Two Captains

everything in a minute, but tread carefully."

"So it's a private affair you say? Concerning a lady?"

"Yes, private. But very serious, very. Captain Tatarinov is an historical

personage. Mr Romashov was in Leningrad. He was there during the

siege and starved so bad that he ate paste off the wallpaper. He tore

down old wallpaper, and boiled and ate it. Afterwards he went on a meat

foraging assignment, and when he came back she was no longer there.

She'd been moved out."

"Where to?"

"That's just the question," Vyshimirsky said. "You know what that

evacuation was like? Go and find anybody! It's not as if she'd been

moved out by special train. You could trace it then. Take the Gold

Storage Plant, for instance. Where did its train go? To Siberia? Then

she'd be in Siberia. But she was evacuated by aeroplane."

307

"By aeroplane?"

"Yes, exactly. As a privileged person, I suppose. And now, who knows

where she is? All we know is that the plane flew via Khvoinaya that is,

the very place where Mr Romashov was getting meat."

I must have sensed instinctively when it was necessary to hold my

tongue and when to put in two or three words. Everything was as it

should be. Here was an army man, seemingly just out of hospital, thin

and peaky, who had called on a friend with whom he had parted at the

front, asking how his friend was getting on, what he was doing. "You'll

know everything in a minute, step warily."

"Well? And did you find her?"

"Not yet. But we will," said Vyshimirsky, "following my plan. I wrote

to Buguruslan and to the Central Inquiry Bureau, but that was useless.

They sent us a dozen Tatarinovs and a hundred Grigorievs, and we don't

know what name we have to give as her first. So then I wrote personally

to the chairmen of the executive committees of all the regional cities. It

was a big job, a big assignment. But Captain Tatarinov was a friend of

mine and for his daughter's sake I spent three months writing and

sending out a stereotype inquiry—will you please give necessary

instructions—evacuation point—historical personality—awaiting your

reply. And we received it."

There was a sharp ring at the door. "That's him," Vyshimirsky said.

A cowed look came into his face. The grey tuft of hair on top of his

head started shaking and his moustache drooped. He went out into the

hallway, while I took up a position against the wall beside the door, so

that Romashov should not catch sight of me at once on coming in. He

might jump out onto the landing, because Vyshimirsky said to him in

the hallway: "Somebody to see you."

"Who?" he asked quickly.

"A man by the name of Grigoriev," the old man said.

He did not jump out, though he could have done-I bided my time. He

stood in the dark corner between the wardrobe and the wall and he gave

a scream when he saw me. Then he raised doubled fists and pressed

them to his face, childlike. There was a key in the door. I turned it, took

it out and slipped it into my pocket. Vyshimirsky was standing between

us. I picked him up and set him aside like a dummy. Then, for some

reason, I pushed him and he toppled mechanically into an armchair.

"Well, let's go and have a chat," I said to Romashov.

He was silent. He had a cap in his hand, and he stuffed it into his

mouth and clamped his teeth down on it.

"Well!" I said again.

He shook his head violently.

"You're not going?"

"No!" he screamed.

The stark terror of despair that had seized him at the sight of me

suddenly fell away from him. I wrenched his arm and he straightened

up. When we entered the room only one eye of his still had a slight

squint to it, but a complete change had come over his face, which was

now composed and blank of expression.

"I'm alive as you see," I said quietly.

"So I see."

308

I could now have a good look at him. He was wearing a light grey suit

with a yellow ribbon on the lapel-the insignia of a seriously wounded

man, whereas he was only slightly shell-shocked. He had put on weight,

and but for Ms protruding red ears, he had never looked such a

presentable gentleman.

"The pistol."

I thought he would start lying about having handed it in when he was

demobbed. But the pistol, with my name engraved on it, was a gift from

my regimental commander for bombing the bridge over the Narova. If

Romashov had handed it in he would have given himself away. That was

why, without saying a word, he now pulled open a drawer of his desk

and got it out. The gun was not loaded.

"The papers!"

He was silent.

"Well!"

"They got soaked and were ruined," he said hastily. "A bomb shelter in

Leningrad was flooded. I was unconscious. Only C.'s photograph was

intact. I gave it to Katya. I saved her."

"Really?"

"Yes, I saved her. That's why I'm not afraid. You won't kill me." "Won't

I? Tell me everything, you skunk," I said seizing him by the collar, then

letting him go at once when I felt the yielding softness of his throat.

"I gave her everything when she was starving. Ah, you don't believe

me!" he cried in despair, sidling up to me to peer into my eyes. "But you

will when you've heard me out. You don't know anything. I hate you."

"Is that so?"

"You've taken from me everything that was good in life. I could have

made a go of it, yes I could," he said arrogantly. "I was always in luck,

because the world's full of fools. I could have made a career. But I didn't

give a damn for that!"

"I didn't give a damn for a career" was putting it pretty strong. From

what I knew of him, Romashov had always been an unprincipled

climber. He had succeeded admirably, considering that he had always

been such a frightful dullard at school.

"So listen," Romashov said, growing still paler, if that were possible.

"You'll believe me because I'm going to tell you everything. The

Tatarinov search expedition-it was me who got it cancelled! At first I

helped Katya because I was sure you were going alone. But she decided

to .go with you, so I got the expedition cancelled. I sent in a letter,

making a rather risky statement—it would have been all up with me if I

hadn't been able to prove it. But I pulled it

off."

Some sheets of writing paper lay in a grey leather case bearing the

initials "M.R." in gold. I drew out one sheet, and Romashov froze, Ms

staring eyes directed to some spot above my head. It looked as if he was

trying to peer ahead into his own future, to see what threat to himself

that simple action of mine contained.

"Yes, write it down," he said, "this man who had the expedition

stopped was eventually exiled and is dead. But write it down if it still

matters to you."

"It doesn't mean anything to me," I answered coolly.

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"I wrote that the idea of finding Captain Tatarinov, who had

disappeared twenty years ago, was a mania with you, and that you

always were unbalanced ever since your schooldays. But behind it all

was an ulterior motive. You had married Captain Tatarinov's daughter

and were raising all this fuss around his name in order to further your

own career. I did not write this by myself."

"Trust you!"

"D'you remember that article 'In Defence of a Scientist'? Nikolai

Antonich wrote that, and we referred to it in the letter."

"You mean in the denunciation."

I was now taking all this down as fast as I could.

"Yes, in the denunciation. And we had it all corroborated. I tricked

Nina Kapitonovna into signing one paper, and my God, what a job it was

to prevent them calling her out! You have no idea what harm this caused

you! In the Civil Air Fleet, and I suppose also afterwards, when you were

already in the army."

How can I convey the feeling with which I heard out this confession? I

couldn't make out why he was coming clean. The simple calculation was

soon to become clear to me though. It was like a light thrown in

retrospect upon all the inexplicable things that had been happening to

me and that I couldn't help thinking of wherever I was.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE SHADOW

"It all began a long time ago, when I was still at school," Romashov

went on. "I had to sit up all night to be able to answer my lesson as well

as you did. I tried not to think about money because I saw that money

didn't mean anything to you. It was my ambition to become like you, to

become you, and I fretted because you were always and in everything

the better man."

With trembling fingers he drew a cigarette out of a glass box lying on the

desk and looked round for a light. I struck my lighter. He lit up, inhaled

and threw the cigarette away.

"Sometimes I used to meet you in the street, and I'd hide myself in

doorways and then follow you like a shadow. I sat behind you in the

theatre, and used to think, my God, in what way am I different from

him? But I knew that what I saw on the stage was different, because I

looked at everything with different eyes than yours. No, Katya was not

the only bone of contention between us. Everything that I ever felt was

always at war with what you felt. That's why I know everything about

you. I know that you were working in agricultural aviation on the Volga,

then in the Far East. You asked to be sent to the North again, but they

refused you. So then you went to Spain-my God, it was as though

everything I had striven for all those years was suddenly working out of

itself. But you came back," Romashov shouted with loathing, "and from

then on everything went well with you. You went to Ensk with Katya-

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you see, I know everything, even things you have long forgotten. You

could forget because you were happy, but I couldn't, because I was

unhappy." He drew a shuddering breath and closed his eyes. Then he

opened them again, and something very keen and sober, a world away

from these passionate confessions, flickered in his quick glance. I

listened to him in silence.

"Yes, I wanted to part you, because this love had given you such

marvellous happiness all your life. I was sick with envy, thinking that

you loved simply out of love, whereas my love had the extra spur in that

I wanted to take her away from you. You may think it funny, my talking

to you about love. But the contest is over, I have lost, and what is this

humiliation to me now compared with the fact that you are alive and

that fate had played a trick on me again?"

The telephone rang in the hall. Vyshimirsky answered it. "Yes, he's in.

Who's that speaking?"

He did not call Romashov, however.

"Then the war broke out. I joined up. I didn't have to, I was reserved.

If I was killed, all the better! But secretly I was hoping that you'd be

killed. Near Vinnitsa I was lying in a barn when an airman came in and

stopped in the doorway, reading a newspaper. 'What a fine bunch o'

lads!' he said. 'A pity, they've gone up in smoke.' 'Who?' 'Captain

Grigoriev and his crew.' I read that paragraph a thousand times. I learnt

it by heart. A few days later I met you in the hospital train."

It was very odd, the way he was seeking my sympathy, as it were, for

the fact that, contrary to his hopes, I was still alive. He was so carried

away, however, that he did not see the absurdity of his attitude.

"You know the rest. Even in the train I was struck by the fact that you

somehow didn't seem to be thinking about Katya. I saw that you were

tormented by all the filth and confusion, but there again you were

yourself, you would have given your life to prevent that retreat. For me

it merely meant that you had shown yourself again to be the better

man."

He fell silent. There might never have been that aspen wood, the

heaps of wet leaves and the woodstack which prevented me from

swinging my arm back, or myself lying on the ground, propped up on

my hands, trying not to shout to him: "Come back, Romashov!"— as he

sat there before me, a dignified gentleman in a light grey suit. The desire

to strike him with my pistol was so great that my arms even began to

ache.

"Yes, a profound thought," I said. "Incidentally, will you please sign

this paper."

While he was confessing I had been writing a "deposition", that is, a

brief history of how the search-party had been torpedoed. It was torture

for me, as I am a poor hand at composing official papers. But I think I

made a good showing with the "Deposition of M.V. Romashov", perhaps

because it contained such phrases as: "Having basely deceived the

leadership of the Northern Sea Route Administration" etc.

Romashov quickly glanced through the paper.

"All right," he muttered, "but first I must explain to you—"

"First, sign, you'll do your explaining afterwards."

"But you don't know-"

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"Sign, you rat!" I said in such a voice that he recoiled in terror, and his

teeth began to chatter in a sort of slow, reluctant manner.

He signed and flung the pen down with a savage gesture.

"You ought to be grateful to me, but instead you intend to take

advantage of my frankness. Ah well!"

"Yes, I do!"

He looked at me. How deeply at that moment he must have regretted

that he had not finished me off in the aspen wood!

"I returned to Moscow," he continued, "and immediately set about

getting a transfer to Leningrad. I travelled by way of Lake Ladoga. The

Germans were sinking our ships, but I made it, and just in time, thank

God," he added hastily. "In another day, at most two days, I would have

had to arrange her funeral."

This may have been the truth. When Vyshimirsky was telling me

about Romashov having been in Leningrad, I recollected the story of the

ginger major which the yardkeeper and her children had told me. "She

dig out ginger man, he have bread. Big sack, carry himself, not let me."

It was not this that worried me. Romashov might have talked Katya into

believing that I had been killed-in battle, of course, and not in the aspen

wood.

"And there I was in Leningrad. You can't imagine what it was. I got a

bread ration of three hundred grams, and brought half of it to Katya. At

the end of December I managed to get some glucose, and I bit all my

fingers while I was taking it to Katya. I dropped beside her bed, and she

said: 'Misha!' But I didn't have the strength to get up. I saved her," he

repeated gloomily, as though the fearful thought that I might not believe

him had struck him again. "And if I didn't die myself it was only because

I knew that she and you needed me." "I too?" "Yes, you too.

Skovorodnikov had written to her that you'd been killed. She was half-

dead with grief when I arrived. You should have seen what happened to

her when I told her I had seen you! I realised at that moment how

pitiful!-Romashov brought this out in such a full, loud voice that there

even came a thud from the hallway, as if Vyshimirsky had fallen off his

chair-"how pitiful I was in the face of this love. At that moment I bitterly

regretted having wanted to kill you. It was a false step. Your death

would not have brought me happiness."

"Is that all?"

"Yes, that's all. In January they sent me to Khvoinaya. I was away a

fortnight. I brought meat, but the flat was already empty. Varya

Trofimova—I expect you know her—had sent Katya away by plane."

"Where to?"

"To Vologda—I found that out definitely. And from there to

Yaroslavl." "Who did you make inquiries of at Yaroslavl?" "The

evacuation centre. I know the man in charge." "Did you get a reply?"

"Yes. But it was only to say that she had passed through the evacuation

centre and had been sent to a hospital for Leningraders."

"Show me."

He found the letter in his desk and handed it to me. "Vspolye Station," I

read. "In reply to your inquiry..."

"Why Vspolye?"

"The evacuation centre is there. It's two kilometres outside Yaroslavl."

"Is that all now?" "Yes."

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"Now listen to me, then," I said, fighting for self-control. "I can't

forgive, or not forgive you, whatever you may have done for Katya. After

what you did for me this is no longer a personal quarrel between us. You

weren't quarrelling with me when you wanted to finish me off and left

me, a badly wounded man, in the wood to die. You were committing a

military offence, a dastardly crime for which you will be tried as a

scoundrel who violated his oath."

I looked him squarely in the eye and was amazed. He was not

listening to me. Somebody was coming up the stairs, two or three people

judging by the footfalls which echoed hollowly on the staircase.

Romashov looked about him uneasily and stood up. There came a knock

at the door, then a ring.

"Shall I open?" Vyshimirsky asked from behind the partition.

"No!" Romashov shouted. "Ask who it is," he added quietly, as though

collecting himself, and walked across the room with a light, almost

dancing tread.

"Who's there?"

"It's from the house management, open the door."

Romashov gave a sharply indrawn breath.

"Tell them I'm not at home."

"I didn't know. Somebody phoned and I said you were at home."

"At home, of course," I said loudly.

Romashov threw himself upon me and seized my arms. I pushed him

away. He squealed, then followed me out into the hallway and took up

the same position as before, between the wall and the

wardrobe.

"Just a minute," I said. "I'll open the door."

Two men came in—an elderly one, who was evidently the house

manager, judging by the dour, businesslike expression of his face, and

that same young man with the cool manner and the smart cap whom I

had seen in the house manager's office. The young man first looked at

me, then, unhurriedly, at Romashov.

"Citizen Romashov?"

"Yes." Vyshimirsky's teeth chattered so loudly that everyone looked

round at him. "Weapons?" "I have none," Romashov answered, almost

unruffled. Only a

vein throbbed in his otherwise impassive face.

"Well, get your things together. Just a change of underwear.

Accompany the prisoner, will you," he said to the house manager.

"Your documents, Captain."

"It's all nonsense, Nikolai Ivanovich!" Romashov was saying in a loud

voice in the next room, where he was packing his knapsack. "I'll be back

in a few days. It's that same stupid old business about the offal.

Remember me telling you about it—the offal from Khvoinaya?" '

Vyshimirsky's teeth chattered again. It was obvious that he had never

heard about that offal before.

"Sanya, I hope you find her in Yaroslavl," Romashov said louder.

"Tell her-"

Standing in the hall, I saw him drop the knapsack and stand for a while

with closed eyes.

"Never mind," he muttered.

313

"Excuse me, may I ask you for a glass of water," the man in the cap said

to Vyshimirsky.

Vyshimirsky gave it to him. Now we all stood in the hall—Romashov

with his knapsack on his back, the house manager, who had not said a

word throughout, and a bewildered Vyshimirsky with the

empty glass in his hand. For a minute or so all were silent. Then the

young man pushed open the door.

"Goodbye, excuse me for disturbing you." And with a polite gesture he

motioned Romashov forward.

Probably, if I had the time, I would have tried to discover some deep

meaning in the fact that fate, working through a member of the Moscow

C.I.D., has so abruptly interrupted my conversation with Romashov. But

the Yaroslavl train was leaving at 8.20 and in the time left to me I had

to:

(a) present myself to Slepushkin and complete all the personnel

formalities besides, and that might take a good hour and a half;

(b) drop in at the Rewards Department—while still at M—v I had

received notice that the award of my second Order of the Red Banner

had been endorsed and I could receive the document at the People's

Commissariat;

(c) get something to eat on the journey—nearly everything I had

brought with me from M-v I had left with a fellow-airman of the Baltic

Fleet in Leningrad;

(d) book my ticket, but this did not worry me much, as I would have

gone without one.

What's more, I had to write to the military prosecutor about

Romashov.

All this appeared to me absolutely necessary, that is, my life during

the four or five hours before my train was due to leave, was to be rilled

with these particular cares. But what I should have really done was

simply to go back to Valya Zhukov, who was a few minutes' walk away,

and then—who knows?—I might have found time to give some thought

to that jumble of truth and lies with which Romashov had tried to put

himself right with me.

I even paused in Arbat Square, in two minds whether to drop in for a

minute on Valya or not. Instead, I went into a barber shop-I had to get

shaved and change my collar before reporting to the Hydrographical

Department, where one rear-admiral was going to introduce me to

another.

At five o'clock sharp I presented myself to Slepushkin, and at six.

I was enlisted in the H.D. personnel for posting to the Far North at the

disposal of R. Two or three years ago these laconic, formal words would

have conjured up a distant scene of wild rolling hills lit up by the timid

sun of a first Arctic day, but just now what with excitement and all these

cares on my mind, I mechanically thrust the document into my pocket

and walked out, thinking of my omission in not having asked R. to get in

touch with Yaroslavl by military telegraph line.

314

I shall not dwell on the hour and a half that I lost in the Rewards

Department and my other errands. But I must describe this last

memorable encounter I had in Moscow.

Very tired, I went down into the Metro at Okhotny Ryad. It was the

close of the working day, and although in the summer of 1942 there was

still plenty of room in Moscow's Metro, there was a crowd at the top of

escalator. As I peered into the faces of the Muscovites coming up on the

moving belt towards me, it suddenly occurred to me that throughout

that busy, tiring day I had seen nothing of Moscow. I noticed from afar a

heavily-built man in a thick cap and an overcoat with broad square

shoulders floating up towards me, waxing larger as he waited with an air

of lofty toleration for that noisy machine to carry him to the top.

It was Nikolai Antonich.

Had he recognised me? I doubt it. Even if he had, of what interest to

him was a little captain in a shabby tunic, with an ugly kitbag from

which a hunk of bread stuck out?

His somnolent, imperious glance slid over my face incuriously.

____________

315

PART NINE

TO FIND AND NOT TO YIELD

CHAPTER ONE

THIS IS NOT THE END YET

At the hotel in Yaroslavl there was a telegram waiting for me: "Leave

immediately for Archangel. Lopatin." It was from the Hydro-graphical

Department. But why not from Slepushkin with whom I had arranged

that I would continue my search for Katya in the event of my not finding

her in Yaroslavl? Who was this Lopatin? And why immediately? Why

Archangel? True, Archangel was still the main base for any hydrological

work along the Northern Sea Route. But hadn't R. told me that we were

to meet at Polarnoye, where his plans would have to be endorsed by the

Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Fleet?

All this was cleared up, and very soon too. But at the moment, there in

Yaroslavl, in that squalid little hotel, where I raised the blue paper blind

and read and reread the telegram, I felt nothing but vexation at this

muddle and uncertainty, which seemed in some way to threaten Katya

and deprive me of the hope of seeing her again soon.

I now had a short journey facing me—a mere thousand kilometres

northward of Katya...

This is what I learnt when, straight from the train, I presented myself

at the HQ of the White Sea Naval Flotilla: Lopatin, whom I had been

cursing all the way, was Personnel Chief of the Hydro-graphical

Department. Only now did I recollect having heard the name at the

People's Commissariat. There had been no muddle in this telegram. The

day I left Moscow events had occurred in the Far North which caused

Rear-Admiral R. to leave urgently, at night, for Archangel, and the same

night a wire had been sent to me. There was nothing now for either R. or

me to do at Polarnoye, as the officer commanding the fleet had himself

316

gone to Archangel. His meeting with R. had taken place the day before.

Evidently, the plan for that "most interesting job" had been approved,

because immediately after this meeting R. flew out to Dickson. He must

have been in a great hurry, or else decided he could manage without me,

otherwise he would have left instructions for me at Flotilla HQ.

"You're late, Captain," The Flotilla Personnel Chief said to me. He was

a genial, grey-headed man with side whiskers, who resembled an old

sailor of the period of Sevastopol's first defence. "What am I to do with

you now? We can't send you chasing after him."

He ordered me to report again in a few days time.

But how Archangel had changed, how unlike itself, while still itself, it

had become.

American sailors strolled about the streets in their little caps, bell-

bottomed trousers and woollen jumpers, fitting close round the waist

and falling loosely over the trousers. British sailors, with the initials

"H.M.S." on their caps, were somewhat more reserved in their manner,

but they, too, had that easy-going air about them which distinguished

them so strongly from our own sailors and struck me as strange. One

encountered Black sailors at every step. Chinese, washing shirts in the

Northern Dvina, right under the quay, and laying them out in the sun

among the rocks, chattered loudly in their softly guttural tongue.

And the Dvina, so spacious, so Russian, that it seemed there could be

no other river like it in the world, bore its brimming waters onward.

Motor launches, cleaving the sparkling wave as with a knife, passed in

one direction, towards the cargo port.

But it was not the foreigners who engaged my attention those days,

though I regarded them with keen but detached curiosity. This was the

city of Sedov and Pakhtusov. At the cemetery in Solombala I stood for a

long time at the grave of "Lieutenant Pyotr Kuzmich Pakhtusov,

Cavalier of the Corps of Navigators, who died at the age of 36 from the

trials and tribulations sustained on his voyages". From here Captain

Tatarinov had taken his white schooner on her long voyage. Here

Navigating Officer Klimov, the only surviving member of the expedition

to reach the mainland, had died in the town hospital. The St. Maria

expedition had an entire section devoted to it in the local museum, and

among the familiar exhibits I found something new and interesting-the

recollections of artist P., a friend of Sedov's, describing how Klimov had

been found on Cape Flora.

Early in the morning, after writing my regular letter to Yaroslavl, I

found myself at a loose end and went down to Kuznechikha. The pine

wood spread its sharp tang over the river. The drawbridge was open and

a little steamboat, weaving its way among the endless timber rafts, was

carrying people to the dock. Wherever you looked was wood, everything

was wooden-the narrow sidewalks along the fronts of the squat old

buildings dating from Nicholas I's time and now housing hospitals and

schools, the road paving, and fantastic edifices built of stacks of fresh-

sawn planks along the river banks. This was Solombala, and here I

found the house in which Captain Tatarinov had lived in the summer of

1912 when the St. Maria was being fitted out.

He had descended the steps of that little log-house and walked

through the front garden-tall, broad-shouldered, in his white naval

jacket, with moustaches turned up in the old-fashioned way. With stiffly

bent head, he had listened to some Demidov of a merchant, who

317

demanded money from him for salt junk or for the "preparation of

ready-made clothing". And out there, in the cargo port, barely visible

among the heavy merchantmen with side paddles, stood the slim and

graceful schooner-too slim and graceful to make the voyage from

Archangel to Vladivostok along the coast of Siberia.

One incident, insignificant in itself but important for me, brought

these misty scenes oddly to life.

The day before a convoy had arrived I had gone to B. Port to see the

foreign ships unload.

Oho, how big this ancient port had grown, how spacious! I must have

walked a couple of kilometres along the wharves but still saw no end to

the cranes, which were piling military and general cargoes in tall,

rectangular stacks. And extensions were still being made to the port. I

came to the end and stopped to take in the panorama of the wharves,

which curved back in a smooth arc. At that very moment the little

steamboat, puffing vigorously, steered clear of a big American vessel

with a Hurricane in the bows and approached the wharf. I glanced at her

name, Lebedin, and remember thinking that this pretty name had

become sort of traditional in northern waters. It had been the name of

the boat in which Tatarinov's friends and relations had gone out to his

schooner to give the captain a last embrace and wish him a pleasant

cruise and happy landfall. Could this be the same Lebedin, which had

been called in one article "the first Russian icebreaker"? Surely not!

I asked a sailor who was rolling a barrel of fuel down the gangway to

call his captain, and a minute later a ruddy-cheeked young fellow of

about twenty-five, clad in ordinary work blues, came up on deck, wiping

his hands, which were black with oil, on a rag.

"I have an historical question to ask you, Captain," I said. "Do you

know by any chance whether this tug of yours was called Lebedin before

the revolution as well?" "She was." "When was she launched?" "In 1907"

"And always had the same name?" "Always."

I told him what it was about, and he surveyed his craft with an air of

cool pride, as though he had never doubted that she would take her

destined place in the history of the Russian fleet. It may sound rather

funny, but the fact is that my encounter with the Lebedin cheered me up

immensely. Although I had read the life of Captain Tatarinov, the last

page of it still remained closed to me.

"This is not the end yet," that old tugboat with her ruddy-cheeked young

skipper seemed to be saying to me. "Who knows, the time may yet come

when you will succeed in turning that page and reading it."

On my third visit to the Personnel Officer I asked him to post me to a

regiment, or, if that was impossible, to place me under the orders of the

Northern Fleet Air Arm HQ.

He was obviously in the know as regards my personal affairs and service

record, because, after a pause, he asked me in a kindly tone:

"What about your health?"

I told him I was as fit as a fiddle. It was the truth or pretty near the

truth, for I always felt better in the North than I did in the South, the

West or the East.

"Ah well, I suppose you'd better be put to use rather than hang about

doing nothing at such a time," the Personnel Chief said reasonably if

rather vaguely.

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He had in mind, of course, my being used on the ground. "Catch me

doing ground work. I'm going to fly," I said to myself as I watched his

old but strong hand writing down and underlining my name on his desk

diary.

I was appointed to an Arctic base within several kilometres of

Polarnoye.

I am not going to say much about the air war in the North, though it

was very interesting, since nowhere else were the qualities of the

Russian airman displayed with such brilliance as here in the North,

where, to all the difficulties and hazards of flying and fighting were

added those of bad weather and six months of Arctic night. I heard one

British officer say: "Only Russians can fly here." This was a flattering

exaggeration, of course, but we had earned the compliment.

Combat conditions in the North were much more difficult than in the

other theatres of air warfare. The German transports usually hugged the

coastline, keeping as close to the cliffs as their draught would permit. It

was hard to sink them, not only because transports, generally speaking,

are hard to sink, but because it is impossible or well-nigh impossible to

get a clear run-in at a transport which is under a cliff.

In July I went to Kirkenes with a load of bombs-with fair success, as

the photographs showed. At the beginning of August I persuaded my

regimental commander to let me go out "hunting" in search of German

convoys. Paired with some lieutenant we sank a transport of four

thousand tons. Strictly speaking, it was the lieutenant who did the

sinking, as my torpedo, launched at too close range, slipped under the

keel and went wide. But in that fight everything was put to the test,

including my wounded leg, which behaved splendidly. I was pleased,

although during the debriefing the squadron commander proved

incontestably that this was just the way transports "ought not to be

sunk". Two or three days later he had occasion to repeat his arguments,

as I flew still lower over a transport, so low that I came home with a

piece of the ship's aerial embedded in my wing. The transport—my

first—was sunk, so that his arguments, while losing none of their

cogency, acquired merely a theoretical interest.

To be brief, I sunk a second transport in the middle of August, one of

six thousand tons, escorted by a patrol vessel and a torpedo boat. This

time I was accompanied by the squadron leader himself and I noticed

with amusement that he attacked from still lower than I did. Needless to

say, he did not give himself a reprimand.

And so life went on—on the whole, not at all badly. At the end of

October the Air Force Commander congratulated me on the award of

the Order of Alexander Nevsky.

I already had friends at the base—the placid, taciturn, pipe-smoking

navigator in the wide trousers turned out to be an intelligent, well-read

man. True, he had little to say for himself, and that little was reduced to

nil when we were in the air, but when asked, "Where are we?" he always

answered with astonishing accuracy. I liked his way of getting onto the

target. We were unlike each other, but you cannot help getting to like a

man who shares with you every day the hard and hazardous work of

flying and making torpedo attacks. If we were to meet death, it would be

together, the same day and hour. And those who face death together,

face life together.

I had other friends at the base besides my navigator, but this was not

the friendship my heart was yearning for. No wonder such a heap of

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unmailed letters had accumulated in those days-I was hoping that Katya

and I would read them together after the war.

CHAPTER TWO

THE DOCTOR SERVES IN THE ARCTIC

I dreamt all night that I had been wounded again, that Doctor Ivan

Ivanovich was bending over me and I was trying to say to him:

"Abraham, saddle, drink", but I couldn't, I was struck dumb. This was a

recurrent dream, but the first one in which this long-forgotten sensation

of dumbness was so vividly real.

And so, waking up before reveille, I found myself thinking of the

doctor and recollected Romashov telling me that the doctor had come to

visit his son at the front. I don't quite know how to explain it, but I felt

vaguely disturbed by this memory, which had been on my mind for a

long time. I went over it word for word and realised what it meant:

Romashov had been telling me that the doctor was serving at Polarnoye.

The amazing thing is that the doctor, too, had been thinking about me

on that very day and at that very hour. He assured me of it quite

seriously. He had read the order concerning my decoration the day

before and at first had not thought it was me. "There are plenty of

Grigorievs in the world," he had said to himself. But the next morning,

while still in bed, he decided that it must be me, like me, he made for the

telephone immediately.

"Ivan Ivanovich!" I cried, when a hoarse voice, which it was hard to

associate with the doctor, reached me as though fighting its way through

the howling autumn wind which raged that morning over Kola Bay.

"This is Sanya Grigoriev speaking. Do you recognise me? Sanya!"

I remained in ignorance as to whether the doctor had recognised me

or not, because the hoarse voice changed to a rather melodious

whistling. I roared myself red in the face, and telephone operator,

appreciative of my efforts, informed me that "Medical officer, Second

Class, Pavlov was reporting".

"What's he reporting? Tell him this is Sanya speaking!"

"Very good," said the telephone girl. "He asks whether you'll be at N.

Base this evening and where can he find you?"

"I'll be here!" I yelled. "Let him come to the Officers' Club. Is that

clear?"

The operator did not say anything, then something clicked in the

earpiece and a voice, which did not sound like hers, growled:

"He'll come."

I was overjoyed, of course, to hear that the doctor was at Polarnoye

and that I would be seeing him that night. Nevertheless, it remained a

puzzle to me, why, on arriving at the club, I drank first a glass of white

wine, then red wine, then white again, and so on. I kept within bounds,

though, all the more so as the Air Arm Commander was dining in the

next room with some war correspondent. But the girls of my

acquaintance, who sat down at my table from time to time between

foxtrots, laughed heartily when I tried to explain to them that if I had

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learnt to dance my life would have shaped quite differently. As it was,

my life was a flop because I had never learnt to dance.

It was in this excellent, though slightly wistful mood that I sat in the

Officers' Club, when a tall, elderly naval man with silver stripes

appeared in the doorway and started to pick his way between the tables.

Doctor Ivan Ivanovich, I took it.

I may have been thinking how bent and old he looked and how grey

his beard had grown, but that was only a mirage, of course. Actually,

this was the mysterious old doctor of my childhood coming towards me

with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, for all the world as though

he were about to examine my tongue or peek into my ear.

"Sanya!"

We embraced, looked at each other, then embraced again.

"Have you been here long, Sanya?" the doctor was saying. "How is it

we have not met all this time?"

"Three months. It's my fault, of course. May I pour you out a drink?" I

reached for the bottle without waiting for his reply.

"You've had enough, Sanya," the doctor said gently, setting aside first

his glass, then mine. "Tell me all about yourself. D'you remember

Volodya? He's been killed," he added quickly, as though to show me that

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I could now tell him everything. His eyes glistened with tears behind his

glasses.

We sat with downcast heads in the brightly lit, noisy Officers' Club.

The band was playing foxtrots and waltzes, and the brass rang out too

loudly in the small wooden rooms.

"Where's Katya, what's happened to her?"

I told him how we had lost track of each other.

"I'm sure she's alive and well," the doctor said. "And searching for you

day and night. She'll find you all right-if I know anything about a

woman in love. Now you can pour me a drink. Let's toast her health."

It was time to go. We were the only people left in the restaurant. The

evening was over-that was a fact. But, God, how reluctant I was to admit

it, when there was still so much left unsaid between us. But what could

you do! We went downstairs and got our overcoats. The warm, bright,

slightly tipsy world was left behind us, and before us, pitch-black, lay N.,

over which a rude, bleak north wind ran riot.

CHAPTER THREE

TO THOSE AT SEA

Submariners were the big boys in those parts, not only because they

had done so much at the beginning of the war, more perhaps than

anyone else in the Northern Fleet, but because the peculiar routine of

their lives, their attitudes, and the stresses of their combat activities

placed an imprint upon the life of the whole township. Nowhere are

men so equal in the face of death as among the crew of a submarine,

where all either perish or vanquish. All combat work is hard, but the

work of submarine crews, especially in midgets, is such that I wouldn't

care to barter a dozen of the most hazardous air missions for a single

cruise in a midget submarine. Even as a boy I used to think that among

men who went down so deep in the water there was sure to be some sort

of secret compact, like the oath which Pyotr and I had once sworn to

each other.

Flying in company with another captain I succeeded in sinking a third

transport at the end of August 1942. A midget commanded by the

famous F. sank a fourth with my assistance. This would not be worth

mentioning-I had no bomb-load at the time and merely reported to HQ

the coordinates of a German vessel I had sighted-had not F. invited me

to the "roast-pig party", which started off a train of events worth

relating.

Who does not know the famous naval tradition of celebrating each

sinking of an enemy ship with a gala dinner at which the commanding

officer treats the victors to roast sucking-pig? The previous day a

transport, patrol-vessel and a torpedo boat had been sent to the bottom,

and the white-capped cooks, all hot and bothered, carried, not one, but

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three whole sucking-pigs into the spacious officers' mess where a "U"

table was set out at the head of which sat the admiral commanding the

Northern Fleet.

The pigs, appetising, delicately pink, with pale, sorrowful-looking

snouts, lay on dishes and the three commanders stood over them with

big knives in their hands. That, too, was a tradition-the victors had to do

the carving with their own hands. And the portions they carved! A huge

chunk, stuffed with buckwheat and trimmed with fanciful shavings of

horse-radish sailed down the table towards me. And I had to put it

away, on pain of offending my hosts.

The admiral rose, glass in hand. The first toast was to the victors— the

commanders and their crews. I looked at him-he had visited my

regiment and I remembered the quick, youthful gesture with which he

had thrown Ms head back as he received the report of the regimental

commander. He was a young man, only four years my senior. I had also

known him from my Spanish days.

"To those at sea!" was the second toast. Glasses clinked. The sailors

drank, standing, to their comrades who were braving the perils of the

Arctic night in the watery wastes. To good luck in battle and a steady

heart in the hour of danger and decision.

Now the admiral was looking at me across the table—1 was sitting on

his right, among the journalist guests, to whom F. was demonstrating

with the aid of knife and fork how the torpedo boat was sunk. His eyes

on me all the time, the admiral said something to his neighbour, and the

latter, the flotilla commander, got up to propose a third toast. "Here's to

Captain Grigoriev, who skilfully vectored the submarine onto the

German convoy." And the admiral made a gesture to show that he was

drinking to me.

I shall not list all the toasts that were proposed, especially as the

journalists I have mentioned told the story of the "three roast-pigs" in

the press. I shall merely mention that the admiral disappeared quite

unexpectedly—he suddenly got up and went out. In passing my chair he

leaned over, and without letting me get up, said quietly: "Please come

and see me today, Captain."

CHAPTER FOUR

RANGING WIDE

The machine took off, and within a few minutes that hash of rain and

mist, which we thought nothing of on the ground, became an important

part of the flight, which, like all flights, consisted of (a) the mission, and

(b) everything that hindered the execution of the mission.

We made a flat turn, banking slightly, and swung round onto our

course.

Our mission, then, or, as the admiral called it, "special assignment"

was this: A German raider (evidently an auxiliary cruiser) had passed

into the Kara Sea and shelled the port of T. and was now lurking

somewhere far in the East. I was to hunt her down and sink her, the

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sooner the better, as a convoy of ours with a cargo of war materials was

on its way through the Northern Sea Route and was now fairly close to

this port. It was not difficult to imagine what havoc a big warship could

cause in these peaceful waters.

I pulled up to five and a half thousand metres. But here, too, there

was nothing but the same dreary cloud hash, which the Almighty

himself seemed to be stirring up thick with a gigantic spoon.

So I had to find her and sink her. Doing the first was far and away the

more difficult of the two. How astonished the admiral had been when I

corrected almost all the islands of the eastern part of the Nordenskjold

Archipelago on his chart. "Have you been there?" "No."

He did not know that I had been there yet not been there. The map of

the Nordenskjold Archipelago had been corrected shortly before the war

by the Nord expedition. I had not been there. But Captain Tatarinov

had, and mentally I had followed in his wake a thousand times.

Indeed, nothing in life is done in vain. Life turns this way and that,

plunges down, forcing its way like an underground river in the darkness

and silence of eternal night, and suddenly emerges into the open, into

the sunshine and light of day, just as my machine now has emerged

from the welter of clouds. Aye, nothing in life is done in vain.

Always uppermost in my mind was the thought of what my life would

have been in the North if I had found Katya and we had been living

together at N.

She would wake up when, at three in the morning, I came home

before setting out on a flight. She would be rosy, warm and sleepy.

Perhaps, on coming in, I would kiss her in a way that would somehow be

different, and she would understand at once how important and

interesting was the task which the admiral had entrusted me with.

I had seen this a thousand times, but would it ever be like that again?

"Navigator, bearings!"

The pilot's course and the navigator's were three degrees out, but

coincided to a T when cigarette-cases, pocket torches and lighters were

turned out of pockets,

What had I been thinking about? About Katya. About the fact that I was

flying to places where we had once planned to go together and from

which I had been kept away for so long. Had I not known for certain,

beyond doubt, that the time would come when I should be flying in

these parts? Had I not charted to within half a degree the route which,

as in a child's dazzling dream, the men from the St. Maria had trudged,

breathing heavily, with eyes shut against the blinding glare? And in the

lead, a big man, a giant in fur boots.

But this was romancing. I drove the thought away. Novaya Zemlya

was close at hand.

You would be bored if I started telling in detail how we hunted that

surface raider. To detect a camouflaged warship, a barely visible streak

amid the boundless wastes of the Arctic seas, was no easy task. We flew

from base to base for over a fortnight. One of the flights lasted seven

hours. After scouring the Kara Sea in both directions we returned to

Novaya Zemlya, but could not find it. It was as though these great

islands had up till now been marked on the map by mistake. While the

fuel lasted we flew around over the place in the black fog, and if the

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wind had not, to our good fortune, torn a small bright hole in the fog, I

should probably not have been able to finish this book. We made for this

gap, and landed safely with the engine cut off.

Altogether it was a hard fortnight we spent on Novaya Zemlya. Every

time we started out in the hope of finding the raider, though it had been

plain to me for some time that we ought to be seeking it much farther

East. We scoured the sea until fuel gave out and the navigator inquired

phlegmatically: "Home?"

And "home" would unfold to our gaze-rugged, tumbling mountains,

blue glaciers split lengthways, as it were, and ready to slide down into

the bottomless snowy gorges.

Then came the moment when our stay on Novaya Zemlya end-ed-a

wonderful moment, which is worth going into in somewhat greater

detail.

I was standing outside a storehouse the roof of which was covered

with birds' carcasses and on its walls were stretched the skins of seals.

Two little Nentsi, looking like penguins in their fur garments with blind

sleeves, were playing on the beach and I was chatting with their parents-

a little girl of a mother and a father of similar stature with a brown head

sticking out of his anorak. We were discussing international affairs, I

remember, and although the analysis of Germany's hopeless position

which I was giving them had been taken from a very old back number of

Pravda, the Nenets was going to pass it on that same day to a friend of

his who lived quite near-a mere two hundred kilometres away. His little

wife, who was quite at sea in politics, nodded her shiny black head with

its pudding-basin haircut and kept saying: "Velly good, velly good."

"Would you like to go to the front?" I asked the man.

"I like, I like."

"Aren't you afraid?"

"Why afraid, why?"

That was the moment when I saw my navigator running towards me-

not just walking, but running along the shore from the point of land on

which our plane stood.

"We're being assigned to a new base."

"Where?"

"To Zapolarie."

He had said "to Zapolarie", and though there was nothing impossible

about our being reassigned to Zapolarie, that is, to the very area where I

thought the raider had to be sought, I was flabbergasted. Why, this was

my own Zapolarie.

"It can't be."

The navigator had reassumed his old imperturbable, unhurried

manner.

"Shall I check it?"

"No need."

"When do we take off?"

"In twenty minutes."

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CHAPTER FIVE

BACK AT ZAPOLARIE

It was some time before I found Doctor Pavlov's street, for the simple

reason that in my day this street had had only one house standing in it-

the doctor's, all the others existing only on the plan that hung in the

office of the District Executive Committee. Now the little house in which

I had once spent my evenings poring over the diaries of Navigating

Officer Klimov was lost amid its tall neighbours. What pleasant,

youthful evenings those had been! Those creaking floor-boards in the

next room under the light tread of Volodya. Mrs Pavlova coming in-

large, determined, open-hearted-and setting before me in silence a plate

with a huge piece of pie.

Still unbent, unyielding to sorrow, she had only turned grey, and two

deep creases hung over her down-drooping mouth.

"What am I to call you now?" she said, when we met in the little front

garden. "You were a boy then. How many years is it? Fifteen7 Twenty?"

"Only nine, Anna Stepanovna. And call me Sanya. I'll always be Sanya

to you."

"A naval airman, with decorations," she said, as though she shared

with me the pride of my being a naval airman with decorations. "Where

have you come from now? From what front?"

"Just now from Novaya Zemlya, but before that from Polarnoye. And

straight from Ivan Ivanovich."

"No, really?"

"My word of honour."

After a pause she said: "So you have seen him?"

"Seen him? Why, we used to meet very often. Didn't he write you

about it?"

"He did," Anna Stepanovna admitted, and I realised that she knew

about Katya.

But I did not need to check her as she had checked me when I started

to speak about Volodya. She did not use any words of comfort, did not

compare her grief to mine. She merely embraced me and kissed me on

the head, and I kissed her hand.

"Well, and how's my old man? Is he well?"

"Quite well."

"D'you mind if I tell my friends that you've arrived. How much time

have you got?"

I said that I was free till night. She placed before me bread, fish and a

tankard of homebrewed wine, which they were very good at making in

Zapolarie, put on a shawl, excused herself and went out.

It was rather thoughtless of me, though, to let Mrs Pavlova tell her

friends that I had arrived. Within less than half an hour a car drew up

outside the house and I was surprised to see all my crew in it.

"Sanya," the navigator said, "Comrade Ledkov has sent for us. Jump

in and let's be off. We'll have breakfast at his place and then—"

"Ledkov? Just a minute... Ah, yes, of course! Ledkov!"

This was the District Executive Committee member for whom the

doctor and I had flown to Camp Vanokan, where Ledkov lay with a

326

wounded leg. He was as well known among the Nentsi in the North as

the famous Dya Vilka was among the inhabitants of Novaya Zemlya.

"Incidentally," the doctor had once told me, "he was interested to

know whether you had found Captain Tatarinov. Remember, when we

were expecting you with the expedition, well, he even rode out to some

nomad camps to make inquiries of the Nentsi. According to his

information a legend about the St. Maria should have been preserved in

one of the clans."

It is not difficult to imagine how warmly we were welcomed to

Zapolarie by Ledkov. My memory of him was vague, and I was surprised

to find that the man who came out onto the porch to meet us was

anything but old. After dinner we drove down to the sawmill, then

visited the new health-centre, and so on. Everywhere we had something

to eat and drink, and everywhere I spoke about Ivan Ivanovich. In the

end I began to believe myself that without Ivan Ivanovich's contribution

the defence of our northern sea routes might well have met with

disaster.

Before take-off there were some things I had to attend to. I sent the

navigator and gunners to the airfield, while I remained with Ledkov in

his office at the D.E.C.

"Now tell me frankly," Ledkov said, "how's our old friend getting on

out there? We need him here ever so badly. It could easily be arranged,

you know." "What could?"

"To have him recalled and demobbed. He's above age." "No, he wouldn't

stay," I said, remembering how sore Ivan Ivanovich had been when the

flotilla commander had not allowed him to join a submarine crew on a

dangerous mission. "He might agree to come on leave. But not to stay.

Especially now."

The "now" was an intimation that the war would soon be over, but

Ledkov interpreted it to mean "now that Volodya has been killed".

We were sitting in armchairs by a wide window, which presented a

panorama of new streets running from the riverside to the taiga. Smoke

rose from the sawmill, electric trolleys ran in and out among the timber

stacks at the lumber yard, and a way out, untrodden, bluish-grey, stood

forest upon virgin forest.

I asked him about his visit to the Nentsi camps where they were said

to have preserved some legends about the men from the St. Maria. Was

it true that he had gone there and questioned the Nentsi? "Yes, I went

there. It was the camp of the Yaptungai clan." "Did you learn anything?"

"I did."

I might have been seventeen again, the way my heart leapt. "What

exactly?" I asked coolly.

" "I got the legend and wrote it down. I don't remember now where I put

those notes," he said, running his eye over the revolving bookstand

loaded with folders and rolled-up papers. "It runs roughly like this: In

the old days, when 'father's father was alive', a man came to the

Yaptungai family who called himself a sailor off a schooner that was

wrecked in the ice of the Kara Sea. This sailor related that ten men were

saved who wintered on an island north of the Taimyr. Then they made

for the mainland, but on the way 'many, many die'. But he 'at one place

not want to die' and he pushed on. And so he reached the Yaptungai

camp." "Do they remember his name?"

327

"No. He died shortly. I took it down like this: 'He come, he say—I will

live. He finish speaking and die.' "

A map of the Nenets region and part of the Kara Sea hung in Ledkov's

office. I found the familiar route—to Russian Islands—Cape Sterlegov—

the mouth of the Pyasina.

"Where do the Yaptungai have their grazing grounds?" Ledkov pointed

them out. But even before he did so I had found the district's northern

boundary and measured the distance with my eye.

"It was a sailor from the St. Maria."

"You think so?"

"Just figure it out. He said that ten men were saved."

"Yes, ten."

"Thirteen went off with Navigator Klimov. That leaves twelve in the

schooner. Two of them-the engineer Tisse and the sailor Skachkov-died

in the first year of drift. That leaves ten. But that's not the point. Even

before, I could have shown you the route they took to within half a

degree. The only thing I was not clear about was whether they had

succeeded in reaching the Pyasina."

"And now?"

"Now I'm sure."

And I pointed to the spot where the rest of Captain Tatarinov's

expedition would be found, if they were ever to be found anywhere on

land.

"Anna Stepanovna, I'm so sorry, I shouldn't have stayed so long with

Ledkov," I said, calling at her house that night and finding her waiting

for me, the table laid. "But I must be going. I'll just give you a kiss and

be off."

We embraced.

"When will you be coming back?"

"Who knows? Maybe tomorrow. Maybe never."

" 'Never' is a dreadful word, I know it," she said with a sigh and made

the sign of the cross over me. "You should never say it. You'll come back

and you'll be happy, and we old people will warm ourselves again at

your happiness."

Late that night—that it was late night you could only discover by

consulting your watch—we started out from Zapolarie. A reddish sun

stood high in the sky. Fleecy clouds raced past, piling up, like steam

from an enormous locomotive.

Could I ever have imagined that the day I had been waiting for all my

life was now coming? I could not! The crew had checked the engines

while I was away, but I was worried whether the check had been

thoroughly carried out.

328

CHAPTER SIX

VICTORY

We took off at two in the morning, and at half past four we sank the

raider. True, we did not see it sink. But after our torpedo hit it it lost

steerageway and was swallowed up in a cloud of steam.

Briefly, it happened something like this: the ship was cruising in such

a nonchalant manner that the navigator and I started an argument

(which had better not be quoted in this book) as to whether the ship did

not belong to our Northern Fleet. Having settled that it did not, we drew

away from it—my navigator's favourite way of doing the job—then

banked steeply to port and made straight for the target.

It's a pity I can't give a drawing of the rather intricate stunt I had to

perform in order to drop my torpedo as accurately as possible. I had to

make a second run-up, as my first attack was unsuccessful. Then we

started to creep away. Creep is the word, because, as it soon became

clear, the Germans had not lost time either.

During my first target run the gunner had shouted: "Cabin full o'

smoke!"

We felt three jarring shocks during my second run, but there was no

time to think of that, as I was already on top of the raider, my teeth

clenched. Now, however, I had enough time to realise that our aircraft

was crippled. Petrol and oil were siphoning away through holes and but

for the navigator, who set going a new gadget in the nick of time, we

would have been in flames long ago. The starboard propeller had

changed over, while we were still on the target, from a little pitch to a

big pitch, then to a very big one—a gigantic one, you might say.

We had our emergency boats, of course, and I could have ordered the

crew to bale out. But we had tested these boats near Archangel on a

quiet little inland lake, and had had to clamber out of the water,

shivering like dogs. And here we had below us an inhospitable, cold sea

covered with sludge ice.

I shall not list the brief reports concerning the state of the machine

which my crew made to me. There were many of them, too many to my

liking. After one of them, a pretty gloomy one, the navigator asked:

"Sticking it out, Sanya?"

"You bet!"

We had entered a cloud, and in the double ring of a rainbow I saw

below the clear-etched shadow of our plane. Unfortunately it was losing

height. Without my having a hand in it, the plane suddenly turned

sharply over on its wing, and if it were possible to see Death, we should

undoubtedly have seen it on that wingtip pointed perpendicular to the

sea.

I don't know how I did it, but I managed to right the machine. To

lighten it I ordered the gunner to jettison the machine-gun drums. Ten

minutes later the guns themselves followed them, toppling, into the sea.

"Sticking it out, Sanya?"

"Sure!"

I asked the navigator how far it was to the shore, and he answered

that it wasn't far, about twenty-six minutes. He lied, of course, to cheer

me up—it would take us all of thirty minutes to reach the shore.

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This was not the first time in my life that I was called upon to count

the minutes. There had been occasions when I had counted them with

despair and rage. There had been occasions when they had lain upon my

heart like round heavy stones, and I had waited in an agony of suspense

for one more crushing minute-stone to roll off and away into the past.

Now I was not waiting. With a furious abandon that sent an exultant

thrill through my heart I hurried and goaded them on.

"Will we make it, Sanya?"

"You bet we will!"

And we did. Some half a kilometre from the shore, which we did not

even have time to look at, we pancaked into the water, and, strange to

say, we did not go to the bottom. We had hit a sandbank. On top of all

our troubles we now had icy waves drenching us from head to foot. But

what did these waves matter or the fact that our aircraft had been

staggering about in the sky for over an hour till we reached the shore, or

the thousand and one new labours and troubles that awaited us,

compared with that laconic phrase in the current communiquй of

Sovinformbureau: "One of our aircraft failed to return."

What made me think that this was Middendorf Bay, and that

consequently we had landed far from any habitation? I don't know. The

navigator had had no time to work it out while we were passing over the

sea—the only course that interested him was the shoreward one. And

now he was too busy, as I had ordered the machine to be made secure,

and we worked at this until we dropped from sheer exhaustion on dry

patches of the beach among the sun-warmed rocks. We lay there quietly,

gazing up at the sky—a clear, wide sky without a cloudlet in it-each

occupied with his own thoughts. But each one's thoughts were tinctured

by the same common feeling—victory.

We were so exhausted that we did not even have the strength to brush

the clinging sand from our faces, and it dried in the sun and fell away in

pieces. Victory. The navigator's dead pipe lay on his chest. He suddenly

gave a loud snore and it rolled off. Victory. We wanted nothing but to

gaze at the radiant blue majesty of the sky and feel the warm pebbles

under our hands. Victory.

Everything was victory, even the fact that we were ravenously hungry

and I couldn't force myself to get up and fetch the sandwiches from the

plane which Anna Stepanovna had given me for the journey.

There is no need to describe how carefully we looked over the plane.

Evidently the cause of the smoke which the gunner had reported was a

shell, which had exploded in the cabin. Apart from a couple of hundred

shot holes, the aircraft seemed in fairly decent shape, at least compared

with the heaps of scrap iron I had often had occasion to land. The only

thing wrong with it was that it could no longer be flown, and we did not

have the means to put the engine right.

Over our dinner-we had an excellent meal: the first course, a soup

made of dried milk, chocolate and butter, and second course, the same

soup in dry form—it was decided:

(a) that the aircraft be made fast where it lay, embedded deep in the

sand—in any case we could not raise it on to the shelving beach;

(b) that the gunner be left to guard the machine;

(c) that we go in search of people and assistance.

I forgot to mention that while we were limping across the sea one of

us—I believe it was the radioman—noticed on the shore what looked like

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a house or a wooden towerlike structure. It disappeared round a bend

when we came inshore. It may have been a landmark, one of those

structures raised on a shore which is seldom visited by ships. If so, it

could be of little use to us. But if it was not?

On the other hand, we could stay where we were, and after our meal,

lie down again among the rocks, choosing a cosy, sheltered spot,

relaxing and gazing at the bluish ice-floes drifting past with the water

running off them, glistening and tinkling. But our radio, worse luck, was

smashed, and no matter what the dogged radioman did to it, it stayed

mute as a stone.

In short, there was nothing for it but to push on. Where to?

Obviously, towards the landmark, which might prove to be an electric

lighthouse or a fog-warning station or something else of that kind.

"But first of all," I said to the navigator, "where are we?"

It took him no less than a quarter of an hour to answer that question;

he gave coordinates which though differing from those I had named

when Ledkov had asked me where I thought the remains of Captain

Tatarinov's expedition could be found, were so close to that point—the

point on which I had put my finger on Ledkov's map— that I couldn't

help looking round me, as if expecting to see the Captain himself

standing within two paces of me, behind that rock there...

__________

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PART TEN

THE LAST PAGE

CHAPTER ONE

THE RIDDLE IS SOLVED

Another book would have to be written to fully describe how Captain

Tatarinov's expedition was found. Strictly speaking I had very many

clues, much more than, for instance, the famous Dumont d'Urville had,

when, as a boy, he showed with amazing accuracy where he would find

La Perouse's expedition. I had it easier than he, because the life of

Captain Tatarinov was closely interwoven with my own, and the

conclusions which these clues led to concerned me as well as him.

This is the route he must have taken if it be accepted that he returned

to Severnaya Zemlya, which he had named Maria Land: from 79°35'

latitude, between meridians 86 and 87, to Russian Islands and the

Nordenskjold Archipelago. And then, probably after wandering around

a good deal, from Cape Sterlegov to the mouth of the Pyasina, where the

old Nenets had come across the boat on the dog-sledge. Then to the

Yenisei, because the Yenisei was his only hope of finding people and

assistance. He had kept to the seaward of the offshore islands, going in

as straight a line as possible.

We found the expedition, or rather what remained of it, in an area

over which our planes had flown dozens of times, carrying mail and

passengers to Dickson, and machinery and merchandise to Nordvik, and

conveying parties of geologists prospecting for coal, oil and ores. If

Captain Tatarinov were to come to the mouth of the Yenisei today he

would meet dozens of great seagoing ships. On the islands which he

passed he would have seen today electric lighthouses and radar

installations, he would have heard nautophones guiding ships during a

fog. Some three or four hundred kilometres farther upstream he would

have come on the Arctic Circle Railway linking Dudinka with Norilsk.

332

He would have seen new towns which had sprung up around oil fields,

mines and sawmills.

I mentioned earlier that I had been writing to Katya from the moment

I arrived in the North. A heap of unposted letters were left at N. Base

which I had been hoping we would read together after the war. These

letters were like a diary kept, not for myself, but for Katya. I will quote

from them only those passages which describe how we found the

camping site.

"1. I was astonished to learn how close life had come up to this place,

which had always seemed to me so infinitely far away. It lies within a

stone's throw of the Great Sea Route and you were quite right when you

said that they had not found your father because they had never looked

for him. Between the lighthouse and the radio station there is a

telephone line, a permanent one on poles. Mines are being worked ten

kilometres to the south, and if we hadn't discovered the camp site the

miners would have stumbled upon it sooner or later.

"It was our navigator who first picked up the piece of canvas from the

ground. Nothing surprising about it! You can pick up all kinds of stuff

on a seashore. But this was a canvas strap you harnessed yourself in to

haul a sledge. But when the gunner found the aluminium lid of a

saucepan, and a dented tin containing balls of string, we divided the

hollow between the hills and the ridge into a number of squares and

started going over them—each man his own square.

"I remember reading somewhere that a single inscription carved on a

stone had helped scholars to reveal the life of a whole country which had

perished long before our own era. Now this place, too, gradually came to

life before our eyes. I was the first to spot the canvas boat, or rather to

guess that this flattened pancake thicking out of the eroded earth was a

boat; moreover, a boat resting on a sledge. In it lay two guns, a skin of

some kind, a sextant and a pair of field-glasses, all rusty, covered with

mould and moss. By the ridge which protected the camp from the sea,

we found various articles of clothing, among them a mouldering

sleeping-bag made of reindeer-skin. Evidently a tent had been pitched

there, because the drift logs lay at an angle forming a square enclosure

with the rocks. In this "tent" we found a food basket fastened with a

strip of sailcloth and containing several woollen stockings and shreds of

a blue and white blanket. We also found an axe and a "fishing-rod", that

is, a length of twine with a hook at the end made from a bent pin. Some

of the articles lay scattered round the "tent"-a spirit lamp, a spoon, a

small wooden box containing various odds and ends, including several

thick sail-needles, also home-made. On some of these objects the rubber

stamp "Trapping Schooner St. Maria" or the inscription "St. Maria"

could still be made out. But this camp site was completely deserted-

there was not a soul there, living or dead.

"2. It was a home-made cookstove—a tin casing enclosing a bucket

with a lid. Usually an iron tray was placed underneath for burning bear

or seal fat. But there stood an ordinary primus heater. I shook it and

found that it still contained some paraffin oil. I tried to pump it up, and

the oil squirted up in a thin stream. Next to it we found a tin marked

"Borsch. Vikhorev Cannery. St. Petersburg, 1912". Had we wished to, we

could have opened that tin of borsch and heated it up on the primus-

stove, which had been lying in the earth for nearly thirty years.

"3. We returned to the camp after a fruitless search in the direction of

Galchikha. This time we approached it from the southeast, and the hills,

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which we had previously seen as an unrelieved undulating line, now

presented quite an unexpected appearance. It was a single large scrap

running into stony tundra intersected by deep notches, as though

excavated' by human hands. We walked along one of these hollows, and

none of us at first paid any attention to the caved-in stack of driftwood

between two huge boulders. There were only a few logs, not more than

half a dozen, but one of them had a sawn end. It was this sawn log that

struck us. Up till now we had believed that the camp had been situated

between the rocky ridge and the hills. It could have been shifted,

however, and before long we found that this was so.

"It would be difficult to enumerate half the things we found in this

hollow. We found a watch, a hunting knife, several ski-sticks, two

single-barrelled Remingtons, a leather vest and a tube containing some

kind of ointment. We found the rotted remains of a bag containing

photographic film. And finally, in the lowest part of the hollow, we

found a tent, and under that tent, its edges still held down by drift logs

and whalebone to prevent it being blown away in a gale—under this

tent, which we had to hack out of the ice with axes, we found him whom

we were looking for...

It was still possible to guess in what attitude he had died-his right arm

flung out, body stretched out as if listening to something. He lay on his

face, and the satchel in which we found his farewell letters was under his

chest. Obviously, he had hoped that the letters would be better

preserved under cover of his body.

"4. There could have been no hope for our ever seeing him alive. But

until the word Death had been pronounced, until I had seen it with my

own eyes, this childish thought had still lingered in my heart. Now it

was gone, but in its stead another light burned up brightly—the thought

that it was not for nothing, not in vain, that I had been seeking him, that

for him there would be no death. An hour ago the steamer came

alongside the electric lighthouse and the sailors, with heads bared,

carried the coffin aboard covered with the tattered remains of the tent.

A salute was fired and the ship flew its flag at half-mast. Alone, I

wandered around the deserted camp of the St. Maria and here I am,

writing to you, my own, dear Katya. How I wish I were with you at this

moment! It will soon be thirty years since that brave struggle for life

ended, but I know that for you he died only today. I am writing to you

from the front, as it were, telling you about your father and friend, who

had fallen in battle. Sorrow and pride for him fill my soul, which is

stirred to its depths by this spectacle of immortality..."

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CHAPTER TWO

THE UNBELIEVABLE

"How I wish I were with you at this moment"—I read and reread these

words, and they seemed to me so cold and empty, as if I were in a cold,

empty room, addressing my own reflection. It was Katya I needed, and

not this diary—the living, bright, sweet Katya, who believed in me and

loved me. Once, shaken by the fact that she had turned her back on me

at her mother's funeral, I had dreamt of coming to her, like the Gadfly,

throwing at her feet the evidence that proved me to have been right.

Afterwards the whole world had learnt of her father through me and he

had become a national hero. But for Katya he remained her father-who,

if not she, was to be the first to learn that I had found him? Who, if not

she, had told me how wonderful everything would be if the fairy-tales

we believed in still came true on earth? Amid the cares, labours and

perturbations of the war I had found him. Not a boy, fascinated by a

dim, glamorous vision of the Arctic which illumined his mute, half-

conscious world, not a youth striving with youth's stubbornness to have

his own way-no, it was as a mature man, who had experienced

everything, that I stood confronting a discovery destined to become part

of the history of Russian science. I was proud and happy. But a surge of

bitterness rose up inside me at the thought that it could all have been

different.

I did not get back to my regiment until the end of January, and the

very next day I was summoned to Polarnoye to report to the commander

of the Northern Fleet.

Our launch entered the bay, and the town unfolded to my gaze, all

white, pink and snowy. It stood on the steep, grey hillside as if on a

pedestal of beautiful granite rocks. White little houses with porch steps

running out in different directions were arranged in terraces, while

along the bay front, forming a semi-circle, stood big stone houses. In

fact, as I found out afterwards, they were called "compass houses", as

though a gigantic compass had described this semi-circle over

Catherine's Bay.

I climbed the flight of steps which passed under an arch thrown

between these houses and saw the whole bay from shore to shore. The

inexplicable agitation under which I had been labouring all that

morning gripped me anew with extraordinary farce. The bay was dark

green and impenetrable, with only a faint glimmer shed by the sky.

There was something very remote, southern, reminiscent of a highland

lake in the Caucasus, about this land-locked bay-except that on the far

side a line of low hills, covered with snow, ran out into the distance with

low trees making here and there a delicate black tracery against their

dazzling background.

I do not believe in intuition, but that was the word that sprung to my

mind as, stirred by the beauty of Polarnoye and Catherine's Bay, I stood

by the compass houses. It was as if the town that appeared before me

were my home, which until then I had only seen in dreams and sought

in vain for so many long years. I found myself thinking with a thrill of

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excitement that something was bound to happen here, something good

for me, perhaps the best thing to happen to me in all my life.

There was nobody at HQ yet. I had come before office hours. The

night-duty officer said that, as far as he knew, I had been ordered to

report at 10 p.m., whereas it was now only seven-thirty.

I went to look up the doctor-not at the hospital, but in his rooms.

Of course, he lived in one of those white little houses arranged in

terraces on the hillside. They had looked much prettier from the sea.

Here was Row One, but I needed Row Five, House No. 7.

Like the Nentsi, I walked along thinking all but aloud of what I was

seeing. A group of Englishmen overtook me. They wore funny winter

caps resembling those our old Russian coachmen used to wear and long,

khaki robe-like affairs and it set me thinking how little they knew our

Russian winters. A boy in a white fluffy fur coat walked along, grave and

chubby, with a toy spade over his shoulder. A be-whiskered sailor

caught him up and carried him on a few steps, and it set me thinking

that there were probably very few children in Polarnoye.

House No. 7, Row 5, differed in no way from any of its neighbours on

the right or left, except perhaps that its front steps were barely visible

under a coating of slippery ice. I took them at a run and collided with

some naval men, who came out onto the porch at that moment. One of

them slid carefully down the steps, remarking that "inability to take

one's bearings in a Polar-night situation points to a deficiency of

vitamins in the body". They were doctors. This was Ivan Ivanovich's

home all right.

I went into the hall, pushed one door, then another. Both rooms were

empty, smelt of tobacco, had unmade beds in them and things lay

scattered about, masculine-like. There was something hospitable about

those rooms, as if their occupants have purposely left the doors open.

"Anybody here?"

There was no need to ask. I went out into the street again.

A woman with her skirt hitched up was rubbing her bare feet with

snow. I asked her whether this was house No 7.

"Who may you be wanting?"

"Doctor Pavlov."

"I daresay he's still asleep," the woman said. "You go round the house,

that's his window over there. Knock hard!"

It would have been simpler to knock at the doctor's door, but I

complied nevertheless and walked round to the window. The house

stood on a slope and the window at the back stood rather low over the

ground. It was covered with hoarfrost, but when I knocked and peered

in, shading my eyes with my hand, I thought I saw a shape like a

woman's figure. Like a woman bending over a basket or a suitcase. She

straightened up when I knocked and came over to the window. She, too,

shaded her eyes with her hand, and through the blurred frostwork of the

window I saw a blurred face.

The woman's lips stirred. She did nothing, just moved her lips. She

was barely visible behind that snowy, misted, murky glass. But I

recognised her. It was Katya.

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CHAPTER THREE

IT WAS KATYA

How can I describe those first minutes, the speechless rapture with

which I gazed into her face, kissed it and gazed again, asked questions

only to interrupt myself, because everything I asked about had

happened ages ago, and terrible though it was to know how she had

suffered and starved, almost to death, in Leningrad, and had given up

hope of ever seeing me again, all this was over and done with, and now

there she stood before me and I could take her in my arms-God, I could

hardly believe it!

She was pale and very thin, and something new had come into her

face, which had lost its former severity.

"You've had your hair cut, I see?"

"Yes, a long time ago," she said. "Back in Yaroslavl, when I was ill."

337

She had not only had her hair cut, she was a different woman. But just

now I did not want to think about that—everything was whirling

around, the whole world, we, this room, which was an exact replica of

those other two, with its things scattered about, with Katya's open

suitcase, from which she had been taking something out when I

knocked, and the doctor too, who, it appears, had been there all the

time, standing in a corner wiping his beard with his handkerchief, and

now started to tiptoe out of the room, but I stopped him. But the main

thing, the most important thing-Katya was in Polarnoye! How had she

come to be in Polarnoye?

"My God, I've been writing to you every day!" she said. "We just

missed each other in Moscow. When you called on Valya Zhukov I was

queuing for bread in Arbat."

"No?"

"You left him a letter, and I dashed off to look for you-but where?

Who could have imagined that you would be going to see Romashov!"

"How do you know I went to see Romashov?"

"I know everything, darling!"

She kissed me. "I'll tell you everything."

And she told me that Vyshimirsky, frightened to death, had sought

out Ivan Pavlovich and told him that I had had Romashov

arrested.

"But who's this Rear-Admiral R.?" she said. "I wrote to you, care of

him, and then to him personally, but he never answered. Didn't you

know that you were coming here? Why did I have to write to you

through him?"

"Because I didn't have an address of my own. I left Moscow to look for

you."

"Where?"

"At Yaroslavl. I was in Yaroslavl."

"Why didn't you write to Korablev when you came here?"

"I don't know. My God, is it really you? Katya?"

We were walking up and down with our arms round each other,

stumbling over things, again and again asking "why?" "why?" and there

were as many of these "whys" as there were causes which had parted us

at Leningrad, prevented us from running into each other in Moscow,

and now thrown us together in Polarnoye, where I had now come for the

first time and where only half an hour ago it was impossible to imagine

Katya being.

She had heard about my discovery of the expedition from the TASS

reports which appeared in the newspapers. She had got in touch with

the doctor and he had helped to get a permit to come to Polarnoye. But

they did not know where to write to me-even if they did know, it is

hardly likely that any mail would reach me at the camp site of Captain

Tatarinov's expedition!

The doctor disappeared, then reappeared with a hot kettle, and

though he couldn't stop the speed with which the world was whirling

around us, he did make us sit down side by side on the sofa, and treated

us to some tooth-breaking hardtack. Then he fetched a billy-can of

condensed milk and set it on the table, apologising for the tableware.

Then he went away. I did not detain him this time, and we were left

alone in that cold house, with its kitchen cluttered with empty tins and

338

dirty dishes, its hallway covered with snow that did not melt. Why were

we in this house, through the windows of which we could see the rolling

hills and the slack water moving importantly between the steep, snowy

shores? But this was yet another "why?" to which I did not bother to

seek an answer.

On going out the doctor had handed me some electric gadget. I

immediately forgot about it and remembered it only when, laughing at

something, I saw dense steam billowing from my mouth and melting

slowly in the air, like from a horse standing out in the frost. The gadget

was an electric fire, obviously of local workmanship, but a very good

one. The room quickly got warm. Katya wanted to tidy up, but I did not

let her. I gazed at her. I held her hands in a tight grip, as though fearing

that she might disappear as suddenly as she had appeared.

On my way to the doctor's I had noticed that the weather was

changing, and now, when I left the house—because it was already a

quarter to ten—the cold, humming wind had dropped, the air was no

longer limpid, and soft snow fell heavily and quickly-all signs of coming

snowstorm.

To my surprise, they already knew at HO that Katya had arrived. The

commander knew it, too-why else should he have greeted me with a

smile? Very briefly I told him how we had sunk the raider. He did not

ask me any questions, merely said that I was to give a report about it

before the War Council that evening. What he was interested in was the

St. Maria expedition.

I began in a restrained, rather embarrassed manner-though the fact

that the expedition had been found during the performance of a combat

mission would not have struck anyone who knew the story of my life as

being odd. How was I to convey this idea to the fleet commander in a

few words? But he was listening with such rapt attention, with such

sincere, young interest, that I finally dismissed the thought of "a few

words" and began telling my story simply— and quite unexpectedly, the

effect was an authentic account of what really happened.

We parted at last, and then only because the admiral bethought

himself of Katya.

I don't know how much time I spent with him-it must have been no

more than an hour-but when I came out I did not find Polarnoye. It was

hidden in a pall of whirling, blinding, whistling snow.

Luckily I was wearing burki (*Burki-high felt boots.-Tr.) -even so I had to

turn the tops back above my knees. Talk about terraces-there wasn't a

trace of them! Only a fantastic imagination could picture houses

somewhere behind those black clouds of whipped snow, and in one of

those houses, in Row 5, Katya laying the hardtack out on the electric fire

to warm them, as I had advised her. In the end I got to the house, of

course. The hardest thing was to recognise it. In little more than an hour

it had turned into a fairy-tale dwarfie hut, standing lopsided and

snowed up to the windows. Like a god of snowstorm I burst into the

hall, and Katya had to brush me down with a whisk broom, starting

from the shoulders, which were caked with frozen snow.

We had talked everything over, it seemed; twice we had approached

the subject of the Captain's letters of farewell-I had brought them with

339

me to Polarnoye to show to the doctor; the rest of the material relating

to the expedition I had left at my regiment. But we

avoided the subject of these letters and everything associated with them,

as though we felt that in the joy of our reunion the time had not yet

come for us to talk about them.

Katya had already told me all about little Pyotr-what a swarthy little

chap he was, the very image of my poor sister. We had already discussed

what to do about Grandma, who had quarrelled with Farm Manager

Perishkin and rented a "private apartment" in the village. I had already

learnt that Pyotr Senior had been wounded a second time, had received

a decoration and returned to the front—in Moscow Katya had chanced

to meet the commander of his battalion, a Hero of the Soviet Union,

who had told her that Pyotr "didn't give a damn for death", a phrase

which had startled Katya. I had learnt about Varya Trofimova, too, and

that if things worked out the way Katya thought they would "it would be

the greatest ever happiness for both of them". Changes had been made

in the room, too—things were arranged more comfortably, looking as if

they were grateful to Katya for having brought warmth to this cold,

masculine abode. Some five or six hours had passed since that

wonderful, momentous change had taken place. The entire world of our

family life, lost to us for so long-for eighteen desolate months-had come

back at last, and I had not yet got used to the idea that Katya was with

me once more.

"D'you know what I've been thinking most of the time? That I didn't

love you enough and kept forgetting how hard you had it with me."

"And I was thinking how hard you had it with me," Katya said. "When

you used to go away and I worried about you I was still happy, despite

all those anxieties, cares and fears."

While we were talking she went on arranging things, as she always did

in hotels, even in trains, wherever we went together. It was the habit of a

woman accustomed to moving with her husband from place to place-

and what a pity, tenderness and remorse I felt towards her for that

pathetic habit.

God, how I had missed her! I had forgotten everything! Forgotten, for

instance, how she did her hair for the night, plaiting it into pigtails. Her

hair was still short, and the pigtails were comical little things. Yet she

plaited them, uncovering her beautiful little ears-even these I had

forgotten.

We talked on after a long silence, now in whispers and about quite

another matter. This other matter was Romashov.

I remember having read somewhere about palimpsests, that is,

ancient parchments from which later scribes erased the text to write

bills and receipts on them, and years later scholars discovered the

original writings, which sometimes belonged to the pen of poets of

genius.

It was like a palimpsest, when Katya gave me Romashov's version of

what had happened in the aspen wood, and I erased this lie as if with a

rubber and beneath it the truth came through. I saw and explained to

her this dirty trick of his, which he had used twice-first to prove to Katya

that he had saved my life, then to show me that he had saved hers.

I related to her word for word our last conversation at his flat, and

Katya was astonished at Romashov's confession, which explained the

cause of all my failures and resolved the riddles which had always

weighed upon her heart.

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"Did you put it all down in writing?"

"Yes. I set it out like an examination record and made him sign it."

I repeated his account of how he had been watching my every step in

life, tormented by envy, which has racked his mean, restless soul ever

since his schooldays. I said nothing, however, about the magnificent

portrait of Katya hanging over his desk. I said nothing because this love

of his was an insult to her.

She listened to me with a sombre face, her eyes burning. She took my

hand and pressed it hard to her bosom. She was pale with emotion. She

hated Romashov twice or thrice as much perhaps for the very thing I did

not want to talk about. As for me, he was remote and insignificant, and

it was cheering to think that I had got the better of him.

My wife was asleep, her cheek pillowed on her hand. My clever, lovely

wife, who, heavens knows why, had always loved me with this undying

love. She was sleeping, and I could gaze my till at her, thinking that we

were alone now and though this short, happy night would end all too

soon, we had wrested it from the raging blizzard that was sweeping

through the world.

I had to be up at six and had prevailed upon Katya not to have me

waken her. We had even kissed goodbye to each other the night before.

But when I opened my eyes I found her already washing up, clad in her

dressing gown and propping the wet plates against the electric fire. She

knew what military service I was doing, but we never talked about it.

Only when I bestirred myself, leaving my glass of tea unfinished, did she

ask, as she used to do, whether I was taking my parachute. I said I was.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE FAREWELL LETTERS

On leaving the house I gave Katya the Captain's letters. Once before,

at Ensk, in Cathedral Gardens, I had left her alone to read one of the

letters which Aunt Dasha and I had found in the bag of the drowned

postman. I had stood beneath St. Martin's tower and turned cold as I

mentally went through that letter with her line by line.

Now I would not be seeing her for several days. Even so, we would be

reading together again, and I knew that Katya would feel me breathing

at her shoulder.

Here are the letters.

Captain 1st Class P.S. Sokolov, Hydrographical Board, St. Petersburg

My dear Pyotr Sergeyevich,

I hope this letter reaches you. I am writing it at the moment when our

voyage is nearing its end, and, I regret to say, I am finishing it in

solitude. I do not think anybody in the world could have coped with

what we have had to endure. All my companions have died one after the

341

other, and the reconnaissance party which I sent to Galchikha did not

return.

I am leaving Maria and your god-daughter in difficult straits. If I knew

that they were provided for I would not be greatly distressed at leaving

this world, because I feel that our country has no reason to be ashamed

of us. We were very unlucky, but we made up for it by returning to the

land we had discovered and studying it to the best of our ability.

My last thoughts are of my wife and child. I dearly hope that my

daughter makes a success of her life. Help them, as you helped me.

Dying, I think with deep gratitude of you and of the best years of my

youth when I worked under your guidance.

I embrace you. Ivan Tatarinov.

To: His Excellency, the Head of the Hydrographical Board, From: I. L.

Tatarinov, Chief of the St. Maria Expedition

Report

I herewith beg to bring to the notice of the Hydrographical Board the

following:

On March 16th, 1915, in observed latitude 79°08' 30" and longitude

89°55' 00" East of Greenwich, from the drifting ship St. Maria, in good

visibility and a clear sky, there was sighted east of the ship an unknown

large stretch of land with high mountains and glaciers. Signs indicating

the presence of land in this area had been observed prior to this: as early

as August, 1912, we had seen large flocks of geese flying from the North

in a N.N.-E-S.S.-E direction. At the beginning of April 1913 we had seen

a sharp-cut silvery strip of the N.E. horizon, and above it clouds of a

very queer shape, resembling distant mountains shrouded in mist.

The discovery of land stretching in a meridional direction gave us the

hope of abandoning ship at the first favourable opportunity in

order, on coming ashore, to follow the coastline in the direction of the

Taimyr Peninsula and beyond, as far as the first Siberian settlements at

the mouths of the rivers Khatanga and Yenisei as the case may be. By

now the direction of our drift was clear beyond doubt. Our ship was

drifting together with the ice on a general course North 7° by West.

Even in the event of this course changing to a more westerly one, that is,

parallel to the drift of Nansen's Fram, we should not get free of the ice

before the autumn of 1916, and our provisions would last only until the

summer of 1915.

After numerous difficulties irrelevant to this report we succeeded on

May 23, 1915, in stepping ashore on the newly discovered land in

latitude 81°09' and longitude 58°36'. This was an ice-covered island,

indicated by the letter A on the attached chart. It was not until five days

later that we succeeded in reaching the second, very large, island, one of

three or four comprising the newly discovered land. The astronomical

position finding made on a jutting cape of this island and marked by the

letter G, gave the co-ordinates 80°26' 30" and92°08'00".

Moving southward along the shores of this unknown land I explored

the coast between parallels 81 and 79. In its northern part the coast is a

low-lying stretch under an extensive icecap. Farther south it rises and

becomes free of ice. Here we found driftwood. At latitude 80° we found

342

a broad strait or bay extending from the point indicated by the letter S

in an E.S.-E. direction.

From the point marked by the letter F. the coastline turns sharply

S.S.-W. I intended to explore the southern shore of the newly discovered

land, but by that time it was decided that we proceed along the coast of

Khariton Laptev in the direction of the Yenisei.

In informing the Board of my discoveries I consider it necessary to

point out that the observation for longitude may not be quite reliable, as

the ship's chronometers, though carefully looked after, have not been

corrected for more than two years.

Ivan Tatarinov

Enclosed: 1. A certified copy of the St. Maria's log.

2. Copy of chronometric record.

3. Canvas-bound notebook with calculations and survey data.

4. Map of the surveyed land. June 18th, 1915, Camp on Island 4

in Russian Archipelago.

Dear Maria,

I'm afraid it's all up with us. I am not even sure that you will ever read

these lines. We cannot go any further, we freeze as we move or halt, and

cannot get warm even when we eat. My feet are very bad, especially the

right one, and I don't even know how and when it got frost-bitten. By

force of habit I write "we", though it is three days now since poor

Kolpakov died. I can't even bury him because of the blizzard. Four days

of blizzard has proved too much for us.

It will soon be my turn, but I am not the least afraid of death,

evidently because I have done all I could and more to stay alive.

I feel very guilty about you, and this thought is the most painful,

though there are others not much easier.

How much anxiety and sorrow you have suffered these years— and

now this, the greatest blow of all, on top of them. I don't want you to

consider yourself tied down for life. If you meet a man with whom you

feel you will be happy, remember that this is my wish. Tell Nina

Kapitonovna this. I embrace her and ask her to help you as much as she

can, especially with Katya.

We had a very hard voyage, but we stood up to it well and would

probably have coped with our task had we not been delayed by supply

problems and had not these supplies been so bad.

My darling Maria, how will you get along without me! And Katya,

Katya! I know who could help you, but in these last hours of my life I do

not want to name him. I didn't have a chance to tell him to his face

everything that had been rankling in my breast all these years. He

personified for me that force that kept me bound hand and foot, and it

makes me feel bitter to think of all I could have accomplished if I had

been-I would not say helped-but at least not hindered. What's done

cannot be undone. My one consolation is that through my labours

Russia has discovered and acquired large new territories. I cannot tear

myself away from this letter, from my last conversation with you, dear

Maria. Look after our daughter, don't let her grow up lazy. That is a trait

of mine. I was always lazy and too trustful.

343

Katya, my little daughter! Will you ever learn how much I thought

about you and how I wanted to have at least one more look at you before

I died?

But enough. My hands are cold, otherwise I would go on writing and

writing. I embrace you both.

Yours forever.

344

CHAPTER FIVE

THE LAST PAGE

Looking back on the winter of 1943-1944 at Polarnoye I see that it was

the happiest winter we had ever had together. This may seem strange

considering that nearly every other day I flew out to bomb German

ships. But it was one thing to fly on missions without knowing what had

become of Katya, and quite another, to know that she was at Polarnoye,

alive and well and that in a day or two I would see her pouring out tea at

table. A green silk lampshade to which Ivan Ivanovich had pinned the

little paper devils cut out of thick paper hung over his table, and

everything that Katya and I took delight in that memorable winter is

floodlit by that bright circle cast by the green shade, leaving all the fret

and worry hidden away outside in the dark corners.

I remember our evenings, when, after long, vain attempts to get in

touch with the doctor, I caught the first launch that came along and

went to Polarnoye, where friends gathered within that circle of light, no

matter how late the hour. Who thought of night when the day was night

too!

Never before had I talked, drunk and laughed so much. The feeling

that had come over me when I first saw Katya here seemed lodged in my

heart now for all time—and the whole world went hurtling along.

Whither? Who knows! I believed that it was towards happiness.

The three of us—the doctor, Katya and I—spent all our free time

studying and sorting the records of the St. Maria expedition.

I don't know which was the more difficult-developing the films or

reading the documents of the expedition. A film, as we know, is liable to

fade with the years, and that is why the makers usually indicate the date

limit after which they cannot guarantee full quality. For the St. Maria

films this date was February 1914. Moreover, the metal containers were

full of water and the films were soaked through and had evidently been

in that condition for years. The Navy's best photographers declared it to

be a hopeless case, and even if they (the photographers) were wizards

they would never be able to develop the film. I persuaded them to try.

As a result, out of hundred and twelve photographs, dried with infinite

precautions, about fifty were adjudged "worth further handling". After

repeated printings we succeeded in obtaining twenty-two clear pictures.

I had once succeeded in deciphering Navigator Klimov's diary, written

in a crabbed, illegible, sprawling hand and smeared with seal-oil. Still

they had been separate pages in two bound notebooks. Not so

Tatarinov's papers. Apart from his farewell letters, which were better

preserved, his papers were found in the form of a compact pulpy mass,

and transforming this into a chronometric record, a logbook, maps,

charts and survey data, was, of course, beyond my powers. This was

done in a special laboratory under expert supervision. No room will be

found in this book for a detailed account of what was found in the

canvas-bound notebook which Captain Tatarinov had listed among his

enclosures. I will only say that he managed to draw deductions from his

observations and that the formulas which he put forward enabled us to

345

calculate the speed and direction of the ice drift in any part of the Arctic

Ocean. This seems

almost incredible, considering the comparatively short drift of the St.

Maria which took place in areas which do not seem to offer any data for

such far-reaching deductions. But then the insight of genius does not

always need many facts to work upon.

"You have read the life of Captain Tatarinov," I had said to myself,

"but its last page has remained sealed."

"This is not the end yet," had been my answer. "Who knows, there

may come a time when I shall succeed in turning and reading that page

too."

That time had come. I had read it, and found it immortal.

CHAPTER SIX

THE HOME COMING

In the summer of 1944 I was granted leave, and Katya and I decided to

spend three weeks in Moscow and the fourth in Ensk, visiting the old

folk.

We arrived on July 17-a memorable date. It was the day the huge

column of German prisoners-of-war passed through Moscow.

We had light suitcases and so decided to make our way to the centre

of the city by Metro, but when we came out of the Metro station on

Leningradsky Prospekt we were unable to cross the road for a good two

hours. First we stood, then, getting tired, we sat down on our suitcases,

then stood up again. And still they came on. The clean-shaven generals

with sickly arrogant faces, among whom were some notorious torturers

and hangmen, must have been at Krimsky Bridge, miles away, but the

soldiers kept on coming and coming, shambling along—some in rags

and barefooted, others with their army coats thrown open.

I looked at them with curiosity. Like many other bomber pilots I had

never set eyes on the enemy all through the war, unless it was when I

dived on to a target-hardly a position from which you can see much. But

now I was "in luck"-fifty seven thousand six hundred of the enemy, in

ranks of twenty, passed before me in one lot, some of them gazing

wonderingly around them at Moscow, which looked its best that radiant

day, others staring down at their feet sullen-faced and indifferent.

Men from all walks of life, their every look and gesture were infinitely

alien to us.

I glanced at Katya. She was standing with her handbag pressed to her

bosom, deeply moved. Suddenly she kissed me tenderly.

"Was that your 'thank you'?" I asked.

"Yes," she answered gravely.

We had lots of money and so took one of the best suites in the hotel

Moskva, a sumptuous affair with mirrors, paintings and a grand piano.

At first we were a bit awe-struck, but then found that it was not so

very difficult to get accustomed to mirrors, carpets and a ceiling

decorated with flowers and cupids. We felt very good in those rooms,

which were spacious and wonderfully cosy.

346

Korablev, of course, came to see us the day we arrived, looking dapper

in an embroidered white shirt which, with his smartly twirled

moustache, gave him a resemblance to some great Russian painter—

exactly which one, Katya and I couldn't for the moment remember.

He had been in Moscow in the summer of 1942 when I had knocked at

that felt-covered door of his. He had been in Moscow and nearly went

mad when he came home and found my letter telling him that I was

going to Yaroslavl to look for Katya.

"How do you like that? To look for Katya, with whom I had gone

along to the police station only the day before, because they didn't want

to register her at the Sivtsev-Vrazhek flat!"

"Never mind, Ivan Pavlovich," I said. "All's well that ends well. I

wasn't very lucky that summer. As a matter of fact I'm glad that we've

met now, when everything is really well. I was black, gaunt, and half-

crazy, but now you see before you a normal, cheerful man. But tell me

about yourself. What are you doing? How are you getting on?"

Korablev was never good at talking about himself. But we did learn

from him many interesting things about the school in Sadovo-

Triumfalnaya, where events of such great moment in my and Katya's

lives had once taken place. With every year that passed after leaving

school, it receded from us farther and farther, and we had begun to find

it strange that we were once those ardent children to whom life had

seemed so bafflingly complicated. But for Korablev school had gone on.

Every day he had leisurely combed his moustache before the mirror,

picked up his stick, and gone off to give his lessons, and new boys had

passed under the searchlight beam of his grave, loving, attentive gaze.

Oh, that gaze of his! I was reminded of Grisha Faber, who had

declared that "the gaze is all-important" and that with a gaze like

Korablev's he would have "made a career in the theatre in no time".

"Where is he, Ivan Pavlovich?"

"Grisha's in the provinces," Korablev said. "In Saratov. I haven't seen

him for some time. I believe he's made good as an actor."

"He was good. I always liked his acting. He shouted a bit, but that

doesn't matter. His voice carried, though."

We ran through the whole list of classmates. It was both sad and

cheering to recall old friends, whom life had scattered throughout the

land. Tania Velichko was an architect building houses in Smolensk,

Shura Kochnev was an artillery colonel and had recently been

mentioned in dispatches. But there were many of whom Korablev knew

nothing either. Time seemed to have passed them by, leaving them in

our memories as boys and girls of seventeen.

So we sat, talking, and meanwhile Professor Valentin Zhukov had

phoned three times and had been given an earful for keeping us waiting,

though he pleaded in excuse some new experiment with his snakes or

fox cross-breeds.

At last he turned up, and stopped in the doorway with a thoughtful

air, finger on his nose, wondering, if you please, if he had come to the

wrong room.

"Come in, Professor, come on in," I said to him.

He ran towards me, laughing and behind him in the doorway

appeared a tall-, portly, fair-haired lady, whom we had once known, if I

am not mistaken, under the name of Kiren.

347

First of all I was interrogated, of course. It was a cross-examination,

with Valya on the right and Kiren on the left of me. Why, in what

manner and on what grounds had I broken into another person's flat,

gone through all the rooms, and on discovering that Katya was living at

Professor V. Zhukov's, had hit on the brilliant idea of leaving a note that

was utterly senseless, since it contained no mention of where I was to be

found and how long I would be in Moscow.

"That was her bed, you ass," Valya said. "And the dress on it was hers.

Christ, couldn't you have guessed that only a woman's hand could keep

my den so tidy?"

"That much I guessed all right."

Kiren burst out laughing, good-naturedly, I think, but Valya made big

eyes at me. Obviously, the ghost of the mysterious Zhenka Kolpakchi

with the variegated eyes still haunted that family hearth.

The women retired into the next room. Kiren was nursing her fourth

child, so I daresay they had plenty to talk about.

We started talking about the war. There were already numerous signs

that it would soon be over. Valya and Korablev listened to me with such

an expression as if it was I who would be called upon in the very near

future to report the capture of Berlin to the High Command. Valya

asked why they were not forcing the Vistula and was deeply pained to

hear me say I did not know. As for the North, to judge by the questions

he put to me, I was in command, not of a squadron, but of the whole

front.

Then Korablev began to speak about Captain Tatarinov, and lowering

my voice a little so that Katya should not hear, I told them some details

which had not been mentioned in the papers. Not far from the Captain's

tent, in a narrow cleft between the rocks, we found the graves of the

sailors. The bodies had been simply laid out on the ground and covered

with large stones. Bears and foxes had got at them and scattered the

bones-one skull was found three kilometres from the camp, in the next

hollow. Evidently the Captain had spent his last days in the same

sleeping bag with the cook Kolpakov, who had died before he did. The

letter to Mrs Tatarinova was first addressed "To my wife" and then

corrected "To my widow". A wedding ring was found on the Captain's

right hand with the initials M.T. on the inside.

I got out of my suitcase and showed them a gold locket in the shape of

a heart. On one side of it there was a miniature portrait of Maria

Vasilievna, and on the other a lock of black hair. Korablev went over to

the window, put on his glasses and examined the locket. He was so long

at it that Valya and I ultimately went over to him and putting our arms

round him from both sides led him back to his chair.

"Katya is the image of her!" he said with a sigh. "This December it will

be seventeen years. I can hardly believe it."

He asked me to call Katya in and told her that he had gone to the

cemetery in the spring, planted some flowers there and employed one of

the caretakers to paint the railing.

348

CHAPTER SEVEN

TWO CONVERSATIONS

I had two things to attend to in Moscow. One was my paper to -be

read before the Geographical Society on how we had found the St.

Maria expedition, the other, my talk with the examining magistrate

about Romashov. Oddly enough, these tasks were not unconnected, for

while I was still at N. Base I had sent to the Procurator's Office a

transcript of my talk with Romashov at his flat. I will begin with the

second.

The general waiting-room was a dimly lit hall divided in two by a

wooden barrier. Broad old-fashioned benches stood against the walls,

and a variety of people—old men, girls, servicemen without shoulder-

straps—were seated on them, waiting to be interrogated.

I found the office of my interrogating officer by the name on the door,

and as it was still early, I occupied myself with shifting the flags on the

map which hung in the waiting-room. It wasn't a bad map, but the flags

were far behind the present line of the front.

A familiar voice arrested my attention—a well-rounded, mellow,

pontifical voice, that instantly made me feel a poorly clad, grimy boy

with a big patch on his trousers. The voice said: "May I come in?"

Evidently, he was asked to wait, because, after opening the door,

Nikolai Antonich closed it again and set down on the bench with a

slightly hurt expression. I had last seen him in the Metro in the summer

of 1942, and he was the same as he was then—his manner lordly,

dignified, patronising.

Whistling, I moved the flags about on the Second Baltic Front.

Seventeen years had passed since the day I had said: "I'll find the

expedition and then we'll see who's right." Did he know that I had found

the expedition? Undoubtedly he did. But what he did not know-the

newspapers had not said a word about it-was that among Captain

Tatarinov's papers there had been found incontestable, irrefragable

evidence proving that I had been right.

He sat with Us head lowered, hands resting on his walking stick. Then

he glanced at me and an involuntary quick movement passed across his

large, pale face. "He's recognised me," I thought, exultant. He had

recognised me. He looked away.

He was considering at that moment what attitude to adopt towards

me. A problem indeed. Evidently, he had disposed of it to his

satisfaction, because he suddenly stood up and strode over to me,

touching his hat.

"Comrade Grigoriev, if I am not mistaken?"

"Yes."

I don't think I had ever had such difficulty in pronouncing that short

word. I, too, had my moment of hesitation in considering what my

manner towards him should be.

349

"You haven't been wasting your time, I see," he went on, glancing at

my medal ribbons. "Where do you come from now? On what front are

you defending us humble toilers of the rear?"

"The Far North."

"Are you in Moscow for long?"

"On leave, three weeks."

"And obliged to waste precious hours in this waiting-room? Ah, well,

it's our civic duty," he added. "I suppose you, too, have been summoned

here in connection with Romashov's case?"

"Yes."

He paused. Oh, how familiar were those deceptive, pregnant pauses of

his, and how, even as a boy, I had loathed them!

"That man is evil incarnate," he said at last. "I consider that society

should rid itself of him, the sooner the better."

Had I been an artist I could have admired this spectacle of smooth

hypocrisy. But being an ordinary layman, I felt like telling him that if

society had rid itself in time of Nikolai Antonich Tatarinov it would not

have had to mess about now with Romashov. But I said nothing.

So far not a word had been said about the St. Maria expedition, but I

knew my Nikolai Antonich—he had come up to me because he was

afraid of me.

"I've heard," he began tentatively, "that you have succeeded in

bringing your undertaking to a happy issue. I want to thank you from

the bottom of my heart for all that you have done. But I hope to do that

publicly."

This meant that he was coming to hear me read my paper and would

try to make out that we were lifelong friends, he and I. He was holding

out the olive branch. Very good. I must pretend that I am accepting it.

"Yes, I think I have been more or less successful." I said nothing more.

But a faint touch of colour had come into his pale, plump cheeks-a sign

of animation. The past was all forgotten, he was now an influential man,

why should I not keep on good terms with him? Probably I had changed

- after all, didn't life change people? I had become like him—I had

decorations, I had made a success, and he could judge of me from his

own experience, his own success.

"-An event, which at any other time, the whole world would have been

talking about," he continued, "and the remains of the national hero-for

such would have been the recognition my cousin merited-would have

been brought in state to the capital and interred amid a vast concourse

of people."

I said that Captain Tatarinov's remains rested on the shore of the

Yenisei Bay, and that he himself would probably not have wished for a

better resting place.

"Without a doubt. But I did not mean that, I meant the exclusiveness

of his destiny. The fact that oblivion had been dogging his steps all his

life, and but for us"-he said "us"-"there would hardly be a person in the

world who would have known who he was and what he had done for his

country and for science."

This was about the limit, and I was on the point of saying something

rude to him, when the door opened and a girl came out of the

interrogating officer's room and invited me in.

I had a feeling all the time that if the examiner had not been so young

and attractive, she (for it was a woman) would not have questioned me

350

in such a pointedly dry manner. But then, her interest stimulated as I

gave my story, she eventually dropped her official tone.

"Are you aware. Comrade Grigoriev," she began after I had told her

my age, occupation, whether I had ever stood trial before, and so on,

"what business I have summoned you on?" I answered that I was.

"You once made a deposition." Evidently she meant my interrogation

at N. Base. "Some things there are not quite clear, and I want to talk to

you first about this." "I'm at your service," I said. "Here, for example."

She read out several passages in which I had given my conversation

with Romashov at his flat word for word.

"Am I to understand that when Romashov wrote his statement

against you he was a tool in the hands of some other person?"

"That person has been named," I said. "It is Nikolai Antonich

Tatarinov, who is waiting outside to see you. As to who was the tool and

who the hands, I cannot say. That's your problem, not mine."

I lost my temper a bit, probably because she had politely referred to

Romashov's denunciation as a statement.

"Well then, it is not quite clear what purpose Professor Tatarinov

could have had in trying to stop the search party. He is an Arctic

scientist and you would expect any plan for the search of his lost cousin

to have his deepest sympathy."

I said that Professor Tatarinov could have pursued a number of ends.

First of all, he was afraid that a successful search for the remains of the

St. Maria expedition would confirm my accusations. Then, he was no

Arctic scientist, but simply a type of pseudo-scientist who had built his

career on the books dealing with the story of the St. Maria expedition.

Therefore, any competition in this field affected his vital interests.

"Did you have serious reasons for hoping that a search would confirm

your accusations?"

I answered that I did. But that no longer came into question, as I had

found the remains of the expedition, and among them direct proofs

which I intended to make public.

It was after this reply that my interrogator quickly climbed down from

her official perch.

"Found the proofs?" she queried with genuine astonishment. "After so

many years? Twenty, or even more, I believe?"

"Twenty-nine."

"What could have been preserved after twenty-nine years?"

"A good deal," I said.

"Did you find the Captain too?"

"Yes."

"Alive?"

"Of course not. We know exactly when he died-it was between the

18th and 22nd of June, 1915."

"Tell me about it."

I couldn't tell her everything, of course. But Professor Tatarinov

waited long to be received, and no doubt had plenty of time to think

things over and talk things over with himself before taking my place at

the desk of this handsome, inquisitive woman.

I told her of things indictable and things non-indictable because of

the offence having been committed so long ago. An old story! But old

stories live long, much longer than appears at first sight.

351

She listened to my story, and though still an interrogator, she was

now an interrogator who, together with me, read the letters which had

been carried into our yard with the spring freshet, who together with me

had copied out passages from polar exploration reports, and together

with me had flown teachers, doctors and party functionaries out to

remote Nenets areas. Navigator Klimov's diaries had already been

perused and the old boat-hook found-the final touch, as I had then

believed, completing the picture of evidence. Then I came to the war and

fell silent, because everything we had lived through rose before me in a

boundless panorama, in the depths of which there just glimmered that

idea which had stirred me so strongly all my life. It was hard to explain

this to an outsider, but I explained it.

"Captain Tatarinov appreciated what the Northern Sea Route meant

for Russia," I said. "And it's no mere accident that the Germans tried to

cut it off. I was a soldier when I flew to the place where the St. Maria

expedition had perished, and I found it because I was a soldier."

CHAPTER EIGHT

MY PAPER

Everybody came to hear my paper, even Kiren's mother.

Unfortunately, I do not remember the exact words of the little speech of

welcome, with quotations from the classics, with which she greeted me.

The speech was a bit longish, and it amused me to see the look of

resignation and despair on Valya's face as he listened to it.

I seated Korablev in the front row, directly facing the speaker's desk—

1 was accustomed to looking at him when I made speeches.

"Well, Sanya," he said gaily, "I'll hold my hand like this, palm

downward, and you keep an eye on it when you speak. When I start

drumming my fingers, it means you are getting excited. If I don't you're

not."

"Ivan Pavlovich, you're a dear."

I wasn't in the least excited, though I did feel a bit nervous, wondering

whether Nikolai Antonich would come or not.

He did. After hanging up my maps I turned round and saw him in the

front row, not far from Korablev. He sat with his legs crossed, looking

straight in front of him with an immobile expression. I thought he had

changed these last few days-his face had a hangdog sort of look, with

sagging jowls and a thin, wrinkled neck showing high above the collar. It

was very pleasant, of course, when the chairman, an old, distinguished

geographer, before calling on me to speak, himself said a few words

about me. I even regretted that he had such a quiet voice. He said that it

was to my "talented tenacity" that Soviet Arctic science owed one of the

most interesting pages-and I took no exception to this either, especially

as the audience applauded, loudest of all Kiren's mother.

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I ought not, perhaps, have made such a long preamble dealing with

the history of the Northern Sea Route, even though it was an interesting

history.

I spoke about this rather lamely, often halting and forgetting the

simplest words, and generally humming and hawing, as Kiren said

afterwards.

But when I came to our own times and gave a general outline of the

military significance of the North, I caught a glimpse of Katya far down

the dark isle. She had been indisposed-having caught a cold—and had

promised to stay indoors. But what a good thing, how splendid it was

that she had come! It cheered me up immensely and I began to speak

with greater confidence and assurance.

"It may seem strange to you," I said, "that in a time of war I should be

talking to you about an old expedition, which ended nearly thirty years

ago. It's now history. But we have not forgotten our history, and perhaps

our main strength lies in the fact that war has not negated or arrested a

single one of the great ideas which have transformed our country. The

conquest of the North by the Soviet people is one such idea."

I hesitated for a moment, as I wished to speak of how Ledkov and I had

surveyed the Arctic region, but this was remote from the subject, so I

switched over, none too skilfully, to the Captain's life story.

I spoke about him with an indescribable feeling. As if it were I, not he,

who had been that boy, the son of a poor fisherman, born on the shores

of the Sea of Azov. As if it were I, not he, who had sailed before the mast

in oil-tankers plying between Batum and Novorossiisk. As if it were I,

not he, who had passed his examination for sub-lieutenant and had then

served in the Hydrographical Board, suffering the slighting arrogance of

the aristocratic officers with proud indifference. As if it were I, not he,

who had made notes in the margins of Nansen's books and by whose

hand was written down that brilliant idea: "The ice itself will solve the

problem." As if his was not a story of ultimate defeat and obscure death,

but, on the contrary, of victory and joy. The story of friends, enemies,

and love was repeated, but life was different now, and it was friends and

love, not enemies, who had won the day.

As I spoke I experienced a mounting sense of exhilaration verging

on inspiration. It was as though I were looking at a distant screen and

had sighted beneath the open sky a dead schooner buried in snow. But

was she dead? No, there was a sound of hammering: skylights were

being boarded up and ceilings covered with tarred felt in preparation for

wintering.

Naval men standing in the aisle made way for Katya as she passed

to her seat, and I thought it was only right that they should make way

respectfully for the daughter of Captain Tatarinov. Besides, she was the

best one there, especially in that simple tailored suit. She was the best,

and she, too, in a manner of speaking, had a share in that fervour and

exhilaration with which I spoke about the voyage of the St. Maria.

But it was time I passed on to the scientific aspects of the drift, and I

prefaced it with the statement that the facts established by Captain

Tatarinov's expedition had lost none of their significance today. Thus,

from a study of the drift, Professor V., the well-known Arctic scientist,

deduced the existence of an unknown island between the 78th and 80th

parallels, and this island was actually discovered in 1935 just where V.

had figured it should be. The constant drift-current shown by Nansen

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was confirmed by the voyage of Captain Tatarinov, whose formulae of

the comparative movement of ice and wind were a notable contribution

to Russian science.

A stir of interest ran through the hall when I began to relate how we

had developed the expedition's photographic films, which had lain in

the earth for nearly thirty years.

The light went out, and on the screen appeared a tall man in a fur cap

and fur boots strapped under the knees. He stood with head doggedly

bent, leaning on his rifle, and at his feet lay a dead bear, its paws folded

like a kitten's. It was as though he had stepped into that hall—a strong

intrepid soul, who had been content with so little! Everyone stood up

when he appeared on the screen, and the hush that fell upon the hall

was so deep and solemn that not a soul dared breathe, let alone utter a

word. And in this solemn silence I read out the Captain's report and his

letter of farewell:

" 'It makes me feel bitter to think of all I could have accomplished if I

had been-I would not say helped-but at least not hindered. What's done

cannot be undone. My one consolation is that through my labours

Russia has discovered and acquired large new territories...'

"But there is a passage in this letter," I continued when everybody had

sat down, "to which I want to draw your attention. Here it is:

'I know who could help you, but in these last hours of my life I do not

want to name him. I didn't have a chance to tell him to his face

everything that had been rankling in my breast all these years. He

personified for me all that force that kept me bound hand and foot...'

Who is that man whose name the Captain did not want to utter at his

dying hour? It was to him that he referred in another letter: 'It can

positively be said that we owe all our misfortunes to him alone.' It was

of him that he wrote: 'We were taking a chance, we knew that we were

running a risk, but we did not expect such a blow.' It was of him that he

wrote: 'Our main misfortune was the mistake for which we are now

having to pay every hour, every minute of the day-the mistake I made in

entrusting the fitting out of our expedition to Nikolai...'"

Nikolai! But there are many Nikolais in the world!

There were even no few in this auditorium, but only one of them

suddenly stiffened and looked round him when I uttered that name in a

loud voice; and the stick on which he was leaning dropped with a clatter.

Someone picked it up and gave it to him.

"If today I am going to give the full name of that man it is not because

I wish to clinch an old argument between him and me. Life itself has

settled that argument long ago. But he continues to claim in his articles

that he has always been Captain Tatarinov's benefactor, and that even

the idea itself of 'following in the steps of Nordenskjold', as he writes,

was his. He is so sure of himself that he had the audacity to come here

today and is now in this hall."

A whisper ran through the hall, then there was a hush, followed by

more whispering. The chairman rang his little bell.

"Strangely enough, he has gone through life without ever having had

his name spelled out in full. But among the Captain's farewell letters we

found some business papers. There was one, which the Captain

evidently never parted with. It was a duplicate of a bond under which:

(1) On the expedition's return to the mainland all the spoils of their

hunting and fishing belonged to Nikolai Antonich Tatarinov - named in

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full. (2) The Captain renounced in advance any claims whatever to any

remuneration. (3) In the event of the loss of the vessel the Captain

forfeited all his property to Nikolai Antonich Tatarinov-named in full.

(4) The ship itself and the insurance belonged to Nikolai Antonich

Tatarinov-named in full.

"Once, in conversation with me, this man said that he recognised only

one witness-the Captain himself. Let him deny those words now before

all of us here, because the Captain himself now names him—in full!"

Pandemonium broke loose in the hall the moment I finished my

speech. People in the front row stood up and those behind shouted at

them to sit down, because they could not see him. He was standing,

holding up his hand with the stick in it, and shouting: "I ask for the

floor, I ask for the floor!"

He got the floor, but the audience would not let him speak. Never in

my life had I heard such a furious uproar as that which broke out the

moment he opened his mouth. Nevertheless he did say something,

though nobody caught what it was, and then, thumping the floor with

his stick, he stepped down from the platform and made for the exit. He

passed down the hall in an utter emptiness, and the space through

which he passed remained empty for a long time, as if nobody wanted to

go where he had just passed, thumping his stick.

CHAPTER NINE

AND THE LAST

The carriage in this train was going only as far as Ensk, and that

meant that all these people in the crowded, dimly lit carriage, who

occupied every inch of free space, including the floor and the upper

berths, would be getting out at Ensk. In the old days this would nearly

have doubled its population.

We made the acquaintance of our travelling companions. They were

girl students from Moscow colleges, who said they were going to Ensk to

work.

"What sort of work?"

"We don't know yet. In the mines."

Not counting the old tunnel in Cathedral Gardens, which Pyotr had

once assured me ran under the river with "skeletons at every step", I had

never heard of anything like a mine there. But the girls were quite

definite about their going to the mines.

After two or three hours, as usual, each compartment settled down to

a life of its own, unlike that of its neighbours, as though the ceiling-high

wooden partition divided not so much the carriage as people's thoughts

and feelings. Some compartments were gay and noisy, others dull. Ours

was gay because the girls, after mildly lamenting the fact that they had

not succeeded in staying in Moscow for their summer field work and

saying something catty about a certain Masha who had succeeded in

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doing so, started to sing and all the evening Katya and I were regaled

with modern war songs, some of which were very amusing. In fact, the

girls sang all the way to Ensk, even in the night-for some reason they

decided to go without sleep. The thirty-four-hour journey passed

quickly enough as we dozed on and off to the sound of these young

voices, singing songs now sad, now gay.

The train used to arrive early in the morning, but now it arrived

towards the evening, so that when we got out, the little station struck

me, in the dusk, as being nice and cosy in an old-fashioned sort of way.

But the Ensk of former days stopped where the broad avenue of lime

trees leading to the station ended. Coming out onto the boulevard, we

saw in the distance a dark mass of buildings over which sped glowing

clouds lit up from below. This, for Ensk, was such a strange townscape

that I found myself saying to the girls that there must be a fire

somewhere across the river, and they believed me because I had been

boasting during the journey that I was a native of Ensk and knew every

stone in the place. As it turned out, it wasn't a fire, but an ordnance

factory which had been built at Ensk during the war.

I had seen the striking changes that had taken place in some of our

towns during the war—those at M—v, for instance—but I had not known

those towns as a child. Now, as Katya and I walked quickly down the

darkening Zastennaya and Gogolevsky streets it seemed to me that these

streets, which used to stretch lazily along the ramparts, now ran hastily

upwards to join the ceaseless glowing motion of the clouds over the

factory buildings. This was our first (and true) impression-that of war-

geared town. To me, of course, it was still my old, native Ensk, but now I

met it as one does an old friend, when one looks at the altered yet

familiar features, and laughs with affection and emotion, at a loss for

words.

We had written to Pyotr from the Arctic that we would be visiting the

old folks and he counted on being able to arrange his long-promised

leave for the same time.

No one met us at the station, though I had wired from Moscow, and we

decided that Pyotr had not arrived. But the first person we ran into at

the lion-guarded entrance to the Marcouse house was none other than

Pyotr. I recognised him at once for all that he had been transformed

from an absent-minded, wool-gathering old thing with a permanent

question-mark expression into a bronzed dashing officer. "Ah, here they

are!" he said as though he had found us at last after a long search.

We embraced, then he strode over to Katya and took her hands in his.

They had their Leningrad in common, and as they stood there gripping

hands, even I was far away from them, though there was probably not a

person in the world nearer to them than I was.

Aunt Dasha was asleep when we burst into her room and must have

thought she was dreaming. She raised herself on her elbow and

regarded us with a pensive air. We started laughing and that brought

her down to earth.

"Good heavens, Sanya!" she said. "And Katya! And the old'un is away

again!"

The "old 'un" was the judge, and "away again" referred to that visit of

ours five years ago when the judge had been out on circuit somewhere in

the district.

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I hardly need describe how Aunt Dasha fussed and bustled round us,

how she grieved that the pie had to be made with dark flour and on

some "outlandish lard". In the end we had to make her sit down while

Katya took charge of the household and Pyotr and I volunteered to help

her, and Aunt Dasha shrieked with horror when Pyotr dumped some

food concentrates into the dough—"for flavour", as he put it-and I all

but popped in some washing soda instead of salt. Oddly enough, the

pastry rose well, and though Aunt Dasha tasted a piece and announced

"not rich enough", the pie was not at all bad as a wartime product.

After dinner Aunt Dasha demanded that we tell her everything,

beginning from the day and hour when we had parted from her at the

Ensk railway station five years before. I persuaded her, however, that

such a detailed report ought to be put off until the judge came home.

Instead, we made Pyotr tell us about himself.

I listened to his story with emotion. I had known him for over twenty-

five years, and he did not strike me at all as being now a different person

as Katya had described him to me. The "artistic vision" that had always

intrigued me in Pyotr and which distinguished him from the ordinary

run of men, had now deepened, if anything.

He showed us his albums—for the last year Pyotr had been serving as

a scenic artist with a frontline theatre. Here were sketches of military

life, often hastily dashed off. But the moral fibre of our people, which

everyone knows who has spent even a few days in the army, was caught

in them with remarkable fidelity.

I had often stopped before unforgettable scenes of war, regretting that

they vanished without a trace as one gave place to another. Now I was

seeing them in bare outline, but none the less faithfully and brilliantly

reproduced.

"There," Pyotr said with a good-natured smile when I had

congratulated him, "and the judge says they're no good. Not heroic

enough. My son draws too," he added, pushing out his lower lip, as he

always did when pleased. "He's not bad, he has a gift, I think."

Katya got Nina Kapitonovna's letters out of the suitcase-the old lady

was still living near Novosibirsk with little Pyotr-and Aunt Dasha, who

had always been interested in Grandma, demanded that some of them

be read out aloud.

Grandma was still living on her own after her quarrel with the Farm

Manager, despite the fact that he had offered her apologies and asked

her to come back. She had "thanked him and declined, as I had never

been taught to sue for a favour", as she wrote. Having had the

satisfaction of declining this invitation, she astonished the whole district

by suddenly taking on a job in the local Recreation Hall.

"I am teaching dress-making," she wrote briefly, "and I congratulate

you and Sanya. I sized him up long ago, when he was a little fellow. I fed

him buckwheat porridge to make him grow. He's a fine boy. Don't you

bully him, you've got a nasty temper."

This was in answer to our letter telling her that we had found each

other.

"I didn't sleep all night for thinking of poor Maria," she wrote on

receiving the news that the remains of the expedition had been found. "I

thought it was for the best, her not knowing the terrible fate your father

suffered."

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Little Pyotr was quite well, and had grown a lot, to judge by his

photograph. He resembled his mother more than ever. We thought of

her and sat in silence for a long time, reliving as it were, the anguish of

that senseless death. As far back as the spring Katya had taken steps to

get a pass for Grandma and the boy to come to Moscow, and there was a

hope that we should see them on our way back.

Our old idea, Katya's and mine, of all of us settling down in Leningrad

as one family was repeated that evening more than once. A single

family—with Grandma and the two Pyotrs. Pyotr Senior looked rather

confused when, speaking of the flat which we had already received in

imagination-and not just anywhere but in Kirovsky Prospekt-we

assigned to him a studio in a quiet part of the flat where nobody would

be in his way. I knew of one woman he did not mind being in his way, a

woman of whom Katya spoke with enthusiasm. But that evening of

course, nobody said a word about her.

The house was still asleep when the judge returned. He gave such a

fierce growl when Aunt Dasha made to wake us that we had to pretend

being asleep for another half hour. Just like five years ago, we heard him

snorting and grunting in the kitchen as he washed and splashed about.

Katya fell asleep again, but I dressed quietly and went into the

kitchen, where he was drinking tea, sitting barefooted, in a clean shirt,

his head and moustache still wet from washing.

"I woke you up after all," he said, stepping up to me and hugging me.

Whenever I turned to my hometown and my old home he always met

me with that stern: "Well, let's hear all about it!" The old man wanted to

know what I had been doing and whether I had been living right during

the years since we last met. Regarding me sternly from' under his tufted

eyebrows, he interrogated me like the real judge he was, and I knew that

nowhere in the world would I receive a fairer sentence. But on this

occasion, for the first time in my life, the judge demanded no account

from me.

"Four, I see?" he said, eyeing my decorations with a pleased look.

"Yes."

"And a fifth for Captain Tatarinov," he went on gravely. "It's hard to

word it, but you'll get it."

It really was hard to word it, but apparently the old man had decided

to tackle that in earnest, because the same evening, when we again met

round the table, he delivered a speech in which he attempted to sum up

what I had done. "Life goes on," he said. "You have come back to your

hometown as grown-up, mature people, and you say you have difficulty

in recognising it, it has changed so much. It has not merely changed, it

has matured, the way you have matured and discovered within

yourselves the strength to fight and win. But other thoughts, too, come

to my mind when I look at you, dear Sanya. You have found Captain

Tatarinov's expedition. Dreams come true, very often truth is stranger

than fiction. It is to you that his farewell letters are addressed-to the

man who would carry on his great work. And it is you that I see standing

by right at his side, because captains such as he and you advance

mankind and science."

And he raised his glass and drained it to my health.

We sat round the table until late into the night. Then Aunt Dasha

announced that it was time to go to bed, but we did not agree and went

out instead for a walk by the river.

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The fiery-black clouds were still chasing each other over the factory.

We went down to the river and walked to the Gap, beside which a thin,

dark boy in a baggy trousers had once caught blue crabs with meat bait.

Time seemed to have stood still, waiting patiently for me on this bank,

between the two ancient towers at the confluence of the Peshchinka and

the Tikhaya-and here I was back again, and we looked into each other's

face. What lay ahead for me? What new trials, new labours, new dreams,

happiness or unhappiness? Who knows. But I did not lower my eyes

under that incorruptible gaze.

It was time to go back. Katya felt cold. We walked along the quayside,

which was cluttered with timber, and made our way home.

The town was quiet and somehow mysterious. We walked along in

silence, our arms round each other. I recollected our flight from Ensk.

The town had been just as dark and quiet, and we so small, unhappy and

brave, facing the unknown, frightening life that lay ahead of us.

My eyes were wet, but I did not wipe away those tears of joy. I was not

ashamed of them.

EPILOGUE

A lovely scene unfolds from this high cliff, at the foot of which wild

Arctic poppies thrust up their slender stems between the rocks. By the

shore one can still see the mirror-like water, and farther out, open lanes

amid the lilac-tinted icefields running out into the mysterious distance.

Here the Arctic air seems extraordinarily limpid. Silence and vast open

spaces. Only a hawk sometimes comes flying over the solitary grave.

The ice-floes drift past it, jostling and circling, some slowly, others

faster, assuming fantastic shapes.

There, sailing along, appears the head of a giant in a silver gleaming

helmet. One can make out everything-the green shaggy beard trailing in

the sea, the flattened nose and the narrowed eyes under grey, bushy

brows.

And here comes a house of ice from which the water rolls off with a

tinkle of innumerable little bells. And following it, great festive boards

covered with clean tablecloths.

They keep coming and coming without end!

Ships putting in at the Yenisei Bay can see this grave from afar. They

pass it with flags at half-mast and their guns fire a salute whose echo

rolls on and on.

The grave-stone is white, and it gleams dazzlingly in the beams of the

Arctic's midnight sun.

At the height of a man these words are carved upon it:

"Here rests the body of Captain I. L. Tatarinov, who made one of the

most daring voyages and perished in June 1915 on his way back from

Severnaya Zemlya, which he had discovered.

"To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield!"

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