Two Captains (29 page)

I saw Sanya every Sunday and I must say-strange though it may sound coming from a brother-that I came to like her more and more.

She had just entered the Academy of Arts and had found a job with a children's publishing house. She knew all about our doings, Pyotr's and mine, and kept the old folks informed about us. She worked a lot at the Academy too, and although she lacked Pyotr's vivid talent she painted extremely well. She was fond of doing miniatures, an art that is nowadays almost completely neglected by our painters, and the fastidious care with which she executed all the minute details of faces and dress was simply remarkable. As in childhood, she liked to talk, and when provoked or carried away she would talk so fast and end up in such a rush that her listeners would be dazed. In short, she was a wonderful sister, and now she was getting married.

Of course, it is not hard to guess whom she was marrying, though of all the young men who gathered that evening at the studio of the photographer-artist Berenstein where she rented a room, Pyotr looked the least like a bridegroom. He sat unperturbed and silent beside a sharp-nosed boy, who was talking at him earnestly.

Altogether, it was an odd wedding. All the evening the guests argued about a cow-whether it was right for the artist Filippov to be painting a cow for the last two and a half years. He was said to have divided it into little squares and was painting each square separately. No one took any notice of the newlyweds. Sanya was kept very busy. There were not enough plates to go round and the guests had to be fed in two shifts. She sat down only for a moment, flushed and tired, in her new dress trimmed with lace, which somehow reminded me of Ensk and Aunt Dasha.

"Someone sends you regards," she said to me. "Guess who."

I guessed at once, but answered calmly:

"I don't know."

"Katya."

"Really? Thanks."

Sanya looked at me critically. Her face even paled slightly with annoyance. She realised, of course, that I was pretending.

"You like to fancy yourself a Childe Harold! Now don't you dare tell me a lie on my wedding-day. I'll write to her and say you kept asking me for this letter all day and I wouldn't give it to you."

"I'm not asking you for anything."

"In your heart you are," Sanya said with conviction. "Outwardly you're pretending you don't care. I can let you have it if you like, only you mustn't read the last page. You won't, will you?"

She thrust the letter into my hand and ran away. I read the letter, of course, the last page three times, seeing that it was about me. Katya did not send her regards to me at all, she just inquired how I was getting on and when I was graduating. To look at, it was just an ordinary letter, but really a very sad one. It had this passage in it, for instance: "It is now four o'clock and already dark here, and suddenly I fell asleep and when I woke up I couldn't make out what had happened to make me feel so good. It was because I had dreamt of Ensk and of my aunts getting me dressed for the journey."

I reread this passage several times, and recalled that memorable day, the day of our departure from Ensk. I remembered the old ladies, her aunts, shouting their last-minute admonitions as the train moved out, and how later I had moved into Katya's carriage and we had started to go through our baskets to see what the old folks had put in them. The little unshaven man who shared our compartment was trying to guess what we were, and Katya stood beside me in the corridor and I had looked at her, standing there, and talked to her. How hard it was to believe, now that she was so far away, that all this really happened...

I was angry with Katya, because I had wanted to say goodbye to her before leaving Moscow and had written to her, but she had not answered and had not come to meet me, though she knew I was going away for a long time and that perhaps we should never see each other again. I did not write to her any more, of course. No doubt Nikolai Antonich had succeeded in convincing her that I had slandered him "with the most dreadful slander which the human imagination is capable of, and that I was "a guttersnipe of impure blood" who had caused the death of her mother.

Ah, well, the future was still ours! The memory of that scene made me groan inwardly.

What could I do in Leningrad, working at the factory from eight till five and then at the flying school from five till midnight?

In the winter, before flight training began, we studied in the reading-room of the Aviation Museum. One day I asked the Custodian whether he knew anything about Captain Tatarinov and whether there were any books in the library about him or perhaps his own book Causes of the Failure of the Greely Expedition.

I don't know why, but the Custodian showed a great interest in the question.

"Captain Tatarinov?" he queried in surprise. "Oho! Why does that interest you?"

To answer that question I should have had to tell him everything you have read in this book. So I answered briefly:

"Oh, I just like reading about voyages of exploration." "Very little, if anything, is known about this voyage," said the Custodian. "Come along, let's go into the library."

Without him, of course, I would never have found anything, as it was all in the form of newspaper articles. There was only one book, or rather a booklet of some twenty-five pages entitled Woman at Sea. The Captain, I discovered, had not only written about the Greely Expedition,

The booklet went out to prove that a woman could become a sailor and quoted instances from the life of the fisherfolk on the shores of the Sea of Azov, when women in dangerous situations had behaved as well as men and even shown themselves braver. The Captain wrote that he visualised a time when ships would carry "women engineers, women navigators and women captains".

As I read this booklet I recollected the Captain's notes on Nansen's voyage and his report concerning the 1911 expedition to the North Pole, and it struck me for the first time that he was not only a brave sailor, but a broadminded man of extraordinarily keen intellect.

The writers of some of the articles evidently thought otherwise. In the Peterburgskaya Gazeta, for instance, one journalist came out against the expedition on the grounds that the Council of Ministers had "turned down Captain Tatarinov's request for the necessary funds". Another newspaper carried an interesting photograph-a beautiful white ship which reminded me of the caravels in The Century of Discovery. It was the schooner St. Maria.

She looked slim and graceful, too slim and graceful to make the voyage from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok along the shores of Siberia.

The next issue of the same newspaper carried a still more interesting photograph-the crew of the schooner. True, it was very difficult to make anything out on this photograph, but the arrangement of the group with the Captain seated in the middle, arms folded over his chest, struck me as very familiar. Where had I seen that photograph? Of course-at the Tatarinovs, among a lot of other photos, which Katya had once shown me. I continued thinking back. No, it was not at the Tatarinovs! It was at Doctor Ivan Ivano-vich's -that's where I had seen it! And suddenly a very simple idea occurred to me. At the same time, however, it was an extraordinary one, which only Doctor Ivan Ivanovich could confirm. There and then I decided to write to him. It was about seven years since he had left Moscow, but I was quite certain that he was alive and well.

A month passed, then a second and a third. We had finished our theoretical studies and moved out to the Corps Airfield.

It was a Big Day at the airfield-September 25th, 1930. We still remember it by that name. It began as usual: 7 a.m. found us sitting by our

"crates". At nine o'clock the instructor arrived and things began to happen.

For one thing, he had brought with him an imposing-looking man in a Russian blouse and gold-rimmed spectacles. This we soon discovered to be the secretary of the District Party Committee. Secondly... But this "secondly"

needs going into greater

detail.

We made several flights that day with the instructor, and he kept studying me all the time, and, contrary to custom, he did not swear at me.

"Well," he said at last. "Now fly solo."

I must have looked excited, because he regarded me for a moment with a searching, kindly look. He checked the instruments to see whether they were working properly, and fastened the straps in the first, now empty, cockpit.

"A routine round flight. Take off, start climbing. Don't turn until you're a hundred and fifty metres off the ground. Bank, then come in to land."

With a feeling as though it were not I but someone else doing it, I taxied to the end of the runway and raised my hand for permission to take off. The flight-controller waved his white flag for me to go. I opened the throttle and sent the machine down the airfield.

I had long forgotten that childish sense of disappointment I had experienced when, on the first taking to the air, I realised what flying meant. In those days I had always imagined that I would fly like a bird, whereas here I was sitting in an armchair just as if I were on the grornd. 1

sat in the armchair and I had no time to think either of the earth or the sky. It was not until my tenth or eleventh solo flight that I noticed that the earth below me was patterned like a map and that we lived in a very precise geometrical world. I liked the shadows of the clouds scattered here and there on the ground, and altogether it dawned on me that the world was very beautiful.

And so this was my first solo flight. The instructor's cockpit is empty. The first turn. The cockpit is empty and the machine becomes airborne. A second turn. I am flying quite alone, with a wonderful sensation of complete freedom. A third turn. Time to land now. Fourth turn. Attention!

I cut off the engine. The ground gets closer and closer. There it is, right under the machine. The landing run. The touch-down. It must have been a decent performance, seeing that even our grumpy instructor nodded approval, while Misha Golomb, behind his back, gave me the thumbs-up sign.

"Sanya, you're a topnotcher," he said, when we sat down on a grassy bank to have a smoke. "Honest, you are. By the way, there's a letter for you. I was at the Aviation Museum today and the doorman said: 'One for Grigoriev. Maybe you'll give it to him?'"

And he held out a letter to me. It was from Doctor Ivan Ivanovich.

"Dear Sanya, I am very glad to hear you are well. I am looking forward to welcoming you with your plane, as we have to use dogs here all the time for travelling. Now about the photograph. It was given to me by the navigating officer of the St. Maria, Ivan Klimov. He was brought to Archangel in 1914 with frostbitten feet and died in the hospital from blood-poisoning. He left a couple of notebooks and some letters-quite a lot of them, round about twenty, I believe. This, of course, was the mail, which he had brought with him from the ship, though he may have written some of the letters himself during his journey-he was picked up somewhere by Lieutenant Sedov's expedition. When he died the hospital posted these letters to their respective addresses, but the notebooks and photographs remained with me. As you are acquainted with Captain Tatarinov's family and are determined 'to present a correct picture of his life and death', you will naturally be interested to know about these notebooks. They are ordinary school copybooks and the writing in them, done in pencil, is unfortunately quite illegible. I tried several times to read them, but had to give it up. This is about all I know. This happened at the end of 1914

when the war had just started and nobody was interested in Captain Tatarinov's expedition. These notebooks and photographs are still in my possession and you can read them if you have the patience when you come, or rather fly out here. My address is: 24 Kirov Street, Zapolarie, Arctic Circle.

"I expect more letters from my interesting patient. Your doctor, I.

Pavlov."

Just as I had thought! That photo had been left by the navigating officer. The doctor has seen the man with his own eyes. The very same man who had written: "I remain your obedient servant, I. Klimov, Navigating Officer." The very same man who had fascinated me for life with the glamorous words "latitude", "schooner", "expedition", "the From" and the extraordinary politeness of his "I hasten to inform you" and "I hope to see you soon".

I decided that as soon as I left school I would go to Zapolarie and read his notebooks. The doctor had given it up, but he wouldn't have done so if he had had the hope of finding in them as much as a single word to prove that he had been right, if somebody had spat in his face, if Katya had thought that he had killed her mother...

Youth does not end in a single day; you do not mark that day off in the calendar: "Today my youth has ended." It passes imperceptibly, and it is gone before you know it.

From Leningrad they sent me to Balashov. After graduating from the flying school I started studying at another-this time under a real instructor and on a real machine.

I do not recall any period in my life when I worked so diligently.

"Do you know how you fly?" our School Superintendent had said to me back in Leningrad. "Like an old tub. For the North you have to be first rate."

I learnt night-flying, when you get into the dark the moment you take off, and while you are climbing you feel all the time as if you are making your way gropingly through a dark corridor. I learnt to fly blind, when everything around you is wrapped in a white mist and you seem to be flying through millions of years into a different geological epoch; as if you are being borne on and on in a Time-Machine instead of an aeroplane.