Two Captains (9 page)

Those crooks employed us to pack food products. We got no wages, only board and lodging. But we were glad to have that.

But for the boss's wife, life wouldn't have been at all bad. But the woman got on our nerves.

Fat, with bulging eyes, her belly shaking, she would come running into the shed where we were packaging the food to see whether everything was safe.

"Pfef A pfef Jak smiesz tak robis?" "How dare you work like this?"

I don't know about robic, but it was a sore temptation while weighing out salted pork fat not to nip off at least a tiny bit for yourself. Lump sugar just got itself stuck into your sleeve or pocket. But we put up with her. Had we known that we should no more see Turkestan than our own ears, that old hag might have really found herself short of quite a few things.

One day, when we had been working for over two months with this gang, she came rushing into the shed clad only in a dressing gown. In her hand was the padlock with which she locked up the shed at night. Eyes popping, she stopped in the doorway, looked over the shoulder and went very pale.

"No knocking, no banging," she whispered, clutching her head. "No shouting! Keep quiet!"

Before we knew where we were, she shot home to bolt, breathing heavily, then hung up the padlock and went away.

It was so unexpected that for a minute or so we really kept quiet. Then Pyotr swore and lay down on the floor. I followed suit, and we both put an eye to the crack under the door to see what was going on.

At first all was quiet-the empty yard, the thawing snow with yellow footprints filled with water. Then there appeared strange legs in a pair of black high boots: after that another pair of legs, then a third. The legs were making for the annex across the yard. Two pairs disappeared, the third remaining on the doorstep. The butt of a rifle came to rest beside them.

"A round-up," Pyotr whispered and sprang to his feet.

In the dark he bumped his head against mine and I bit my tongue. But this was no time to think of bitten tongues.

"We must run for it!"

Who knows-my life might have taken quite a different turn if we had taken some rope with us. There was plenty of rope in the shed. But we didn't think of it until we were up in the loft. The shed was brick-built, with a loft, a lean-to roof, and a round opening in the rear wall which gave on to the yard next door.

Pyotr poked his head through this opening and took a look round. He had scratched a cheek when we had removed a plank from the ceiling in the darkness, and now he kept wiping the blood away with his fist every minute.

"Let's jump, eh?"

But it was no easy thing, jumping through a small opening in a sheer wall from a height of fifteen or eighteen feet, unless you took a dive, head foremost. You had to crawl through this opening feet foremost, sitting bent up almost double, then push free from the wall and drop to the ground.

That's what Pyotr did. I had half a mind to go back for some rope, when he was already sitting in the hole. He couldn't turn round. He just said, "Come on, Sanya. Don't be afraid." And he was gone. I looked out, my heart in my mouth. He was all right. He had dropped on to a heap of wet snow on the other side of the fence, which at this point came close up to our shed.

"Come on!"

I crawled out and sat down, knees drawn up to my chin. I could now see the whole of the next-door yard. A little girl there was playing with a hand sled outside an old house with columns, and a crow was sitting on a drainpipe. The girl stopped and looked at us with curiosity. The crow glanced at us incuriously, then turned away and drew its head between its wings.

"Come on!"

Besides the girl and the crow, there was a man in the yard, a man in a leather overcoat. He was standing at the point where our annex adjoined the next yard. I saw him finish his cigarette, throw away the fag end and coolly walk towards us.

"Come on!" Pyotr cried desperately.

As I started feebly to push off from the wall with my hands everything suddenly came into motion. The crow took wing, the girl backed away in fright. Pyotr made a dash for the gateway, and the leathered man gave chase.

At that moment I understood everything. But it was too late-I was hurtling down.

Such was my first flight-down in a straight line from a height of fifteen feet, without a parachute; I shouldn't call it a successful flight.

I stmck the fence with my chest, jumped up and fell again. The last thing I saw was Pyotr dashing out into the street and slamming the gate in the face of the man in the leather coat.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN CLAY MODELLING

It was very silly, of course, to run away when you hadn't done anything wrong. After all, we weren't blackmarketeers, we had been only working for them. Our captors wouldn't do anything to us, they'd simply question us and let us go. But it was too late now for regrets. The man in the leather coat gripped my arm and marched me off-to jail probably. I had been caught, while Pyotr had got away. I was alone now. It was already evening, the sun was going down, and the daws were circling slowly over the trees along the Strastnoi Boulevard. I wasn't crying, but I must have looked pretty miserable, because the man in the leather coat looked at me closely and let go of my arm. He realised that I wouldn't run away.

He brought me into a large well-lighted room on the fifth floor of a huge building at Nikitsky Gate. It was a children's reception centre of the Education Department, where I was to spend three memorable days.

My heart sank when I saw all those ugly customers. Some were playing cards, squatting around a clay-built stove, some were taking down the wooden valance rods from the high windows and feeding them straight into the stove, while others were sleeping or building a house out of old frames and canvases stacked haphazardly in a corner. At night, when it got colder inside the reception centre than outside, these houseowners lighted a primus-stove and exacted payment for admission into their house at the rate of a couple of cigarettes or a piece of bread. And gazing incuriously with the sightless white eyes upon all this chaos there stood on tall pedestals plaster figures of Hercules, of Apollo, Diana and other Greek gods.

The only human faces there were those of the gods. Waking up from the cold towards morning with chattering teeth, I glanced at them fearfully.

They were probably thinking: "You poor mutt, you! What made you run away from home? That orphanage? You'd be back in the spring and find some job helping the old folks. And now what? Now you're all alone. If you die no one will remember you. Only Pyotr will be running around Moscow, looking for you, and Aunt Dasha will heave a sigh. Ask for some clothes, my lad, and hotfoot it home!" They changed your clothes at the Education Department, they burned your old ones and gave you trousers and a shirt instead. Many waifs deliberately let themselves be rounded up in order to change their ragged clothes.

All those three days I kept silent. For a boy who had only recently learned to speak that was not at all difficult. Who was there to talk to anyway! Every time they brought in a new batch of waifs I caught myself looking to see if Pyotr was among them. But he wasn't, and that was just as well. I sat apart and kept silent.

What with hunger, cold and misery, I started modelling. There were lots of white sculptor's clay in this former art studio. I picked up a lump, soaked it in hot water and started to knead it between my fingers. Almost without realising what I was doing, I had made a toad. I gave it big nostrils and goggle-eyes, then tried my hand on a hare. It was all pretty poor, of course. But at the sight of the familiar features of Frisky emerging from the shapeless lump of clay something stirred within me. I was to remember that moment. Nobody had seen me modelling: an old thief, who had by some miracle landed in the reception centre for homeless children, was describing how they worked at the railway stations in "two-men teams". I stood apart by the window, holding my breath as I gazed at the little lump of clay with long ears sticking out of it, and I couldn't make out why it stirred me so.

After that I modelled a horse with a thick-combed mane. Then it struck me-why, old Skovorodnikov's horses-that's what it was! The figures he used to carve out of wood!

I don't know why, but the discovery bucked me up. I fell asleep in a cheerful mood. I had a feeling as though these figurines were going to be my salvation. They would enable me to get out of this place, help me to find Pyotr, help me to return home and him to reach Turkestan. They would help my sister at the orphanage, Pyotr's uncle at the front, and everybody who roamed the streets at night in cold and hungry Moscow. That's how I prayed-not to God, no! to the toad, the horse and the hare, which were drying on the window-sill, covered with scraps of newspaper.

I daresay some other boy in my place would have become an idol worshipper and I have had everlasting faith in the toad, the horse and the hare. Because they did help me!

The next day a commission from the Education Department came to the reception centre and that place was done away with from now on and for aye.

The thieves were packed off to jail, the waifs to orphanages, and the beggars to their homes. All that remained in the spacious art studio were the Greek gods Apollo and Diana and Hercules.

"What's this?" said one of the commission members, a tousled unshaven youth, whom everybody called simply Alee. "Ivan Andre-yevich, look at this sculpture!"

Ivan Andreyevich, no less unkept and unshaven, but older put on his pince-nez and studied the figures.

"Typical Russian figure work from Sergiev Posad," he said.

"Interesting. Who did this? You?"

"Yes."

"What's your name?"

"Alexander Grigoriev."

"Would you like to study?"

I looked at him and said nothing. I must have had a pretty rough time of it during those months of hungry street life, because all of a sudden my face twisted and the floodgates opened everywhere- from eyes to nose.

"He'd like to," said commissioner Alee. "Where shall we send him, Ivan Andreyevich?"

"To Nikolai Antonich's, I think," the other answered, carefully replacing my hare on the window-sill.

"Why, of course! Nikolai Antonich has just that bent in art. Well, Alexander Grigoriev, do you want to go to Nikolai Antonich's?"

"He doesn't know him, Alee. Better write it down. Alexander Grigoriev... How old are you?"

"Eleven."

I had added six months to my age.

"Eleven. Have you put that down? To Tatarinov, Commune School No. 4."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN NIKOLAI ANTONICH

The fat girl from the Education Department, who somehow resembled Aunt Dasha, left me in a long dimly-lit corridor of a room, saying that she would soon be back. It was in the cloakroom. Empty racks, looking like skinny people with horns, stood in open cupboards. All along the wall-doors and doors. One of them was of glass. I saw myself in it for the first time since I had left home. What a sight! A pale-faced boy with a round cropped head looked at me despondently; he was very small, smaller than I thought. A peaked nose, down-drawn mouth.

The fat girl returned and we went to see Nikolai Antonich. He was a stout pale man with scant hair combed back over his balding head. A gold tooth gleamed in his mouth, and I, in my usual stupid way, stared at that tooth and could not keep my eyes off it.

Nikolai Antonich was talking to a group of boys of about sixteen who crowded round him arguing and interrupting each other. He heard them out, twiddling his stubby fingers, which reminded me of hairy caterpillars-cabbage-worms I believe they're called. He was unhurried, condescending, dignified.

We came forward.

"A waif?"

"No."

"From the Education Department," the fat girl explained and placed a paper on the desk.

"Where do you come from, Grigoriev?" Nikolai Antonich demanded after reading the paper.

I told him.

"And what are you doing here, in Moscow?"

"Passing through," I said.

"Oh, I see. Where were you going?"

I took a deep breath and said nothing. I had been asked all these questions a hundred times.

"All right, we'll discuss that some other time," Nikolai Antonich said.

He wrote something on the back of the paper. "You won't run away, will you?"

I was quite sure that I would, but to be on the safe side I said, "No."

We went out. In the doorway I looked back. Nikolai Antonich was gazing after me with a thoughtful air. What was he thinking? One thing he was definitely not thinking was that Fate itself had appeared to him that day in the shape of a half-starved ragamuffin in outsize boots and regulation jacket from which protruded a skinny neck.

"I'll stick it till the first warm day," I had firmly decided. As soon as the frosts let go, it was goodbye for me at the children's home. They'd never see me again. But things worked out differently. I didn't run away at all. What kept me there were the reading sessions.

First thing in the morning we went to the bakery for bread, then lessons began. We were counted as Form I, though some of us were old enough to be studying in Form 6.

Our teacher was an old lady by the name of Serafima Petrovna, who came to school with a rucksack on her back. I really couldn't say what she taught us exactly.

I remember the Duck lesson. It was three lessons in one-geography, nature study and Russian. At the nature study lesson we studied the duck as such: what sort of wings it had, what sort of feet, how it swam, and so on.

At the geography lesson the same duck was studied as a denizen of the Earth: you had to point out on the map where it lived and where it didn't. At the Russian lesson Serafima Petrovna taught us to write "d-u-c-k" and read to us something from Brehm about ducks. She mentioned, in passing, that the German for duck was so-and-so, and the French so-and-so. This, I believe, was called at the time the "complex method". It was all sort of "incidental". It is quite likely that Serafima Petrovna got this method mixed up a bit. She was an old lady and wore a mother-of-pearl watch pinned to her breast, so that in answering her we always looked to see what time it was.