Two Captains (59 page)

I flew headlong down the avenue running alongside the Summer Garden. I saw everything, took it all in-the allotments on Mars Field, with camouflaged anti-aircraft guns in the middle of them; the riotous greenery, which had never looked so lush in Leningrad before;

the general clean and tidy appearance of the city-I had read in /the papers that in the spring of 1942 three hundred thousand Leningraders had turned out to clean up their city. But everything I saw turned to me a single side-where was Katya, would I find her? I thought I never would, seeing that nearly all the houses had no window-panes in them and the houses stood silent, sad-eyed. I never would, seeing that every wall was dented and smashed by artillery shells. Yes, I would find her, seeing that even the square round the Suvorov monument was planted with carrots and beetroot, and the young shoots stood erect as though no better natural conditions for them could be thought of. I came out on the Neva and involuntarily my eyes sought the admiralty spire-I don't know how to explain it, but it was part of Katya-the fact that it was slightly dulled, like an old engraving. We had not been able to say goodbye to each other when the war started, but another leavetaking, the one before I left for Spain, came back to me so vividly that I almost saw her physically, standing in the dark hall of the Berensteins' flat among the old coats and jackets. How could I bring all that back again? To clasp her in my arms again? To hear her ask: "Sanya, is that you? Can it be you?"

From afar I saw the house in which the Berensteins lived. It still stood there, and strange to say it looked more beautiful than before. The window-panes were intact, and the facade threw back a resplendent gleam like that of fresh paint in the sunshine. But the closer I got to it the more was I disturbed by this strange immobility and spruceness. Another ten, fifteen, twenty paces-and something gripped my heart, then let go, and it began to race wildly. There was no house. The facade had been painted on large sheets of plywood.

All that long summer day the distant roar of the artillery pounded in my ears like surf beating on a pebbly beach.

All day long I searched for Katya.

A woman with a triangular green face whom I met outside the wrecked house sent me to Doctor Ovanesyan, who was a member of the District Soviet.

This old Armenian, a grey-black genial man with a three day's stubble, sat in the office of the former Elite Cinema, now the district HQ of the Civil Defence. I asked him whether he knew Ekaterina Tatarinova-Grigorieva. He said, "Sure I did. I even offered her a job as a nurse when the war started."

"Well?"

"She refused and went out to do trench-digging," the doctor said. "I never saw her again, I regret to say."

"Maybe you know Rosalia Berenstein, too, Doctor?"

He looked at me with his kind old eyes, and pursed his lips.

"Are you a relative others?"

"No, just a friend."

"I see."

He was silent for a while.

"She was a fine woman," he sighed. "We sent her to the hospital, but it was too late. She died."

I went back to the courtyard of the wrecked house. The facade had collapsed, but the side of the building facing the yard was intact. I found myself aimlessly mounting the debris-cluttered staircase. I got as far as the first landing. Higher up was a jumble of iron rods and beams hanging over the gaping staircase well and only at the second floor level did the stairs begin again.

In this house there had once lived my sister, whom I loved. Here we had celebrated her wedding. I had come here every Sunday, an air cadet in blue uniform, who dreamt of great discoveries. Here Katya and I had stayed whenever we came to Leningrad, and whenever we came we were received here as the nearest and dearest of friends. In this house Katya had lived for more than a year when I was fighting in Spain. In this house she had lived during the blockade, suffering hunger and cold, working and helping others, bestowing upon them the light of her clean, brave spirit. Where was she?

Terror gripped my throat. I clenched my teeth to still the quivering of my body.

At that moment I heard the voice of a child, and in a gap in the wall overhead there appeared a boy of about twelve, dark-complexioned, with high cheekbones.

"Who do you want, Comrade Officer?"

"Do you live here?"

"Yes."

"Alone?"

"Of course not. With my mother."

"Is your mother at home just now?"

"Yes."

He showed me how to go up-at one spot there was a narrow plank bridging a gap in the staircase-and within a few minutes I was talking to his mother, a tired-looking woman-a Tatar, as I realised the moment she spoke. She was the yardwoman of House No. 79. To be sure, she knew Rosalia and Katya well.

"When Nine was hit she go dig," she said, speaking of Katya. The boy, who spoke good Russian, explained that "Nine" was the house where the food store had been. "She dug man out, him friend. Ginger man. He lived her flat."

"She dug out a friend of hers," the boy quickly translated. "Afterwards he lived in her flat."

"Second old lady die. Hakim go bury him."

"The second old lady was Rosalia's sister," the boy explained. "Hakim's me. When she died we took her down to the cemetery. The ginger one was there too. He hired us for the job. Military man, too-a major."

I now had to ask about Katya. I steeled myself and did so. With an angry shake of the head the yardwoman said that she herself had been laid up in hospital for three months. "I call for mullah, no mullah in Leningrad, all mullah die." And when she returned home Rosalia's flat was already empty.

"Must ask house management," she said on second thoughts. "But him die too. Maybe she go away? She dig out ginger man, he have bread. Big sack, carry himself, not let me. I say to him: 'You greedy fool. We save your life. Don't think about bag, pray to God, read Koran.' "

Katya was not living at Rosalia's when the bomb hit the house- that was all she knew. I spoke to a number of other women. They wept as they told me how Katya had helped them. Hakim brought his pals, and they complained that the ginger major had promised them three hundred grams per head for the burial, but had "diddled" them by giving them only two hundred.

Who the devil could that ginger major be? Pyotr? But Pyotr wasn't a major, and it was impossible to imagine him doing starving boys out of a hundred grams of bread. Ah, well, whoever the man was, he had helped Rosalia bury her sister. Who knows but that he may have helped Katya in her need.

She had been at the funeral with him, and evidently could not have been so weak if she had managed to walk all the way to the cemetery. Since then, however, no one had seen her, either alive or dead.

It was past five when, tired out and with a splitting headache, I started for the Military Medical Academy. The Academy itself had been evacuated, but the clinics, turned into hospitals from the first day of the war, still remained. The Stomatology Department, where Katya worked, was still there. I was sent to the office, where an elderly typist, who somehow reminded me of Aunt Dasha, said that Katya had been in a bad way and Doctor Troflmova had arranged for her to be evacuated from Leningrad.

"Where to?"

"That I can't say. I don't know."

"Is Doctor Troflmova herself in Leningrad?"

"As soon as she sent your wife off she went to the front," the typist said. "Since then we've had no news from either of them."

I realised now that it had been naive of me to write to Katya in the course of six months without getting a word in answer, and then expect that I only had to turn up in Leningrad for her to meet me on her doorstep with outstretched arms. As if there had not been that cruel hungry winter of nineteen forty one, with its trainloads of dying children and special hospitals for Leningraders in cities throughout the land. As if there had not been those sickly faces with the clouded eyes. As if the rumble of gunfire could not still be heard in the city coming now from the East, now from the West.

I was thinking of this as I sat in the office of the Stomatology Clinic, listening to the typist's story of the young sailor, the spit image of her own son killed in the war, who had suddenly come and given her three hundred grams of bread when she no longer had the strength to rise from her bed.

"You'll find Katerina all right," she said. "She dreamt of a flying eagle. Your husband, I told her. She wouldn't believe me. Now, wasn't I right? I'm telling you now, too-you'll find her."

Maybe. She was dying while I had been living in clover in M-v, I thought, staring dully at this old woman, who was trying to convince me that I would find Katya, that she would come back to me. "I was taken care of and nursed. And she didn't have the hundred grams of bread to pay the boys with for burying Bertha." With despair and fury I thought that I should have flown to Leningrad in January, I should have insisted, demanded that they discharge me from hospital. Who knows-I might have come out then in better shape than I was now, and could have found and saved my Katya.

But it was too late in the day now to have regrets about things that could no longer be mended. "I'm no worse off than anybody else," Katya had written from Leningrad. Only now did I realise what those simple words meant.

The old woman, who had probably been through much more than I had, kept trying to comfort me. I asked her for some boiling water and treated her to some pork fat and onions-things that were still scarce in Leningrad.

From then on a chill lodged in my heart. No matter what I was thinking or doing, always the question "Katya?" obtruded itself.

While at M-v I had conned over the telephone numbers of nearly all my Leningrad acquaintances. But none of those I rang up from the clinic answered the call. The ringing seemed to be lost in the mysterious emptiness of Leningrad. I tried the last number in my memorised list, the only one I was not sure of. I held the receiver to my ear for a long time, listening to some far-off rustling sounds, and behind them, still fainter impatient voices.

"Hullo," suddenly came a deep masculine voice.

"Can I speak to-"

I gave the name.

"Speaking."

"This is Air Pilot Grigoriev."

Silence.

"Not Alexander Grigoriev, surely?"

"Yes."

"Would you believe it! My dear Alexander Ivanovich, I've been racking my brains these three days where to look for you."

About six years ago, when the Tatarinov search expedition was decided upon and I was engaged in organising it, Professor V. had introduced to me a naval man, a hydrographer, who taught at the Frunze School. We had spent only one evening together in Leningrad, but I was often to recall that man, who had painted for me with such remarkable clarity a picture of the future world war.

He had come late. Katya was asleep, curled up in an armchair. I wanted to wake her, but he would not let me, and we had a drink with some olives for a snack; Katya always had a stock of olives.

He was deeply interested in the North. He was sure that the North, with its inexhaustible resources of strategic raw materials, would be called upon to play a very important part in the coming war. He regarded the Northern Sea Route as a naval highway and declared that the Russo-Japanese campaign had gone wrong because of the failure to grasp this idea, which had been put forward by Mende-leyev. He had urged that naval bases should be set up along all convoy routes.

I remember that, at the time, this idea struck me as extremely sensible. I appreciated it anew on June 14, 1942, a few days before I flew to Leningrad, when, sitting on the bank of the Kama, I heard the far-off voice of the radio announcer reading out the text of the treaty between Great Britain and the Soviet Union. It was not difficult to guess what the lines of communication mentioned in this treaty were, and my thoughts went back to that "nocturnal visitor", as Katya had later called the hydrographer.

I had run into him several times between 1936 and 1940 and read his articles and his book Soviet Arctic Seas, which became famous and was translated into all European languages. I followed his career with interest, as he, I believe, followed mine. I knew that he had left the Frunze School and was in command of a hydrographic vessel and then served at the Hydrographical Department of the People's Commissariat of the Navy. Shortly before the war he took his doctor's degree; I remember reading the announcement about his thesis in a Moscow evening paper. I shall call him R.

It was a rare occasion-"it happens once in a thousand years", as R. put it-my finding him at home. The flat was sealed and he had unsealed it and come in only a couple of minutes before I phoned, and that only because he was leaving Leningrad for long. "Where are you going?"

"A long way away. Come over, I'll tell you all about it. Where are you staying?"

"I haven't fixed up yet."

"Very good. I'll be waiting for you."

He lived near Liteiny Bridge in a new block. It was a spacious flat, rather neglected since the war, of course, but with something poetic about it, like the home of an artist. It may have been the tastefully fashioned dolls standing under glass covers on the piano that suggested this idea to me, or the multitude of books on the floor and the shelves, or perhaps the host himself, who received me without ceremony in his shirt-sleeves, the open neck of his shirt revealing a full, hairy chest. I had seen a portrait like that somewhere of Shevchenko. But R. was no poet, he was a rear-admiral, as his service coat hanging on the back of a chair testified.

He first of all asked me where I had been and what I had been doing with myself during the year of war.