wife yet, and
if you're going to carry on in this silly way I'll go and marry someone
else. We haven't been to the registrar's yet, have we?"
I even began to feel sorry for him as he stood there blinking, laughing
awkwardly, taking off his cap and wiping his forehead with his hand.
"I'm sorry, Katya, honestly!" he muttered.
I gave him a quick kiss, though we happened to be standing in the
courtyard facing the building of the Arctic Institute, and said: "Good
luck."
He promised to ring me at six or drop in at Pyotr's place, if he could
manage it.
May 7, 1936. He returned that day not at six but at eleven, and not to
Pyotr's but to the Astoria and phoned demanding that we come down straight
away and have supper with him, as he had had nothing to eat and was as
hungry as a wolf, and wanted company.
But Pyotr felt done up after an anxious day, and besides, he had had
some vodka to buck him up and was now lying on the sofa, blinking sleepily,
and looking like Punch with that fantastic nose of his and ungainly legs and
arms.
I remember the dates of all my meetings with Sanya and of our letters
too. We met in the garden in Triumfalnaya Square on April 2 and outside the
Bolshoi Theatre on June 13. And that evening on May 4, when he rang me up on
his return from the Arctic Institute and I went over to see him-that day,
too, I shall remember as long as I live.
We have known each other since childhood and I thought that I knew him
better by now than he perhaps knew himself. But never before had I seen him
the way he was that evening. When we were having supper I even told him as
much.
His plan had been fully approved and he had received lots of
compliments. He had met Professor V., the man who had discovered the island
by tracing the drift of the St. Maria, and the Professor had been very nice
to him. And he was in Leningrad, that great, beautiful city, which he had
loved ever since his flying school days-in Leningrad after the silences of
the Arctic! Everything was fine!
This happiness of his, this success, showed so clearly in his face, in
his every gesture, even in the way he ate. His eyes shone, he sat erect and
at the same time at his ease. If I were not already in love
269
with him I would certainly have fallen in love with him that evening.
We sat eating and drinking for God knows how long, then we went for a
walk after I had mentioned that I hadn't yet seen the sights of Leningrad.
Sanya was all eagerness to show me himself "what kind of a city this was".
It was past two, the darkest hour of the night, but when we came out of
the Astoria it was so light that I purposely stopped in Gogol Street to read
a newspaper in one of the wall stands.
Leningrad of the Midnight Sun! But Sanya said these white nights were
nothing new to him and the one good thing about the Leningrad brand was that
it did not last six months.
It grew cold and I was lightly clad, so we both wrapped ourselves in
Sanya's raincoat and sat for a long time in utter silence with our arms
round each other.
We were sitting on a semi-circular granite seat on the Neva embankment,
and somewhere down below a wave slapped gently against the stone facing.
Then we went back to the Astoria and made coffee in Sanya's room. Sanya
always carried a coffee-pot and spirit lamp about with him when travelling.
"Doesn't it frighten you to feel so happy?" he said, taking me in his
arms. "Your heart's going pit-a-pat! So's mine, you just listen."
He took my hand and placed it over his heart.
"We're terribly excited-isn't it funny?"
He was saying something, without hearing what he was saying, and his
voice grew strangely deep with emotion...
We did not go to the Skovorodnikovs until about one o'clock in the
afternoon. One of the elegant little old ladies opened the door and said
that Pyotr was not at home.
"He has gone to the Clinic."
"So early?"
"Yes."
She looked worried.
"What's the matter?"
"Nothing. He telephoned there and they told him that Alexandra was
slightly worse."
May 21, 1936. Then began days which I shall probably remember all my
life with horror and impotent despair. We went to the Schroder Clinic three
times a day and stood for a long time in front of the board which displayed
the patients' temperature charts: "Skovorod-nikova-98;99,2;101;103.8".
Then the temperature dropped sharply and rose again after several hours
to as high as 104.9. I suspected that this was not a case of pneumonia, as
we had been told at the Clinic, and I called on the professor at his flat.
But he confirmed the diagnosis-the area of inflammation could be clearly
detected by auscultation, and there were several areas in both lungs.
I hardly saw Sanya those days. He rang me up sometimes at night and
once I dropped in to see him at the Institute, in the little office set
apart for the organisation of the search party. He was sitting at a desk
piled with weapons, cameras, mittens and fur stockings. A man with a grave
whiskered face, wearing a leather coat, was assembling a doublebarrelled gun
on his desk and swearing because the barrels would not fit into the stock.
"Well, how is she? Did you see her? What do the doctors say?"
The telephone kept ringing every minute. Annoyed, he lifted the
receiver and threw it down on the desk.
"Same as before," I answered.
"And the temperature?"
"This morning it was a hundred and five."
"Hell! Isn't there anything they can do?"
His face looked drawn, anxious and tired, and he was quite unlike
himself, especially the self he was on the day of his arrival.
I had seldom had occasion to nurse sick people, especially people as
ill as Sasha was, but having been given permission to watch at her bedside,
I learned to do it. It was hard, because Sasha practically never slept, and
if she did fall asleep she would wake up on the instant and one had to
listen to her breathing all the time.
There were days when she rallied, and very strongly too. I remember one
such day, the fourth day of my stay at the hospital. She had slept well
during the night and woke up in the morning saying she was hungry. She drank
some tea with milk and ate an egg, and when we were tucking her in to air
the ward she suddenly said: "Katya, darling, have you been with me all the
time? And sleeping here too?"
My face must have given me away, because she showed surprise.
"Have I been as ill as that?"
"Darling, we're going to open the window. You just lie still and keep
quiet. You were ill and now you are getting better and everything will be
fine."
She complied without demur, and only kept my hand in hers for a little
while when I started to wipe her face and hands with toilet vinegar. Then
they brought the baby and we watched him while he fed, his eyes wide open
with such a serious, silly expression.
"He looks like him, doesn't he?" Sasha said from behind her mask.
She was pleased that the boy resembled Pyotr. As a matter of fact he
did have that longish sort of profile. He had a profile already, though he
was only ten days old.
Towards the evening Sasha felt slightly worse, but it did not worry me
very much, because she usually got worse towards the evening. I sat reading,
holding the book close under the lamp which stood on the bedside table with
a kerchief thrown over the shade to keep the light out of Sasha's eyes.
Sanya had sent me several books the day before and I was reading
Stefansson's The Friendly Arctic.
My candidature as a member of the-expedition had been finally approved,
precisely as a geologist, and the books which Sanya had sent me were basic
and had to be read.
It must have been round about three when I got up to listen to Sasha's
breathing and saw that she was lying with her eyes open. "What is it,
darling?"
She was silent. Then, quietly, she said: "Katya, I'm dying." "You're
getting better. Today you are much better." "It wouldn't be so terrible if
it weren't for the baby." Her eyes were full of tears and she tried to turn
her head to wipe them on the pillow.
I dried her eyes and kissed her. Her forehead was very hot. The nurse
came in and I sent her to fetch the oxygen pad How can I describe the horror
which began that night! What a lot you learn about a person when he dies!
Listening to the speeches at the memorial service in the Academy of Arts I
thought that Sasha had not had half as many nice things said about her
during her life as those they were saying now after her death.
The coffin stood on a dais, and there were lots of flowers, so many
that her pale face could hardly be seen amidst them. People made speeches,
saying what "a fine artist" and "a fine person" she had been and that
"sudden death had torn the thread of a noble life" and so on. And how feeble
all those speeches were before the dead, austere face lying in that coffin!
Pyotr was all right, though his pale, impassive face struck me as odd.
He seemed to be waiting patiently for this whole long procedure to end at
last and then Sasha would be with him again and everything would be fine
once more. Old Skovorodnikov, who had arrived the day before to attend the
funeral, stood behind him, tears rolling down his cheeks into his neat grey
moustache. Then a mist rose before my eyes again and I have no further
memory of how the ceremony ended.
May 28, 1936. Once in conversation with me, C. had used the expression
"getting the North into your blood". And only now, while helping Sanya to
fit out the search party,, did I get to know what it really meant. Not a day
passes without Sanya being visited by some persons who had contracted that
malady. One of them is P., an old artist, a friend and companion of Sedov,
who had warmly acclaimed Sanya's article in Pravda and subsequently
published his own reminiscences of how the St. Phocas, on her way back to
the mainland, had picked up Navigation officer Klimov at Cape Flora.
Boys come, asking Sanya to take them on as stokers, cooks-any old job.
Ambitious men come, seeking easy paths to honour and fame;
also disinterested dreamers, to whom the Arctic is a sort of
wonderland, full of magic and glamour.
And yesterday, when I fell asleep, waiting for Sanya, curled up in an
armchair, a man came to see Sanya. A naval man-1 couldn't say what rank-a
bluff, hearty man with a Cossack's forelock and dark mocking eyes. Whether
he had come alone or with Sanya, I couldn't say, but waking up in the middle
of the night I found them engaged in earnest conversation and quickly closed
my eyes, pretending to be asleep. It was pleasant to listen and doze, or
pretend that you were dozing-you didn't have to introduce yourself, or do
your hair, or change.
"It's all very well to say that a search for Captain Tatarinov has
nothing in common with the basic tasks of the N.S.R.A. That's nonsense, of
course. You only have to remember the search for Franklin. Searching for
people is a jolly good thing-it helps to improve the map. But I'm talking of
a different thing."
Pencil in hand, he began figuring out the mineral resources of the Kola
Peninsula. Now here I was on my own ground. But the nocturnal visitor
counted all these peaceful minerals as "strategic raw material" needed in
the event of war, and mentally I started arguing with him, convinced as I
was that there would be no war.
"I assure you," the man said, "that Captain Tatarinov understood
perfectly well that at the back of every Arctic expedition there must be
some military purpose."
"Of course he did," I mentally retorted in that queer state of
drowsiness when you can think and speak, which is the same as not speaking
and not thinking. "But there won't be any war!"
"It is high time we set up defensive bases all along the route of our
convoys. I'd like to see a good long-range battery on Novaya Zemlya, say..."
He went on talking and talking, and all of a sudden, from this quiet
hotel room, where I lay curled in an armchair and where Sanya had just
covered the lamp with the end oftablecloth to keep the light out of my eyes,
I was transported to some strange town half-destroyed by fire. Here, too, it
was quiet, but with a tense, deathly hush. Everyone was waiting for
something to happen, talking in whispers, and one had to go down into a
basement, groping for the damp walls in the dark. I didn't go. I was
standing on the front steps of a dark, empty wooden house with the clear
mysterious sky stretching above me. Where was he now? The plane was hurtling
through this fearful starlit void, its engine stuttering, its ice-laden
wings growing heavier every moment. It was the decree of fate, nothing could
alter it. The sound of the engine grew muffled, the machine quivered, and
the call-signs from the distant stations could no longer be heard...
"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.
PART SEVEN
FROM THE DIARY
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.
Now he is silent, that schoolboy. But the future is still ours.
He is silent, and works tirelessly day and night. On the Volga he
sprays reservoirs. He carries the mail between Irkutsk and Vladivostok and
is happy when he succeeds in delivering Moscow newspapers to Vladivostok
within forty-eight hours. He is promoted to Pilot, Second Class, and it is
I, not he, who feels outraged when, after he had asked-for the nth time-to
be sent to the North, he receives by way of reply a reappointment as sky
chauffeur, this time between Simferopol and Moscow. What is this secret
shadow that keeps falling across his path? I don't know. Nor does he.
He works and is appreciated, but I alone realise how tired he is of the
monotony of those dreary flights, each one resembling the other like a
thousand brothers...
In the winter of 1937 Sanya is transferred to Leningrad. We stay with
the Berensteins, and all would be well but for one thing: I wake up in the
night to find Sanya lying with his eyes wide open...
We stand in the Be rensteins' tiny hallway among some old winter coats
and mantles. We stand there in silence. The last quarter of an hour before
another parting. He is going away in mufti, looking so unfamiliar in that
fashionable coat with the wide shoulders and the soft hat.
"Is that you, Sanya'? Maybe it isn't?"
He laughs.
"Let's consider that it isn't me. You are crying?"
"No. Take care of yourself, darling."
He says, "I'll be back" and some other tender, confused words. I don't
remember what I said, all I remember is asking him not to forget his
parachute. He doesn't always carry one.
Where is he going? To the Far East, he says. Why in mufti? Why, when I
ask him about this assignment, does he take Ms time answering? Why, when he
geits a phone call from Moscow late at night does he answer only "yes" or
"no" and afterwards paces up and down the room, smoking, agitatted, pleased
with himself? What is he pleased with? I don't know, I"m not supposed to
know. Why can't I see him off to the station?"
"It's not very convenient," says Sanya. "I'm not going alone. Maybe I
won't go at all. If it'll be convenient I'll phone you from the railway
station."
He did phone me to say the train was leaving in ten minutes. I mustn't
worry, everything will be all right. He will write to me every day. He won't
forget his parachute, of course...
From time to time: I receive letters bearing a Moscow postmark. Judging
by these letters he gets mine regularly. People I don't know ring me up to
find ou-t how I am getting on. Somewhere a thousand miles away, in the
mountains of Guadarrama, fighting is going on. A map with little flags
pinned all over it hangs over my bedside table. Spain, faraway and
mysterious, the Spain of Jose Diaz and Dolores Ibarruri, becomes as close to
me as the street in which I spent my childhood.
On a rainy day in March the Republican aircraft-"everything that had
wings"-fly out against the rebels, who plan to cut Valencia off from Madrid.
It is the victory of Guadalajara. Where are you, Sanya?
In July the Republican army hurls the rebels back from Brunete. Where
are you, Sanya? The Basque country is cut off, communication with Bilbao is
by means of old civil planes, flying in mist over the mountains. Where are
you, Sanya?
"I'm being detained," he writes. "Anything might happen to me. Whatever
happens, remember that you are free, without any obligations."
Then suddenly the impossible, the incredible happens. Such a simple
thing, yet it makes everything a thousand times better-the weather, my
health, everything.
He comes home-a late night phone call from Moscow, a scared Rosalia
wakes me, and I run to the telephone... And a few days later he stands
before me, looking thinner, bronzed, very much like a Spaniard. I pin the
Order of the Red Banner to his tunic with my own hands.
In the autumn we are going to Ensk. Pyotr and his son and the "learned"
Nanny spend the summer at Ensk every year, and Aunt Dasha keeps asking us
down in'every letter-and now, at last, we are going. Evening finds me
standing by the carriage, mentally scolding Sanya, because there are only
five minutes to go before the train leaves and he hasn't come back yet,
having gone off to buy a cake. He jumps aboard as the train moves off,
breathless and gay. We sit for a long time in the semi-darkness of our
compartment without putting on the lights.
When was that? We were returning from Ensk like grown-ups, and those
old Nihilists, the Bubenchikovs aunts, with their big funny muffs were seing
us off. The little unshaven man kept trying to guess what we were-brother
and sister? No resemblance. Husband and wife? Too young. And those lovely
apples-red-cheeked, firm, winter apples! Why is it that people eat such
apples only in childhood?
"It was the day I fell in love with you."
"It wasn't. You fell in love that day we were coming back from the
skating-rink and you offered me some sweets, and I wouldn't take them, and
you gave them away to some little toad of a girl."
"That was when you fell in love with me."
"No, I know it was you. Otherwise you wouldn't have given them away."
We stand in the corridor, watching the telegraph wires dipping and
leaping past, as we had done then. Things are not the same any more, yet we
are happy. The stout, mustachioed conductor keeps glancing at us-or at me
perhaps?-and says, sighing, that he, too, has a beautiful daughter.
Ensk. Early morning. The trams are not running yet, and we have to walk
right across the town. A polite ragamuffin carries our baggage and talks
without a stop. All our efforts to stem the flow by telling him that we are
natives of Ensk ourselves are in vain. He knows all the late Bubenchikovs,
Aunt Dasha, and the judge-the judge in particular, whom he had had occasion
to meet more than once.
"Where?"
"At the police court."
In the square, among the carts from which the farmers are selling
apples and cabbages, stands Aunt Dasha weighing a head of cabbage in her
hand, musing whether to take it or not. She has aged.
Sanya hails her. She eyes us sternly over her glasses the way old
people do, then suddenly drops the cabbage from her listless hand.
"Sanya! My darlings! What are you doing here, in the market?"
"We're passing through on our way to you. Aunt Dasha-my wife." He leads
me up to Aunt Dasha, and business in the Ensk market is suspended-even the
horses take their noses out of their bags to gaze curiously at Aunt Dasha
and me kissing.
The judge comes home late in the evening, when we had long ceased to
expect him. Somewhere round the corner a flivver starts spluttering and the
old man appears on the garden path in a dusty white cap, carrying two
briefcases.
"Well, we have visitors I hear. I'll get washed, then come and kiss
you."
We hear him grunting with pleasure and splashing about in the kitchen.
Aunt Dasha grumbling about him making a mess of the floor again, but he
keeps on grunting and snorting, exclaiming "Ah, that's good!", then finally
he appears, his hair combed, his bare feet in slippers, and wearing a clean
Russian blouse. He drags us out onto the doorsteps in turn to have a good
look, first at me, then at Sanya. Sanya's decoration comes in for a special
scrutiny. "Not bad," he says, looking pleased. "And a bar?" "Yes, a bar." "A
captain, eh?" "Yes." He wrings Sanya's hand.
We sit at the table till late into the night, talking our heads off. We
talk about Sasha, simply and naturally, as if she were with us. She is with
us-little Pyotr becomes more and more like her with every passing month-that
same Mongolian set of the eyes, the same soft dark hair on the temples. In
bending his head, he lifts his eyebrows just as she used to do.
Sanya talks about Spain, and a queer, long-forgotten feeling grips me.
I listen to him as though he were talking about somebody else. So it was he,
who, going out one day on a reconnaissance flight, spotted five Junkers and
closed in with them without hesitation? It was he who, diving in among the
Junkers, fired almost at random, because it was impossible to miss? It was
he who, covering his face with his glove, his jacket smouldering, set down
his wrecked plane and within the hour was up again in another.
We clink glasses and Sanya says in Spanish: "Salad/" Then, "Let's
consider that our 'voyage into life' has only just begun. The ship put out
of harbour yesterday and one can still see in the distance the lighthouse
which had sent her its farewell signal: 'Happy sailing and success!' Once
upon a time, small but brave, we walked through the dark quiet streets of
this town. We were armed with only one Finnish knife between us, the knife
for which Pyotr made a sheath out of an old boot. But we were better armed
than might appear at first sight. We went forward because we had sworn to
each other an oath:
'To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.' We went forward and our
road has not come to an end yet."
Saying this, Sanya raised his glass high, drained it and shattered it
against the wall...
In 1941 we moved to Leningrad, hoping it is now for good. We rent a
three-roomed summer cottage in the country with a well and a handsome old
landlord who resembles one of the ancient Russian Streltsi and whom Pyotr
immediately starts to paint. We live at this dacha all together, one
family-the two Pyotrs and the Nanny did not go to Ensk that year-we bathe in
the lake, drink tea from a real, brass pot-bellied samovar, and I find it
odd that other women do not seem to notice this wonderful peace and
happiness.
On Saturdays we go to meet Sanya. The whole family troop to the sation,
and the most eager to meet Uncle Sanya, of course, is little Pyotr, who
secretly hopes he will bring him a battleship. His hope is justified. Sanya,
a magnificent ship in one hand, jumps down from the step of a carriage,
waves to us, but continues to walk alongside the moving carriage. The train
stops and he holds out his hand. A little dried-up old woman steps down with
a brisk preoccupied air, in one hand an umbrella, in the other a canvas
travelling-bag. I can hardly believe my eyes. It is Grandma all right.
Grandma in a chic pongee suit and a cute straw hat, whom he protectively
pilots through the crowd which instantly fills the small platform...
I was very keen on having Grandma come and live with us when we decided
to make our home in Leningrad. But each time I met her I was persuaded that
it was impossible. She had less and less to say against Nikolai Antonich and
spoke of him more and more with a sort of superstitious awe. Deep down in
her heart she was convinced that he was endowed with supernatural powers.
"The moment I think of a thing, he knows it," she once said. "It's
uncanny. The other day I decided to bake some pies, and he says:
'But not with sago. It's bad for the digestion.' "
What could have happened to make Grandma show up at our countryside
station and stride briskly towards us, umbrella in one hand and
travelling-bag in the other?
After a nap and a wash she appeared at table looking younger and spruce
in a dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves and cream-coloured high boots with
pointed toes.
"Got himself a housekeeper," she began without any preliminaries. '"Not
a housekeeper, but a secretary,' he says. 'She'll help me too.' And she goes
and puts her dirty shoes on my kitchen stove. Some help!"
The person who put her dirty shoes on the stove went by the name of
Alevtina. It was most interesting. We were sitting in the garden. Grandma
proudly telling her story, but so far it was difficult to make out what it
was all about. I could see that Pyotr was dying to sketch her, but I wagged
a finger at him warning him not to.
I did the same to Sanya, who could barely restrain his mirth. The only
serious listener was little Pyotr.
"If you're a secretary, why d'you shove your shoes where I do my
cooking. I'm not having any of that! Maybe I'll light the stove today?"
"Really?"
"And so I did."
"You did?"
"And burnt 'em to a cinder," quoth Grandma. "She'll know better next
time."
We held our sides with laughter.
In