Two Captains (11 page)

"N. A. Tatarinov," I read it out suddenly.

Gosh! Tatarinov, Nikolai Antonich. Our Head. This was his flat.

We spent the summer at Silver Woods, just outside Moscow, in an old deserted house which had lots of little passage steps, carved wooden ceilings and corridors that unexpectedly ended in blank walls. The whole place creaked-the doors in one key, the shutters in another. One large room was boarded up, but even in there something creaked and rustled, and suddenly there would come a measured rattling sound like that of a little hammer in a striking clock tapping without striking the bell. In the attic grew puffballs and foreign books lay scattered about with pages torn out of them and covers missing.

Before the Revolution the house had belonged to an old gypsy countess.

A gypsy countess! How mysterious! It was rumoured that before she died she had hidden away her valuables. Romashka searched for the treasure all through the summer. Puny, big-headed, he prowled around the house with a stick, tapping and listening. He tapped at night until he got a clip on the ear from one of the older boys. At thirteen he was determined to get rich.

Whenever he spoke about money his pale ears would begin to burn. He was a born treasure-seeker-superstitious and greedy.

Lilac grew thickly round the tumbledown arbours. Statues lined the green paths. They were quite unlike those Greek gods. Those had been remote, with white sightless eyes, whereas these were people, just like us.

Life was good only at the beginning of the summer, when we first moved into Silver Woods. Afterwards things got worse. They all but stopped feeding us. Our children's home was put under a system of "self-supply". We caught fish and crabs, we sold lilac at the stadium when anything was on there, and simply helped ourselves to anything we could lay hands on. In the evenings we lit fires in the garden and roasted what we had bagged.

Here is a description of one such evening-they were all much alike.

We are sitting around our fire, tired out, hungry and ill-tempered.

Everything is black with smoke-the mess-tin, the sticks from which it hangs, our faces and hands. Like cannibals getting ready to devour Captain Cook, we sit in silence, staring into the fire. The smouldering brands suddenly blaze up and fall apart, and a cap of curling, dark-red smoke, hangs over the fire.

We are a "commune". The whole children's home is divided into communes.

Foraging on one's own is a hard job. Each commune has its chairman, its own fire and its own reserve supply-whatever has not been eaten that day and is left over for the next.

Our chairman is Stepka Ivanov, a fifteen-year-old boy with a smooth mug. He is a greedy-guts and bully whom everyone fears.

"What about a game o' knuckles?" Stepka says lazily.

All are silent. No one cares to play knuckles. Stepka is sated, that's why he wants to play.

"All right, Stepka. Only it's dark, you know," says Romashka.

"Know where it's dark? Get up!"

There was nothing our chairman liked more in the world than to play knucklebones. But he cheated and everyone knew it. All except Valya and I sucked up to him, especially Romashka. Romashka even lost to him on purpose so's to keep in with him.

If you think we were roasting some dainty gamebird over our fire you are mistaken. In our mess-tin, seized in battle from the kitchen, we were cooking soup. It is real "soup made from sausage stick", as in the fairy-tale which Serafima Petrovna had read to us during the winter. The difference, if any, is that while that soup had been made from a mouse's tail, ours had any odd thing put into that came to hand, sometimes even frogs' legs.

And yet it wasn't a bad summer. It had stuck in my memory not because we were poorly fed. I was used to that. I don't remember ever having had a decent meal those days. The reason I remember this summer was quite a different one. It was then for the first time that I gained a sense of self-respect.

It happened at the end of August, shortly before we went back to town, and around one of those fires on which we were cooking our supper. Stepka all of a sudden announced a new procedure for eating. Up to now we had eaten from the one pot in turn, spoon by spoon. Stepka started, as chairman, then Romashka, and so on. But now we were to tuck in all together while the soup was still hot, the quickest getting the most.

Nobody liked the new arrangement. No wonder! With a chairman like ours no one stood a chance. He could wolf down the whole pot in no time.

"Nothing doing," Valya said with decision.

This was greeted with a hubbub of approval. Stepka slowly got up, dusted his knees and hit Valya in the face. It was a smashing blow that sent the blood gushing over his face. It must have got into his eyes too, because he started to wave his arms about like a blind man. "Well," Stepka drawled,

"anyone else asking for it?"

I was the smallest boy in the commune, and he could have mopped up the floor with me, of course. Nevertheless I hit out at Stepka. All at once he staggered and slumped down. I don't know where I had struck him, but he sat on the ground blinking, wearing a sort of thoughtful expression. The next minute he was up and made a rush at me, but now the other boys took my part.

Stepka was thrashed like the cur he was. While he lay by the fire, howling, we hastily elected another chairman-me. Stepka, of course, did not vote. In any case he would have been in a minority of one, because I was elected unanimously.

Oddly enough, this scrap was my first act of social service. I heard the boys say of me: "He's got plenty of guts." I had guts! Now, what sort of person was I? Here was food for thought indeed.

Nothing changed in our school life that year except that I had now become a pupil of Form 3. As usual, Korablev turned up at school at 10 a.m.

He would arrive in a long autumn overcoat and a wide-brimmed hat, leisurely comb his moustache in front of the looking-glass and go in to his classroom.

He asked no questions and set no homework. He simply related something or read to us. It turned out that he had been a traveller and had been all over the world. In India he had seen yogi conjurors who had been buried in the ground for a year and then got up as alive and well as anything. In China he had eaten the tastiest of Chinese dishes-rotten eggs. In Persia he had witnessed the sacrificial feats of the Mohammedans.

It was not until several years later that I learned he had never been outside Russia. He had made it all up, but how interestingly! Although, for some reason many had said that he was a fool, none could maintain that he knew nothing.

As before, the chief figure at our school was the Head, Nikolai Antonich. He made all decisions, went into everything, attended all meetings. The senior boys visited him at home to "thrash things out". One day I was lounging about the assembly hall, trying to make up my mind whether to go down to the Moskva River or to Sparrow Hills, when the doors of the teachers' room opened and Nikolai Antonich beckoned to me.

"Grigoriev," he said (he had a reputation for knowing everyone in the school by name). "You know where I live, don't you?"

I said that I did.

"And do you know what a lactometer is?"

I said that I didn't.

"It's an instrument which tells you how much water there is in the milk. As we know," he went on, raising a finger, "the women who sell milk on the market dilute their milk with water. If you put the lactometer in such milk you will see how much milk there is and how much water. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Well, go and fetch it to me."

He wrote a note.

"Mind you don't break it. It's made of glass."

I was to give the note to Nina Kapitonovna. I had no idea that this was the name of the old lady from Ensk. But instead of the old lady, the door was opened by a spare little woman in a black dress.

"What do you want, boy?"

"Nikolai Antonich sent me."

The woman, of course, was Katya's mother and the old lady's daughter.

All three had the same purposeful noses, the same dark, lively eyes. But the granddaughter and her grandmother were brighter looking. The daughter had a drooping careworn expression.

"Lactometer?" she said in a puzzled tone, after she had read the note.

"Ah, yes!"

She went into the kitchen and returned with the lactometer in her hand.

I was disappointed. It was just like a thermometer, only a little bigger.

"Be careful you don't break it."

"Me break it?" I replied with scom.

I remember distinctly that the daring idea of testing the lactometer for snow salt struck me a minute or two after Katya's mother had shut the door behind me.

I had just reached the bottom of the stairs and stood there gripping the instrument with my hand in my pocket. Pyotr had once said that snow had salt in it. Would the lactometer show that salt or was Pyotr fibbing? That was the question. It needed testing.

I chose a quiet spot behind a shed, next to a refuse dump. A little house was built of bricks in the trodden-down snow, from which a black thread, resting on pegs, ran round the back of the shed- the children had probably been playing a field telephone. I breathed on the lactometer and with a beating heart stuck it into the snow next to the little house. You can judge what a stupid head I was when I tell you that, after a while, I pulled the lactometer out of the snow and finding no change in it, I stuck it back again upside down.

Nearby, I heard someone gasp. I turned round.

"Run! You'll be blown up!" came a shout from inside the shed. . It all happened in a matter of seconds. A girl in an unbuttoned overcoat rushed out of the shed towards me. "Katya," I thought, and reached for the instrument.

But Katya grasped my arm and dragged me away. I tried to push her off and we both fell in the snow. Bang! Pieces of brick flew through the air, and powdery snow rose behind us in a white cloud and settled on us.

I had been under fire once before, at my mother's funeral, but this was much more terrifying. Rumblings and explosions still came from the refuse dump, and each time I lifted my head Katya quivered and said, "Smashing, eh?"

At last I sprang to my feet.

"The lactometer!" I yelled and ran like mad towards the dust-heap.

"Where is it?"

At the spot where I had stuck it in the snow there was a deep hole.

"It's exploded!"

Katya was still sitting in the snow. Her face was pale and her eyes shone.

"Silly ass, it was firedamp that exploded," she said scornfully. "And now you'd better run for it, because the policeman will soon pop-and he'll nab you. He won't catch me though."

"The lactometer!" I repeated in despair, feeling that my lips were beginning to quiver and my face twitch. "Nikolai Antonich sent me for it. I put it in the snow. Where is it?"

Katya got up. There was a frost in the yard and she was without a hat, her dark hair parted in the middle and one plait stuffed in hef mouth. I wasn't looking at her at the time and didn't remember this until afterwards.

"I've saved your life," she said with a little sniff. "You'd have been killed on the spot, hit right in the back. You owe your life to me. What were you doing here around my firedamp anyway?"

I did not answer. I was choking with fury.

"I would have you know, though," she added solemnly, "that even if it had been a cat coming near the gas I should have saved it just the same.

Makes no difference to me."

I walked out of the yard in silence. But where was I to go? I couldn't go back to the school-that much was clear.

Katya caught up with me at the gate.

"Hey, you, Nikolai Antonich!" she shouted. "Where are you off to? Going to snitch?"

I went for her. Did I enjoy it! I paid her back for everything-for the ruined lactometer, for the tip-tilted nose, for my not being able to go back to school and for her having saved my life when nobody asked her to.

She gave as good as she got, though. Stepping back, she planted a blow in my stomach. I grabbed her by the plait and poked her nose into the snow.

She leapt to her feet.

"That wasn't fair, your backheeling," she said briskly. "If it wasn't for that I'd have laid into you good and proper. I thrash all the boys in our form. What form are you in? Wasn't it you who helped Grandma to carry her bag? You're in the third form, aren't you?"

"Yes," I said drearily.

She looked at me.

"Fancy making all that fuss over a silly thermometer," she said contemptuously. "If you like I'll say it was me who did it. I don't care.

Wait a minute."

She ran off and was back in a few minutes wearing a small hat and looking quite different, sort of impressive, and with ribbons in her plaits.

"I told Grandma you'd been here. She's sleeping. She asked why you didn't come in. It's a good thing that lactometer is broken, she says. It was such a nuisance, having to stick it into the milk every time. It didn't show right anyway. It's Nikolai Antonich's idea, but Grandma can always tell whether the milk's good or not by tasting it."

The nearer we got to the school the more pronounced became Katya's gravity of manner. She walked up the stairs, head thrown back, eyes narrowed, with an aloof air.

Nikolai Antonich was in the teachers' room where I had left him.

"Don't say anything, I'll tell him myself," I muttered to Katya.

She gave a contemptuous sniff, one of her plaits arching out from under her hat.

It was this conversation that started off the string of riddles of which I shall write in the next chapter.

The thing was that Nikolai Antonich, that suave Nikolai Antonich with his grand air of patronage, whom we were accustomed to regard as lord and master of School 4-vanished the moment Katya crossed the threshold. In his place was a new Nikolai Antonich, one who smiled unnaturally when he spoke, leaned across the table, opening his eyes wide and raising his eyebrows as though Katya were speaking of God knows what extraordinary things. Was he afraid of her, I wondered?