock tapping without striking the

bell. In the attic grew puffballs and foreign books lay scattered about

with pages torn out of them and covers missing.

Before the Revolution the house had belonged to an old gypsy

countess. A gypsy countess! How mysterious! It was rumoured that

before she died she had hidden away her valuables. Romashka searched

for the treasure all through the summer. Puny, big-headed, he prowled

around the house with a stick, tapping and listening. He tapped at night

until he got a clip on the ear from one of the older boys. At thirteen he

was determined to get rich. Whenever he spoke about money his pale

ears would begin to burn. He was a born treasure-seeker—superstitious

and greedy.

Lilac grew thickly round the tumbledown arbours. Statues lined the

green paths. They were quite unlike those Greek gods. Those had been

remote, with white sightless eyes, whereas these were people, just like

us.

Life was good only at the beginning of the summer, when we first

moved into Silver Woods. Afterwards things got worse. They all but

stopped feeding us. Our children's home was put under a system of

"self-supply". We caught fish and crabs, we sold lilac at the stadium

when anything was on there, and simply helped ourselves to anything

we could lay hands on. In the evenings we lit fires in the garden and

roasted what we had bagged.

Here is a description of one such evening—they were all much alike.

We are sitting around our fire, tired out, hungry and ill-tempered.

Everything is black with smoke-the mess-tin, the sticks from which it

hangs, our faces and hands. Like cannibals getting ready to devour

Captain Cook, we sit in silence, staring into the fire. The smouldering

brands suddenly blaze up and fall apart, and a cap of curling, dark-red

smoke, hangs over the fire.

We are a "commune". The whole children's home is divided into

communes. Foraging on one's own is a hard job. Each commune has its

chairman, its own fire and its own reserve supply—whatever has not

been eaten that day and is left over for the next.

Our chairman is Stepka Ivanov, a fifteen-year-old boy with a smooth

mug. He is a greedy-guts and bully whom everyone fears.

"What about a game o' knuckles?" Stepka says lazily.

56

All are silent. No one cares to play knuckles. Stepka is sated, that's

why he wants to play.

"All right, Stepka. Only it's dark, you know," says Romashka.

"Know where it's dark? Get up!"

There was nothing our chairman liked more in the world than to play

knucklebones. But he cheated and everyone knew it. All except Valya

and I sucked up to him, especially Romashka. Romashka even lost to

him on purpose so's to keep in with him.

If you think we were roasting some dainty gamebird over our fire you

are mistaken. In our mess-tin, seized in battle from the kitchen, we were

cooking soup. It is real "soup made from sausage stick", as in the fairy-

tale which Serafima Petrovna had read to us during the winter. The

difference, if any, is that while that soup had been made from a mouse's

tail, ours had any odd thing put into that came to hand, sometimes even

frogs' legs.

And yet it wasn't a bad summer. It had stuck in my memory not

because we were poorly fed. I was used to that. I don't remember ever

having had a decent meal those days. The reason I remember this

summer was quite a different one. It was then for the first time that I

gained a sense of self-respect.

It happened at the end of August, shortly before we went back to

town, and around one of those fires on which we were cooking our

supper. Stepka all of a sudden announced a new procedure for eating.

Up to now we had eaten from the one pot in turn, spoon by spoon.

Stepka started, as chairman, then Romashka, and so on. But now we

were to tuck in all together while the soup was still hot, the quickest

getting the most.

Nobody liked the new arrangement. No wonder! With a chairman like

ours no one stood a chance. He could wolf down the whole pot in no

time.

"Nothing doing," Valya said with decision.

This was greeted with a hubbub of approval. Stepka slowly got up,

dusted his knees and hit Valya in the face. It was a smashing blow that

sent the blood gushing over his face. It must have got into his eyes too,

because he started to wave his arms about like a blind man. "Well,"

Stepka drawled, "anyone else asking for it?"

I was the smallest boy in the commune, and he could have mopped up

the floor with me, of course. Nevertheless I hit out at Stepka. All at once

he staggered and slumped down. I don't know where I had struck him,

but he sat on the ground blinking, wearing a sort of thoughtful

expression. The next minute he was up and made a rush at me, but now

the other boys took my part. Stepka was thrashed like the cur he was.

While he lay by the fire, howling, we hastily elected another chairman—

me. Stepka, of course, did not vote. In any case he would have been in a

minority of one, because I was elected unanimously.

Oddly enough, this scrap was my first act of social service. I heard the

boys say of me: "He's got plenty of guts." I had guts! Now, what sort of

person was I? Here was food for thought indeed.

CHAPTER FIVE

IS THERE SALT IN SNOW?

57

Nothing changed in our school life that year except that I had now

become a pupil of Form 3. As usual, Korablev turned up at school at 10

a.m. He would arrive in a long autumn overcoat and a wide-brimmed

hat, leisurely comb his moustache in front of the looking-glass and go in

to his classroom.

He asked no questions and set no homework. He simply related

something or read to us. It turned out that he had been a traveller and

had been all over the world. In India he had seen yogi conjurors who

had been buried in the ground for a year and then got up as alive and

well as anything. In China he had eaten the tastiest of Chinese dishes-

rotten eggs. In Persia he had witnessed the sacrificial feats of the

Mohammedans.

It was not until several years later that I learned he had never been

outside Russia. He had made it all up, but how interestingly! Although,

for some reason many had said that he was a fool, none could maintain

that he knew nothing.

As before, the chief figure at our school was the Head, Nikolai

Antonich. He made all decisions, went into everything, attended all

meetings. The senior boys visited him at home to "thrash things out".

One day I was lounging about the assembly hall, trying to make up my

mind whether to go down to the Moskva River or to Sparrow Hills,

when the doors of the teachers' room opened and Nikolai Antonich

beckoned to me.

"Grigoriev," he said (he had a reputation for knowing everyone in the

school by name). "You know where I live, don't you?"

I said that I did.

"And do you know what a lactometer is?"

I said that I didn't.

"It's an instrument which tells you how much water there is in the

milk. As we know," he went on, raising a finger, "the women who sell

milk on the market dilute their milk with water. If you put the

lactometer in such milk you will see how much milk there is and how

much water. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Well, go and fetch it to me."

He wrote a note.

"Mind you don't break it. It's made of glass."

I was to give the note to Nina Kapitonovna. I had no idea that this was

the name of the old lady from Ensk. But instead of the old lady, the door

was opened by a spare little woman in a black dress.

"What do you want, boy?"

"Nikolai Antonich sent me."

The woman, of course, was Katya's mother and the old lady's

daughter. All three had the same purposeful noses, the same dark, lively

eyes. But the granddaughter and her grandmother were brighter

looking. The daughter had a drooping careworn expression.

"Lactometer?" she said in a puzzled tone, after she had read the note.

"Ah, yes!"

She went into the kitchen and returned with the lactometer in her

hand. I was disappointed. It was just like a thermometer, only a little

bigger.

"Be careful you don't break it."

"Me break it?" I replied with scorn.

58

I remember distinctly that the daring idea of testing the lactometer for

snow salt struck me a minute or two after Katya's mother had shut the

door behind me.

I had just reached the bottom of the stairs and stood there gripping

the instrument with my hand in my pocket. Pyotr had once said that

snow had salt in it. Would the lactometer show that salt or was Pyotr

fibbing? That was the question. It needed testing.

I chose a quiet spot behind a shed, next to a refuse dump. A little

house was built of bricks in the trodden-down snow, from which a black

thread, resting on pegs, ran round the back of the shed- the children had

probably been playing a field telephone. I breathed on the lactometer

and with a beating heart stuck it into the snow next to the little house.

You can judge what a stupid head I was when I tell you that, after a

while, I pulled the lactometer out of the snow and finding no change in

it, I stuck it back again upside down.

Nearby, I heard someone gasp. I turned round.

"Run! You'll be blown up!" came a shout from inside the shed. . It all

happened in a matter of seconds. A girl in an unbuttoned overcoat

rushed out of the shed towards me. "Katya," I thought, and reached for

the instrument. But Katya grasped my arm and dragged me away. I tried

to push her off and we both fell in the snow. Bang! Pieces of brick flew

through the air, and powdery snow rose behind us in a white cloud and

settled on us.

I had been under fire once before, at my mother's funeral, but this was

much more terrifying. Rumblings and explosions still came from the

refuse dump, and each time I lifted my head Katya quivered and said,

"Smashing, eh?"

At last I sprang to my feet.

"The lactometer!" I yelled and ran like mad towards the dust-heap.

"Where is it?"

At the spot where I had stuck it in the snow there was a deep hole.

"It's exploded!"

Katya was still sitting in the snow. Her face was pale and her eyes

shone.

"Silly ass, it was firedamp that exploded," she said scornfully. "And

now you'd better run for it, because the policeman will soon pop—and

he'll nab you. He won't catch me though."

"The lactometer!" I repeated in despair, feeling that my lips were

beginning to quiver and my face twitch. "Nikolai Antonich sent me for

it. I put it in the snow. Where is it?"

Katya got up. There was a frost in the yard and she was without a hat,

her dark hair parted in the middle and one plait stuffed in her mouth. I

wasn't looking at her at the time and didn't remember this until

afterwards.

"I've saved your life," she said with a little sniff. "You'd have been killed

on the spot, hit right in the back. You owe your life to me. What were

you doing here around my firedamp anyway?"

I did not answer. I was choking with fury.

"I would have you know, though," she added solemnly, "that even if it

had been a cat coming near the gas I should have saved it just the same.

Makes no difference to me."

I walked out of the yard in silence. But where was I to go? I couldn't

go back to the school-that much was clear.

59

Katya caught up with me at the gate.

"Hey, you, Nikolai Antonich!" she shouted. "Where are you off to?

Going to snitch?"

I went for her. Did I enjoy it! I paid her back for everything-for the

ruined lactometer, for the tip-tilted nose, for my not being able to go

back to school and for her having saved my life when nobody asked her

to.

She gave as good as she got, though. Stepping back, she planted a

blow in my stomach. I grabbed her by the plait and poked her nose into

the snow. She leapt to her feet.

"That wasn't fair, your backheeling," she said briskly. "If it wasn't for

that I'd have laid into you good and proper. I thrash all the boys in our

form. What form are you in? Wasn't it you who helped Grandma to

carry her bag? You're in the third form, aren't you?"

"Yes," I said drearily.

She looked at me.

"Fancy making all that fuss over a silly thermometer," she said

contemptuously. "If you like I'll say it was me who did it. I don't care.

Wait a minute."

She ran off and was back in a few minutes wearing a small hat and

looking quite different, sort of impressive, and with ribbons in her

plaits.

"I told Grandma you'd been here. She's sleeping. She asked why you

didn't come in. It's a good thing that lactometer is broken, she says. It

was such a nuisance, having to stick it into the milk every time. It didn't

show right anyway. It's Nikolai Antonich's idea, but Grandma can

always tell whether the milk's good or not by tasting it."

The nearer we got to the school the more pronounced became Katya's

gravity of manner. She walked up the stairs, head thrown back, eyes

narrowed, with an aloof air.

Nikolai Antonich was in the teachers' room where I had left him.

"Don't say anything, I'll tell him myself," I muttered to Katya.

She gave a contemptuous sniff, one of her plaits arching out from

under her hat.

It was this conversation that started off the string of riddles of which I

shall write in the next chapter.

The thing was that Nikolai Antonich, that suave Nikolai Antonich

with his grand air of patronage, whom we were accustomed to regard as

lord and master of School 4-vanished the moment Katya crossed the

threshold. In his place was a new Nikolai Antonich, one who smiled

unnaturally when he spoke, leaned across the table, opening his eyes

wide and raising his eyebrows as though Katya were speaking of God

knows what extraordinary things. Was he afraid of her, I wondered?

"Nikolai Antonich, you sent him for the lactometer, didn't you?"

Katya said motioning to me with her eyes in an offhand manner.

"I did, Katya."

"Very well. I've broken it."

Nikolai Antonich looked grave.

"She's fibbing, " I said glumly. "It exploded."

"I don't understand. Shut up, Grigoriev! What's it all about, Katya,

explain."

"There's nothing to explain," Katya answered with a proud toss of her

head. "I broke the lactometer, that's all."

60

"I see. But I believe I sent this boy for it, didn't I?"

"And he hasn't brought it because I broke it."

"She's fibbing," I repeated.

Katya's eyes snapped at me.

"That's all very well, Katya," Nikolai Antonich said, pursing his lips

benignly. "But you see, they've delivered milk to the school and I've put

off breakfast in order to test the quality of this milk before deciding

whether or not to continue taking it from our present milk women. It

seems I have been waiting for nothing. What's more, it appears that a

valuable instrument has been broken, and broken in circumstances

which are anything but clear. Now you explain, Grigoriev, what it's all

about."

"What a frightful bore! I'm going, Nikolai Antonich," Katya

announced.

Nikolai Antonich looked at her. Somehow it struck me at that

moment that he hated her.

"All right, Katya, run along," he said in a mild tone. "I'll have it out

here with this boy."

"In that case I'll wait."

She settled herself in a chair and impatiently chewed the end of her

plait while we were talking. I daresay if she had gone away the talk

would not have ended so amicably. The lactometer affair was forgiven.

Nikolai Antonich even recalled the fact that I had been sent to his school

as a sculptor-to-be. Katya listened with interest.

From that day on we became friends. She liked me for not letting her

take the blame on herself and not mentioning the firedamp explosion

when telling my story.

"You thought I was going to catch it, didn't you?" she said, when we

came out of the school.

"Mmm."

"Not likely! Come and see us. Grandma's invited you."

CHAPTER SIX

I GO VISITING

I woke up that morning with the thought: should I go or not? Two

things worried me - my trousers, and Nikolai Antonich. The trousers

were not exactly picture-look, being neither short nor long, and patched

at the knees. As for Nikolai Antonich, he was Head of the school, you

will remember, that's to say a rather formidable personage. What if he

suddenly started questioning me about this, that and the other?

Nevertheless, when lessons were over, I polished my boots, and wetted,

brushed and parted my hair. I was going to pay a visit!

How awkward I felt, how shy I was! My confounded hair kept sticking

up on the top of my head and I had to keep it down with spit. Nina

Kapitonovna was telling Katya and me something, when all of a sudden

61

she commanded: "Shut your mouth!" I had been staring at her open-

mouthed.

Katya showed me round the flat. In one of the rooms she lived herself

with her mother, in another Nikolai Antonich, and the third was used as

a dining-room. The desk-set in Nikolai Antonich's room represented "a

scene from the life of Ilya of Murom", as Katya explained to me. In fact,

the inkwell was made in the shape of a bearded head wearing a spiked

helmet, the ashtray represented two crossed, ancient Russian gauntlets,

and so on. The ink was under the helmet, which meant that Nikolai

Antonich had to dip his pen right into the hero's skull. This stuck me as

odd.

Between the windows stood a bookcase; I had never seen so many

books together. Over the bookcase hung a half-length portrait of a naval

officer with a broad brow, a square jaw and dancing grey eyes.

I noticed a similar but smaller portrait in the dining-room and a still

smaller one in Katya's room over the bed.

"My Father," Katya explained, glancing at me sideways. And I had been

thinking that Nikolai Antonich was her father! On second thoughts,

though, she would hardly have called her own father by his name and

patronymic. "Stepfather," I thought, but the next moment decided that

he couldn't be. I knew what a stepfather was. This did not look like it.

Then Katya showed me a mariner's compass—a very interesting

gadget. It was a brass hoop on a stand with a little bowl swinging in it,

and in the bowl, under a glass cover, a needle. Whichever way you

turned the bowl, even if you held it upside down, the needle would still

keep swinging and the anchor at the tip would point North. "Such a

compass can stand any gale." "What's it doing here?" "Father gave it to

me." "Where is he?"

Katya's face darkened.

"I don't know."

"He divorced her mother and left her," I decided immediately. I had

heard of such cases.

I noticed that there was a lot of pictures in the flat, and very good

ones, too, I thought. One was really beautiful-it showed a straight wide

path in a garden and pine trees lit up by the sun.

"That's a Levitan," Katya said in a casual, grown-up way.

I didn't know at the time that Levitan was the name of the artist, and

decided that this must be the name of the place painted in the picture.

Then the old lady called us in to have tea with saccharin.

"So that's the sort you are, Alexander Grigoriev," she said. "You went

and broke the lactometer."

She asked me to tell her all about Ensk, even the post-office there.

"What about the post-office?" she said. She was rattled because I hadn't

heard of some people by the name of Bubenchikov.

"And the orchard by the synagogue! Never heard of it? Tell me

another! You must have gone after those apples scores of times."

She heaved a sigh.

"It's a long time since we left Ensk. I didn't want to move, believe me!

It was all Nikolai Antonich's doing. He came down. It's no use waiting

any longer, he says. We'll leave our address, and if need be they'll find

us. We sold all our things, this is all that's left, and came here, to

Moscow."

"Grandma!" Katya said sternly.

62

"What d'you mean-Grandma?"

"At it again?"

"All right. I won't. We're all right here."

I understood nothing—whom they had been waiting for or why it was

no use waiting any longer. I did not ask any questions, of course, all the

more as Nina Kapitonovna changed the subject herself.

That was how I spent my time at our headmaster's flat in Tverskaya-

Yamskaya Street.

When I was leaving Katya gave me the book Helen Robinson against

my word of honour that I would not bend back the covers or dirty the

pages.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE TATARINOVS

The Tatarinovs had no domestic help, and Nina Kapitonovna had a

pretty hard time of it considering her age. I helped her. Together we

kindled the stove, chopped firewood, and even washed up. I found it

interesting there. The flat was a sort of Ali Baba's cave to me, what with

its treasures, perils and riddles. The old lady was the treasure, and

Maria Vasilievna the riddle, while Nikolai Antonich stood for things

perilous and disagreeable.

Maria Vasilievna was a widow—or maybe she wasn't, because one day

I heard Nina Kapitonovna say of her with a sigh: "Neither widowed nor

married." The odd thing about it was that she grieved so much for her

husband. She always went about in a black dress, like a nun. She was

studying at a medical institute. I thought it rather strange at the time

that a mother should be studying. All of a sudden she would stop talking

and going anywhere, either to her institute or to work (she was also

working), but would sit with her feet up on the couch and smoke. Katya

would then say: "Mummy's pining," and everybody would be short-

tempered and gloomy.

Nikolai Antonich, as I soon learnt, was not her husband at all, and

was unmarried for all that he was forty-five. "What is he to you?" I once

asked Katya. "Nothing."

She was fibbing, of course, for she and her mother bore the same

surname as Nikolai Antonich. He was Katya's uncle, or rather a cousin

once removed. He was a relative, yet they weren't very nice to him. That,

too, struck me as odd, especially since he, on the contrary, was very

obliging to everybody, too much so in fact.

The old lady was fond of the movies and did not miss a single picture,

and Nikolai Antonich used to go with her, even booking the tickets in

advance. Over the supper she would start telling enthusiastically what

the film was about (at such times, by the way, she strongly resembled

Katya), while Nikolai Antonich patiently listened, though he had just

returned from the cinema with her.

63

Yet she seemed to feel sorry for him. I saw him once playing patience,

his head bent low, lingers drumming on the table, and caught her

looking at him with compassion.

If anyone treated him cruelly, it was Maria Vasilievna. What he did

not do for her! He brought her tickets for the theatre, staying at home

himself. He gave her flowers. I heard him begging her to take care of

herself and give up her job. He was no less attentive to her visitors. The

moment anyone came to see her, he would be there on the spot. Very

genial, he would engage the guest in conversation, while Maria

Vasilievna sat on the couch, smoking and brooding.

He was his most amiable when Korablev called. He obviously looked

at Whiskers as his own guest, for he would drag him off at once to his

own room or into the dining-room and not allow him to talk shop.

Generally, everybody brightened up when Korablev came, especially

Maria Vasilievna. Wearing a new dress with a white collar, she would lay

the table herself and do the honours, looking more beautiful than ever.

She would even laugh sometimes when Korablev, after combing his

moustache before the mirror, began paying noisy court to the old lady.

Nikolai Antonich laughed too .and paled. It was an odd trait of his-he

always turned pale when he laughed.

He did not like me. For a long time I never suspected it. At first he

merely showed surprise at seeing me, then he started to make a wry face

and became sort of sniffy. Then he started lecturing:

"Is that the way to say 'thank you'?" He had heard me thank the old

lady for something. "Do you know what 'thank you' means? Bear in

mind that the course your whole life will take depends upon whether

you know this or not, whether you understand it or not. We live in

human society, and one of the motive forces of that society is the sense

of gratitude. Perhaps you have heard that I once had a cousin.

Repeatedly, throughout his life, I rendered him material as well as

moral assistance. He turned out to be ungrateful. And the result? It

disastrously affected his whole life."

Listening to him somehow made me aware of the patches on my

trousers. Yes, I wore broken-down boots, I was small, grubby and far

too pale. I was one thing and they, the Tatarinovs, quite another. They

were rich and I was poor. They were clever and learned people, and I

was a fool. Here indeed was something to think about!

I was not the only one to whom Nikolai Antonich held forth about his

cousin. It was his pet subject. He claimed that he had cared for him all

his life, ever since he was a child at Genichesk, on the shores of the Sea

of Azov. His cousin came from a poor fisherman's family, and but for

Nikolai Antonich, would have remained a fisherman, like his father, his

grandfather and seven generations of his forefathers. Nikolai Antonich,

"having noticed in the boy remarkable talents and a penchant for

reading", had taken him to Rostov-on-Don and pulled strings to get his

cousin enrolled in a nautical school. During the winter he paid him a

"monthly allowance", and in the summer he got him a job as seaman in

vessels plying between Batum and Novorossiisk. He was instrumental in

getting his brother a billet in the navy, where he passed his exam as

naval ensign. With great difficulty, Nikolai Antonich got permission for

him to take his exams for a course at Naval College and afterwards

assisted him financially when, on graduation, he had to get himself a

new uniform. In short, he had done a great deal for his cousin, which

explained why he was so fond of talking about him. He spoke slowly,

64

going into great detail, and the women listened to him with something

akin to awed reverence.

I don't know why, but it seemed to me that at those moments they felt

indebted to him, deeply indebted for all that he had done for his cousin.

As a matter of fact they did owe him an unpayable debt, because that

cousin, whom Nikolai Antonich alternately referred to as "my poor" or

"missing" cousin, was Maria Vasilievna's husband, consequently Katya's

father.

Everything in the flat used to belong to him and now belonged to

Maria Vasilievna and Katya. The pictures, too, for which, according to

the old lady, "the Tretyakov Gallery was offering big money", and some

"insurance policy" or other for which eight thousand rubles was payable

at a Paris bank.

The one person least interested in all these intricate affairs and

relationships among the grown-ups was Katya. She had more important

things to attend to. She carried on a correspondence with two girl

friends in Ensk, and had a habit of leaving these letters lying about

everywhere, so that anyone who felt like it, even visitors, could read

them. She wrote her friends exactly what they wrote her. One friend,

say, would write that she had dreamt of having lost her handbag, when

all of a sudden Misha Kuptsov— "you remember me writing about

him"—came towards her with the bag in his hand. And Katya would

reply to her friend that she dreamt she had lost, not a handbag, but a

penholder or a ribbon, and that Shura Golubentsev - "you remember me

writing about him"-had found it and brought it to her. Her friend would

write that she had been to the cinema, and Katya would reply that so

had she, though in fact she had stayed indoors. Later it occurred to me

that her friends were older than her and she was copying them.

Her classmates, however, she treated rather high-handedly. There

was one little girl by the name of Kiren-at least that was what the

Tatarinovs called her—whom she ordered about more than anybody

else. Katya got cross because Kiren was not fond of reading. "Have you

read Dubrovsky, Kiren?" "Yes." "Don't tell lies." "Spit in my eye."

"Then why didn't Masha marry Dubrovsky - tell me that." "She did."

"Fiddlesticks!" "But I read that she did marry him."

Katya tried the same thing on me when I returned Helen Robinson,

but there was nothing doing. I could go on reciting word for word from

any point. She did not like to show surprise and merely said:

"Learned it off by heart, like a parrot."

I daresay she considered herself as good as Helen Robinson and was

sure that in a similar desperate plight she would have been just as brave.

If you ask me, though, a person who was preparing herself for such an

extraordinary destiny ought not to have spent so much time in front of

the mirror, especially considering that no mirrors are to be found on