Two Captains (67 page)

"How I wish I were with you at this moment"-I read and reread these words, and they seemed to me so cold and empty, as if I were in a cold, empty room, addressing my own reflection. It was Katya I needed, and not this diary-the living, bright, sweet Katya, who believed in me and loved me.

Once, shaken by the fact that she had turned her back on me at her mother's funeral, I had dreamt of coming to her, like the Gadfly, throwing at her feet the evidence that proved me to have been right. Afterwards the whole world had learnt of her father through me and he had become a national hero.

But for Katya he remained her father-who, if not she, was to be the first to learn that I had found him? Who, if not she, had told me how wonderful everything would be if the fairy-tales we believed in still came true on earth? Amid the cares, labours and perturbations of the war I had found him.

Not a boy, fascinated by a dim, glamorous vision of the Arctic which illumined his mute, half-conscious world, not a youth striving with youth's stubbornness to have his own way-no, it was as a mature man, who had experienced everything, that I stood confronting a discovery destined to become part of the history of Russian science. I was proud and happy. But a surge of bitterness rose up inside me at the thought that it could all have been different.

I did not get back to my regiment until the end of January, and the very next day I was summoned to Polarnoye to report to the commander of the Northern Fleet.

Our launch entered the bay, and the town unfolded to my gaze, all white, pink and snowy. It stood on the steep, grey hillside as if on a pedestal of beautiful granite rocks. White little houses with porch steps running out in different directions were arranged in terraces, while along the bay front, forming a semi-circle, stood big stone houses. In fact, as I found out afterwards, they were called "compass houses", as though a gigantic compass had described this semi-circle over Catherine's Bay.

I climbed the flight of steps which passed under an arch thrown between these houses and saw the whole bay from shore to shore. The inexplicable agitation under which I had been labouring all that morning gripped me anew with extraordinary farce. The bay was dark green and impenetrable, with only a faint glimmer shed by the sky. There was something very remote, southern, reminiscent of a highland lake in the Caucasus, about this land-locked bay-except that on the far side a line of low hills, covered with snow, ran out into the distance with low trees making here and there a delicate black tracery against their dazzling background.

I do not believe in intuition, but that was the word that sprung to my mind as, stirred by the beauty of Polarnoye and Catherine's Bay, I stood by the compass houses. It was as if the town that appeared before me were my home, which until then I had only seen in dreams and sought in vain for so many long years. I found myself thinking with a thrill of excitement that something was bound to happen here, something good for me, perhaps the best thing to happen to me in all my life.

There was nobody at HQ yet. I had come before office hours. The night-duty officer said that, as far as he knew, I had been ordered to report at 10 p.m., whereas it was now only seven-thirty.

I went to look up the doctor-not at the hospital, but in his rooms.

Of course, he lived in one of those white little houses arranged in terraces on the hillside. They had looked much prettier from the sea. Here was Row One, but I needed Row Five, House No. 7.

Like the Nentsi, I walked along thinking all but aloud of what I was seeing. A group of Englishmen overtook me. They wore funny winter caps resembling those our old Russian coachmen used to wear and long, khaki robe-like affairs and it set me thinking how little they knew our Russian winters. A boy in a white fluffy fur coat walked along, grave and chubby, with a toy spade over his shoulder. A be-whiskered sailor caught him up and carried him on a few steps, and it set me thinking that there were probably very few children in Polarnoye.

House No. 7, Row 5, differed in no way from any of its neighbours on the right or left, except perhaps that its front steps were barely visible under a coating of slippery ice. I took them at a run and collided with some naval men, who came out onto the porch at that moment. One of them slid carefully down the steps, remarking that "inability to take one's bearings in a Polar-night situation points to a deficiency of vitamins in the body".

They were doctors. This was Ivan Ivanovich's home all right.

I went into the hall, pushed one door, then another. Both rooms were empty, smelt of tobacco, had unmade beds in them and things lay scattered about, masculine-like. There was something hospitable about those rooms, as if their occupants have purposely left the doors open.

"Anybody here?"

There was no need to ask. I went out into the street again.

A woman with her skirt hitched up was rubbing her bare feet with snow.

I asked her whether this was house No 7.

"Who may you be wanting?"

"Doctor Pavlov."

"I daresay he's still asleep," the woman said. "You go round the house, that's his window over there. Knock hard!"

It would have been simpler to knock at the doctor's door, but I complied nevertheless and walked round to the window. The house stood on a slope and the window at the back stood rather low over the ground. It was covered with hoarfrost, but when I knocked and peered in, shading my eyes with my hand, I thought I saw a shape like a woman's figure. Like a woman bending over a basket or a suitcase. She straightened up when I knocked and came over to the window. She, too, shaded her eyes with her hand, and through the blurred frostwork of the window I saw a blurred face.

The woman's lips stirred. She did nothing, just moved her lips. She was barely visible behind that snowy, misted, murky glass. But I recognised her.

It was Katya.

How can I describe those first minutes, the speechless rapture with which I gazed into her face, kissed it and gazed again, asked questions only to interrupt myself, because everything I asked about had happened ages ago, and terrible though it was to know how she had suffered and starved, almost to death, in Leningrad, and had given up hope of ever seeing me again, all this was over and done with, and now there she stood before me and I could take her in my arms-God, I could hardly believe it!

She was pale and very thin, and something new had come into her face, which had lost its former severity.

"You've had your hair cut, I see?"

"Yes, a long time ago," she said. "Back in Yaroslavl, when I was ill."

She had not only had her hair cut, she was a different woman. But just now I did not want to think about that-everything was whirling around, the whole world, we, this room, which was an exact replica of those other two, with its things scattered about, with Katya's open suitcase, from which she had been taking something out when I knocked, and the doctor too, who, it appears, had been there all the time, standing in a corner wiping his beard with his handkerchief, and now started to tiptoe out of the room, but I stopped him. But the main thing, the most important thing-Katya was in Polarnoye! How had she come to be in Polarnoye?

"My God, I've been writing to you every day!" she said. "We just missed each other in Moscow. When you called on Valya Zhukov I was queuing for bread in Arbat."

"No?"

"You left him a letter, and I dashed off to look for you-but where? Who could have imagined that you would be going to see Romashov!"

"How do you know I went to see Romashov?"

"I know everything, darling!"

She kissed me. "I'll tell you everything."

And she told me that Vyshimirsky, frightened to death, had sought out Ivan Pavlovich and told him that I had had Romashov

arrested.

"But who's this Rear-Admiral R.?" she said. "I wrote to you, care of him, and then to him personally, but he never answered. Didn't you know that you were coming here? Why did I have to write to you through him?"

"Because I didn't have an address of my own. I left Moscow to look for you."

"Where?"

"At Yaroslavl. I was in Yaroslavl."

"Why didn't you write to Korablev when you came here?"

"I don't know. My God, is it really you? Katya?"

We were walking up and down with our arms round each other, stumbling over things, again and again asking "why?" "why?" and there were as many of these "whys" as there were causes which had parted us at Leningrad, prevented us from running into each other in Moscow, and now thrown us together in Polarnoye, where I had now come for the first time and where only half an hour ago it was impossible to imagine Katya being.

She had heard about my discovery of the expedition from the TASS

reports which appeared in the newspapers. She had got in touch with the doctor and he had helped to get a permit to come to Polarnoye. But they did not know where to write to me-even if they did know, it is hardly likely that any mail would reach me at the camp site of Captain Tatarinov's expedition!

The doctor disappeared, then reappeared with a hot kettle, and though he couldn't stop the speed with which the world was whirling around us, he did make us sit down side by side on the sofa, and treated us to some tooth-breaking hardtack. Then he fetched a billy-can of condensed milk and set it on the table, apologising for the tableware.

Then he went away. I did not detain him this time, and we were left alone in that cold house, with its kitchen cluttered with empty tins and dirty dishes, its hallway covered with snow that did not melt. Why were we in this house, through the windows of which we could see the rolling hills and the slack water moving importantly between the steep, snowy shores? But this was yet another "why?" to which I did not bother to seek an answer.

On going out the doctor had handed me some electric gadget. I immediately forgot about it and remembered it only when, laughing at something, I saw dense steam billowing from my mouth and melting slowly in the air, like from a horse standing out in the frost. The gadget was an electric fire, obviously of local workmanship, but a very good one. The room quickly got warm. Katya wanted to tidy up, but I did not let her. I gazed at her. I held her hands in a tight grip, as though fearing that she might disappear as suddenly as she had appeared.

On my way to the doctor's I had noticed that the weather was changing, and now, when I left the house-because it was already a quarter to ten-the cold, humming wind had dropped, the air was no longer limpid, and soft snow fell heavily and quickly-all signs of coming snowstorm.

To my surprise, they already knew at HO that Katya had arrived. The commander knew it, too-why else should he have greeted me with a smile? Very briefly I told him how we had sunk the raider. He did not ask me any questions, merely said that I was to give a report about it before the War Council that evening. What he was interested in was the St. Maria expedition.

I began in a restrained, rather embarrassed manner-though the fact that the expedition had been found during the performance of a combat mission would not have struck anyone who knew the story of my life as being odd. How was I to convey this idea to the fleet commander in a few words? But he was listening with such rapt attention, with such sincere, young interest, that I finally dismissed the thought of "a few words" and began telling my story simply- and quite unexpectedly, the effect was an authentic account of what really happened.

We parted at last, and then only because the admiral bethought himself of Katya.

I don't know how much time I spent with him-it must have been no more than an hour-but when I came out I did not find Polarnoye. It was hidden in a pall of whirling, blinding, whistling snow.

Luckily I was wearing burki(*Burki-high felt boots.-Tr.) -even so I had to turn the tops back above my knees. Talk about terraces-there wasn't a trace of them! Only a fantastic imagination could picture houses somewhere behind those black clouds of whipped snow, and in one of those houses, in Row 5, Katya laying the hardtack out on the electric fire to warm them, as I had advised her. In the end I got to the house, of course. The hardest thing was to recognise it. In little more than an hour it had turned into a fairy-tale dwarfie hut, standing lopsided and snowed up to the windows. Like a god of snowstorm I burst into the hall, and Katya had to brush me down with a whisk broom, starting from the shoulders, which were caked with frozen snow.

We had talked everything over, it seemed; twice we had approached the subject of the Captain's letters of farewell-I had brought them with me to Polarnoye to show to the doctor; the rest of the material relating to the expedition I had left at my regiment. But we

avoided the subject of these letters and everything associated with them, as though we felt that in the joy of our reunion the time had not yet come for us to talk about them.

Katya had already told me all about little Pyotr-what a swarthy little chap he was, the very image of my poor sister. We had already discussed what to do about Grandma, who had quarrelled with Farm Manager Perishkin and rented a "private apartment" in the village. I had already learnt that Pyotr Senior had been wounded a second time, had received a decoration and returned to the front-in Moscow Katya had chanced to meet the commander of his battalion, a Hero of the Soviet Union, who had told her that Pyotr

"didn't give a damn for death", a phrase which had startled Katya. I had learnt about Varya Trofimova, too, and that if things worked out the way Katya thought they would "it would be the greatest ever happiness for both of them". Changes had been made in the room, too-things were arranged more comfortably, looking as if they were grateful to Katya for having brought warmth to this cold, masculine abode. Some five or six hours had passed since that wonderful, momentous change had taken place. The entire world of our family life, lost to us for so long-for eighteen desolate months-had come back at last, and I had not yet got used to the idea that Katya was with me once more.