Two Captains (22 page)

Like a flash of lightning in a forest that suddenly illumines everything around and transforms the dark scene so that you can even make out the leaves on a tree which a moment before had worn the shape of a beast or a giant, the whole thing dawned on me as I read these lines. Even trivial details which I never thought I could remember came back to me.

I understood Nikolai Antonich's hypocritical speeches about his "poor cousin". I understood that false solemnity of expression he wore when speaking about his cousin, the pucker between his brows deepening as though you, too, were partly to blame for what had happened. The full depth of the man's baseness, the show he made of being proud of his own nobility, were brought home to me. He had not been named in the letter, but that it was he who was meant I did not have the slightest doubt.

My throat went dry through excitement and I was talking to myself so loudly that Aunt Dasha was seriously alarmed. "Sanya, what's the matter with you?"

"Nothing, Aunt Dasha. Where do you keep the rest of these old letters?"

"They're all there."

"That can't be! Don't you remember reading me this letter once? It was a long one, on eight sheets."

"I don't remember, dear."

I found nothing more in the packet-only these three sheets out of the eight. But they were enough!

I changed the "come at four" in Katya's letter to "come at three", then to "come at two". But as it was already two o'clock I changed it back to three.

"DO NOT TRUST THA T MAN"

I had been to Cathedral Gardens a thousand times as a boy, but it had never struck me then as being such a beautiful place. It stood high on a hill overlooking the confluence of two rivers-the Pes-chinka and the Tikhaya, and was surrounded by the old ramparts. These were in an excellent state of preservation, but the towers seemed to have shrunk since Pyotr and I had last met there to take the "blood-oath of friendship".

At last they came-Katya and Sanya. I saw Sanya, wrapped in an old-womanish, yellow sheepskin coat, wave her hand around as much as to say,

"this is Cathedral Gardens", and immediately take her leave with a mysterious nod of the head. "Katya!"Icried. She started, saw me and laughed.

We spent half an hour scolding each other: I her for not having told me she was going away, and she me, for not having waited for her letter before coming. Then we both recollected that we had not spoken to each other about the most important thing of all. It appeared that Nikolai Antonich had had a talk with Katya. "In the name of my poor cousin" he had forbidden her to see me. He had delivered a long speech and wept.

"Believe me or not, Sanya," Katya said gravely, "but I saw it with my own eyes, honestly!"

"Well, well," I said and placed my hand on my chest.

There, in my breast pocket, wrapped in a piece of lint which I had got from Aunt Dasha, lay Captain Tatarinov's letter.

"Listen, Katya," I began on a firm note, "I want to tell you a story.

It's like this. Imagine that you're living on the bank of a river and one fine day a postman's bag turns up on this bank. It hasn't dropped from the skies, of course, it's been washed up by the water. The postman drowned. And his bag falls into the hands of a woman who's very fond of reading. And this woman has a boy of eight among her neighbours who's very fond of listening.

So one day she reads him a letter which begins 'Dear Maria Vasilievna'."

Katya looked up at me, startled.

" 'I hasten to inform you that Ivan Lvovich is alive and well," I went on quickly. "Four months ago, on his orders...' " :.

I recited the letter of the navigating officer in a single breath. I did not stop once, though Katya clutched my sleeve several times in horror and amazement.

"Did you see this letter?" she asked, her face white. "He was writing about Father?" she asked again, as though there could be any doubt about it.

"Yes. But that's not all."

And I told her how Aunt Dasha had one day come upon another letter describing life aboard an icebound ship which was slowly drifting north.

" 'My darling, my own dear, sweet Maria,' " I began reciting from memory, then stopped.

A cold shiver ran up my spine and a choking sensation gripped my throat as I suddenly saw before me, as in a dream, the bleak, prematurely aged face of Maria Vasilievna, her brows puckered in gloom. She had been about the same age as Katya was now when he wrote her that letter, and Katya was a little girl always waiting for "a letter from Daddy". That letter had come at last!

"Here it is," I said, drawing it from my breast pocket wrapped up in the piece of lint. "Sit down and read it. I'll go away and come back when you've finished."

Needless to say, I didn't go anywhere. I stood under the tower of St.

Martin and watched Katya all the time while she was reading. I felt very sorry for her and warm inside whenever I thought about her, but cold when I thought how dreadful it must be for her to read those letters. I saw her push her hair back with an unconscious gesture when it got into her eyes, then stand up as if trying to make out some difficult word. I wasn't sure till then whether it was a joy or sorrow to get a letter like that. But looking at her now, I realised what grief, what terrible grief it was. I realised that she had never given up hope. Thirteen years ago her father had disappeared in the icy wastes of the Arctic, a thing that could only mean death from cold and starvation. But for her he had died only that day!

When I went back to her, Katya's eyes were red and she was sitting on the garden seat with her hands in her lap, holding the letters.

"Not feeling cold?" I asked, at a loss for words.

"I haven't been able to make out some words... Here: 'I beg of

you...

"Ah, that! It reads: 'I beg of you, do not trust that man.' "

Katya called on us that evening, but we did not speak about the old letters-we had agreed on that beforehand. Katya was very sad. Everyone was nice to her, especially Sanya, who had become attached to her immediately as only girls know how. Afterwards Sanya and I saw her home.

The old folks were still up when we got back. The judge, somewhat belatedly, was scolding Aunt Dasha for not having delivered that mail-"at least those letters where the address could be made out"- and could find only one extenuating circumstance: that it had happened ten years ago. Aunt Dasha was talking about Katya. My fate, she thought, was decided.

"I think she's very nice," she said, sighing. "Beautiful and sad.

Healthy girl."

I asked Sanya for the map of the Soviet North and showed her the route which Captain Tatarinov was to have taken from Leningrad to Vladivostok.

Only then did I remind myself of his discovery. What land could that be lying north of the Taimyr Peninsula? "Why, that must be Severnaya Zemlya!"

Sanya said. What the devil! It was Severnaya Zemlya (Northern Land) discovered in 1913 by Lieutenant Vilkitsky. Latitude 79°35,' between 86 and 87 longitude. Very strange!

"Hold on!" I said, and must have gone a bit pale, because Aunt Dasha looked at me anxiously. "I've got it! First it was a silvery strip running out from the very horizon. On April 3rd the strip became an opaque patch.

April 3rd!"

"Sanya," Aunt Dasha began in alarm.

"Hold on! April 3rd. Now Vilkitsky discovered Severnaya Zemlya in the autumn, I don't remember when, but it was in the autumn, some time in September or October. In the autumn, six months later! That's to say he discovered nothing at all, dammit, because it had already been discovered."

"Sanya!" It was the judge speaking now.

"Discovered and named after Maria Vasilievna," I went on, pressing my finger hard on Severnaya Zemlya as though afraid there might be some other mistake about it. "Named after Maria Vasilievna. Maria Land, or something like that. Now sit down and I'll explain it all to you."

Talk about sleep after a day like that! I drank water and studied the map. The dining-room was hung with pictures of the town, and I studied them, too, for a long time without realising that they were Sanya's paintings and that she was studying painting and dreamt of going to the Academy of Arts. I looked at the map again. I recollected that the name Severnaya Zemlya had been given to these islands only recently and that Vilkitsky had named them Nicholas II Land.

Poor Captain Tatarinov! He had been surprisingly, extraordinarily unlucky. There was not a single mention of him in any geography book and nobody in the world knew what he had done.

I felt a cold shiver of pity and rapture, and went to bed, as it had gone five and from outside in the street came the sounds of a sweeping broom. But I couldn't fall asleep. Disjointed phrases from the Captain's letter haunted me, and I could hear Aunt Dasha's voice reading the letter and see her peering over her spectacles, sighing and faltering. I recollected a scene, which had once presented itself to my imagination-a scene of white tents in the snow, huskies harnessed to sledges, a giant of a man in fur boots and a tall fur cap-and I wished that this had all happened to me, that I had been on board that ship which was slowly moving to her doom with the drifting ice and that I had been the Captain who wrote that farewell letter to his wife, and could not finish it. "I have named it after you, so now you will find on every map a heartfelt greeting from your..."

I wondered how that sentence ended? Then something slowly passed through my head, very slowly, almost reluctantly, and I sat' up in bed, half incredulous, feeling that in another minute I would go mad. Go mad remembering this: "greeting from your Mongotimo Hawk's Claw, as you used to call me. God, how long ago that was! I am not complaining , though..."

"I am not complaining, though," I repeated, muttering, fumbling and groping among my memories for some missing word. "I am not complaining. We shall see each other again and all will be well. But one thought, one thought torments me!"

I jumped up, switched on the light and rushed over to the table on which lay the pencils and maps.

"It's galling to think," I was now writing on one of the maps, "that everything could have turned out differently. Misfortunes dogged us, but 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? Was it Nikolai? Yes, it was!

I paused at this point; beyond it there was a sort of gap in my memory, and after that there had come something-I remembered that now quite clearly-something about a sailor named Skachkov, who had fallen into a crevasse and been crushed to death. But this was not the thing. This was the general context of the letter, not the actual text, of which I could recall nothing more, except a few disconnected words.

I got no sleep at all. The judge was up at eight and got a fright when he saw me sitting in my underwear over a map of the North, from which I had managed to read all the details of the ill-fated voyage of the St. Maria-details which would have astonished Captain Tatarinov himself had he returned.

We had arranged the previous evening to go to the town's museum. Sanya was keen on showing us this museum, which was the pride of Ensk. It was housed in an old mansion, once the residence of a rich merchant. On the second floor was an exhibition of paintings by Sanya's teacher, the artist Tuva, and she took us to see these first of all. The artist was there in person-a genial little man in a velvet blouse a la Tolstoy and with a mop of black hair in which gleamed thick grey strands. His paintings were not bad, though rather monotonous-all Ensk and Ensk. Ensk by day and by night, in moonlight and sunlight, the old town and the new town. We praised them fulsomely, though-this Tuva was such a nice man and Sanya gazed at him with such adoration.

She must have guessed that Katya and I wanted to have a talk, because she suddenly excused herself and stayed behind on some trifling pretext, while we went downstairs into a large hall in which stood knights in chain-mail, which stuck out from under their breastplates like a shirt under a man's waistcoat.

Naturally, I was all eagerness to tell Katya about my nocturnal discoveries. She saved me the trouble of starting the conversation by starting it herself.

"Sanya," she said, when we stopped in front of a Stephen Bathori man-at-arms, who somehow reminded me of Korablev. "I've been thinking about who he meant in that phrase: 'Don't trust that man.' "

"Well?"

"I've come to the conclusion that it ... it's not him."

We were silent. She stared fixedly at the man-at-arms.

"But it was about him," I retorted grimly. "By the way, your father dicovered Severnaya Zemlya. It was he, and not Vilkitsky at all. I've established the fact."

This news, which a few years later was to create a sensation among all the world's geographers, produced no effect whatever on Katya.

"What makes you think," she went on, speaking with an effort, "that it's he ... Nikolai Antonich? The letter doesn't say so, does it?"

"Oh, yes it does," I said, feeling that I was beginning to lose my temper. "For one thing, take those dogs. Who had boasted a thousand times that he had bought excellent dogs for the expedition? Secondly-"

"Secondly what?"

"Secondly, last night I recollected another passage from that letter.

Here it is."

And I recited the passage which began with the words: "Mongotimo Hawk's Claw." I recited it loudly and distinctly, like poetry, and Katya listened to it wide-eyed, grave as a statue. Suddenly her eyes went cold and I thought that she didn't believe me.

"Don't you believe me?"