Two Captains (49 page)

"Quite right, an old story," the naval man suddenly said in a loud voice and I woke up with a sigh of relief. It was all nonsense, of course.

In a day or two we would both be leaving for the North, and there he stood before me, my own Sanya, clever, tired, dear Sanya, whom I loved and from whom I would now never be parted again.

"But the N.S.R.A. is not interested in history. Dammit, they ought to read the Large Soviet Encyclopedia! By the way, it gives an interesting quotation from Mendeleyev. Listen, I copied it out. A splendid quotation!"

And burring his r's in a childlike manner, he read out the famous words of Mendeleyev, which I had first come across somewhere among my father's papers: "If only a tenth of what we lost at Tsushima had been spent on reaching the Pole, our squadron would probably have got to Vladivostok without passing through either the North Sea or Tsushima."

Sitting curled up in the armchair, pretending to be asleep, lazily examining through half-lowered eyelids our unexpected nocturnal visitor with his ardent manner, his childlike burring speech and that amusing Cossack's forelock of his, I was glad that my dream had been only a dream, that the whole thing was just nonsense which you could dismiss from your mind...

May 29, 1936. A nurse had been found at last for Pyotr junior, a very good nurse with references, stout, clean, with forty years' experience-"a regular professor of a nurse", as the delighted Berens-teins informed me.

She arrived, followed by the yardman dragging in a large old-fashioned trunk, from which the nurse promptly extracted a pinafore and cap and an ancient photograph dimly portraying the nurse's parents and herself as a seven-year-old wearing a petrified expression.

June 2, 1936. I shall remember that night as long as I live-the last night before our departure. In the evening I had run over to see the baby.

He had just had his bath and was sleeping, and the nurse, in cap and splendid white pinafore, was sitting on her trunk and knitting.

"I've nursed Counts in my day," she said proudly in answer to my last-minute requests and admonitions.

A chill struck my heart at the thought of all the silly things such a learned nurse was capable of, but the sight of the little boy reassured me.

He lay there so clean and white, and the whole place was spick and span.

Pyotr and the Berensteins were going to see us off at the station.

Sanya was asleep when I got back. Some money was lying about on the carpet; I picked it up and began to read Sanya's long list of things which had to be attended to the next day.

Though it was already night, the room was light, Sanya had forgotten to draw the curtains. I took off my dress, had a wash and got into a dressing gown. My cheeks were burning, and I didn't feel a bit sleepy. On the contrary, I wished Sanya would wake up.

The telephone rang and I picked up the receiver.

"He's asleep."

"Has he been asleep long?"

"No." "Oh, all right, don't wake him."

Catch me waking him! It was V., I recognised his voice. It must have been something important to make him phone at night. Anyway, it was a good thing I had not woken Sanya. He slept soundly, on the sofa, in his clothes, and must have been having disturbing dreams. A shadow crossed his face and his lips compressed.

Oh, how I wanted to wake him up! I walked up and down the room, touching my hot cheeks. It was a hotel room, and tomorrow other people would be in it. It was like a thousand other such rooms:

a sofa covered with light-blue rep, window blinds, a small desk with a sheet of glass on top-but all the same it was our first home and I wanted to retain it in my memory always.

From behind the partition came the sound of a violin. It had been playing for a long time, but I became aware of it only now. The player was that slim red-haired boy, a well-known violinist, who had been pointed out to me in the lobby. I knew he was living in the next room to ours.

He was playing something altogether different in mood from what I was thinking at the moment-not that strange, happy feeling about Sanya being my husband and I his wife, but our former young meetings, as though he saw us at the school ball, when Sanya had kissed me for the first time.

"Youth continues," played the red-haired boy, whom I had thought so ugly. "After sorrow comes joy, after parting, reunion. Do you remember commanding, in your heart, that you find him, and now there he stands, grey-headed, erect, and the joy and excitement of it are enough to drive one mad. Tomorrow you start out, and everything will be as you have commanded.

Everything will be fine, because the fairy-tales we believe in still come true on this earth."

I lay down on the carpeted floor, listening and weeping, half-ashamed of myself for those foolish tears. But I hadn't cried for so long, and had always taken pains to pretend that I could not.

I woke Sanya at six o'clock and told him that V. had phoned during the night.

"You're not angry, are you?"

"What about?"

He sat up on the sofa and looked at me sleepily first with one eye, then with the other.

"At my not waking you."

"I'm furious," he said, and laughed. "You look younger. Yesterday V.

asked how old you were, and I told him eighteen."

He kissed me, then ran into the bathroom, came out in bathing trunks and started to do his exercises. He had made me do morning exercises, too, but I did them by fits and starts, whereas he did them regularly, even twice a day-morning and evening.

Still wet, wiping his chest with a rough towel, he went over to the telephone and lifted the receiver, though I said it was too early to phone V. I was doing something, lighting the spirit-lamp, I believe, to make coffee. Sanya asked for V. Then, in a queer voice, he said, "What?" I turned to see the towel slip from his shoulder to the floor without him making any attempt to pick it up. He stood there, very straight, with the blood ebbing from his face.

"All right, I'll send an express telegram," he said and hung up.

"What's the matter?"

"Oh, nothing. Some nonsense or other," Sanya said slowly, picking up the towel. "V. got a wire last night saying that the search party was off.

I've been ordered to report to Moscow immediately, at Civil Air Fleet Headquarters, to take up a new appointment."

August 19, 1936. Sanya used to say that life was always like that:

everything goes well, then suddenly a sharp turn sends you into

"Barrels" and "Immelmanns". This time, though, you could say that the machine had gone into a spin.

"It's all over, Katya," he said savagely when he had returned from V.

"The Arctic, expeditions, the St. Maria-\ don't want to hear anything more about them. It's all fairy-tales for children, time we forgot them."

And I promised to be with him in forgetting those "fairy-tales", though I was sure that he never would forget them.

I still had a slender hope that Sanya would succeed in Moscow in getting the order revoked. But the telegram I got from him, sent not from Moscow but from somewhere on the way to Saratov, killed that hope. The very appointment which he had received put the seal, as it were, to the cancellation of the expedition. He had been transferred to the Agricultural Aviation Service, known as the S.P.A.- Special Purpose Aviation-and his job now was to sow wheat and spray reservoirs. "Very well, I'll be what they take me for," he wrote in his first letter from some farm, where he had been spending over a week now "co-ordinating and fixing" things with the local authorities. "To hell with illusions, for they were illusions really! C. was right after all-if a thing's worth doing at all, do it well. Don't imagine that I've thrown my hand in. The future is still ours."

"Let's be grateful for that old story," he wrote in another letter, "if only because it helped us to find and love each other. I am confident, though, that very soon these old private reckonings will prove important not only to us."

Nothing seemed to be working out the way I had thought and dreamt. I had come to Leningrad for two or three weeks to meet Sanya and follow him wherever he might go, and now he was far away from me again. I now found myself with a family-Pyotr junior, Pyotr senior and Nanny, who had to be taken care of, and it was I who had to do all the thinking.

I continued my studies of Arctic geology, though I had promised Sanya to think no more of the North. Being hard up for money, I took up some dreary work at the Geological Institute.

Ordinarily, I would probably have taken it badly, cursed myself, and thought about myself a thousand times more than need be. But a curious inward composure had suddenly taken possession of me. It was as though, together with the "fairy-tales", I had seen the last of my vanity, my pride, my sense of personal grievance at things not having turned out the way I so passionately wanted them to. "It can't be helped, dearest!" I answered Sanya when he blamed himself in one of his letters for having dragged me out to Leningrad and abandoned me there, and with a whole family on my hands into the bargain. "As our old judge says, you can't have things your own way in life."

I wrote to him often, long letters about our "learned" Nanny, about how quick little Pyotr was changing, about how Pyotr senior all of a sudden had thrown himself eagerly into his work and his design for a Pushkin monument was going splendidly.

But not a word did I write about how, one day, while shopping at a grocery store in October 25th Prospekt, I saw through the window a familiar figure in a grey overcoat and soft hat, the very hat which had been bought for my benefit and which sat so awkwardly on the big square head.

It was getting dark, and I may have been mistaken. No, it was Romashov all right. Aloof, pale, leaning slightly forward, he slowly walked past the shop window and was lost in the crowd.

OF KATYA TATARINOVA

SEPARATION

September 2, 1941. I once read some verses in which the years were compared to lanterns hanging "on the slender thread of time drawn through the mind". Some of these lanterns burn with a bright, beautiful light, others flicker smokily in the darkness.

We live in the Crimea and in the Far East. I am the wife of an airman and I have many new acquaintances, all airmen's wives, in the Crimea and the Far East. Like them, I worry when new aircraft are received in the detachment. Like them, I keep telephoning detachment headquarters, to the annoyance of the duty-officer, whenever Sanya goes aloft and doesn't come back in time. Like them, I am sure that I shall never get used to my husband's job, and like them, end up by getting used to it. Almost impossible though it is, I have not given up my geology. My old professor, who still calls me "dear child", assures me that had I not got married, and to an airman at that, I should long ago have won my M. Sc. degree. She went back on these words when, in the late autumn of 1937, I came back to Moscow from the Far East with a new piece of research done together with Sanya.

Aero-magnetic prospecting, the subject was. Searching for iron-ore deposits from an airplane.

We are in a sleeping-car compartment of the Vladivostok-Moscow express.

It is almost unbelievable-we have actually been together under the same roof for ten whole days, without parting day or night. We have breakfast, dinner and supper at the same table. We see each other in the daytime-there are said to be women who do not find this strange.

"Sanya, now I know what you are."

"What am I?"

"You're a traveller."

"Yes, a sky chauffeur-Vladivostok-Irkutsk, take-off from Pri-morsky Airport, seven forty-four."

"That doesn't mean anything. You don't get a chance. All the same you're a traveller by vocation, it's your grand passion. You know, it has always seemed to me that every person has a characteristic age of his own.

One person is bom forty, while another remains a boy of nineteen all his life. C. is like that, and so are you. Lots of airmen, in fact. Especially those who go in for ocean hops."

"You think I'm one of them?"

"Yes. You won't throw me over when you're hopped across, will you?"

"No. But they'll call me back mid-way."

I said nothing. "They'll call me back"-now that was quite a different story. A story of how my father's life, which Sanya had pieced together from fragments scattered between Ensk and Taimyr, had fallen into alien hands.

The portraits of Captain Tatarinov hang in the Geographical Society and the Arctic Institute. Poets dedicate verses to him, most of them very poor ones.

The Soviet Encyclopedia has a big article about him signed with the modest initials N.A.T. His voyage is now history, the history of Russia's conquest of the Arctic, along with names like Sedov, Rusanov and Toll.

And the higher this name rises, the more often does one hear it uttered alongside that of his cousin, the distinguished Arctic scientist, who gave his whole fortune to organise the expedition of the St. Maria and devoted his whole life to the biography of that great man.

Nikolai Antonich's admirable work has received appreciative recognition. His book Amid the Icy Wastes is reprinted every year in editions designed both for children and adults. The newspapers carry reports of various scientific councils which he chairs. At these councils he delivers speeches, in which I find traces of the old dispute which ended that day and hour when a woman with a very white face was carried out into a cold stone yard and taken away from home for ever. But that dispute had not ended yet, no! It is not for nothing that that worthy scientist never tires of repeating in his books that the people responsible for Captain Tatarinov's death were the tradesmen, notably one named von Vyshimirsky. It is not for nothing that this worthy scientist uses arguments with which he had once tried to give the lie to the words of a schoolboy who had discovered his secret.