Two Captains (3 page)

Not knowing what to do, I bent over him, then ran to the sentry-box-that was when I saw it was empty-and back again to the watchman.

I couldn't even shout, not only because I was a mute at the time, but from sheer terror. Now voices could be heard from the bank, and I rushed back to the place where I had been fishing for crabs. Never again in my life did I run so fast; my heart hammered wildly and I could scarcely breathe. I had no time to cover up the crabs with grass and I lost half of them by the time I got home. But who cared about crabs then!

With a thumping heart I opened the door noiselessly. In the single room of our home it was dark, all were fast asleep and no one had seen me go and come. In a moment I was lying in my old place beside my father, but I could not fall asleep for a long time. Before my eyes was the moonlit bridge and on it the two long running shadows.

CHAPTER TWO FATHER

Two vexations awaited me the next morning. For one thing, Mother had found the crabs and cooked them. There went my twenty kopeks and with them the hope of new hooks and spoonbait for catching pike. Secondly, I had lost my penknife. It was Father's knife, really, but as the blade was broken he had given it to me. I searched for it everywhere, inside the house and in the yard, but it seemed to have vanished into thin air.

The search kept me occupied till twelve o'clock when I had to go down to the wharf with Father's lunch. This was my duty, and very proud of it I was.

The men were still at work when I arrived. One wheelbarrow had got stuck between the planks and all traffic between the ship's side and the bank was stopped. The men behind were sliouting and swearing, and two men were leaning their weight on a crowbar, trying to lift the barrow back into the wheel-track. Father passed round them in his leisurely way. He bent over and said something to them. That is how I have remembered him-a big man with a round, moustached face, broad-shouldered, lifting the heavily-laden wheelbarrow with ease. I was never to see him like that again.

He kept looking at me as he ate, as much as to say, "What's wrong, Sanya?" when a stout police-officer and three policemen appeared at the waterside. One of them shouted "Gaffer! "-that was what they called the ganger-and said something to him. The ganger gasped and crossed himself, and they all came towards us.

"Are you Ivan Grigoriev?" the officer asked, slipping his sword round behind him.

"Yes."

"Take him!" the police-officer cried, reddening. "He's arrested."

Voices were raised in astonishment. Father stood up, and all fell silent.

"What for?" "None o' your lip! Grab him!"

The policemen went up to Father and laid hold of him. Father shook his shoulder, and they fell back, one of them drawing his sword.

"What is this, sir?" Father said. "Why are you arresting me? I'm not just anybody, everyone here knows me."

"Oh no they don't, my lad," the officer answered. "You're a criminal.

Grab him!"

Again the policemen stepped towards Father. "Don't wave that herring about, you fool," Father said quietly through clenched teeth to the one who had drawn his sword. "I'm a family man, sir," he said, addressing the officer. "I've been working on this wharf for twenty years. What have I done? You tell 'em all, so's they know what I'm being taken for. Otherwise people will really think I am a criminal."

"Playing the saint, eh?" the officer shouted. "Don't I know your kind!

Come along!"

The policemen seemed to be hesitating. "Well?"

"Wait a minute, sir, I'll go myself," Father said. "Sanya," he bent down to me, "run along to your mother and tell her-Oh, you can't, of course, you're..."

He wanted to say that I was dumb, but checked himself. He never uttered that word, as though he hoped that one day I'd start speaking. He looked around in silence.

"I'll go with him, Ivan," said the ganger. "Don't worry." "Yes, do, Uncle Misha. And another thing..." Father got three rubles out of his pocket and handed them to the ganger. "Give them to her. Well, goodbye." They answered him in chorus.

He patted me on the head, saying: "Don't cry, Sanya." I didn't even know I was crying.

Even now I shudder at the memory of how Mother took on when she heard that Father had been arrested. She did not cry, but as soon as the ganger had gone, she sat down on the bed, and clenching her teeth, banged her head violently against the wall. My sister and I started howling, but she did not as much as glance at us. She kept beating her head against the wall, muttering something to herself. Then she got up, put on her shawl and went out.

Aunt Dasha managed the house for us all that day. We slept, or rather, my sister slept while I lay with open eyes, thinking, first about my father, how he had said goodbye to them all, then about the fat

police-officer, then about his little boy in a sailor suit whom I had seen in the Governor's garden, then about the three-wheeler this boy had been riding (if only I had one like that!) and finally about nothing at all until mother came back. She looked dark and haggard, and Aunt Dasha ran up to her.

I don't know why, but it suddenly occurred to me that the policemen had hacked Father to pieces, and for several minutes I lay without stirring, beside myself with grief, hearing nothing. Then I realised that I was wrong: he was alive, but they wouldn't let Mother see him. Three times she repeated that they had arrested him for murder-the watchman had been killed in the night on the pontoon bridge-before I grasped that the night was last night, and the watchman was that very watchman, and the pontoon bridge was that very same bridge on which he had lain with outstretched arms. I jumped up, rushed to my mother and cried out. She took me in her arms. She must have thought I had taken fright. But I was already "speaking"...

If only I had been able to speak then!

I wanted to tell her everything, absolutely everything-how I had stolen away to the Sands to catch crabs and how the dark man with the walking stick had appeared in the gap in the ramparts and how he had sworn and ground his teeth and then spat in the fire and gone off. No easy thing for a boy of eight who could barely utter two or three inarticulate words.

"The children are upset too," Aunt Dasha said with a sigh when I had stopped, thinking I had made myself clear, and looked at Mother.

"It isn't that. He wants to tell me something. Is there something you know, Sanya?"

Oh, if only I could speak! I started again, describing what I had seen.

Mother understood me better than anyone else, but this time I saw with despair that she did not understand a word. How could she? How far removed from that scene on the pontoon bridge were the attempts of that thin, dark little boy to describe it, as he flung himself about the room, clad in nothing but his shirt. At one moment he threw himself upon the bed to show how soundly his father had slept that night, the next he jumped on to a chair and raised tightly clenched fists over a puzzled-looking Aunt Dasha.

After a while she made the sign of the cross over me. "The boys must have been beating him."

I shook my head vigorously.

"He's telling how they arrested his father," said Mother. "How the policeman threatened him. Isn't that right, Sanya?"

I started to cry, my face buried in her lap. She carried me to the bed and I lay there for a long time, listening to them talking and thinking how to communicate to them my amazing secret.

CHAPTER THREE THE PETITION

I am sure that in the long run I would have managed it somehow, if Mother hadn't taken ill the next morning. She had always seemed a bit queer to me, but I had never seen her so queer before.

Previously, when she would suddenly start standing at the window for hours on end, or jumping up in the middle of the night and sitting at the table in her nightdress until the morning. Father would take her back to the home village for a few days, and she would come back recovered. But Father wasn't there any more, and, besides, it was doubtful whether the trip would have helped her now.

She stood in the passage, bareheaded and barefooted, and did not even turn her head when somebody came into the house. She was silent all the time, except when she uttered two or three words in a distracted manner.

What's more, she seemed to be afraid of me, somehow. When I started to

"speak", she stopped up her ears with a tortured expression. She passed a hand over her eyes and forehead as if trying to recollect something. She was so queer that even Aunt Dasha crossed herself furtively when Mother, in answer to her pleadings, turned and fixed her with a dreadful stare.

It must have been a fortnight before she came round. She still had fits of absent-mindedness, but little by little she began to talk, go outside into the yard and work. Ever more often now the word "petition" was on her lips. The first to utter it was old Skovorodnikov, then Aunt Dasha picked it up, and after her the whole yard. A petition must be lodged!

That day Mother went out and took us with her-me and my sister. We were going to the "Chambers" to hand in a petition. The "Chambers" were a dark building behind tall iron railings in Market Square.

My sister and I waited for a long time, sitting on an iron seat in the dimly lit high-ceilinged corridor. Messengers hurried to and fro with papers, doors slammed. Then Mother came back, seized my sister's hand, and we all started off at a run. The room we went into was barriered off, and I couldn't see the person to whom Mother was speaking and bowing humbly. But I heard a cold indifferent voice, and this voice, to my horror, was saying something which I alone in all the world could disprove.

"Ivan Grigoriev..." I heard the rustle of pages being turned over.

"Article 1454 of the Criminal Code. Premeditated murder. What do you want, my dear woman?"

"Your Honour," my mother said in a tense unfamiliar voice, "he's not guilty. He never killed anyone."

"The court will go into that."

I had been standing all the time on tiptoes, my head thrown back so far that it bade fair to drop off, but all I could see across the barrier was a hand with long dry fingers, in which a pair of spectacles was being slowly dangled.

"Your Honour," Mother said again, "I want to hand in a petition to the court. Our whole yard has signed it."

"You may lodge a petition on payment of one ruble stamp duty."

"It's been paid. It wasn't his knife they found, Your Honour."

Knife? Had I heard aright?

"On that point we have the evidence of the accused himself."

"Maybe it was a week since he lost it."

Looking up, I could see Mother's lips trembling.

"Someone would have picked it up, my dear woman. Anyway, the court will go into that."

I heard nothing more. At that moment it dawned on me why my father had been arrested. It wasn't he, it was me who had lost that knife-an old clasp-knife with a wooden handle. The knife I had searched for the morning after the murder. The knife which could have dropped out of my pocket when I bent over the watchman on the pontoon bridge. The knife on whose handle Pyotr Sko-vorodnikov had burned out my name with a magnifying glass.

Looking back on it now I begin to realise that the officials who sat behind high barriers in dimly-lit halls would not have believed my story anyway. But at the time! The more I thought about it the heavier it weighed on my mind. It was my fault, then, that they had arrested Father. It was my fault that we were now going hungry. It was my fault that Mother had had to sell the new cloth coat for which she had been saving a whole year, my fault that she had had to go to the "Chambers" and speak in such an unfamiliar voice and bow so humbly to that unseen person with the long, horrible, dry fingers in which there slowly dangled a pair of spectacles.

Never before had I felt my dumbness so strongly.

CHAPTER FOUR THE VILLAGE

The last of the rafts had passed down the river. The lights in the rafters' drifting huts were no longer visible at night when I woke up. There was emptiness on the river, emptiness in the yard and emptiness in the house.

Mother did washing in the hospital. She left the house first thing in the morning while we were still asleep, and I went to the Skovorodnikovs and listened to the old man swearing to himself.

Grey and unkempt, in steel-rimmed glasses, he sat on a low leather-covered stool in the little dark kitchen, stitching boots. When he was not stitching boots he was making nets or carving figures of birds and horses out of aspen wood. He had brought this trade with him from the Volga, where he had been born.

He was fond of me, probably because I was the only person he could talk to without being answered back. He cursed doctors, officials, tradesmen, and, with especial virulence, priests.

"If a man be dying, dare he murmur against it? The priests say no. But I say yes! What is murmuring?"

I didn't know what murmuring meant.

"Murmuring is discontent. And what is discontent? It's wanting more than's been allotted to you. The priests say you mustn't. Why?"

I didn't know why.

"Because 'dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return'. To the earth, that is."

He gave a bitter laugh.

"And what does the earth need? No more than is allotted to it."

So it was autumn now, and even the crabs, which had lately become a staple item in our domestic fare, had hidden themselves away in their holes and refused to be enticed out by my frogs. We were going hungry, and Mother finally decided to send me and my sister to the village.

I had never been in the country, but I knew that my father had a farm there. A farm! How disappointed I was on discovering that this was simply a cottage with a household plot, a little, overgrown vegetable garden in the middle of which stood a few aged apple trees.