Two Captains

square head.

It was getting dark, and I may have been mistaken. No, it was

Romashov all right. Aloof, pale, leaning slightly forward, he slowly

walked past the shop window and was lost in the crowd.

248

PART SEVEN

FROM THE DIARY OF KATYA TATARINOVA

SEPARATION

September 2, 1941. I once read some verses in which the years were

compared to lanterns hanging "on the slender thread of time drawn

through the mind". Some of these lanterns burn with a bright, beautiful

light, others flicker smokily in the darkness.

We live in the Crimea and in the Far East. I am the wife of an airman

and I have many new acquaintances, all airmen's wives, in the Crimea

and the Far East. Like them, I worry when new aircraft are received in

the detachment. Like them, I keep telephoning detachment

headquarters, to the annoyance of the duty-officer, whenever Sanya

goes aloft and doesn't come back in time. Like them, I am sure that I

shall never get used to my husband's job, and like them, end up by

getting used to it. Almost impossible though it is, I have not given up my

geology. My old professor, who still calls me "dear child", assures me

that had I not got married, and to an airman at that, I should long ago

have won my M. Sc. degree. She went back on these words when, in the

late autumn of 1937, I came back to Moscow from the Far East with a

new piece of research done together with Sanya. Aeromagnetic

prospecting, the subject was. Searching for iron-ore deposits from an

airplane.

We are in a sleeping-car compartment of the Vladivostok-Moscow

express. It is almost unbelievable-we have actually been together under

the same roof for ten whole days, without parting day or night. We have

breakfast, dinner and supper at the same table. We see each other in the

daytime-there are said to be women who do not find this strange.

"Sanya, now I know what you are."

"What am I?"

"You're a traveller."

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"Yes, a sky chauffeur-Vladivostok-Irkutsk, take-off from Primorsky

Airport, seven forty-four."

"That doesn't mean anything. You don't get a chance. All the same

you're a traveller by vocation, it's your grand passion. You know, it has

always seemed to me that every person has a characteristic age of his

own. One person is born forty, while another remains a boy of nineteen

all his life. C. is like that, and so are you. Lots of airmen, in fact.

Especially those who go in for ocean hops."

"You think I'm one of them?"

"Yes. You won't throw me over when you're hopped across, will you?"

"No. But they'll call me back mid-way."

I said nothing. "They'll call me back"—now that was quite a different

story. A story of how my father's life, which Sanya had pieced together

from fragments scattered between Ensk and Taimyr, had fallen into

alien hands. The portraits of Captain Tatarinov hang in the

Geographical Society and the Arctic Institute. Poets dedicate verses to

him, most of them very poor ones. The Soviet Encyclopaedia has a big

article about him signed with the modest initials N.A.T. His voyage is

now history, the history of Russia's conquest of the Arctic, along with

names like Sedov, Rusanov and Toll.

And the higher this name rises, the more often does one hear it

uttered alongside that of his cousin, the distinguished Arctic scientist,

who gave his whole fortune to organise the expedition of the St. Maria

and devoted his whole life to the biography of that great man.

Nikolai Antonich's admirable work has received appreciative

recognition. His book Amid the Icy Wastes is reprinted every year in

editions designed both for children and adults. The newspapers carry

reports of various scientific councils which he chairs. At these councils

he delivers speeches, in which I find traces of the old dispute which

ended that day and hour when a woman with a very white face was

carried out into a cold stone yard and taken away from home for ever.

But that dispute had not ended yet, no! It is not for nothing that that

worthy scientist never tires of repeating in his books that the people

responsible for Captain Tatarinov's death were the tradesmen, notably

one named von Vyshimirsky. It is not for nothing that this worthy

scientist uses arguments with which he had once tried to give the lie to

the words of a schoolboy who had discovered his secret.

Now he is silent, that schoolboy. But the future is still ours.

He is silent, and works tirelessly day and night. On the Volga he

sprays reservoirs. He carries the mail between Irkutsk and Vladivostok

and is happy when he succeeds in delivering Moscow newspapers to

Vladivostok within forty-eight hours. He is promoted to Pilot, Second

Class, and it is I, not he, who feels outraged when, after he had asked-for

the nth time—to be sent to the North, he receives by way of reply a

reappointment as sky chauffeur, this time between Simferopol and

Moscow. What is this secret shadow that keeps falling across his path? I

don't know. Nor does he.

He works and is appreciated, but I alone realise how tired he is of the

monotony of those dreary flights, each one resembling the other like a

thousand brothers...

In the winter of 1937 Sanya is transferred to Leningrad. We stay with

the Berensteins, and all would be well but for one thing: I wake up in the

night to find Sanya lying with his eyes wide open...

250

We stand in the Berensteins' tiny hallway among some old winter

coats and mantles. We stand there in silence. The last quarter of an hour

before another parting. He is going away in mufti, looking so unfamiliar

in that fashionable coat with the wide shoulders and the soft hat.

"Is that you, Sanya? "

"Maybe it isn't?"

He laughs.

"Let's consider that it isn't me. You are crying?"

"No. Take care of yourself, darling."

He says, "I'll be back" and some other tender, confused words. I don't

remember what I said, all I remember is asking him not to forget his

parachute. He doesn't always carry one.

Where is he going? To the Far East, he says. Why in mufti? Why,

when I ask him about this assignment, does he take Ms time answering?

Why, when he gets a phone call from Moscow late at night does he

answer only "yes" or "no" and afterwards paces up and down the room,

smoking, agitated, pleased with himself? What is he pleased with? I

don't know, I'm not supposed to know. Why can't I see him off to the

station?"

"It's not very convenient," says Sanya. "I'm not going alone. Maybe I

won't go at all. If it'll be convenient I'll phone you from the railway

station."

He did phone me to say the train was leaving in ten minutes. I mustn't

worry, everything will be all right. He will write to me every day. He

won't forget his parachute, of course...

From time to time: I receive letters bearing a Moscow postmark.

Judging by these letters he gets mine regularly. People I don't know ring

me up to find out how I am getting on. Somewhere a thousand miles

away, in the mountains of Guadarrama, fighting is going on. A map with

little flags pinned all over it hangs over my bedside table. Spain, faraway

and mysterious, the Spain of Jose Diaz and Dolores Ibarruri, becomes as

close to me as the street in which I spent my childhood.

On a rainy day in March the Republican aircraft—"everything that had

wings"—fly out against the rebels, who plan to cut Valencia off from

Madrid. It is the victory of Guadalajara. Where are you, Sanya?

In July the Republican army hurls the rebels back from Brunete.

Where are you, Sanya? The Basque country is cut off communication

with Bilbao is by means of old civil planes, flying in mist over the

mountains. Where are you, Sanya?

"I'm being detained," he writes. "Anything might happen to me.

Whatever happens, remember that you are free, without any

obligations."

Then suddenly the impossible, the incredible happens. Such a simple

thing, yet it makes everything a thousand times better-the weather, my

health, everything.

He comes home-a late night phone call from Moscow, a scared Rosalia

wakes me, and I run to the telephone... And a few days later he stands

before me, looking thinner, bronzed, very much like a Spaniard. I pin

the Order of the Red Banner to his tunic with my own hands.

In the autumn we are going to Ensk. Pyotr and his son and the

"learned" Nanny spend the summer at Ensk every year, and Aunt Dasha

keeps asking us down in every letter – and now, at last, we are going.

Evening finds me standing by the carriage, mentally scolding Sanya,

251

because there are only five minutes to go before the train leaves and he

hasn't come back yet, having gone off to buy a cake. He jumps aboard as

the train moves off, breathless and gay. We sit for a long time in the

semi-darkness of our compartment without putting on the lights.

When was that? We were returning from Ensk like grown-ups, and

those old Nihilists, the Bubenchikovs aunts, with their big funny muffs

were seeing us off. The little unshaven man kept trying to guess what we

were—brother and sister? No resemblance. Husband and wife? Too

young. And those lovely apples—red-cheeked, firm, winter apples! Why

is it that people eat such apples only in childhood?

"It was the day I fell in love with you."

"It wasn't. You fell in love that day we were coming back from the

skating-rink and you offered me some sweets, and I wouldn't take them,

and you gave them away to some little toad of a girl."

"That was when you fell in love with me."

"No, I know it was you. Otherwise you wouldn't have given them

away."

We stand in the corridor, watching the telegraph wires dipping and

leaping past, as we had done then. Things are not the same any more,

yet we are happy. The stout, moustachioed conductor keeps glancing at

us-or at me perhaps? - and says, sighing, that he, too, has a beautiful

daughter.

Ensk. Early morning. The trams are not running yet, and we have to

walk right across the town. A polite ragamuffin carries our baggage and

talks without a stop. All our efforts to stem the flow by telling him that

we are natives of Ensk ourselves are in vain. He knows all the late

Bubenchikovs, Aunt Dasha, and the judge-the judge in particular, whom

he had had occasion to meet more than once.

"Where?"

"At the police court."

In the square, among the carts from which the farmers are selling

apples and cabbages, stands Aunt Dasha weighing a head of cabbage in

her hand, musing whether to take it or not. She has aged.

Sanya hails her. She eyes us sternly over her glasses the way old people

do, then suddenly drops the cabbage from her listless hand.

"Sanya! My darlings! What are you doing here, in the market?"

"We're passing through on our way to you. Aunt Dasha—my wife." He

leads me up to Aunt Dasha, and business in the Ensk market is

suspended-even the horses take their noses out of their bags to gaze

curiously at Aunt Dasha and me kissing.

The judge comes home late in the evening, when we had long ceased

to expect him. Somewhere round the corner a flivver starts spluttering

and the old man appears on the garden path in a dusty white cap,

carrying two briefcases.

"Well, we have visitors I hear. I'll get washed, then come and kiss

you."

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We hear him grunting with pleasure and splashing about in the

kitchen. Aunt Dasha grumbling about him making a mess of the floor

again, but he keeps on grunting and snorting, exclaiming "Ah, that's

good!", then finally he appears, his hair combed, his bare feet in

slippers, and wearing a clean Russian blouse. He drags us out onto the

doorsteps in turn to have a good look, first at me, then at Sanya. Sanya's

decoration comes in for a special scrutiny. "Not bad," he says, looking

pleased. "And a bar?" "Yes, a bar." "A captain, eh?" "Yes." He wrings Sanya's hand.

We sit at the table till late into the night, talking our heads off. We

talk about Sasha, simply and naturally, as if she were with us. She is

with us-little Pyotr becomes more and more like her with every passing

month-that same Mongolian set of the eyes, the same soft dark hair on

the temples. In bending his head, he lifts his eyebrows just as she used

to do.

Sanya talks about Spain, and a queer, long-forgotten feeling grips me.

I listen to him as though he were talking about somebody else. So it was

he, who, going out one day on a reconnaissance flight, spotted five

Junkers and closed in with them without hesitation? It was he who,

diving in among the Junkers, fired almost at random, because it was

impossible to miss? It was he who, covering his face with his glove, his

253

jacket smouldering, set down his wrecked plane and within the hour

was up again in another.

We clink glasses and Sanya says in Spanish: "Salud!" Then, "Let's

consider that our 'voyage into life' has only just begun. The ship put out

of harbour yesterday and one can still see in the distance the lighthouse

which had sent her its farewell signal: 'Happy sailing and success!' Once

upon a time, small but brave, we walked through the dark quiet streets

of this town. We were armed with only one Finnish knife between us,

the knife for which Pyotr made a sheath out of an old boot. But we were

better armed than might appear at first sight. We went forward because

we had sworn to each other an oath:

'To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.' We went forward and our

road has not come to an end yet."

Saying this, Sanya raised his glass high, drained it and shattered it

against the wall...

In 1941 we moved to Leningrad, hoping it is now for good. We rent a

three-roomed summer cottage in the country with a well and a

handsome old landlord who resembles one of the ancient Russian

Streltsi and whom Pyotr immediately starts to paint. We live at this

dacha all together, one family—the two Pyotrs and the Nanny did not go

to Ensk that year—we bathe in the lake, drink tea from a real, brass pot-

bellied samovar, and I find it odd that other women do not seem to

notice this wonderful peace and happiness.

On Saturdays we go to meet Sanya. The whole family troop to the

station, and the most eager to meet Uncle Sanya, of course, is little

Pyotr, who secretly hopes he will bring him a battleship. His hope is

justified. Sanya, a magnificent ship in one hand, jumps down from the

step of a carriage, waves to us, but continues to walk alongside the

moving carriage. The train stops and he holds out his hand. A little

dried-up old woman steps down with a brisk preoccupied air, in one

hand an umbrella, in the other a canvas travelling-bag. I can hardly

believe my eyes. It is Grandma all right. Grandma in a chic pongee suit

and a cute straw hat, whom he protectively pilots through the crowd

which instantly fills the small platform...

I was very keen on having Grandma come and live with us when we

decided to make our home in Leningrad. But each time I met her I was

persuaded that it was impossible. She had less and less to say against

Nikolai Antonich and spoke of him more and more with a sort of

superstitious awe. Deep down in her heart she was convinced that he

was endowed with supernatural powers.

"The moment I think of a thing, he knows it," she once said. "It's

uncanny. The other day I decided to bake some pies, and he says: 'But

not with sago. It's bad for the digestion.' "

What could have happened to make Grandma show up at our

countryside station and stride briskly towards us, umbrella in one hand

and travelling-bag in the other?

After a nap and a wash she appeared at table looking younger and

spruce in a dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves and cream-coloured high

boots with pointed toes.

"Got himself a housekeeper," she began without any preliminaries.

'"Not a housekeeper, but a secretary,' he says. 'She'll help me too.' And

she goes and puts her dirty shoes on my kitchen stove. Some help!"

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The person who put her dirty shoes on the stove went by the name of

Alevtina. It was most interesting. We were sitting in the garden.

Grandma proudly telling her story, but so far it was difficult to make out

what it was all about. I could see that Pyotr was dying to sketch her, but

I wagged a finger at him warning him not to.

I did the same to Sanya, who could barely restrain his mirth. The only

serious listener was little Pyotr.

"If you're a secretary, why d'you shove your shoes where I do my

cooking. I'm not having any of that! Maybe I'll light the stove today?"

"Really?"

"And so I did."

"You did?"

"And burnt 'em to a cinder," quoth Grandma. "She'll know better next

time."

We held our sides with laughter.

In short, the housekeeper lost her shoes, and the result was that

Nikolai Antonich invited Grandma in for a serious talk.

"I'm this, I'm that!" said Grandma, puffing herself up the way Nikolai

Antonich did when talking about himself. "Why don't you keep quiet if

you're better than the next man. Let other people say it. Showed me the

flat. 'Take your choice, Nina Kapitonovna!' "

Nikolai Antonich had been given a flat in a new house in Gorky Street

and had offered poor old Grandma the choice of any room she liked in

this splendid flat. He had been running around Moscow a whole month,

selecting furniture. The old flat, Nikolai Antonich said, was to be turned

into a "Captain Tatarinov Museum". The fact that Captain Tatarinov had

never set foot in this flat did not seem to bother him.

"And I bowed to him and said: 'Much obliged, I'm sure. But I've never

yet lived in other people's homes.' "

It was after this conversation that Grandma got the idea of leaving

Nikolai Antonich and coming to live with us. But her fear of him was so

great that instead of simply packing up and going away, she first made

her peace with him and even with the housekeeper. She devised a

cunning psychological plan based on Nikolai Antonich's departure for

Bolshevo to spend his holiday at the Scientists' Rest Home. For the first

time in twenty years she left home and sneaked out of Moscow,

umbrella in one hand and travelling-bag in the other.

Sanya always got up after six and we'd go for a swim before breakfast.

We did the same that morning, which looked no different from any

other Sunday morning.

No different. Then why do I remember it so well? Why do I see, as

though it were yesterday, Sanya and myself tripping down the hill hand

in hand, and he balancing as he glides along the aspen tree thrown

across the brook, while I take off my shoes and wade across, feeling the

thick folds of the sandy bed with my feet? Why is it that I can repeat

every word of our conversation? Why do I still feel the dreamy, misty

delight of the river in the slanting beams of the sun? Why, with a

tenderness that wrings my heart, do I remember every trivial detail of

that morning - the drops of water on Sanya's tanned face, shoulders and

chest and the wet tuft of hair on the back of his head when he comes out

of the water and sits down beside me clasping his knees? And that boy,

with his trousers rolled up, and carrying a home-made net, whom Sanya

255

had taught how to catch crabs with the aid of a campfire or a bait of

rotten meat?

Because before some three or four hours had passed all this-our

wonderful swim together, the dreamy pool of the river with its

motionless banks reflected in it, the boy with the net and a thousand

other thoughts, feelings and impressions—all this was suddenly gone,

swept miles and miles away, looking small, insignificant and infinitely

remote as if seen through the wrong end of binoculars.

September 3, 1941. If time could be made to stand still, I would have

done it the moment when, running back to town and no longer finding

Sanya there, I had got off the tram in Nevsky Prospekt and stopped in

front of a huge shop window displaying the first communiquй issued by

the High Command. Standing close to the window I read the

communiquй, then turned to see the grave anxious faces behind me,

and a curious feeling took hold of me, as if this reading of mine was

taking place in some new strange life. That evening, the first warm

evening that summer, the pale shadows walking the pavements, the

moon riding the sky above the Admiralty spire with the sun still up—all

these belonged to that mysterious new life. The first words in that life

were written in heavy letters across the whole width of the window.

People kept coming up to read them, and there was nothing you could

do about it, however desperately you wanted to.

Rosalia had given me Sanya's note and I kept taking it out of my bag

and reading it.

"Darling Pi-Mate," ran the hastily scribbled note on the bluish sheet

from his pocket-diary, "I embrace you. Remember, you believe."

When we lived in the Crimea we had a dog named Pirate, who used to

follow me about whenever I went. Sanya used to laugh and invented the

name "Pi-Mate" for the two of us. "Remember, you believe"-those were

my words. I had once said that I believed in his life. He was in excellent

spirits. Though we didn't say goodbye to each other, he did not even

mention it in his note, it didn't mean anything.

I returned to the dacha and spent the night there, but I don't think I

slept a wink. I must have done, though, because I suddenly woke up

dismayed, with a wildly beating heart. "It's war. And there's nothing you

can do about it."

I got up and woke Nanny.

"We must pack up. Nanny. We're leaving tomorrow."

"You do keep changing your mind," Nanny said crossly, yawning.

She was sitting on the bed in a long white nightgown, grumbling

sleepily, while I paced up and down the room, not listening to her, then

flung the windows open. Out there, in the young, smiling wood, such a

stillness reigned, such a joyous peace!

Grandma heard us talking and called me.

"What's the matter, Katya?" she demanded.

"We didn't say goodbye. Grandma! I don't know how it happened, but

we didn't!"

She looked at me and gave me a kiss, then furtively made a sign of the

cross.

"It's a good thing that you didn't. It's a good sign. It means that hell

come back soon," she said, and I cried and felt that I couldn't bear it,

just couldn't bear it.

256

Pyotr arrived by the evening train, looking tired and worried, but

determined, which was quite unlike him.

It was from him that I first heard that children were to be evacuated

from Leningrad, and it seemed so fantastic that we had to leave this

cottage in the country, where we had been so happy, where Nanny and I

had planted flowers—stocks and marigolds—and the first tender shoots

were coming up, that we had to take little Pyotr in a crowded, dirty

railway carriage, in this heat—all through June the weather had been

cold, and now it had started getting hot and stuffy—take him not only to

Leningrad, but farther to some other strange town!

Pyotr said that the Artists' Union was sending members' children to

Yaroslavl Region. He had already signed on little Pyotr and Nina

Kapitonovna. With Nanny, it was more difficult, but he would have to

try again.

The train with the children was due to leave at four o'clock and it did

so punctually on time. Pyotr came running up at the last moment. His

son was handed to him through the window, and he took him in his

arms and pressed his dark little head to his face. Grandma began to get

nervous, so he kissed him hastily and handed him back.

To this day I cannot recall without distress that scene of the children

going away, a distress that was all the more poignant because I feel so

powerless to describe it adequately. Although I had lived through so

much during those two months of war, and such strange, powerful

impressions had stamped themselves for ever in my heart and mind,

that day stands before me quite apart, all on its own.

September 7, 1941. Rosalia set up a first-aid station in the office of the

former Elite Cinema and the local Defence Committee invited me to

work there as a nurse, Rosalia having told them that I had some

experience in nursing sick people.

"Bear in mind, my dear," the genial old doctor, a member of the

Defence Committee, said to me in confidence, "if you refuse we shall

immediately assign you to fortification work."

Work on fortifications, or "trenching", as people in Leningrad called

it, was of course harder than nursing. Nevertheless, I said thank you and

declined.

We went out late in the afternoon and dug anti-tank ditches all night.

The ground was hard and clayey and had to be broken up first with a

pick before a spade could be used. I found myself working with a team

from one of Leningrad's publishing houses, which had already shown a

high standard of performance in the "digging of Hitler's grave", as it was

jokingly called. The team was made up almost entirely of women—

typists, proof-readers, editors, many of them surprisingly well-dressed. I

asked one pretty brunette, an editor, why she had turned up to dig

trenches in such a smart dress, and she laughed and said that she simply

hadn't any other.

The grey, spectral light that hung motionless between earth and sky

was suddenly shot through with something fresh and morning-like, and

even the faint breeze which stole through the field and stirred the

bushes that masked the anti-aircraft guns seemed to generate a

different, dawning light. Far out over the city the barrage balloons,

silvered by the still invisible shafts of the sun, resembled huge amiable

fishes.

257

Everyone looked rather wan by morning, and one girl felt faint, 4 but

still, our team finished their stint ahead of the others. We were very

thirsty, and the brunette with whom I had made friends overnight

dragged me off to where people were queuing up for kvass. Tents had

been pitched near an old, tumbledown church, and we queued up there.

My editor friend on a sudden impulse suggested that we climb up the

belfry. It was silly, because my back ached and I was dead tired, but to

my own surprise I found myself consenting.

I recognised our section from above by the hand-barrow stuck into the

ground with a wall newspaper fixed to it. New people were coming up to

it. Had we done so little, I wondered? But our section merged into

another, and that into another, on and on. As far as the eye could see,

women were breaking the clay in ten-foot deep ditches, throwing it out

with shovels and carrying it away in wheel-barrows. There was not one

amongst them who would not have laughed heartily had anyone told her

two months before that she would drop her home and her work and go

outside town at night into an empty field to dig up the earth and build

ditches, earthworks and trenches. But they had gone out and now had

nearly completed these gigantic belts which girdled the city and broke

off only at the roadblocks.

I got home the next day at noon. Dog-tired, I lay down and closed my

eyes. The moment I did so my head began to swim with whirling visions

of girls lifting barrows loaded with hard, heavy clay, wheelbarrows

slowly sliding along planks, and the sun gleaming on the dark-red walls

of the trenches.

Then daylight broke through, faint and lingering after the bright

night, and the paling world slipped away from me as I began to drop off.

I felt so good, so wonderfully good, but for that dreary long-drawn

moan-or was it a song?-which came from behind the partition. How I

wished it would stop...

"Katya, the alert!"

Rosalia was shaking me by the shoulder.

"Get up, it's the alert!"

September 16, 1941. A few days ago I met Varya Trofimova in Nevsky.

She was the wife of an aviator. Hero of the Soviet Union, with whom

Sanya had served in the S.P.A. Varya and I had travelled together to

Saratov once to visit our husbands, and I remember having been

surprised to learn that she was a dentist.

She was a tall, ruddy-cheeked, robust woman, who walked with a

purposeful stride. She reminded me somehow of Kiren, especially when

she laughed loudly, showing her long beautiful teeth.

"And my Grisha," she said with a sigh, "would you believe it, he's

bombing Berlin. Did you read about it?"

We fell into conversation and she suggested that I come and work at

the Stomatological Clinic of the Military Medical Academy.

While I was turning this over in my mind Varya added quickly that I

had better come and see what it was like first, because one young lady

she had recommended had given up the job after two days, saying that

she couldn't stand the smell.

Varya hated "young ladies"- that, too, I remembered from the time

we went to Saratov together.

As a matter of fact the smell really was impossible-it hit me the

moment I entered the corridor, which had wards on both sides. It was a

258

smell that made me feel sick right away and kept me feeling sick all the

time Varya Trofimova was introducing me to the other nurses, the

radiologist, the head physician's wife and a lot of other people.

Here lay men who had been wounded in the face. Just as I arrived

they brought in a young man who had had his face blown away by a

mine.

In nursing these men-I realised this the second or third day of my

work there—one had to keep reassuring them, as it were, that it didn't

matter, there was nothing to worry about if a scar remained, that they

must grin and bear it and hardly anything would be noticeable. But how

was one to deal with that hidden, unspoken fear lurking behind every

word, that horror with which a man gets his first glimpse at his own

disfigured face, that endless standing in front of the mirror on the eve of

discharge, those pathetic attempts to look smart, spruce themselves up?

September 23, 1941. Yesterday I spent the night at home instead of at

the hospital, and early in the morning I went in search of Rosalia, since

there was no one in the flat. I found her in the courtyard. Three boys

were standing in front of her and she was teaching them how to mix

paint.

"Too thick is as bad as too thin," she was saying, "Where's the board?

Vorobyov, don't scratch yourself. Try it on the board. Not all at once."

Automatically, she started to speak to me in the same lecturing tone.

"Fire-prevention measures. Painting of attics and other wooden upper

structures. Fire-resistant mixture. I'm teaching the children to use

paint... Oh, Katya, look at me!" she exclaimed. "There's a letter for you! I

have paint on my hands, pull it out."

I put my hand in her pocket and drew out a letter from Sanya...

I ran through it first to learn whether anything had happened to him,

then I reread it more slowly, word by word.

"Do you remember Grisha Trofimov?" he wrote towards the end of

the letter. "We used to spray Paris green together over the lakes.

Yesterday we buried him."

I did not remember Trofimov very well. He had flown off somewhere

almost as soon as I arrived in Saratov. I had no idea that he had been

serving in the same regiment as Sanya. Then I pictured Varya, poor

Varya, and the letter dropped from my hand, the sheets scattering on

the ground.

It was time to go to the hospital, but I found myself trudging back to

the house, forgetting that I had given Rosalia the key to the flat. On the

stairs I ran into the "learned nurse", who at once began complaining

that she couldn't fix up anywhere-nobody would employ her because

there wasn't enough to eat-and that one domestic help had got a job

with the Tree-Planting Trust, but she no longer had the strength for

such work, etc., etc. I listened to her, thinking:

"Varya, poor Varya."

Arriving at the hospital, where I avoided going into the

Stomatological Clinic for fear of running into Varya, I reread the letter,

and it struck me that Sanya had never written me such letters. I

recollected that one day in the Crimea he had come home pale and tired,

saying that the stuffy heat gave him a pain at the back of his head. But

next morning his navigator's wife told me that their plane had caught

fire in the air and they had made a crash landing with a load of bombs. I

ran to Sanya, but he said with a laugh: "You dreamt it."

259

Sanya, who had always sheltered me, who deliberately spared me any

knowledge of the dangers of his professional life - Sanya had suddenly

written-and in such detail-about the death of a comrade. He had even

described Trofimov's grave.

"In the middle we laid out some dud shells and large stabilisers with

smaller ones for a border, making a sort of flowerbed with iron flowers."

The locker containing my white overall was in the Stomatological

Clinic and I hastily put it on and went out onto the landing leading to

the hospital. Just before I reached my ward I heard Varya's voice,

saying: "You must do it yourself if the patient can't do it yet." She was

telling off one of the nurses for not having washed out a patient's mouth

with hydrogen peroxide, and her voice was the same firm, ordinary

voice as that of yesterday and the day before, and she walked out of the

ward with the same brisk mannish stride, issuing instructions as she

went. I glanced at her-the same old Varya. She knew nothing. For her

nothing had happened yet.

Ought I to tell her that her husband had been killed? Or should I say

nothing, and leave it for that sad day to bring her the black message:

"Killed in action in defence of his country", a message that was coming

to hundreds and thousands of our women. At first she would not grasp

it, her heart would refuse to accept it, then it would start fluttering like a

captive bird. There was no escape from it, nowhere you could hide away

from it. This grief was yours—receive it! All that day I hurried past the

room where Varya was working without raising my eyes.

The day dragged on endlessly, with the wounded coming in all the

time until the wards were full up and the senior sister sent me to the

head physician to ask whether she might put some beds in the corridor.

I knocked on the door, first softly, then louder. There was no answer.

I opened the door a little and saw Varya.

The head physician was not there and she must have been waiting for

him, standing there by the window, her shoulders slightly bent,

drumming monotonously on the window-pane with her fingers.

She did not turn round, did not hear me come in, did not see me

standing in the doorway. Slowly, she moved away from the window and

struck her head hard against the wall several times.

"It was the first time in my life that I saw anyone actually beating his

head against a wall. She was striking the wall not with her forehead, but

sort of sideways, probably so that it should hurt more. And she did not

cry. Her face was expressionless, as though she were engaged in some

routine procedure. Then suddenly she pressed her face to the wall and

flung her arms wide.

She knew. All that hard, wearisome day, when non-urgent operations

had had to be put off because there were not enough hands to deal with

new arrivals, when there was nowhere to put the patients and everyone

was fretting and upset, she alone had worked as though nothing had

happened. In Ward No. 1 she had been teaching one poor lad with a

lolling tongue to speak-and she had known. She had told the cook off in

a dull voice because the potatoes had not been properly mashed and got

stuck in the patients' tubes-and she had known. Her brusque, firm voice

could be heard now in one ward, now in another, and nobody in the

world would have guessed that she knew.

December 8, 1941. As clearly as I used to remember the days when

Sanya and I met, I now remember the days when I got letters from him.

260

The letter I received from him on September 23rd, in which he wrote of

Grisha Trofimov's death, was the third and the last. I have received

nothing since.

I am writing this in the light of an oil "blinker", wrapped up in a

winter coat. There is a terrible draught from the window, which has

been smashed in by an air blast and covered up with pillows, and every

other minute I have to take a tin with hot water in my hands to warm

them. But I must write this, even though my fingers are freezing and my

head is reeling from hunger.

There have been no letters. I don't think I had ever worked so hard in

my life as I did that autumn. I attended the Red Cross courses, went to

the front and was even mentioned in despatches for bringing back

wounded men under heavy fire. But still no letters. In vain I searched

for Sanya's name among the airmen who had been decorated for raids

on Berlin, Konigsberg and Ploesti.

But I worked like mad, gathering up speed like a runaway train that

tears ahead, ignoring signals, sounding its whistle as it plunges into the

autumn night.

Then came a day when the train rushed past me, leaving me lying

under the embankment, lonely, broken, steeped in misery.

Varya was with me that evening. The sirens started off, as usual, at

seven thirty. We sat through the first alert, though Rosalia phoned and

in the name of the Self-Defence Group ordered us to go down. We sat

through the second alert too. The bomb-shelters always depressed me,

and I had long decided that if I was to be one of the "unlucky" ones I'd

rather it was out in the open, under Leningrad's skies. Besides, we were

roasting coffee—an important job, seeing that this was not only coffee,

but flatcakes too, if you added a little flour to the grounds. Leningrad

was beginning to starve.

But a third alert came on, bombs fell nearby and the house rocked, as

though it had taken a step forward then back. The saucepans came

tumbling down in the kitchen. Varya took my arm and marched me

downstairs, ignoring my protests. Women were standing in the dark

entrance hall, talking in quick anxious tones. I recognised the voice of

the yardkeeper, a Tatar woman named Gul Ijberdeyeva, whom

everybody in the building called Masha.

"Number Nine's hit," she was saying. "Hit hard. House manager-he

give order-take spades, go, dig him up."

"Number Nine" was the building which housed Delicatessen Shop No.

9.'

"Take spade, come along. All come! Who has no spade will get spade

there. Come on, missus! When you get hit, they'll dig you out."

"Number Nine" had been cleft into two. The bomb had gone through

all five floors. Through the black jagged gap you could see a narrow

Leningrad courtyard with fantastic broken shadows. The facade of the

building had collapsed, blocking the roadway with its debris. Sticking

out of the tangled mass of rubble, furniture and steel girders was the

black wing of a grand piano. A sideboard hung suspended from the

fourth floor, and a coat and a lady's hat could distinctly be seen on the

wall.

It was quiet all round. People approached the building at a leisurely

pace, oddly calm, and their voices, too, were slow and guarded. A

261

woman started to scream, then threw herself on the ground. She was

raised and carried aside and all grew quiet again. A dead old man in a

coat white with plaster and rubble lay on the pavement. People stopped

short, peered into his face and slowly walked round him. The basement

was flooded. Something had to be done first about the water. A slim,

agile sergeant, who was in charge of the rescue work, set me to man the

pump.

Flushed and beautiful, Varya wrenched mattresses, blankets and

pillows out of the heap of wrecked furniture, laid out the injured on

them, applied artificial respiration, shouted at the stretcher-bearers,

and kept the two ambulance doctors on the run, obedient to her every

word.

Hitching up her skirt, she went down into the basement and came out

carrying a wet man across her shoulder. The sergeant ran up to help,

followed by the stretcher-bearers.

"Sit him up!" she commanded.

It was a soldier or an officer. He had no cap and his army coat was

sodden and black from the water. They sat him up. His head dropped on

his chest. Varya took him by the chin, and his head lolled back like a

doll's. There was something familiar about that pale face with the dark-

yellow matted hair clinging to his forehead, and I worked for several

minutes, trying to recollect where I had seen him.

"There, he'll be all right in a minute," Varya said gruffly.

She forced his teeth open and put two fingers into his mouth. He

shook his head violently and his body twitched as he started to draw his

breath, wheezing and gasping.

"Aha, bite, would you?" Varya said.

The pump handle kept going up and down and I could see what Varya

was doing to him only in snatches. Now he was sitting and breathing

heavily with his eyes shut, his face with the flattened nose and square

jaw startlingly white in the moonlight, as though etched in chalk-a face

which I had seen a thousand times and which I now scarcely recognised.

To this day I can't make out why I had not let Romashov-for it was he-

be taken to the hospital. Incredible as it may seem, I was glad, when,

sitting on the ground in Ms unbuttoned army coat, he raised his eyes

with a glazed stricken look, saw me as if through a mist, and said in a

barely audible whisper, "Katya." He wasn't surprised to find me

standing there in front of him with a little bottle of something which

Varya said he was to smell. But when I took his hand to feel his pulse, he

clenched his teeth, shuddering, and repeated still louder: "Katya,

Katya."

In the morning we started off home. We staggered along, Varya and I

just as bad as Romashov, although no bomb had cleaved five floors over

us, and we had not floundered in a flooded basement.

Varya and I trudged along, while Masha and some other woman all but

dragged Romashov along behind us. He kept worrying about his kitbag,

afraid it would get lost, until Masha angrily thrust it under his nose,

saying:

"Don't think about bag. Think about God. Your life saved, you fool!

You should pray, read Koran!"

He was still sleeping when we left—Rosalia had made up a bed for him

in the dining-room. The blanket had slipped and he was sleeping in

262

clean underwear. Varya, in passing, straightened the blanket with an

habitual gesture and tucked it under him. He was breathing through

clenched teeth and a slit of eyeball was visible through the eyelids-a

Romashov true to life, not to be confused with any other Romashov in

the world.

Somehow it seemed to me that he would disappear by the evening,

like a vision that belonged to that vanished night. But he didn't. When I

rang up, it was he, and not Rosalia, who answered the telephone.

"Katya, I must talk to you," he said in a firm, yet, deferential tone.

"When will you be back? Or may I come and see you?"

"You may come."

"Won't it be rather awkward, though, at the hospital?"

"I daresay it will. But I won't be home for several days."

He was silent for a while.

"I realise that you haven't the slightest desire to see me. But that was

such a long time ago... The reason why you did not want to meet me-"

"Oh, no, not so very long ago."

Silence.

"This is no accident, our meeting. I was on my way to see you. I

rushed down into the basement when I heard someone shout that there

were children there. We must meet, because it's a matter that concerns

you."

"What matter?"

"A very important matter. I'll tell you all about it."

My heart missed a beat, as though I didn't know who it was speaking

to me.

"Well?"

Now he was silent, and for so long that I very nearly hung up.

"All right, you needn't see me. I'm going away and you will never see

me again. But I swear..."

He said something in a whisper. I could see him standing there, teeth

clenched and eyes shut, breathing heavily into the mouthpiece, and that

silence and despair suddenly decided me. I said I would come, and rang

off.

Cheese and butter on the table—that's what I saw when, letting myself

in with the latchkey, I stopped in the doorway of the dining-room. It was

unbelievable—real cheese, red Dutch cheese, and the butter, too, was

real, in a big enamelled mug. Bread of a kind we had not seen in

Leningrad for a long time was cut up in generous slices. Romashov was

engaged in opening some tins of food with a kitchen knife when I came

in. From the kitbag lying on the table the tip of a bottle could be seen

projecting.

Rosalia came out of the bedroom, excited and happy. "Katya," she

whispered to me, "what about Bertha? May I invite her?"

"I don't know."

"My God, you're angry? But I only wanted to know—" "Misha," I broke

in, "Rosalia here wants to find out whether she can invite her sister

Bertha to the table."

"What a question! Where is she? I'll invite her myself." "You'll scare her,

I'm afraid."

He laughed awkwardly. "Supper is served, ladies!"

263

It was a gay supper. Poor Rosalia prepared the sandwiches with

trembling hands and ate them with a religious expression. Bertha, frail,

grey, with a peaked little nose and wandering glance, whispered

something over every morsel. Romashov chattered without a stop-

chattered and drank.

That was when I got a good look at him!

We hadn't seen each other for some years. He had been rather stout

then. His face and body, with its slight backward tilt, had shown those

signs of solidity peculiar to a man who was beginning, to put on weight.

Like all ugly people, he took pains to dress immaculately, even

foppishly.

Now he was gaunt and skinny, tightly strapped in new leather harness,

clad in an army tunic with an officer's insignia-not a major, surely? His

skull bones were now prominent. His eyes, unblinking, wide-open,

seemed to have something new in them-weariness perhaps?

"I've changed, haven't I?" he said, seeing that I was studying him. "The

war has turned me inside out. Everything is changed-body and soul."

If it was changed he would not be telling me about it.

"Where did you get all this food, Misha? Stole it?"

Apparently he did not hear the last two words.

"Tuck in, tuck in! I'll get some more. You can get anything here. You

people just don't know how to go about it."

"Really?"

"Yes, of course. You have to know the right people."

I don't know what he meant by that, but instinctively I put my

sandwich back onto the plate.

"Have you been in Leningrad long?"

"Two days. I was transferred from Moscow at the disposal of the chief

of Voentorg (-a retail organisation of army and navy stores.— Tr.) I was at the

Southern Front. Caught in encirclement. Broke through by nothing

short of a miracle."

It was the truth, for me a shocking truth, but I listened to him

carelessly, with a long-forgotten sense of my power over him.

"We retreated towards Kiev. We didn't know that Kiev was cut off. We

thought the Germans were God knows where, but they met us near

Khristinovka, within two hundred kilometres of the front. It was hell,"

he added with a laugh. "But that's another story. Now I wanted to tell

you that I saw Nikolai Antonich in Moscow. Strange to say, he stayed in

Moscow, didn't evacuate."

"Is that so?" I said indifferently.

We were silent for a while.

"Didn't you want to talk to me about something, Misha?" I said at

length. "If so, come into my room."

He stood up and straightened his back. Drew his breath and adjusted

his belt.

"Yes. Do you mind if I take some wine with us?"

"No."

"Which one?"

"Anyone you like, I won't drink."

He took a bottle and some glasses from the table, thanked Rosalia and

followed me out. We settled down-I on the sofa, he at the table, which

264

had once been Sasha's. Her paint brushes in a tall glass still stood on it

untouched.

"It's a long story."

He was agitated. I was calm.

"A very long and... Do you smoke?"

"No."

"Lots of women have started smoking during the war."

"I know. They're waiting for me at the hospital. You have exactly

twenty minutes."

"Very good," Romashov enunciated slowly. "I won't tell the story of

how I came to be in the South. We fought near Kiev and were defeated."

He said "we".

"At Khristinovka I joined a hospital train which was making for

Uman, bypassing Kiev. They were ordinary goods trucks with the

wounded lying in them on bunks. A lot of them badly wounded. We

travelled three, four, five days, in stuffy heat and dust..."

Bertha was praying in the next room.

He got up and shut the door.

"I was shell-shocked a couple of days before I joined the hospital

train. True, just lightly-stabs once in a while in my left side. It still gets

sort of brownish, you know," he added with a strained smile.

Varya, who had changed his clothes that night, had said that his left

side was burnt-I suppose that is what he called "gets brownish".

"I found myself taking things in hand on our train-managing the

household, you know. The first thing to be done was to organise meals,

and I'm proud to say that throughout the journey-we were a good

fortnight travelling-no one died of starvation. But I'm not talking about

myself."

"About whom then?"

"Two girls, students from a Teachers' College at Stanislav, were

travelling with us. They carried meals to the wounded, changed

dressings, did everything they could. Then one day one of them called

me to an airman, a wounded airman lying in one of the trucks."

Romashov poured out some wine.

"I asked the girls what it was about. 'Talk to him.' 'What about?' 'He

doesn't want to live, says he'll shoot himself, cries.' We went to see him-

it so happened that I had never been in that particular truck before. He

was lying on his face, his legs bandaged, but very carelessly, clumsily.

The girls sat down next to him, called him..."

Romashov fell silent.

"Why don't you have a drink, Katya?" he said in a voice that had gone

husky. "I'm drinking all by myself. I'll get drunk-what will you do then?"

"Turn you out. Finish your story."

He tossed off the glass, took a walk round the room, and sat down

again. I took a sip. After all, the world was full of airmen!

Here is the story as Romashov told it.

Sanya had been wounded in the face and legs. The lacerated wound in

the face was healing. He had said nothing about the circumstances in

which he was wounded-Romashov got that quite by accident from the

army newspaper Red Falcons, which carried a paragraph about Sanya.

He was bringing me that newspaper, and would have brought it but for

265

that stupid accident, when he almost got drowned in the basement

trying to save the children. But that didn't matter, he remembered the

paragraph by heart:

"While returning from a mission the aircraft piloted by Captain

Grigoriev was overtaken by four enemy fighter planes. In the unequal

combat Grigoriev shot down one Fighter, and put the others to flight.

Though his machine was damaged, Grigoriev flew on. Not far from the

front-line he was attacked again, this time by two Junkers. Grigoriev,

his machine in flames, rammed one of the Junkers. The men of the X air

unit will forever cherish the memory of their brave comrades, Captain

Grigoriev, Navigator Luri, Radio Operator-Gunner Karpenko and Aerial

Gunner Yershov, who fought for their country to their last breath."

This might not be the exact text, the words might be in a different

order, but the substance of it was correct-Romashov was prepared to

vouch for it with his life. He had kept the copy of the paper in his

dispatch-case together with other papers, very important ones, but the

dispatch-case had fallen into the water, the newspaper had become wet

pulp, and when he had dried it he found that the column containing the

paragraph was missing. But that did not matter.

Sanya, then, was considered killed, but he was only wounded—

wounded in the face and legs. In the face only lightly, but in the legs

evidently seriously. At any rate, he couldn't go about unaided.

"How did he come to be in the train?" "I don't know," said Romashov,

"we didn't speak about it." "Why not?" "Because an hour after our talk,

twenty kilometres short of Khristinovka our train was shot up by

German tanks." That's what he said, "shot up."

It was unexpected, running into German tanks behind our own lines.

The train stopped-the locomotive was put out of action by the first shell.

The wounded started to jump out onto the embankment, scattering, and

the Germans used shrapnel on them, firing through the train.

First thing, Romashov ran to Sanya. It was no easy job-dragging him

out of the truck under fire, but Romashov did it and they hid behind the

wheels. The badly wounded screamed in the trucks:

"Brothers, help!" and the Germans kept on firing. It was getting close to

where they lay and Sanya said: "Run, I have a pistol, they won't get me."

But Romashov did not leave him. He dragged him aside into a ditch,

knee-deep in the mud, though Sanya struggled with him and swore.

Then a lieutenant with a burnt face helped Romashov to drag him

across the swampy ground, and there left them, the two of them, in a

wet little aspen wood.

It was terrifying, because a big German tank-mounted force had

seized the nearest railway station; fighting was going on all round, and

at any moment the Germans might make their appearance in the wood,

which was the only defensible spot in a stretch of open country. They

had to move on, there wasn't a minute to be lost. But the wound on

Sanya's face had opened, and he kept telling Romashov: "Leave me,

you'll never make it with me!" And once he said: "I thought that in my

position I'd have to fear you." When he put his legs down the pain was

unbearable. Romashov made a crutch for him out of a tree branch. But

Sanya could not walk all the same, so Romashov went alone-not

forward, but back to the train in the hope of finding those Stanislav

girls. But he did not get to the train, the Germans opened fire on him on

the edge of the marsh. He went back.

266

"I got back in an hour, maybe a little more," Romashov said, "and I

didn't find him. It was a small wood and I searched the length and

breadth of it. I was afraid to shout but nevertheless I did, several times.

There was no answer. I searched all night until finally I dropped down

and fell asleep. In the morning I found the spot where we had parted.

The moss was torn up and trampled down, and the crutch lay under a

tree..."

Afterwards Romashov had got caught in an encirclement, but broke

through to our troops with a detachment of sailors off the Dnieper

Flotilla. He never heard about Sanya again.

I had pictured to myself a thousand times how I would get to know

about this. A letter would come, an ordinary letter without a stamp, and

I would open it—and the world would be blotted out. Or Varya would

come—Varya, whom I had tried so many times to comfort—and she

would try to break the news to me gently, starting from afar with: "If he

were killed, what would you do? " And I would answer:

"I wouldn't survive it." Or I would be standing in a queue with other

women at the Military Registration Office, and we would be looking at

one another, all thinking the same thing: "Who would it be today? " I

had thought of everything, but never had it entered my mind that I

would hear about this from Romashov.

It was all nonsense, of course. He had made it up or read something

like it in a magazine. Most likely he had made it up. The calculated

cunning so characteristic of him was evident in his every word. But how

unfair, how painful it was to have this stupid, this harrowing game

played out at my expense! To have this man turn up in Leningrad,

where life was hard enough without him, in order to deceive me so

meanly!

"Misha," I began very calmly, "all this is a lie and you know it. If you

don't admit it and ask my forgiveness, I'll drive you out like the cad you

are. When did this happen-all you've been telling me? "

"In September."

"There, you see—in September. And I received a letter dated the

twentieth of October in which Sanya writes that he is alive and well and

may fly in to Leningrad for a day or two if his chiefs permitted. Now

what do you say to that, Misha? "

I don't know where I got the strength to lie at such a moment! I had

received no letter dated October twentieth. I had not heard from Sanya

for over a month.

Romashov smiled wryly.

"It's a good thing that you didn't believe me," he said. "Never mind,

it's all for the best."

"So it was all a lie, then? "

"Yes," said Romashov, "it's a lie."

He should have argued with me, should have tried to convince me, lost

his temper, he should-like that time in Dogs' Place-have stood before me

with trembling lips. But he said impassively: "Yes, it's a lie."

My heart sank, went cold and leaden within me.

He must have sensed it. He came up and took my hand-easily and

boldly. I wrenched it free.

"If I wanted to deceive you I would simply have shown you the

newspaper, which reports in black and white that Sanya was killed. But I

told you what nobody else in the world knows. It is ridiculous," he said

267

haughtily, "to think that I did this for base personal motives. Or that I

believed that such news could help me win your favour? But it's the

truth, and I dare not conceal it from you."

I still sat motionless, but everything around me began to drift away-

Sasha's table with the brushes in the tall glass and that red-haired

soldier at the table, whose name I had forgotten. I was silent, I didn't

want anything, but the soldier for some reason hastily left the room and

came back with a grey, elegant little woman, who clutched her head

when she saw me and cried: "Katya, my God! Give me some water!

What's the matter, Katya? "

December 30, 1941. Bertha died a fortnight ago, on one of our "alert"

days, when the bombing started first thing in the morning, or rather

continued from overnight. She did not die from starvation—poor

Rosalia repeated a dozen times that starvation had nothing to do with it.

She wanted to have her sister buried the same day, as the ritual

required. But it was impossible. So then she hired a long, mournful Jew,

and he read prayers all night over the dead woman, who lay on the floor

in a shroud made from two separate bedsheets - this, too, was in

accordance with the ritual. The bombs were falling very near, not a

single pane of glass was left whole that night in Maxim Gorky Prospekt,

and the streets were bright and ghastly with the lurid glow of

conflagrations, while that mournful man sat mumbling prayers, then

quietly fell asleep. Coming into the room at daybreak I found him

peacefully sleeping next to the dead woman with his prayer-book under

his head.

Romashov managed to obtain a coffin—at that time, a fortnight ago, it

was still possible—and when that thin little old woman was laid into that

huge, rough-hewn box, it looked as if even there, in the coffin, she were

cowering with terror in a corner.

One had to dig the grave oneself-the grave-diggers, Romashov

thought, demanded an "outrageous" price. He hired boys to do it — the

same boys whom Rosalia had taught to paint.

Very animated, he ran downstairs ten times, held whispered

conferences with the house manager, patted Rosalia on the shoulder,

and ended up by getting angry with her for insisting on having Bertha

buried in a shroud of two separate bedsheets.

"Sheets can be bartered for bread! " he shouted. "She doesn't need

them. In any case somebody will take them off her in a day or two."

I sent him about his business and told Rosalia that everything would

be the way she wanted it.

It was early morning. Tiny brittle snowflakes eddied in the air, then

suddenly, as if in a hurry, fell to the ground, when Romashov and the

boys carried the coffin out, bumping against the walls and turning

awkwardly on the landings, and placed it on a hand sled in the yard. I

wanted to give the boys money, but Romashov said he had arranged to

pay them with bread.

"A hundred grams per head in advance," he said gaily. "Okay, boys? "

The boys nodded consent without looking at him.

"Are you going upstairs, Katya? " he went on. "Will you please fetch

the bread. It's in my coat."

I don't know why he put the bread in his coat—maybe to conceal it

from Rosalia or that Jew. The coat hung in the hall.

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I remember thinking as I went upstairs that I ought to dress warmer.

I had been feeling a bit feverish in the night and I daresay it would be

better for me not to go to the cemetery, which was said to be a good

seven kilometres away. But I was afraid that without me Rosalia would

drop on the way.

The piece of bread, wrapped in a bit of paper, was in the coat pocket.

Together with the bread I pulled out what felt like a soft little bag. It

dropped on the floor and I opened the door on the landing to pick it up,

it being dark in the hall. It was a yellow chamois-leather tobacco-pouch:

among other gifts, we sent such tobacco-pouches to the front for the

soldiers. After a moment's thought I untied it. Inside lay a photograph

broken in half and some rings. "Trucked them somewhere," I thought

with disgust. The photograph was an old one, and had some writing on

the back, which was hard to make out, as the letters had completely

faded. I was about to put the photo back but some odd feeling restrained

me, a feeling that I had once held this tobacco-pouch in my hand.

I went out onto the landing, where there was more light, and began to

spell out the writing. "If it's worth..." I read. A white sharp light flashed

before my eyes and stabbed my very heart. The writing on the

photograph read: "If it's worth doing at all, do it well."

I don't know what happened to me. I screamed, then found myself

sitting on the landing, groping about for that photograph. Through a

darkness that clouded my eyes I read the inscription and recognised C.

in a flying helmet, which made him look like a woman. C. with his large

eagle-like face and kind sombre eyes looking out from under his heavy

eyebrows. It was the photograph of C., which Sanya had always carried

about with him. He kept it in his pocket-book together with other

documents, though I had told him a thousand times that the

photograph would be worn away in his pocket and that it should be

framed and placed on his desk.

In a fury, I rushed back into the hall, tore the coat off the hanger and

flinging it out on to the landing, turned the pockets out. Sanya was dead,

killed. I don't know what I was looking for. Romashov had killed him.

The other pocket contained some money. I crushed the notes and threw

them down the stair-well. Killed him and taken the photograph. I did

not cry. Stole the documents, all the papers, maybe the disk as well, so

that nobody should know that this dead man in the wood, this corpse in

the wood, was Sanya. "Other papers, very important ones, in the

dispatch-case"—the words rang in my ears and it seemed as if someone

had lighted a lantern in front of every word of Romashov's.

This photograph had been in the dispatch-case. Other papers and the

newspaper Red Falcons had been there, too, but they had got soaked

and were ruined-hadn't Romashov said, "The newspaper had become

wet pulp"? But the photograph was intact, maybe because Sanya had

always carried it wrapped in tracing-paper.

Voices could be heard below. Rosalia was calling me. I slipped the

photograph in my bosom and put the tobacco-pouch back into the

pocket. I hung the coat up again, went downstairs and gave the bread to

Romashov.

"What's the matter?" he said. "Aren't you well?"

"No, I'm all right."

There was nothing. No empty, soundless streets through which people

walked in silence, slowly dragging their feet as in a frightful slow dream.

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No ice-encrusted tramcars stranded in the middle of the streets with

thick ledges of snow hanging from them like from the eaves of country

cottages. No narrow tracks running away behind us as we dragged the

hand sled on which, swaddled like a child, lay a small body. I recollected

then that Romashov had had the coffin left behind because there was no

room for it on the sled.

"That's all right, we'll sell it," he had said.

As for Rosalia, she must have gone mad, because she said it was the

proper rite to have no coffin. I remembered this, then immediately

forgot it. A little girl with a tiny old woman's face stepped into the snow

to let us pass—there was no room for two on the narrow path trodden

down Pushkarskaya Street. Someone passed us in an oddly loose

dangling overcoat—a man with a briefcase slung across his shoulder on

a string. This, too, I saw and immediately forgot it. I saw everything-the

snowed-up streets, the swaddled body on the little sled, and another

body some woman was towing on the other side of the road, and who

kept stopping and finally dropped behind. Like traceless shadows that

glide noiselessly across glass, the freezing city passed before me all

white, buried in snow.

I was seeing another scene, one that smote my heart cruelly. Legs

stretched out in dirty bandages yellow with blood, lay Sanya with his

cheek to the ground and his murderer standing over him-alone, all

alone in a wet little aspen wood. Shoulders hunched, blue with cold, my

arm in that of Rosalia's, who could barely move-she had so many clothes

on—I trudged along behind the sled which moved far ahead, then, drew

near when the boys stopped to have a smoke. Two lonely pathetic old

women—we looked much the same, she and I. The similarity must have

struck Romashov, too, for he caught up with us and said irritably: "Why

did you have to go? You'll catch your death of cold. Go back, Katya, go

home!"

I looked at him-alive and hale. In his white new sheepskin coat,

shoulder harness and holster at his belt. Alive! I caught the air with

open mouth. And hale! I bent down and put some snow in my mouth.

The spade tied to the body glinted, and I stared and stared at its

hypnotic glitter.

The cemetery. We waited for a long time in a small, dirty office with

white strips of hoarfrosted tow running between the logs of the

timbered walls. The clerk, a woman with a bloated face, sat by an iron

little stove, her feet, wrapped in rags, thrust out close to the fire.

Romashov for some reason was shouting at her. Then they called us—

the grave was ready. The boys, leaning on their spades, stood on a

mound of earth and snow. What a shallow resting-place they had made

for poor Bertha! Romashov sent them for the body. Soon they came

back with her. The long mournful Jew walked behind the sled and from

time to time commanded a halt to read a short prayer. Romashov laid

ropes out on the snow, deftly lifted the body and kicked the sled away.

Now she was lying on the ropes. Rosalia gave her sister a last kiss. The

Jew sang, now raising his voice with surprising stresses, now dropping

to a low tone, like a mournful old bird.

We went back to the office to warm up—1 and Romashov. He made

mysterious signs to me and slapped his pocket as we approached the

door. Inside he drew out a bottle.

"Have some?" he said.

270

Oh, how my heart began to burn and swell, what hot waves surged

through my arms and legs! I felt hot. I undid my coat, threw off my

warm shawl. I walked, walked about the office, on light, springy feet.

"Some more?"

The woman with the bloated face looked at us hungrily, and I told

Romashov to pour some out for her. He did so—"Ah well, in for a

penny!"—gay, pale, with red ears, fur cap tilted back at a rakish angle. I,

too, felt gay, in jocular mood. I picked up from the desk one of the black

painted grave plates and held it out to Romashov.

"This is for you."

He laughed.

"Now that's more like my old Katya!"

"Not yours!"

He came over and took hold of my hands. His mouth began to quiver,

a small, childlike mouth that revealed his teeth—strange that I never

noticed before what sharp small teeth he had.

"Yes, mine," he said huskily.

I drew my right hand away. There was a hammer on the window' sill-I

suppose it was used for nailing the plates to the crosses. Very slowly I

picked up the hammer. It was a small but heavy one, with an iron

handle.

Had the blow struck his temple, I daresay I would have killed him. But

he recoiled and the hammer slid down and cut open his cheek-bone. The

woman sprang to her feet, screaming, and made a dash for the door.

Romashov leapt after her and hustled her back into the room, slamming

the door. Then he went up to me.

"Leave me alone!" I said with despair and loathing. "You're a

murderer! You killed Sanya."

He was silent. The blood was gushing from his gashed cheek. He

rubbed it with his hand, but it kept dripping down onto his shoulder and

chest, and his sheepskin coat was covered with wet pink stains.

"I must stanch it," he muttered without looking at me. "Have you a

clean handkerchief, Katya?"

"All right, let's say I killed him! In that case why should I have saved

that photograph of his? We wanted to bury the documents. Sanya was

holding them in his hands and the photo must have dropped out. I

didn't tell you I had found it—1 was afraid you wouldn't believe me. My

God, you can't imagine what war is like! What a crazy idea— to think

that I could have killed one of our own men! No matter who it was, how

I felt about him! To kill a wounded man—Katya! Why, it's crazy, nobody

would believe it!"

This was not the first time Romashov had repeated those words:

"Nobody would believe it." He was afraid that I would write of my

suspicions to the Military Tribunal or the Procurator. He gave all his

money and bread to the woman in the cemetery office, and I heard him

say to her: "Not a word to anybody." He did not go to the hospital.

Rosalia stopped the blood and put a plaster on the big gash in his cheek.

"I had no love for him, it's true, and I don't intend to conceal the fact,"

Romashov went on. "But when I found him with those crippled legs,

with the pistol at his head, lying in that filthy truck, it wasn't him I was

thinking of, it was you. No wonder he was glad to see me—he realised

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that I was his salvation. And it wasn't my fault that he strayed away

when I went to fetch someone to help with a stretcher."

He paced the little kitchen, talking and talking without a stop. He

clutched his head and when he did that two funny big-nosed faces grew

out of the shadows which flitted across the wall. A forgotten memory of

childhood touched me like a muted string. "And here's a cow with

horns"—that was Mother speaking. I was lying in my cot, and Mother

was sitting beside me, holding her hands up to the wall and laughing

because I was looking at her hands instead of at the wall. "And here's

bearded Billy Goat..." My eyes were wet, but I did not wipe the tears

away-it was too cold to take your hands out of all those blankets,

overcoats and the old fox fur.

"Just my rotten luck—I had to meet him on that train! I could have

killed him easily. Several corpses were carried out of the trucks every

day and no one would have been surprised if that airman, who was so

miserable that he wanted to shoot himself, had been found one morning

with a bullet through his head. But I couldn't kill him," Romashov

shouted, "I couldn't because it would have been you, and not him, who

would have been found in the morning with a bullet in your head! I

realised this when he asked one of the girls what her name was and she

answered 'Katya'. His face lighted up. I realised what a paltry, petty

figure I was in contrast to him, with my thoughts about the happiness I

was to win through his death. And I decided to do everything I could to

save him for you. And now you dare to accuse me of having killed him!

No." Romashov said solemnly, "I swear by the mother that bore me for

this life of pain and misery! I swear by what I hold most sacred—my love

for you. If he has died, I am not guilty of his death either in word or

deed."

He started to do up his sheepskin coat but couldn't get the hooks into

the eyes, his hands were trembling so.

If only I could have believed him, if only I could have dared believe

him again! I gazed dispassionately at that gaunt face with the sunken

eyes, at the yellow matted hair falling over his forehead, and the ugly

patch of plaster which disfigured and tightened his cheek.

"Go away!"

"You're not feeling well, let me stay."

"Go away."

I don't know whether he had ever cried before, but his face now was

wet with tears as, sinking on his knees, he buried it in the bedclothes,

his body shaken with smothered sobs. "Sanya is alive," came the sudden

thought, and my heart leapt with joy. "Unless this man standing on his

knees before me is not human, but a fiend? No, no. It's impossible,

unthinkable, that anyone can dissemble like that."

"Go away."

I don't know where I expected him to go. He had been living with us

for nearly a month now—Rosalia having registered him for some reason

as a resident. It was night time, too, and an alert was on. But he went

out, and I was left alone.

"Tick-tock" went the metronome. I remember someone telling me

that it was only in Leningrad that they broadcast the sound of a

metronome during an alert. The window-panes shook together with the

yellow tongue of the "blinker" standing on the table. What had really

happened out there, in the wet little aspen wood?

272

Lying under the heap of sheepskins and blankets, I did not hear the

all-clear. Almost immediately, it was followed by another alert. "Tick-

tock" the metronome started again. "Believe-not believe".

It was my heart beating and praying on a wintry night, in the starving

city, in the tiny kitchen of a freezing house barely lit up by the yellow

flame of an oil "blinker", which flickered feebly, battling with the

shadows that crept out of the comers. May my love keep you alive! May

my hope be yours. May it stand beside you,

look into your eyes, breathe life into your blanched lips! Press its face to

the blood-stained bandages on your legs. Say: It is I, your Katya! I have

come to you, wherever you may be. I am with you, whatever happens to

you. That somebody else who tends you, supports you, gives you food

and drink-is me, your own Katya. And should Death bend over your

couch and should you have no strength left to fight him, only a tiny

flicker of strength remaining in your heart-that, too, will be me, and I

will save you.

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PART EIGHT

TOLD BY SANYA GRIGORIEV

TO STRIVE. TO SEEK

CHAPTER ONE

HE

With an odd sense of powerlessness to convey the things I see, my

mind drifts back to fragmentary scenes from the early days and weeks of

the war. The old life had gone for good and its place was instantly taken

by a quite different life, which took command of everything, of me and

Katya, of all our thoughts, feelings and impressions. This different life

was the war, and I would probably not have written about it merely

because it was different, had it not been for the fact that what happened

to me in the war was interwoven in such a surprising way with the affair

of Captain Tatarinov and the St. Maria.

I see a large, dark room in a peasant cottage, a table dimly lit by a

candle-end, and windows curtained off with ground-sheets. The door

opens, and a man comes in, his tunic undone. He rummages about in

the stove and eats hungrily. He is Grisha Trofimov. Another man gets up

from the bunk and joins him at the table. He is Luri. I hear their quiet

talk, which makes my heart beat slow and strong.

"Been over to Ladoga?"

Grisha nods and goes on eating.

"Well?"

"Nothing new."

"Been at Zvanka?"

He goes on eating. Says nothing. He's been over to Zvanka too.

The two Leningraders look into each other's faces. It is the first night

of the Leningrad blockade.

274

I see the message-bag dropping over the side of my plane-that's the

way we saved men who mistakenly believed that they were surrounded.

I see the first grave, which we decorated with dud shells laid out to

look like iron flowers. We flew over them as low as we could when

returning from missions.

The lake, too, appears before me-that same lake, in whose sleepy

morning frame I had seen the last vision of the old life. Now it is sombre

and sullen. The water, filled to the brim of its shores, glints dully, and

grey-blue smoke creeps across the misted mirror of its surface. The

forest is burning, set alight by the Germans.

In the evenings we come out of the dugout built into the hillside.

Patrol boats lay hidden among the bushes. We race across the dark

water amid spray and foam. Planes come out of the forest like huge sea

birds. This is Lake L., our third and fourth base.

I see lots of things. But everything I see passes before me, as it were,

against the backcloth of the map which unfolds every day beneath the

wings of my plane-a map with the breaking lines in the front and the

widening black wave of the German offensive.

Every day new pilots arrived, most of them from the Civil Air Fleet.

With some of them I had worked together in the North, with others in

the Far East. They were experienced. First and Second Class pilots, and

three of them even "millionaires", that is, men who had notched up over

a million kilometres, and it was amusing to watch the comical blunders

these civilians made in the process of becoming fighting flyers. We

talked about this very often, both in the canteen and at home, in the

dugout, where the three of us lived together -I, Luri and mechanic.

Perhaps the reason we talked about it so often was because we had

tacitly agreed not to talk about "other things". The newspapers did that

for us.

In September my crew and I were ordered to report for duty to the Air

Force Command of the Southern Front.

It was just an ordinary fight as air fights go, and I do not intend to

describe it, the more so as it was very soon over. We succeeded right

away in bringing down one of the Messers—he crashed in the very act of

making a stall-turn. The two others hoicked and got in each other's way

as they tried to settle on our tail. It was smart of them but not smart

enough; we were not the kind to let someone get in behind us. They

tried it once, but it didn't work. Then they came in again and very nearly

got caught in our gun sights. To cut a long story short, we kept them at

bay until they gave up and I headed straight for the front-line, which

was not far off.

This was easier said than done, what with a quarter of my port wing

shot away and the tanks being holed. I was wounded in the leg and in

the face, and the blood was running into my eyes.

I suddenly felt strangely weak. It was at that moment, I believe, that I

recalled the fearful dreams of childhood in which I was being killed or

drowned-and the joyous sense of relief when you wake up to find

yourself alive.

"But now"—the thought was a very calm one—"now I won't wake up."

I must have lost consciousness, but not for long, because I came to at

the sound of my own voice. It was as though I had started to speak

before I had regained consciousness. I ordered the crew to bale out. The

radio operator-gunner complied immediately, but Luri grumbled:

275

"Oh, all right!", as though I were suggesting some tiresome jaunt to

which he reluctantly agreed in deference to me.

The hardest thing was to fight this mist which made my eyes close and

my arms go limp and helpless. Only once in a thousand years, it seemed,

did I manage to fight it off and become aware that something,

something most important, had to be put right immediately. A thousand

years—and only a moment in which to regain control of my machine,

struggling only with my left hand. Another thousand—and far below me

I saw the Junkers, two Junkers, lumbering towards me like large, heavy

bulls. This was the end, of course. And they took their time about it—1

saw that at a glance.

Luri baled out, and they started shooting at him. Killed, I suppose.

Then they came back and drew alongside me.

What did that German look like? Was he handsome or ugly, old or

young? Who cares. This was no soldier flying alongside me, but a

murderer.

I don't know how to explain it, but it seemed to me that I saw both

him and myself as from a distance. Myself, clutching at the controls with

feeble hands, the blood streaming down my face, in a plane that was

falling to pieces. And he, goggles raised, studying me with cold curiosity

and a sense of his complete power over me. I may have said something

to Luri, forgetting that he had baled out and they had probably killed

him. The German passed under me, and the wing with the yellow cross

on it appeared on my left. I pulled the stick over, trod on the pedal and

hurled myself at that wing.

I don't know where the blow struck-probably on the cockpit, because

the German didn't even open his parachute. I had killed him outright.

Was I happy!

I found myself in the grip of an overwhelming, glorious feeling. To

live! To live! I was wounded, I knew that they had got me, but no, my

one thought was—to live! I saw the earth—it was quite close now— the

plough field and the white dusty road.

Some part of me was burning-my jacket and my boots, but I felt no

heat. Incredibly, I somehow managed to flatten out just above ground-

level. I undid the straps-it was the last thing I managed to do that day,

that week, that month, those four months... But let us not forestall

events.

CHAPTER TWO

ALL WE COULD

I was very thirsty, and all the way to the village I kept asking for a drink

and about Luri. When we got to the village I was given a bucket of water,

and I couldn't understand what made the women cry when I put my

head into the bucket and began to drink, seeing and hearing nothing

276

around me. My face was singed, my hair matted, my leg crippled and I

had two gaping wounds in my back. I must have been a sight. A blissful

feeling stole through my body, waxing bigger and stronger. I was lying

on some hay in a farmyard, by the wall of a barn, and it seemed to me

that this feeling came from the prickly touch of the grass, from the scent

of the hay, from the earth, where no one could kill me. I had been carted

down, and the old white horse was now tied to a paling a little way off,

and the tears gathered in my eyes at this sense of bliss, at the happiness

I felt looking at that horse. We had done all we could, I thought. I wasn't

worried about the radio operator-gunner and the aerial gunner. I only

asked them not to move me from here until they had all turned up-Luri

was alive, too, I thought happily, he must be, seeing how lucky we had

been in beating them off. He was alive and I would soon see him.

I did. The horse snorted and shied when they brought him in, and an

austere old woman-the only person whom I remember-went up to it and

punched it on the nose.

His face was serene and quite untouched, but for a scratched cheek,

caused, no doubt, by the parachute dragging him along when he landed.

His eyes were open. At first I couldn't understand why all the men took

their hats off when he was laid on the ground. The old woman knelt

beside him and began to arrange his arms...

Afterwards I was jolting along in a cart on my way to the casualty

clearing station. Some other woman now, not a countrywoman, was

holding my hand, feeling my pulse and repeating: "Careful, careful."

I was wondering, "Why careful? Am I dying then?" I must have said it

aloud, for the woman smiled and answered: "You'll live."

And again the cart jolted along, bumping. My head was lying in

somebody's lap, I saw Luri lying near the doorstep with dead, folded

arms, and I tried to go to him, but they held me back.

CHAPTER THREE

"IS THAT YOU, OWL?"

We travelled in railway trucks, and there were only two passenger

coaches in front. I must have been in a bad way if that little doctor with

the intelligent harassed face ordered me after Ms first round to be

transferred to one of those coaches. I was swathed in bandages-my

head, chest and leg-and lay motionless like a fat white doll. Orderlies

were talking outside our window on the station platform: "Get some of

it from the dangerous car." I was a dangerous case. Something was

beating inside me, I couldn't make out whether it was in my head or

heart. It seemed to me that this was life beating and stirring in me, busy

building something with hands which were tenacious, though still weak.

Only a few days had passed since I had looked out from my plane on

what no other combatant in this war, I thought, had ever seen. Our

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retreat had appeared to me in terms of algebraic formulas as it were, but

now these formulas had been translated into real living facts.

I was no longer viewing our retreat from a height of eighteen

thousand feet. I was retreating myself now, tormented by my wounds,

my thirst, the heat, and not least by the dismal thoughts, which were as

persistent as those blue, hard flies which settled on my bandages with

revoltingly loud buzzings.

Evening was drawing in, and evidently we were no longer standing

still, because my "cradle" was swinging rhythmically in time with the

carriage's movement. The setting sun glanced through the window and

the dusty, heavy air laden with the smell of iodine could clearly be seen

in its slanting rays. Somebody was moaning in a low but harrowing

manner, or rather droning monotonously through clenched teeth like a

buzzer. Where had I heard that dreary voice before? And why was I

trying so hard to remember where I had heard it?

Then suddenly school desks ranged themselves in rows before me

and, as in a waking dream, I saw a lot of lively laughing children's faces.

The lesson was an interesting one-about the manners and customs of

the Chukchi people. But who cared about the lesson when a bet had

been made and a ginger boy with wide-set eyes was holding my finger

and coolly sawing it with a penknife?

"Romashka!" I said aloud.

The droning stopped.

"Is that you, Owl?"

He took a long time threading his way under the suspended cots and

between the wounded lying on the floor until he emerged at last amidst

protruding bandaged legs.

"What is it?" he said guardedly, looking straight at me without

recognising me.

I thought he looked a little more human, though he was still "no oil

painting", as Aunt Dasha would have said. At any rate, the lordly

manner he had lately assumed was now gone. He was scrawny and pale,

his ears stuck out like Petrushka's and his left eye squinted warily.

"Don't you recognise me?"

"No."

"Try again."

He had never been able really to conceal his feelings, and I could now

read them in the order, or rather disorder, in which they appeared.

Bewilderment. Dismay. Horror, which made Ms lips quiver. Then again

bewilderment. Disappointment.

"But you were killed, weren't you?" he mumbled.

CHAPTER FOUR

OLD SCORES

The Destiny theme figures largely in old Russian songs, and though I

am no fatalist, the word came to my mind despite myself when I read a

278

report of my own death in the newspaper Red Falcons. I remember it

word for word:

"While returning from a mission the aircraft piloted by Captain

Grigoriev was overtaken by four enemy fighter planes. In the unequal

combat Grigoriev shot down one lighter and put the other to flight.

Though his machine was damaged, Grigoriev flew on. Not far from the

front-line he was attacked again, this time by two Junkers. Grigoriev,

his machine in flames, rammed one of the Junkers. The men of the X air

unit will forever cherish the memory of their brave comrades, Captain

Grigoriev, Navigator Luri, Radio Operator-Gunner Karpenko and Aerial

Gunner Yershov, who fought for the country to their last breath."

What happened was this: A war correspondent came to the village -1

learned of this only in the summer of 1943-soon after I had been

removed from there. The farmers had witnessed the air fight and he

questioned them about it. He photographed the wreckage of the burnt-

out aircraft. He was told that I was in a hopeless condition.

Whether it was because I had escaped death by nothing short of a

miracle, or because it was the first time in my life that I had occasion to

read my own obituary, but this report had the effect of an insult on me.

My thoughts ran off at a tangent. I pictured Katya-not the Katya, who,

as I knew, would suddenly wake up and wander about the room,

thinking of me, but a different Katya, a sad and aged one, who, upon

reading this report, would put the newspaper down on the table, and go

on doing things for a while as though nothing had happened, perhaps

plaiting or letting down her hair with a stony face, and then suddenly

topple over like a doll.

"Ah, well," I said. "These things happen."

And I crushed the newspaper and flung it out of the window.

Romashov gasped. While we were talking the train had been standing.

Afterwards he picked up the paper-apparently it gave him pleasure at

least to read that I was dead, now that he had seen evidence to the

contrary.

"So you're alive! I can't believe it! My dear chap!"

That was what he said-"dear chap".

"Christ, am I glad! Is it just a coincidence? Somebody with the same

name? But what does it matter! The thing is you're alive."

He began to ask me where I had been hit, whether badly, whether any

bones were broken, and so on. I disappointed him again, saying that I

was wounded lightly and a doctor of my acquaintance had fixed me up

in this passenger coach.

"I can imagine how upset Katya will be," he said. "She may have read

this report."

I said, "Yes, she may," and began to ask him about Moscow.

Romashov mentioned in passing that it was less than a month since he

had left Moscow.

I daresay I ought to have given him to understand straight away that

nothing had changed between us instead of talking to him in such a

peaceful way. But man is a strange animal-that's stale news. I looked at

his strained, unnaturally pale face, and nothing stirred in me beyond

habitual contempt mixed with a faint interest. Needless to say, he was to

me the same cad he had always been. But at that moment I thought of

him as a familiar cad of long standing, one who sort of "belonged".

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And he realised it; he realised everything. He began to talk about

Korablev; did I know that the old fellow, despite his sixty-three years,

had joined the People's Guard and this had been reported in a Moscow

evening papers? He spoke about Nikolai Antonich, saying (with a touch

of irony) that he had received not only a new flat but an academic

degree. That of Doctor of Geography. And without presenting a thesis,

mind you. To Romashov's mind it was almost impossible.

"And d'you know who made his career for him?" Romashov added

viciously, with a gleam in his eye. "You." "Me?"

"Yes. He's a Tatarinov, and you've made that name famous." He meant

that it was my studies of the St. Maria expedition that first drew

attention to the person of Captain Tatarinov and that Nikolai Antonich

had cashed in on this, seeing that he bore the same name. In all justice

to Romashov I must say that he expressed this thought most succinctly.

This, however, was the last subject I wanted to discuss with him. He

understood and switched the conversation.

"Do you know who I met on the Leningrad front?" he said.

"Lieutenant Pavlov." "Who's he?"

"I like that!. He says he knows you since a child. A big broad-

shouldered chap."

How was I to guess that this big, broad-shouldered chap was that boy

Volodya with the baby-blue eyes, who wrote poetry and took me for sled

rides behind his dogs Buska and Toga. "His father came to see him, an

old doctor." "Ivan Ivanovich!"

It gave me pleasure, even from Romashov's lips, to hear that Ivan

Ivanovich was well and was even serving in the Navy. There was a man

for you!

Romashov mentioned several times that he had been on the

Leningrad front. Katya had stayed in Leningrad and I was worried about

her. But I just couldn't see myself asking Romashov about Katya!

By this time, now more or less reconciled to the fact that I was alive,

he was all eagerness to talk about himself. He was already proud, I

think, that he had met me on a hospital train, that he, too, was

wounded, and so forth.

The war had found him in Leningrad, manager of the supplies

department of one of the institutes of the Academy of Sciences. Though

listed as reserved occupation he declined to take advantage of this, all

the more so as the whole institute to a man had joined the People's

Guard. Wounded near Leningrad, he had remained in the ranks. His

former chief, now a high-ranking army man, had summoned him to

Moscow. He was given a new assignment, but did not reach destination.

His train was bombed near Vinnitsa. The blast had hurled him against a

telegraph pole, and since then the whole of his left side gave him

"terrible pains" from time to time.

"I was moaning in my sleep, you know, when you heard me," he

explained. "And the doctors just don't know what to do about it."

"Now own up," I said sternly, "how much of this you have invented

and how much of it is true?"

"It's the absolute truth, every word of it!"

"Is that so?"

"I swear it is! Those days are past when we had to play the fox with

each other."

He said "we" and "each other".

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"That's all over now, old chap. I have my life to live, you have yours.

What is there to come between us now? You won't believe me again, but

honestly, I'm amazed sometimes when I remember what it was we

quarrelled over. Compared with what is happening now before our eyes

it's so trivial."

"I should say it is!"

"Let's be done with it!"

He looked at me questioningly. Evidently he was not sure whether I

would accept the offer.

But I did. Nothing could be further from my mind these days than the

old scores of ours. I felt sick at heart, pitiable and helpless as I was with

my crippled leg in face of the gigantic Shadow that was advancing on

our country and was even now pursuing us, gaining on our lost train. At

other times I would imagine life in a hospital, and day dragging

endlessly, monotonously, the nurse coming in soft-footed and placing

flowers on the bedside table, and God knows how I longed with all my

heart and all my strength for anything but this peace and quiet, these

flowers on the table, that noiseless hospital tread!

Or else there came to me a chilling thought, more dreadful than

anything I could think of, the thought: "I shall never fly again." I would

go hot over and start to breathe through an open mouth, and my heart

would sink, sink so low that I never believed it would rise again.

CHAPTER FIVE

IN THE ASPEN WOOD

I lay by the window, with my back to the engine. The receding

countryside opened out before me, and I did not see the three tanks

until we had passed them. Nothing out of the ordinary, just three tanks.

The tankmen were looking at us from their open hatches. They had no

helmets on, so we took them for our own men. Then the hatches were

closed down and that was the last moment when we could still believe

that no able-bodied men were capable of gunning a hospital train

carrying no fewer than a thousand wounded.

The carriages clashed with a metallic grating sound, and I was flung

forward violently.. A groan escaped me as my weight fell on my

wounded leg. A young fellow, with a clatter of crutches, dashed, yelling,

down the carriage. Somebody knocked him down and he slumped in a

corner beside me. Through the window I saw the first of the wounded,

who had jumped out of the trucks, running and falling as the tanks

sprayed them with shrapnel.

The man lying next to me, also an airman by the name of Simakov,

looked out of the window too. His face was white when, turning away

from the window, we looked into each other's eyes.

"We must get out!"

"I suppose so," I said. "All you need for that is a pair of legs."

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Nevertheless, we managed somehow to crawl out of our berths and

the rush of wounded men swept us out onto the platform at the end of

the carriage.

I shall never forget the feeling that gripped me with such scorching

intensity when, stifling the agonising pain, I descended the steps and

crawled under the carriage. It was a feeling of contempt and even hatred

for myself such as I had never experienced in my life before. Men lay all

round me with arms thrown out in queer attitudes. They were corpses.

Others ran and dropped with a cry, while I was sitting under the

carriage, helpless, tormented with fury and pain.

I drew my pistol, but not to shoot myself, though the idea may have

flitted through my mind together with the thousands of thoughts that

swilled back and forth in it. Someone grasped my wrist.

It was one of the nurses. Her name was Katya. I pointed to Simakov,

who was lying a little way off, his cheek pressed to the ground. She

glanced at him and shook her head.

He was dead.

"Hell, I'm not going anywhere!" I said to the second girl, who had

suddenly appeared from nowhere. She was remarkably unhurried amid

the din and turmoil. "Leave me alone! I've got a pistol, they won't take

me alive."

But the girls grabbed me and the three of us rolled down the

embankment. I caught a momentary glimpse of Romashov ahead of me,

crawling along on his belly, yellow, looking like a Chinese. He was

crawling along the same ditch as we were; a muddy, clayey ditch

running parallel with the track. The embankment ran into a marsh.

It was hard on the girls, and I asked them several times to leave me.

Katya, I believe, shouted to Romashov, asking him to stop and help us,

but he just looked back and went on crawling forward on all fours like a

monkey.

That's how it was, except that it happened a thousand times more

slowly than I am telling it.

We managed with difficulty to get across the marsh and lay down in a

small aspen wood. "We" were the girls, myself, Romashov and two

soldiers who had joined us on the way. They were slightly wounded, one

in the right arm, the other in the left.

I sent the two soldiers out to reconnoitre and they came back

reporting that there were as many as forty vehicles in various directions

and some field-kitchens had even appeared. Apparently the tanks which

had gunned our train were part of a large force that had broken through.

"We can get away, of course. But since the captain can't walk, we'd

better make use of the railcar."

They had found a railcar under the embankment by a switch-track.

I remember it was while discussing whether the railcar could be raised

and placed on the track that Romashov lay down on his back, groaning

and complaining of the bad pain. He may really have had an attack,

because when the girls undid his tunic we saw that the left side of his

body was all red. Until then I had never heard of such contusions.

Anyway, in such a state he obviously couldn't go to the switch-track with

the soldiers. The girls went instead, just as unhurried and resolute,

carrying on a leisurely conversation in their low, melodious Ukrainian

voices.

Romashov and I were left alone in the little, wet aspen wood.

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Was he feigning or was he really feeling bad? I wasn't quite sure.

Several times he twitched like an epileptic, then bleated and fell silent.

"Romashov!" I said.

He lay on his back, his chest arched high, with a perfectly white, dead-

looking nose. I called him again, and he answered in such a feeble voice

as though he had already departed this life and was now returning with

great reluctance to this aspen wood in an area where a German tank

force was operating.

"Pretty bad this time!" he muttered, attempting a smile.

He raised his eyelids and stood up with difficulty, mechanically

removing the aspen leaves that had stuck to his face.

I find it hard to give an account of that day, possibly because, despite

the predicament we were in, it was rather dull, especially compared with

the events of next morning. We waited and waited without an end. I lay

on a heap of last year's leaves beside a scattered wood-stack. Romashov

sat Turkish-fashion, with his legs tucked under him, and who knows

what he was thinking, with those bird-like eyes half-closed and his

hands resting on his bony knees.

The wood was damp and a recent rain had left large drops on the

branches and spiders' webs, which quivered under the weight. The

glittering raindrops fell to the ground with a plop. At least, we did not

suffer from thirst.

Once or twice the sun peeped out at us. At first it was on our right,

then, having described a semi-circle, it appeared on our left. That meant

that three hours had gone since the girls and the soldiers went off to fix

up the railcar.

Before going away the one called Katya had put her knapsack under

my head. Judging by the sound it gave off when I punched it up it must

have contained rusks. Romashov started to whine that he was dying of

hunger, but I silenced him sharply.

"They won't come back," he said nervously after a while. "They've

deserted us."

He had recovered from his attack and started to saunter around at the

risk of betraying our whereabouts, since the wood was a sparse one and

all was open terrain as far as the track.

"It's your fault," he said, coming back and squatting down beside me.

"You sent them all away. One of the girls should have stayed behind."

"As a hostage?"

"Yes, as a hostage. And now you can whistle for them. Catch them

coming back for us! That railcar is worked by hand and it can only take

four people in any case."

I must have been in a bad temper, for I drew my pistol and told

Romashov I'd kill him if he didn't stop whining. He shut up. His ugly

face twisted and it was all he could do to keep from blubbering.

The outlook was pretty blue. Dusk was beginning to creep through the

wood, but there was no sign of the girls. Of course, I never for a moment

believed that they could go away in the railcar without us, as Romashov

suspected.

Lying on my back, I looked up at the sky, which was darkening and

receding from me among the thin, trembling aspens. I was not thinking

of Katya, but something light and tender went through me. I felt:

"Katya." It was half-dream, half-sleep, and but for Katya I would have

driven it away, because I dare not sleep, I felt that I dare not, though I

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couldn't yet say why. I dreamt of Spain or of the letter I had written

from Spain-something very youthful and muddled, not about the

fighting, but about the tiny orchards near Valencia, where the old

women, when they learnt that we were Russians, did not know where to

seat us, how to regale us. "Whatever happens," I had written to Katya,

though I had felt her beside me, "remember that you are free, without

any obligations."

I dreaded having to part with this dream, though my drenched leg felt

cold and my greatcoat had slipped far down from my shoulders and was

crumpled under me. I was holding Katya's hands, not letting go off my

dream, but already something frightful had happened and I had to force

myself awake.

I opened my eyes. A mist, lit up by the early rays of the sun, was

drifting lazily among the trees. My face was wet and so were my hands.

Romashov was sitting a little way off in the same pose of drowsy

unconcern. Everything looked the same as before, but in fact everything

was quite different.

He was not looking at me. Then he stole a glance at me out of the tail

of his eye, and I understood at once why I was lying so uncomfortably.

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He had pulled the knapsack with the rusks from under my head. What's

more, he had taken my flask containing vodka and my pistol.

The blood rushed to my face. He had taken my pistol!

"Give me back my gun this minute, you fathead!" I said calmly.

He did not answer.

"D'you hear!"

"You'll die all the same," he said hastily. "You don't need a gun."

"Whether I'm going to die or not is my own business. You give me

back my gun if you don't want to face a court martial. Get me?"

His breath was coming quick and short.

"Court martial!" he sneered. "We're alone and no one will know

anything. As a matter of fact you've long been dead. Nobody knows that

you're still alive."

He was staring me straight in the face now, and his eyes looked very

queer-sort of solemn and wide-open. I wondered whether he had gone

mad.

"I tell you what," I said calmly, "take a swig out of that flask and pull

yourself together. Then we'll decide whether I'm alive or dead."

But Romashov was not listening.

"I've stayed behind to tell you that you've always been in my way

everywhere. Every day, every hour of my life. I'm sick and tired of it! I've

had a thousand years of you!"

Definitely, he was not quite normal at that moment. That last phrase

of his spoke for itself.

"But that's all finished with now!" Romashov plunged on. "You would

have died anyway, you've got gangrene. You'll die now all the quicker."

"That may be." There was not more than three paces between us. If I

took good aim and threw my crutch at him I could stun him perhaps.

My voice was still calm, though. "But why have you taken my map-case?

My papers are in there."

"Why? To have them find you just as you are. Who? Unidentified. (He

was omitting words). Just another corpse lying about.

You'll be a corpse," he said arrogantly, "and no one will know that I

killed you."

Looking back, this scene is almost fantastic. But I have not altered or

added a single thing.

CHAPTER SIX

NOBODY WILL KNOW

As a boy I was very quick-tempered and I remember what a

dangerous sense of exhilaration came over me when I let myself go. It

was with just this feeling, which had gone slightly to my head, that I

found myself listening to Romashov. I had to keep perfectly calm, and I

forced myself to do this, while my hand slid slowly behind my back and

rested on my crutch.

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"You may be interested to know that I've sent a letter off to my unit,"

I said in a steady voice, "so it's no use your relying on that report."

"What about the hospital train?"

He looked at me exultantly. He meant that the attack on the hospital

train would easily explain my disappearance. At that moment I realised

how long he had been wishing my death, ever since our schooldays

perhaps.

"All right. But, strangely enough, you gain nothing by it," I said this,

or words to this effect, just to gain time.

The wood stack prevented me from swinging my arm back. I had to

move away from it unobserved and strike from the side to make sure of

hitting his head.

"Whether I gain by it or not doesn't matter. You have lost anyway. I’ll

going to shoot you. There!"

He pulled out my pistol.

Had I believed him really capable of shooting me he might have found

it in him to do so. I had never seen him so worked up. But I just spat in

his face and said: "Shoot, damn you!"

My God, how he howled and twisted about, gnashing his teeth and

even snapping! The sight would have been terrifying had I not known

that behind these antics was only cowardice and bluster. A struggle with

himself-whether to shoot or not-that was the meaning of his wild dance.

The pistol burned his hand. He kept flourishing the gun at me and

shivering, until I began to fear that he might press the trigger without

meaning to.

"Damn you!" he shouted. "You've always tormented me! If only you

knew to whom you owe your life, you rotter, you nobody! If only I could

do it, my God! Why should you live, why? All the same they'll saw your

leg off. You won't fly any more."

It may sound silly, but of all the idiotic curses he hurled at me one

that struck home was his saying that I would never fly again.

"Anyone would think I was mostly in your way up in the air," I said.

My voice had acquired a deadly quality, but I was trying to keep it calm.

"But down on the ground we were Orestes and Pylades."

He was now standing sideways to me, covering his eyes with Ms left

hand, as though despairing of persuading me to die of my own accord. It

was a good opportunity, and I hurled my crutch. It had to be thrown like

a spear, the body drawn hard back then flung forward with the arm

thrown out. I did the best I could, but unfortunately I missed his head

and struck his shoulder instead, not very hard.

Romashov was dumbfounded. He gave a great, clumsy jump, like a

kangaroo. Then he faced me.

"You would, eh!" he said and swore. "All right!"

Leisurely, he packed the knapsacks, tied them together the easier to

carry them and slipped one over each arm.

Just as unhurriedly, he walked round me, and bent down to pick up a

twig. Waving it about, he made for the marsh, and five minutes later his

stoop-shouldered figure could just barely be seen among the distant

aspen trees. I sat leaning my hands on the ground, my mouth dry,

fighting an impulse to cry out: "Romashov, come back!" as this, of

course, was impossible.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

ALONE

To leave me in the lurch, hungry, unarmed and badly wounded,

within a stone's throw of the German detachment—this, I felt sure, had

been carefully planned in advance. All the rest of Romashov's

performance was done on the spur of the moment, probably in the hope

of scaring and humiliating me. Having failed in this, he had gone away,

and this was tantamount to, if not worse than, the murder from which

he had flinched.

I could not say that this sobering thought made me feel any happier. I

had to keep moving if I did not want Romashov's prophecy about my

remaining in this little aspen wood for ever to prove true.

I stood up. The crutches were of different length. I took a step. It was

not the sort of pain that hits you in the back of the head and knocks you

out, but it was as though a thousand fiends were tearing my leg to pieces

and lacerating the half-healed wounds on my back with iron scrapers. I

took another step, then a third.

"Well," I said to the fiends.

I took a fourth step.

The sun stood fairly high in the sky by the time I reached the edge of

the wood, beyond which lay the marsh, intersected by a single strip of

wet, trampled grass. Green tussocks, like beautiful globes, were visible

here and there, and I remembered how they had turned over under the

girls' feet yesterday.

Some men were walking about on the embankment. I wondered who

they were-our own or Germans. Our train was still burning; the flames,

pale in the sunlight, licked the blackened walls of the trucks.

Should I go back to it? What for? The rolling thunder of gunfire

reached me, muffled by distance, coming seemingly from the East. The

nearest station along the line, some twenty kilometres distant, was

Shchelya Novaya. Fighting was going on there, and this meant our

troops were there. I directed my steps that way, if you could call that

agony steps.

The wood came to an end, giving place to bushes of blue-black berries,

the name of which I had forgotten. They looked like bilberries, only

much bigger. A welcome sight, seeing that I had not had anything to eat

since the day before. Something dark and motionless lay in the field

beyond the bushes, probably a dead body, and every time I reached for a

berry, leaning on my crutches, that dark object worried me. After a time

I forgot about it, only to remember it again with a cold shiver. Several

berries dropped into the grass. I lowered myself carefully to look for

them, and a stab went through my heart—it was a woman. I made my

way towards her as fast as I could.

She was lying on her back with outspread arms. It wasn't Katya, it was

the other girl. She had been shot in the face, and her beautiful black

eyebrows were drawn together in a look of suffering.

It was then, I believe, that I first noticed I was talking to myself, and

saying rather odd things at that. I recollected the name of those blue-

black berries that resembled bilberries-whortleberries they were called-

and was overjoyed at the discovery. I began speculating aloud about

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how this girl had been killed. Probably she had been going back to fetch

me, and the Germans on the embankment had fired a burst at her from

a submachine-gun. I said some kind words to her to buck her up, as

though she were not dead, hopelessly dead, with those eyebrows drawn

together in an expression of pain.

Then I forgot her. I hobbled along, babbling, and I didn't at all like the

way I was babbling. This was delirium, it had crept upon me unawares

and I did not even try to fight it because I needed every ounce of

strength to fight an irresistible desire to fling away my crutches, which

had blistered my armpits, and to lie down on the ground, where I would

find peace and happiness.

I must have stopped seeing anything around me long before I lost

consciousness, otherwise where could that fine pale-green head of

cabbage have come from alongside my own head? I was lying in a

vegetable garden gazing rapturously at the cabbage. Everything would

have been fine if not for that scarecrow in the tattered black hat which

wheeled slowly above me. The crow sitting on its shoulder circled with

it, and I thought that but for that bird with the flat blinking eye

everything in the world would be fine. I shouted at it, but my voice was

so hoarse and feeble, that it just looked at me and stirred its wings, as

though shrugging its shoulders.

Yes, everything would have been fine, if only I could stop the world

from making those slow circles round me. I would then perhaps have

been able to make out that unpainted log-built cottage at the top of the

garden, with the porch, and that tall well-sweep in the yard. One of the

windows kept darkening now and again. Somebody I couldn't see was

walking about the house, looking anxiously out of the window.

I got to my feet. The doorstep was about forty paces from me-a trifle

compared with the distance I had covered the previous day. But those

forty steps cost me dear. I dropped exhausted on the porch amid a

clatter of my crutches.

The door opened slightly. A boy of about twelve stood on his knee

behind a stool. Lying on the porch, it was some time before I could make

him out in the depths of the darkish room with its low ceiling and large

double-tiered bunks screened off from the rest of the room by cotton

curtains. He was aiming straight at me, one eye screwed up and the butt

pressed to his cheek.

"Look, I need help," I said, trying to stop the room, which was also

spinning round me in that slow accursed manner. "I'm a wounded

airman from the hospital train."

"Kirill, stop!" said the boy with the gun. "He's one of ours."

He appeared to become duplicated at that moment. Another boy

exactly like him peeped out from behind the curtains. He had a hunting

knife in his hand. He was still puffing and blinking with excitement.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE BOYS

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I hardly remember what happened afterwards. The days I spent with

the boys are wreathed, as it were, in clouds of vapour. It was real

vapour, too, coming from a big kettle that boiled from morning till night

on a trivet in the Russian stove. But there was also another, visionary

vapour, which made my breathing rapid and hoarse and left me in a

drenching sweat. Sometimes it would clear a little, and then I would see

myself in bed with a mound of coloured pillows under my leg. The boys

had done that to keep the flow of blood away from the wound. I knew

already that their names were Kirill and Vladimir, that they were the

sons of a pointsman named Ion Leskov and that their father had gone to

the station and told them to lock the door and let nobody in. They were

twins, and though I knew it, I got scared every time I saw them together.

They were so exactly alike that I thought I was being delirious again.

It was as though two selves were struggling within me—one a

cheerful, blithe soul who tried to conjure up vivid memories of all the

good things of life, the other a sombre and resentful person harbouring

a grievance and brooding over his humiliation.

At times I saw a tall bearded man, so still with cold that he could not

even shut the door behind him, coming into the cottage where my sister

and I were living. It wasn't Doctor Ivan Ivanovich though. It was myself.

I dropped exhausted on the porch steps, the door was flung open, boys

aimed a gun at me, then said: "He's one of ours."

And I kept thinking that the reason they were so kind to me was

because once, many years ago, my sister and I-lonely, neglected children

in a remote, snowbound village-had helped the doctor.

At other times I saw myself with teeth bared in hatred, gun in hand,

crouching under a railway carriage. People lay all round me in queer

attitudes, with arms flung out. What had I done, what sin of omission

was I guilty of? What important thing, the most important thing in life,

had I overlooked? How had it happened that these men had come to us

and dared to shoot down wounded men, as though there were no justice

in this world, no honour, none of the things I had been taught at school,

and learned to respect and love ever since a child?

I tried to answer this question, but I couldn't, because I was fighting

for breath, and the boys looked at me anxiously and kept saying that if

their father came he would know what to do to make me feel better.

The father did come. There could be no doubt it was he—the same

ungainly figure as the boys, the same sombre face and shining blue eyes.

They were shining at the moment when, with arms hanging down his

sides and back bent, he stopped beside my bed.

"The German detachment has been routed," he said. "We surrounded

them at Shchelya Novaya and mopped them all up to a man."

Then he gazed at me silently with a frown, and I thought that I must

be in a bad way indeed if people looked at me with such kindly eyes,

asked me my full name and rank, and pinned the slip of paper with

these details to the wall so as not to lose it. There was no harm in that,

though; let him do it; I didn't have to look at that paper. I took the

man's hand and started earnestly to tell him what a reception his boys

had given me. I may have been spinning it out too long, repeating

myself and getting confused, because he put something cold on my

forehead and said I was to go to sleep.

I knew that he would be pleased if I did, so I closed my eyes and

pretended to be asleep. But the picture I had been describing to him

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remained-somewhere in an interminable perspective, between wide-

spaced walls.

Thousands of little houses loomed before me. Thousands of boys

knelt behind stools on which lay thousands of guns. Thousands of other

boys hid behind curtains, knife in hand. From horizon to horizon, in

every house, in the depth of dark rooms, boys were lying in wait for the

enemy, waiting to kill him as he entered.

CHAPTER NINE

DEALING WITH LOVE

If, like the poets, one compares life to a road, it can be said that at the

sharpest turns in this road I have always encountered traffic-regulators,

who showed me the right direction. This particular turn in the road

differed from the others merely in fact that I was helped out by a

pointsman, that is, by a professional traffic-regulator.

I lay in his house for two days and nights, now coming to myself, now

losing consciousness, always opening my eyes to the sight of that

sombre man standing by my bed, never moving away, as though to keep

me from taking the turn where the road drops away into the abyss.

Sometimes he turned into a boy with the same amazingly bright eyes,

and the boy, too, stood steadfast at his post and kept me there in that

room with the little windows and the low ceiling, away from the place

where (if the report in Red Falcons was to be believed) I had already

gone to.

The remarkable thing was that never, either awake or in delirium, did

I think of Romashov. Could that have been an instinct of self-

preservation? Probably it was-the memory of it would not have done me

any good.

But when traffic was restored, when the family took me to Zaozorye

by railcar-no doubt the very one which the nurses had failed to reach-

and three pairs of shining blue eyes shyly took leave of me, when I found

myself in another hospital train, this time a real one with a bathroom, a

radio and a library; when, bathed, rebandaged and fed, with my leg

hitched to the ceiling according to all the rules of medical science, I had

slept my way through the whole of Central Russia, to find myself

somewhere beyond Kirov in a strange world of unblacked-out windows-

it was then that I remembered and went in my mind over everything

that had occurred between me and Romashov.

I recollected our talk on the evening before the German tanks had

gunned our train.

"Admit that you have committed some base actions in your life," I had

said. "Base from your own point of view, I mean."

"Maybe," he had said coolly. "But what do you call a base action? I

regard life as a game. Even now, for instance. Hasn't fate itself put the

cards in our hands?"

It was the war, not fate, that had dealt the cards. Not the war either,

but the retreat. If not for the retreat he would never have dared to steal

my gun and papers from me and leave me in the wood alone.

290

I went over the whole history of our relationship, a very complicated

one, bearing in mind (a thing now almost fantastic) that he had once

seriously contemplated marrying Katya.

Was he reconciled to the fact that he had lost her for ever? I don't

know. He had married somebody by the name of Alevtina Sergeyevna,

and Nina Kapitonovna said that he had got terribly drunk at the

wedding and had wept. Katya had listened to the story with a blush. Did

she guess, then, that Romashov still loved her? I don't know, I don't

know...

I had written to Katya while still in the train, and I wrote to her from

the hospital almost every day. I wrote to the Berensteins' address, and to

Pyotr through the field post, and to the Military Medical Academy

where Katya was working with Varya Trofimova, as she had written to

me in September. There was no railway communication with Leningrad,

but the mail was delivered by plane, and I could not understand why my

letters did not reach them. I comforted myself with the thought that if

anything had happened to Katya somebody was sure to answer me.

That unhappy day, February 21, 1942, will always stick in my memory.

One of the volunteer nurses told me that she had met a train from

Leningrad at the station with trade-school pupils who were being

evacuated from the starving city. She was a stern-faced woman who had

mentioned one day, with a calmness that astonished me, that her

husband and son had been killed at the front. Yet when she told me

about the boys, so weak from dystrophy that they had to be carried out

of the carriages, she wept.

I had to force myself to eat my dinner that day. My leg, which had

been in a plaster cast for over a month now, had suddenly begun to give

me an excruciating pain. The doctor ordered an X-ray, and that was

when I "let it get me", as Aunt Dasha was fond of saying.

For one thing, the X-ray showed that the leg had knitted wrong and

would have to be removed from the plaster and have some bones or

other broken. That meant starting the treatment all over again.

Secondly, it was devilishly cold in the X-ray room and I was kept there

for an hour and a half. I must have caught a cold, because towards the

evening I noticed that I was talking nonsense—a first sign with me that I

was running a temperature.

In short, I contracted pneumonia. This meant putting off the second

operation, and the doctors feared that I would be left lame.

I am afraid I am making too much of my ailments—dull stuff,

especially considering that I had been wounded in the third month of

the war without having done anything worth mentioning. And that at a

time when the "miracle at the gates of Moscow", as the foreign

newspapers headlined it, had already been accomplished; when for two

hundred miles west of Moscow stiff legs clad in ridiculous ersatz valenki

stuck out from every snowdrift. That at a time when work was in full

swing on the build-up of a long-range naval air force-without me, who

had spent fifteen years crisscrossing the skies over the sea in all

directions? I even had a feeling as though the war mentality were

wearing off, submerged in the senseless trivialities of hospital life.

291

CHAPTER TEN

THE VERDICT

I had always thought of a medical board as a sort of tribunal, one at

which I had always had to plead guilty of not having been created a tall,

broad-shouldered man with a square jaw and muscles capable of lifting

a hundred and fifty pounds. It was with this unpleasant feeling that I

found myself standing utterly naked before the medical board at M—v. I

did knee-bends, shut my eyes and stretched my arms out in front of me,

careful not to let them tremble, performed leg jerks and recognised the

smallest letters at a great distance with faultless accuracy. Then an old,

grey-haired lady doctor listened to my heart. There was something in

my chest she didn't quite like, judging by the way she paused, frowned,

then tapped me over again, as though practising scales on a piano. Then

she said: "Breathe in, breathe out, hold it!"

It wasn't my lungs that had been worrying me when I went before the

board. Whenever I got nervous I started to limp on my wounded leg,

and this was a nuisance. It set me thinking how my leg would behave

during a combat flight. I had always had sound lungs, though I had

contracted the Spanish flu and afterwards had severe pleurisy as a boy.

But it was my lungs that seemed to make an unfavourable impression

on this grumpy old medical officer. She tapped me all over, turned me

round and tapped again, then made me lie down, seemingly determined

to prove at all costs that I was ill, ill, ill... That I was unfit and would

never fly again.

Nearly six months had passed since I had hidden this horrible thought

away somewhere deep down within me—hidden it and covered it up

with any old thing. But it had not died or left me, it was merely lurking

somewhere along with another anxious thought-about Katya.

And now, as I stood naked before the board, with scars from my

wounds on my legs and back, I could no longer hide this thought either

from myself or from others. The doctor must have read this in my eyes,

because, picking up her pen, she hesitated to write down her decision,

and passed me over to the chairman of the medical board, a short, stout

doctor in horn-rimmed spectacles, who started tapping me vigorously

on the ribs and shoulder blades with a little hammer instead of his

fingers. The hammer gave off sounds now clear, now dulled, as though

asking: "Aren't you ill, ill, ill? Unfit, and will never fly again?"

"There's nothing to worry about, Captain," the doctor said after a

glance at my face as he stuck the rubber tubes into his big hairy ears.

"You'll be all right after a little treatment."

He made a note in my case papers and repeated in a kindly tone: "You'll

be all right.

" But he put me down for six months' leave, and I knew how bad one

had to be for a medical board to give such an opinion of a combatant

officer in the year 1942.

I whistled softly, not to attract the attention of passers-by, as I walked

down the tree-lined street leading to the Kama. On the wall of the town's

best building housing the flying school I read for the thousandth time

the marble plaque, which said: "Popov, the inventor of radio and

eminent Russian scientist, went to school here."

292

I climbed, limping, to the top of the high bank, and the Kama, still

turbid, yellow-grey from the spring spate, spread before me with its

wharves and steamboats, hauling huge barges, with its whistles and

shouts resounding over the broad expanse of water.

The sight of a group of boys on the bank reminded me of the time

Katya and I had visited Ensk after my return from Spain. The boys in

Ensk had followed me about, doing everything that I did. When I had

stopped to buy some cigarettes at a kiosk, they, too, had stopped and

bought the same cigarettes. I felt like taking a dip. Leaving Katya in

Cathedral Gardens, I went down to the river, undressed and dived in.

They, too, undressed a little way off and plunged into the water just as I

had done. No wonder—here was an airman who had fought in Spain and

come home with the Order of the Red Banner pinned to his chest! And

now?

My fingers shook slightly as I rolled myself a cigarette. Lighting up, I

stood for a while motionless on the bank, taking in the unfamiliar sights

and varied activities of the great river. A grey passenger steamer went

past. I read its name: Lyapidevsky. "You didn't become a Lyapidevsky,"

I thought. "Nor a Kamanin either," when I read the name on the side of

a similar small steamer that passed by. Farther out, by a wharf, lay the

Mazuruk and I couldn't help smiling at the thought that all the vessels

of the Kama Steamship Line bore the names of famous airmen, good

friends of mine too. "(These are the names of pilots who took part in the rescue of

the Chelyuskin expedition in 1934. —Tr.)

Anyway, there was nothing to prevent me now from flying to

Leningrad, in order to find my wife or reassure myself that I had riot

lost her forever.

I waited three weeks for a plane. Whether it was because I had got

used to the idea of being ill, or because hope had crept stealthily into my

heart, whispering assurance that all would come right yet, but little by

little I recovered from the shock and put my thoughts and feelings in

order.

It was not myself I was thinking of now, but of Katya. I thought of her

when I heard "Nina's Romance" on the radio-she had liked it. I thought

of her when seeing a show put on by the wounded. We had so seldom

gone to shows! I thought of her when everybody was asleep in the vast

ward, and only here and there could be heard an occasional moan or

quick, hoarse mutterings.

A major of my acquaintance, who had flown to M—v on some mission

from Leningrad front HQ, readily agreed to take me back with him.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I LOOK FOR KATYA

293

I had been grounded now for over six months. How can I convey the

feeling with which I took the air again? It was galling to think that for

the first time in my life I was flying as a passenger. Over the years I had

become accustomed to feeling more at home in the air than on the

ground. I looked out of the window with pleasure, as if checking

whether any harm had come to this vast countryside with its black

spring fields, its bright, winding streams and the dark-green velvet of its

forests. It was with pleasure that I went into the cockpit, feeling its

familiar, ordered compactness with my whole body. With pleasure I

waited to see how the pilot would steer clear of the storm-we ran into

one over Cherepovets, a magnificent mass of thunderclouds resembling

palaces, with walls riven by lightning. I was reminded of my impressions

of first flights, before the sky had become for me simply an air route.

At the airport in Leningrad I got a lift in a car that had come down for

Pravda matrixes. It took me as far as Liteiny Prospekt. From there I

would have to walk or take a tram. The only tram running to the

Petrogradskaya was a No. 3, but the Leningraders who had settled

themselves round the tram stop in a home-like way, said that I should

have to wait perhaps an hour. The major, who had to get to the

Petrogradskaya too, tried to persuade me to wait, seeing that I had a

heavy knapsack—I had brought some food for Katya. But how could I

wait, when I had to catch my breath at least twenty times at the mere

thought that Katya and I were at last together in the same city, that at

this very moment, perhaps, she was-I don't know what-waiting for me,

sick, dying?

I flew headlong down the avenue running alongside the Summer

Garden. I saw everything, took it all in—the allotments on Mars Field,

with camouflaged anti-aircraft guns in the middle of them; the riotous

greenery, which had never looked so lush in Leningrad before;

the general clean and tidy appearance of the city—I had read in /the

papers that in the spring of 1942 three hundred thousand Leningraders

had turned out to clean up their city. But everything I saw turned to me

a single side-where was Katya, would I find her? I thought I never

would, seeing that nearly all the houses had no window-panes in them

and the houses stood silent, sad-eyed. I never would, seeing that every

wall was dented and smashed by artillery shells. Yes, I would find her,

seeing that even the square round the Suvorov monument was planted

with carrots and beetroot, and the young shoots stood erect as though

no better natural conditions for them could be thought of. I came out on

the Neva and involuntarily my eyes sought the admiralty spire—I don't

know how to explain it, but it was part of Katya-the fact that it was

slightly dulled, like an old engraving. We had not been able to say

goodbye to each other when the war started, but another leave-taking,

the one before I left for Spain, came back to me so vividly that I almost

saw her physically, standing in the dark hall of the Berensteins' flat

among the old coats and jackets. How could I bring all that back again?

To clasp her in my arms again? To hear her ask: "Sanya, is that you? Can

it be you?"

From afar I saw the house in which the Berensteins lived. It still stood

there, and strange to say it looked more beautiful than before. The

window-panes were intact, and the facade threw back a resplendent

gleam like that of fresh paint in the sunshine. But the closer I got to it

the more was I disturbed by this strange immobility and spruceness.

294

Another ten, fifteen, twenty paces-and something gripped my heart,

then let go, and it began to race wildly. There was no house. The facade

had been painted on large sheets of plywood.

All that long summer day the distant roar of the artillery pounded in

my ears like surf beating on a pebbly beach.

All day long I searched for Katya.

A woman with a triangular green face whom I met outside the wrecked

house sent me to Doctor Ovanesyan, who was a member of the District

Soviet. This old Armenian, a grey-black genial man with a three day's

stubble, sat in the office of the former Elite Cinema, now the district HQ

of the Civil Defence. I asked him whether he knew Ekaterina

Tatarinova-Grigorieva. He said, "Sure I did. I even offered her a job as a

nurse when the war started."

"Well?"

"She refused and went out to do trench-digging," the doctor said. "I

never saw her again, I regret to say."

"Maybe you know Rosalia Berenstein, too, Doctor?"

He looked at me with his kind old eyes, and pursed his lips.

"Are you a relative others?"

"No, just a friend."

"I see."

He was silent for a while.

"She was a fine woman," he sighed. "We sent her to the hospital, but it

was too late. She died."

I went back to the courtyard of the wrecked house. The facade had

collapsed, but the side of the building facing the yard was intact. I found

myself aimlessly mounting the debris-cluttered staircase. I got as far as

the first landing. Higher up was a jumble of iron rods and beams

hanging over the gaping staircase well and only at the second floor level

did the stairs begin again.

In this house there had once lived my sister, whom I loved. Here we

had celebrated her wedding. I had come here every Sunday, an air cadet

in blue uniform, who dreamt of great discoveries. Here Katya and I had

stayed whenever we came to Leningrad, and whenever we came we were

received here as the nearest and dearest of friends. In this house Katya

had lived for more than a year when I was fighting in Spain. In this

house she had lived during the blockade, suffering hunger and cold,

working and helping others, bestowing upon them the light of her clean,

brave spirit. Where was she? Terror gripped my throat. I clenched my

teeth to still the quivering of my body.

At that moment I heard the voice of a child, and in a gap in the wall

overhead there appeared a boy of about twelve, dark-complexioned,

with high cheekbones.

"Who do you want, Comrade Officer?"

"Do you live here?"

"Yes."

"Alone?"

"Of course not. With my mother."

"Is your mother at home just now?"

"Yes."

He showed me how to go up-at one spot there was a narrow plank

bridging a gap in the staircase-and within a few minutes I was talking to

295

his mother, a tired-looking woman-a Tatar, as I realised the moment

she spoke. She was the yardwoman of House No. 79. To be sure, she

knew Rosalia and Katya well.

"When Nine was hit she go dig," she said, speaking of Katya. The boy,

who spoke good Russian, explained that "Nine" was the house where the

food store had been. "She dug man out, him friend. Ginger man. He

lived her flat."

"She dug out a friend of hers," the boy quickly translated. "Afterwards

he lived in her flat."

"Second old lady die. Hakim go bury him."

"The second old lady was Rosalia's sister," the boy explained.

"Hakim's me. When she died we took her down to the cemetery. The

ginger one was there too. He hired us for the job. Military man, too-a

major."

I now had to ask about Katya. I steeled myself and did so. With an

angry shake of the head the yardwoman said that she herself had been

laid up in hospital for three months. "I call for mullah, no mullah in

Leningrad, all mullah die." And when she returned home Rosalia's flat

was already empty.

"Must ask house management," she said on second thoughts. "But

him die too. Maybe she go away? She dig out ginger man, he have bread.

Big sack, carry himself, not let me. I say to him: 'You greedy fool. We

save your life. Don't think about bag, pray to God, read Koran.' "

Katya was not living at Rosalia's when the bomb hit the house— that

was all she knew. I spoke to a number of other women. They wept as

they told me how Katya had helped them. Hakim brought his pals, and

they complained that the ginger major had promised them three

hundred grams per head for the burial, but had "diddled" them by

giving them only two hundred.

Who the devil could that ginger major be? Pyotr? But Pyotr wasn't a

major, and it was impossible to imagine him doing starving boys out of a

hundred grams of bread. Ah, well, whoever the man was, he had helped

Rosalia bury her sister. Who knows but that he may have helped Katya

in her need. She had been at the funeral with him, and evidently could

not have been so weak if she had managed to walk all the way to the

cemetery. Since then, however, no one had seen her, either alive or

dead.

It was past five when, tired out and with a splitting headache, I started

for the Military Medical Academy. The Academy itself had been

evacuated, but the clinics, turned into hospitals from the first day of the

war, still remained. The Stomatology Department, where Katya worked,

was still there. I was sent to the office, where an elderly typist, who

somehow reminded me of Aunt Dasha, said that Katya had been in a

bad way and Doctor Trofimova had arranged for her to be evacuated

from Leningrad.

"Where to?"

"That I can't say. I don't know."

"Is Doctor Trofimova herself in Leningrad?"

"As soon as she sent your wife off she went to the front," the typist

said. "Since then we've had no news from either of them."

296

CHAPTER TWELVE

I MEET HYDROGRAPHER R.

I realised now that it had been naive of me to write to Katya in the

course of six months without getting a word in answer, and then expect

that I only had to turn up in Leningrad for her to meet me on her

doorstep with outstretched arms. As if there had not been that cruel

hungry winter of nineteen forty one, with its trainloads of dying children

and special hospitals for Leningraders in cities throughout the land. As

if there had not been those sickly faces with the clouded eyes. As if the

rumble of gunfire could not still be heard in the city coming now from

the East, now from the West.

I was thinking of this as I sat in the office of the Stomatology Clinic,

listening to the typist's story of the young sailor, the spit image of her

own son killed in the war, who had suddenly come and given her three

hundred grams of bread when she no longer had the strength to rise

from her bed.

"You'll find Katerina all right," she said. "She dreamt of a flying eagle.

Your husband, I told her. She wouldn't believe me. Now, wasn't I right?

I'm telling you now, too-you'll find her."

Maybe. She was dying while I had been living in clover in M-v, I

thought, staring dully at this old woman, who was trying to convince me

that I would find Katya, that she would come back to me. "I was taken

care of and nursed. And she didn't have the hundred grams of bread to

pay the boys with for burying Bertha." With despair and fury I thought

that I should have flown to Leningrad in January, I should have

insisted, demanded that they discharge me from hospital. Who knows-I

might have come out then in better shape than I was now, and could

have found and saved my Katya.

But it was too late in the day now to have regrets about things that

could no longer be mended. "I'm no worse off than anybody else," Katya

had written from Leningrad. Only now did I realise what those simple

words meant.

The old woman, who had probably been through much more than I

had, kept trying to comfort me. I asked her for some boiling water and

treated her to some pork fat and onions-things that were still scarce in

Leningrad.

From then on a chill lodged in my heart. No matter what I was

thinking or doing, always the question "Katya?" obtruded itself.

While at M-v I had conned over the telephone numbers of nearly all

my Leningrad acquaintances. But none of those I rang up from the clinic

answered the call. The ringing seemed to be lost in the mysterious

emptiness of Leningrad. I tried the last number in my memorised list,

the only one I was not sure of. I held the receiver to my ear for a long

time, listening to some far-off rustling sounds, and behind them, still

fainter impatient voices.

"Hullo," suddenly came a deep masculine voice.

297

"Can I speak to-"

I gave the name.

"Speaking."

"This is Air Pilot Grigoriev."

Silence.

"Not Alexander Grigoriev, surely?"

"Yes."

"Would you believe it! My dear Alexander Ivanovich, I've been

racking my brains these three days where to look for you."

About six years ago, when the Tatarinov search expedition was

decided upon and I was engaged in organising it, Professor V. had

introduced to me a naval man, a hydrographer, who taught at the

Frunze School. We had spent only one evening together in Leningrad,

but I was often to recall that man, who had painted for me with such

remarkable clarity a picture of the future world war.

He had come late. Katya was asleep, curled up in an armchair. I

wanted to wake her, but he would not let me, and we had a drink with

some olives for a snack; Katya always had a stock of olives.

He was deeply interested in the North. He was sure that the North,

with its inexhaustible resources of strategic raw materials, would be

called upon to play a very important part in the coming war. He

regarded the Northern Sea Route as a naval highway and declared that

the Russo-Japanese campaign had gone wrong because of the failure to

grasp this idea, which had been put forward by Mendeleyev. He had

urged that naval bases should be set up along all convoy routes.

I remember that, at the time, this idea struck me as extremely

sensible. I appreciated it anew on June 14, 1942, a few days before I flew

to Leningrad, when, sitting on the bank of the Kama, I heard the far-off

voice of the radio announcer reading out the text of the treaty between

Great Britain and the Soviet Union. It was not difficult to guess what the

lines of communication mentioned in this treaty were, and my thoughts

went back to that "nocturnal visitor", as Katya had later called the

hydrographer.

I had run into him several times between 1936 and 1940 and read his

articles and his book Soviet Arctic Seas, which became famous and was

translated into all European languages. I followed his career with

interest, as he, I believe, followed mine. I knew that he had left the

Frunze School and was in command of a hydrographic vessel and then

served at the Hydrographical Department of the People's Commissariat

of the Navy. Shortly before the war he took his doctor's degree; I

remember reading the announcement about his thesis in a Moscow

evening paper. I shall call him R.

It was a rare occasion—"it happens once in a thousand years", as R.

put it-my finding him at home. The flat was sealed and he had unsealed

it and come in only a couple of minutes before I phoned, and that only

because he was leaving Leningrad for long. "Where are you going?"

"A long way away. Come over, I'll tell you all about it. Where are you

staying?"

"I haven't fixed up yet."

"Very good. I'll be waiting for you."

298

He lived near Liteiny Bridge in a new block. It was a spacious flat,

rather neglected since the war, of course, but with something poetic

about it, like the home of an artist. It may have been the tastefully

fashioned dolls standing under glass covers on the piano that suggested

this idea to me, or the multitude of books on the floor and the shelves,

or perhaps the host himself, who received me without ceremony in his

shirt-sleeves, the open neck of his shirt revealing a full, hairy chest. I

had seen a portrait like that somewhere of Shevchenko. But R. was no

poet, he was a rear-admiral, as his service coat hanging on the back of a

chair testified.

He first of all asked me where I had been and what I had been doing

with myself during the year of war.

"Yes, you've had a run of bad luck," he said when I told him about my

misfortunes. "But you'll make up for it. How come you were with the

Baltic Fleet, then the Black Sea Fleet? Deserted the North, I see? I

always took you for an enthusiast of the North-for good and all."

It was too long a story to tell him how I had come to "desert" the

North. I merely said that I had left the Civil Aviation only when I had

given up hope of returning to the North.

I became lost in thought and started out of my reverie when R.

addressed me.

"You'd better lie down and get some sleep," he said. "You're tired.

We'll talk tomorrow."

Ignoring my protests, he brought in a pillow, removed the holsters

from the divan, and made me lie down. I fell asleep instantly, just as

though somebody had tiptoed up to me and thrown a thick, heavy

blanket over all that had happened that day.

It was still very early, probably round about four o'clock, when I

opened my eyes. R. was already up, curtaining off his bookshelves with

old newspapers. For some reason the thought that he was going away

that day depressed me. He sat down beside me, but did not allow me to

get up. Screwing up his quick, black eyes and rumpling his thinning

hair, he began talking.

Nowadays every schoolboy knows, if only roughly, what was

happening on the seaways from Britain and America to the Soviet Union

in the summer of 1942. But at that time, in the summer of 1942, the

things R. was telling me were news even to me, though I had never

stopped taking an interest in the North and pounced on every item that

appeared in the press concerning the operations of the Air Army of the

Northern Fleet.

Very briefly, but in far greater detail than even in special articles I was

subsequently to read, he painted for me a picture of the big war that was

being waged in the Barents Sea. I listened raptly to the story of the

daring raid by midget submarines into the Gulf of Petsamo, the enemy's

major naval base; of Safonov, who had shot down into the sea twenty-

five enemy aircraft; of the work of the airmen, who attacked transports

under cover of snow blasts-I hadn't forgotten yet what a snow blast was.

Listening to him, I experienced for the first time in my life a galling

sense of frustration. The North R. was telling me about was my North!

From him I first learned what a "convoy" was. He pointed out to me

on the map the possible "rendezvous points", that is, the secretly

arranged spots where the British and American ships were to meet, and

explained the manner in which they passed under the protection of our

Navy.

299

"This is the way they go," he said, showing me, in a general way, of

course, the route, which at that time, in 1942, was not usually talked

about. "A column of from one to two hundred ships. You can guess, of

course, at what spot they will run into difficulties?" And he pointed out

approximately where that spot was. "But never mind the western route.

We have men here with good heads on their shoulders" (he pointed out

the place). "There's another matter, no less important. These gates,

which the Germans are trying to close," he said briskly, covering the

outlet from the Barents Sea into the Kara Sea with his hand, "because

they understand perfectly well how important the X. mines are for

aircraft engine industry. And, of course, they don't like the idea of our

having so valuable a means of transit as the Northern Sea Route,

especially as they were already hoping this spring-"

He did not finish the sentence, but I understood what he meant. I

happened to have heard that the Germans had succeeded in seriously

damaging a port which was of great importance for the western route.

"You can imagine how far the war has spread," R. went on, "if not so

long ago a German submarine fired on our aircraft off Novaya Zemlya.

But that's not the whole story. Today I'm flying to Moscow in a plane

which the Military Council of the Northern Fleet has sent for me. The

pilot. Major Katyakin, tells me he has been hunting a German surface

raider for two weeks—and where would you think? In the area—" He

named a remote area. "In short, the war is already being fought in places

where only hydrographers and polar bears used to roam. This is where

they remembered me," R. said, laughing. "Not only remembered me, but

also-" here his face assumed a kindly, jovial expression-"also given me a

most interesting and important job. .1 can't tell you anything about it, of

course, it's a military secret. But I can tell you that you were the first

person I thought of. Your phoning me up the way you did was a miracle.

Alexander Ivanovich," he wound up gravely, even solemnly, "I propose

that you fly with me to the North."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

DECISION

He went away, and I was left all alone in the empty abandoned flat. All

four spacious rooms were at my disposal, and I could wander about

them, thinking as much as I liked. R. would be coming back at three in

the afternoon when I was to tell him one short word: "Yes". Or another

still shorter: "No".

Between these two words stretched a long, hard road, and I plodded

along it, resting and plodding along again, and there was no end to it.

The Germans were shelling the district. The first ranging-in shrapnel

shell had burst long since, and the cloud of smoke, dispersing slowly,

still hung over Liteiny Bridge. The explosions, starting at a distance,

began to draw nearer, advancing from right to left, striding savagely

between the blocks straight towards this house, towards the empty

rooms where I was wandering between "yes" and "no", which were so

infinitely far apart.

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It was probably the nursery. A black, one-eyed teddy bear sat on top

of the cupboard with dropping head; in a corner lay a scooter, and on a

low round table stood various collections and games, and I pictured to

myself a small version of R., just as energetic and full of the same

controlled ardour as the senior, with the same droll Cossack's forelock

and round face. In this room I rested from my "yes" and "no". Here I

could even think of the home which Katya and I had once planned to set

up in Leningrad. For where there is a home there are children.

The shell bursts drew nearer and nearer. One exploded quite close,

flinging open the doors and bringing a cheery tinkle of splintered glass.

In the ensuing silence footsteps echoed hollowly in the street. I looked

out of the window and saw two boys, with what looked to me like

ghastly faces, running towards the house. When they drew level one of

the boys touched the other on the back and with a loud laugh, turned

and ran back again. They were playing tag.

R. would be coming back at three and I would say to him: "Yes".

It would be as though those six months of frustrating idleness had

never been. I would go to the North. The farther away from me it had

been all those years, the closer and more alluring it had grown. Had I

not fought as best I could in the West and the South? But up there, in

the North-that was where I had to be, defending a land which I knew

and loved.

Then suddenly I stopped still and said to myself: "Katya."

To go away and leave her? To go far away, for a long time? To make

no attempt to find Pyotr, whose field post number may simply have

been changed? To undertake no other search here, in Leningrad and at

the Leningrad front? Wherever Katya might have been evacuated she

was sure to try and join Nina Kapitonovna and little Pyotr. Was I to lose

this trail I had picked up, faint though it was, but which might lead me

to where she was, numb with grief because that damned newspaper

report could not but have reached her?

My decision was made. I would stay in Leningrad for a few more days.

I would find Katya, then go to the North.

R. returned at three o'clock. I told him of my decision. He heard me

out and said that in my place he would have done the same. "But we

must go to Moscow together. I'll arrange for you to be put on strength at

Headquarters, and then Slepushkin will give you a fortnight's leave for

family considerations. A wife after all. And what a wife! I remember

Ekaterina Ivanovna very well. A sensible girl, kind-hearted, and talk

about charming-one in a thousand!"

I shall not describe how, the next day, I went back to the Petrogradskaya

and made another round of all the tenants of house No. 79; how, at the

Academy of Arts, I tried to find out where Pyotr was, only to learn that

he had been wounded and had been in the clearing hospital on

Vasilyevsky Island. The sculptor Kostochkin had visited him, but that

sculptor had died of starvation and Pyotr, rumour had it, had returned

to the front. Or how I discovered why my letters had never reached the

children's camp of the Artists' Union, which had been re-evacuated to a

place near Novosibirsk; or how Doctor Ovanesyan went with me to the

District Soviet and shouted at an indifferent fat man who declined to

make any inquiries about Katya.

Evacuee trains in January had been routed to Yaroslavl, where special

hospitals had been set up for Leningraders. This was the only solid fact I

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had been able to establish, and it was the opinion of all the Leningraders

I met that I must look for Katya in Yaroslavl.

Two circumstances combined to convince me that this was so. For one

thing, the children's camp of the Artists' Union before its re-evacuation

had been in the Yaroslavl region, in a village called Gniloi Yar. Secondly,

Lukeria Ilyinichna, as the typist of the Stomatology Clinic was called,

suddenly remembered that Doctor Trofimova had sent Katya to

Yaroslavl.

"My God!" she said with vexation. "Fancy getting such a thing

muddled up! My memory's gone weak, you know, it's because I don't

have any sugar. I've remembered it though, sugar or no sugar. And I tell

you-Yaroslavl's the place where you'll find her."

R.'s plane was leaving at midnight. I rang him up and arrived ten

minutes before the take-off.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

FRIENDS WHO WERE NOT AT HOME

If my movements on that day were to be traced on the map of

Moscow, one would think I had deliberately gone out of my way to avoid

meeting any of those I was so keen on seeing. "Keen" is the word,

though I wanted to see different people for quite different reasons. Both

lots were in Moscow. Another glance at the map, perhaps, would reveal

that their route that day ran alongside my own. Or crossed it two

minutes later. Or ran parallel with mine along the next street, behind a

narrow line of buildings. Be that as it may, my luck was out, and with

one exception, I found no one at home and went straight from the

airfield to Vorotnikovsky Street where Korablev lived, seeing that my

luggage consisted of one small suitcase.

The tumbledown wooden annexe, lost amid the tall built-up houses,

looked like a summer cottage, what with its shutters and its veranda.

Korablev no longer had held the ground floor to himself, and though

Moscow had struck me, at first sight as being oddly empty, here, in this

little house, I found a head sticking out of nearly every window. Women

were sitting round the doorsteps, knitting, and the moment I appeared I

found at least a dozen pairs of eyes scrutinising me with curiosity. I

might have been back at Ensk, in our old courtyard. ' "Who d'you want?"

"Korablev."

"Ah, Ivan Pavlovich? Second door on the left down the corridor." "I

know that," I said, mounting the steps. "Is he at home?" "Knock. I think

he is."

The last time I saw Korablev was before the war. Katya and I had

dropped in on the old man without warning, bringing a cake and a

bottle of French wine. He was a long time shaving and talking to us from

the next room, while we looked at some old school photographs.

At last he had come out, wearing a new suit with a starched collar, his

moustache twisted up with a youthful swagger. That was how I saw him

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as I walked down the dark corridor, just as he had been on that

wonderful, memorable evening. In a moment he would come out and

recognise me at once. "Is that you, Sanya?"

But I knocked two or three times at the familiar felt-padded door

without getting an answer. Korablev was not at home.

"Dear Ivan Pavlovich," I wrote, moving aside because the women were

watching me and I did not want them to see how agitated I was. "I don't

know whether I'll have time to call again. I'm leaving for Yaroslavl

today, where Katya was evacuated in January. I may travel still farther

from there until I have found her. I can't in this note explain what

happened to me and how we lost each other. Should you (or Valya,

whom I hope to see today) happen to have heard anything of her, please

let me know immediately at the following address: c/o Rear-Admiral R.,

Political Department, Polarnoye, the Arctic. Dear Ivan Pavlovich, in case

you have read about my death, here I am writing to you, your Sanya."

A dozen hands reached out simultaneously for my letter. I took the

Metro, which looked more beautiful and imposing than ever before, to

the Palace of Soviets station. The war might have ended long ago, the

way the old men sat about on Gogol Boulevard, leaning on their gnarled

old sticks. Children were playing. Preoccupied with my own thoughts

and cares, it suddenly dawned on me-why, this is Moscow, Moscow!

The brass plate on Valya's door read: "Professor Valentin Zhukov".

Oho! A professor! I rang, knocked, then kicked the door.

There was nothing surprising in the fact that in the summer of 1942,

when nearly all Moscow's inhabitants spent most of their lives ''а! work,

I should not find Professor Zhukov at home during working hours. But

the fact that Valya, my old pal Valya, was poking around somewhere

when I needed him so badly, made me wild. I kicked the door again, and

suddenly it yielded, as though alive, with a plaintive squeak. I pulled the

handle, and the door opened.

The flat was empty, of course, and the faint hope that Valya might be

asleep was dashed at once. I went into the "all-purpose kitchen", which

had once served as both dining-room and nursery. Strange to say, the

place had been tidied up. The table was covered with a cloth, and white

paper with scalloped edges lay on the shelves. It looked as if a woman's

hand had been over those clean-swept walls, over those windows with

the fresh lilies-of-the-valley on the sills. Valya buying flowers? One

would have to be a great artist to imagine such a scene. In another room

a narrow iron cot stood against the wall and over the foot of it lay a

neatly folded dress. Katya had once had a dress like that-white polka

dots on a blue ground. What could a woman be doing in Valya's

bachelor flat? Kiren and the children had gone away at the beginning of

the war-I learnt that from Katya's first letters. "I wonder who's hooked

you, old chap?" I recalled a letter of Katya's in which she poked fun at

Kiren for being jealous of her husband, engrossed though he was in the

study of cross-bred silver foxes. The cause of her jealousy was a "Zhenka

Kolpakchi, who has eyes of different colour". It looked as if that Zhenka

hadn't lost much time! Anyhow, I had not found Valya in.

"Dear old Valya," I wrote, "on my way to Yaroslavl, where I hope to

find Katya or at least find out where she is, I dropped in on you but

unfortunately did not find you in. I've had no news of Katya for the last

six months. She corresponded with Kiren when she was in Leningrad, so

maybe Kiren or you know something about her? I was wounded and was

in hospital at M—v. I wrote to you but got no reply. I've been through a

303

lot, but how much easier it would have been if Katya and I had met, or

at least if each of us knew that the other was alive. Write to me, care of

Rear-Admiral R., Northern Fleet, Political Department, Polarnoye. This

is a tentative address as I have no other yet. Keep well, dear friend. The

door was open. You'll have to break it down now—at least that's better

than leaving the flat open. I'll drop in again before I leave, if I can

manage it."

I put this note on the kitchen table. Then I placed the door-hook in

position so that it would drop into the eye when I shut the door, and I

slammed the door. The hook fell straight into the eye.

I had one more important errand in that neighbourhood. Not far from

Valya there lived a man whom I had to see, whether he relished the

prospect of such a visit or not. This visit of mine was long overdue!

During my sleepless nights in hospital, tossing about in delirium, I

had thought about this encounter. I needed it so much that I felt I had

to keep alive until I had seen him!

I had often pictured to myself this meeting. I wanted to appear before

him at some relaxed moment in his life, at the theatre, say, when the

thought of me would be farthest from his mind. Or somewhere in a

hotel, say, when I would lock the door and eye him with a smile.

Sometimes, in the gloom of pre-dawn, I would see him on the bed next

to mine, sitting his legs tucked under him and a look of strange

indifference in his flat, half-closed eyes.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE. KATYA'S PORTRAIT

One day, as we were passing through Dogs' Place, Katya had

remarked: "Romashov lives here." She had pointed to a grey-green

building, which looked no different from its neighbours on either side.

Yet both then and now I thought there was something indefinably mean

about those peeling walls.

There was no list of tenants at the entrance, as before the war, and I

had to go to the house-manager's office to find out the number of the

flat.

And this is what took place in the office: the registration clerk, a dour,

prim lady in pince-nez, started and looked at me with round eyes when I

asked for Romashov. In a cubbyhole partitioned off with boards, men

wearing aprons-evidently yardkeepers-sat and stood about. There was a

slight stir among them too.

"Why don't you phone him," the clerk suggested. "His phone was

connected yesterday."

"No, I'd rather call without phoning," I said, smiling. "A sort of

surprise. You see, I'm an old friend of his whom he thinks dead."

Though this was a quite ordinary conversation, the clerk reacted with

an oddly forced smile, and from the adjoining room there slowly

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emerged a very cool and deliberate young man in a smart cap, who gave

me a close look.

I had to go back into the street to get to the entrance, and at the street

door I hesitated for a moment. I had no gun, and was thinking whether I

ought not have a word with the militiaman standing on the corner. I

dismissed the idea, however. "He won't get away," I thought.

I never for a moment doubted that he was in Moscow, probably not in

the army. Even if he was in the army he would still be living in his flat.

Or in a summer cottage. In the mornings he would walk about in his

pyjamas. I could see him as large as life in Ms pyjamas, after a bath,

with the yellow tufts of wet hair sticking up on his head. It was a vision

that set purple circles spinning before my eyes. I had to compose myself,

which meant thinking of something else. I recalled that at five o'clock R.

would be waiting for me at the Hydrographical Department.

"Who's there?"

"May I speak to Romashov?"

"Call back in an hour."

"Couldn't I wait for him inside," I said very politely. "I shan't be able

to call again, unfortunately. I'm afraid he'll be disappointed at not

seeing me."

The door-chain clinked. It was not slipped off, though. On the

contrary, it was being fastened, so that the person inside could have a

peep at me through the slit. Then with another clink it was taken off. An

old man in an unbuttoned shirt and baggy trousers held up by braces let

me into the hallway. He stared at me suspiciously. There was something

aristocratically haughty and at the same time pitiful about that

weazened, hook-nosed face. A yellow-grey tuft of hair stuck up from his

bald forehead. The skin hung over his Adam's apple in long folds, like

stalactites.

"Von Vyshimirsky?" I said, wonderingly. He started. "I mean

Vyshimirsky without the 'von'-you're Nikolai Ivanovich Vyshimirsky,

aren't you?"

"What?"

"My dear Nikolai Ivanovich, don't you remember me?" I proceeded

cheerfully. "I came to see you once."

He started breathing hard.

"I've had lots of people coming to see me, thousands," he answered

sullenly. "As many as forty used to sit down at my table."

"You were working at the Moscow Drama Theatre and used to wear a

jacket with brass buttons. My friend Grisha Faber played the red-haired

doctor, and Korablev introduced us in Grisha's dressing-room."

I wonder why I felt so light-hearted? Here I was standing in

Romashov's flat as though I were the master there. He would be here

within an hour. I took a deep breath with half-open mouth. What would

I do to him?

"I don't know! What name did you say?"

"Captain Grigoriev at your service. So you are living here now? In

Romashov's Hat?"

Vyshimirsky glanced at me suspiciously.

"I live where I'm registered," he said. "Not here. And the house-

manager knows I live there, and not here."

"I see."

305

I took out my cigarette-case, flipped open the lid and offered him a

cigarette. He took one. The door leading into the next room was open.

The place was clean and tidy, all light-grey and dark-grey-walls and

furniture. A round table stood before a divan. And over the divan

somebody's portrait, a large one in a smooth light-grey frame.

"Everything to match," I thought.

"You mean Ivan Pavlovich, the teacher?" Vyshimirsky suddenly

asked.

"Yes."

"Yes, of course, Korablev. A fine man. Valya was a pupil of his. Nyuta

wasn't, she graduated from the Brzhozovskaya Girls' School. But Valya

was a pupil of his. To be sure! He was a help, yes, he was..." And the

glimmerings of a kindly feeling flitted across his bewhiskered old face.

Then, pretending to recollect himself, the old man invited me into the

rooms-we had been standing all this time in the hallway-and even asked

me whether I had just arrived in town.

"If you have," he said, "there's an army canteen where you can get

quite a decent meal with bread for next to nothing on your travel

warrant."

But I wasn't listening to his chatter. I had stopped in the doorway,

astounded. That portrait over the divan in the light-grey frame was of

Katya-a splendid portrait, which I had never seen before. It was a full-

length photograph of Katya in the squirrel coat, which looked so nice on

her and which she had made just before the war. I remember how hard

she had been trying to get it done by some famous furrier named Manet,

and was cross with me because I couldn't understand that the cap and

the muff had to be made of fur too. What could this mean, my God?

At least a dozen thoughts jostled in my mind, one of them so absurd

that the memory of it today makes me feel ashamed. I imagined almost

everything except the truth, a truth which proved to be even more

absurd than that absurd idea!

"I must say I never expected to meet you here, Nikolai Ivanovich," I

said when the old man had told me how, after leaving the theatre, he

had been employed at a mental hospital as a cloak-room attendant, and

had been dismissed because the inmates had "unlawfully notified the

matron that I stole soup and ate it at night".

"Are you working for Romashov? Or just keeping up the

acquaintance?"

"Yes, keeping up the acquaintance. He suggested that I help him out

in his business, and I agreed. I was employed as secretary to the

Metropolitan Isidore, and I don't conceal the fact; on the contrary, I

state the fact in my personnel questionnaires. It was a big job, an

enormous task. Our daily mail alone was over fifteen hundred letters.

The same here. But here I work as a favour. I get a worker's ration,

because Romashov has fixed me up at his institution. And the

institution knows I am working here."

"Isn't Romashov in the army now? When we last met he was in army

uniform."

"No, he's not in the army. Reserved for the duration. Indispensable or

something."

"What sort of mail are you getting?"

"Oh, business letters, very important," Vyshimirsky said. "Extremely

important. We have an assignment. At the present moment we are

306

under instructions to find a certain woman, a lady. But I suspect it's not

an assignment, but a private affair. A love affair, so to speak."

"What woman is it?"

"The daughter of an historic personage, a man I knew very well,"

Vyshimirsky said proudly. "You may have heard of him perhaps—

Tatarinov? We are searching for his daughter. We'd have found her long

ago, but it's such a frightful muddle. She's married and has a double

name."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

"YOU WON'T KILL ME"

It was as though life had suddenly pulled up sharply, jolting my head

foremost into an imaginary wall. That was how I felt as I stared at the

old man, just an ordinary old man, standing before me in an ordinary

room and telling me that Romashov was looking for Katya, that is, doing

the same thing I was doing.

Our conversation, however, proceeded as though nothing had

happened. From Katya the old man switched over to some member of

T.U. committee who had had no right to call him "a hangover from the

old regime", because he, Vyshimirsky, had a work record ~of fifty years,

then he wandered off into reminiscences, relating how in the old days,

back in 1908, when he came out of the theatre the commissionaire

would cry out: "Vyshimirsky's carriage! "-and the carriage would roll up.

He wore a top hat and cloak in those days, but now people did not wear

such things, which was "a great pity, because it was elegant".

"When did he die?" he suddenly asked.

"Who?"

"Korablev."

"Who said he died? He's alive and well," I said in a jocular tone,

though I was quivering in all my being, thinking: "You'll know