e
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."
CHAPTER TWELVE
1 MEET HYDROGRAPHER R.
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.
"Yes, you've had a run of bad luck," he said when I told him about my
misfortunes. "But you'll make up for it. How come you were with the Baltic
Fleet, then the Black Sea Fleet? Deserted the North, I see? I always took
you for an enthusiast of the North-for good and all."
It was too long a story to tell him how I had come to "desert" the
North. I merely said that I had left the Civil Aviation only when I had
given up hope of returning to the North.
I became lost in thought and started out of my reverie when R.
addressed me.
"You'd better lie down and get some sleep," he said. "You're tired.
We'll talk tomorrow."
Ignoring my protests, he brought in a pillow, removed the holsters from
the divan, and made me lie down. I fell asleep instantly, just as though
somebody had tiptoed up to me and thrown a thick, heavy blanket over all
that had happened that day.
It was still very early, probably round about four o'clock, when I
opened my eyes. R. was already up, curtaining off his bookshelves with old
newspapers. For some reason the thought that he was going away that day
depressed me. He sat down beside me, but did not allow me to get up.
Screwing up his quick, black eyes and rumpling his thinning hair, he began
talking.
Nowadays every schoolboy knows, if only roughly, what was happening on
the seaways from Britain and America to the Soviet Union in the summer of
1942. But at that time, in the summer of 1942, the things R. was telling me
were news even to me, though I had never stopped taking an interest in the
North and pounced on every item that appeared in the press concerning the
operations of the Air Army of the Northern Fleet.
Very briefly, but in far greater detail than even in special articles I
was subsequently to read, he painted for me a picture of the big war that
was being waged in the Barents Sea. I listened raptly to the story of the
daring raid by midget submarines into the Gulf of Pet-samo, the enemy's
major naval base; of Safonov, who had shot down into the sea twenty-five
enemy aircraft; of the work of the airmen, who attacked transports under
cover of snow blasts-I hadn't forgotten yet what a snow blast was. Listening
to him, I experienced for the first time in my life a galling sense of
frustration. The North R. was telling me about was my North!
From him I first learned what a "convoy" was. He pointed out to me on
the map the possible "rendezvous points", that is, the secretly arranged
spots where the British and American ships were to meet, and explained the
manner in which they passed under the protection of our Navy.
"This is the way they go," he said, showing me, in a general way, of
course, the route, which at that time, in 1942, was not usually talked
about. "A column of from one to two hundred ships. You can guess, of course,
at what spot they will run into difficulties?" And he pointed out
approximately where that spot was. "But never mind the western route. We
have men here with good heads on their shoulders" (he pointed out the
place). "There's another matter, no less important. These gates, which the
Germans are trying to close," he said briskly, covering the outlet from the
Barents Sea into the Kara Sea with his hand, "because they understand
perfectly well how important the X. mines are for aircraft engine industry.
And, of course, they don't like the idea of our having so valuable a means
of transit as the Northern Sea Route, especially as they were already hoping
this spring-"
He did not finish the sentence, but I understood what he meant. I
happened to have heard that the Germans had succeeded in seriously damaging
a port which was of great importance for the western route.
"You can imagine how far the war has spread," R. went on, "if not so
long ago a German submarine fired on our aircraft off Novaya Zemlya. But
that's not the whole story. Today I'm flying to Moscow in a plane which the
Military Council of the Northern Fleet has sent for me. The pilot. Major
Katyakin, tells me he has been hunting a German surface raider for two
weeks-and where would you think? In the area-" He named a remote area. "In
short, the war is already being fought in places where only hydrographers
and polar bears used to roam. This is where they remembered me," R. said,
laughing. "Not only remembered me, but also-" here his face assumed a
kindly, jovial expression-"also given me a most interesting and important
job. .1 can't tell you anything about it, of course, it's a military secret.
But I can tell you that you were the first person I thought of. Your phoning
me up the way you did was a miracle. Alexander Ivanovich," he wound up
gravely, even solemnly, "I propose that you fly with me to the North."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN DECISION
He went away, and I was left all alone in the empty abandoned flat. All
four spacious rooms were at my disposal, and I could wander about them,
thinking as much as I liked. R. would be coming back at three in the
afternoon when I was to tell him one short word: "Yes". Or another still
shorter: "No".
Between these two words stretched a long, hard road, and I plodded
along it, resting and plodding along again, and there was no end to it.
The Germans were shelling the district. The first ranging-in shrapnel
shell had burst long since, and the cloud of smoke, dispersing slowly, still
hung over Liteiny Bridge. The explosions, starting at a distance, began to
draw nearer, advancing from right to left, striding savagely between the
blocks straight towards this house, towards the empty rooms where I was
wandering between "yes" and "no", which were so infinitely far apart.
It was probably the nursery. A black, one-eyed teddy bear sat on top of
the cupboard with dropping head; in a corner lay a scooter, and on a low
round table stood various collections and games, and I pictured to myself a
small version of R., just as energetic and full of the same controlled
ardour as the senior, with the same droll Cossack's forelock and round face.
In this room I rested from my "yes" and "no". Here I could even think of the
home which Katya and I had once planned to set up in Leningrad. For where
there is a home there are children.
The shell bursts drew nearer and nearer. One exploded quite close,
flinging open the doors and bringing a cheery tinkle of splintered glass. In
the ensuing silence footsteps echoed hollowly in the street. I looked out of
the window and saw two boys, with what looked to me like ghastly faces,
running towards the house. When they drew level one of the boys touched the
other on the back and with a loud laugh, turned and ran back again. They
were playing tag.
R. would be coming back at three and I would say to him: "Yes".
It would be as though those six months of frustrating idleness had
never been. I would go to the North. The farther away from me it had been
all those years, the closer and more alluring it had grown. Had I not fought
as best I could in the West and the South? But up there, in the North-that
was where I had to be, defending a land which I knew and loved.
Then suddenly I stopped still and said to myself: "Katya."
To go away and leave her? To go far away, for a long time? To make no
attempt to find Pyotr, whose field post number may simply have been changed?
To undertake no other search here, in Leningrad and at the Leningrad front?
Wherever Katya might have been evacuated she was sure to try and join Nina
Kapitonovna and little Pyotr. Was I to lose this trail I had picked up,
faint though it was, but which might lead me to where she was, numb with
grief because that damned newspaper report could not but have reached her?
My decision was made. I would stay in Leningrad for a few more days. I
would find Katya, then go to the North.
R. returned at three o'clock. I told him of my decision. He heard me
out and said that in my place he would have done the same. "But we must go
to Moscow together. I'll arrange for you to be put on strength at
Headquarters, and then Slepushkin will give you a fortnight's leave for
family considerations. A wife after all. And what a wife! I remember
Ekaterina Ivanovna very well. A sensible girl, kind-hearted, and talk about
charming-one in a thousand!"
I shall not describe how, the next day, I went back to the
Petro-gradskaya and made another round of all the tenants of house No. 79;
how, at the Academy of Arts, I tried to find out where Pyotr was, only to
learn that he had been wounded and had been in the clearing hospital on
Vasilyevsky Island. The sculptor Kostochkin had visited him, but that
sculptor had died of starvation and Pyotr, rumour had it, had returned to
the front. Or how I discovered why my letters had never reached the
children's camp of the Artists' Union, which had been re-evacuated to a
place near Novosibirsk; or how Doctor Ovanesyan went with me to the District
Soviet and shouted at an indifferent fat man who declined to make any
inquiries about Katya.
Evacuee trains in January had been routed to Yaroslavl, where special
hospitals had been set up for Leningraders. This was the only solid fact I
had been able to establish, and it was the opinion of all the Leningraders I
met that I must look for Katya in Yaroslavl.
Two circumstances combined to convince me that this was so. For one
thing, the children's camp of the Artists' Union before its re-evacuation
had been in the Yaroslavl region, in a village called Gniloi Yar. Secondly,
Lukeria Ilyinichna, as the typist of the Stomatology Clinic was called,
suddenly remembered that Doctor Tro-fimova had sent Katya to Yaroslavl.
"My God!" she said with vexation. "Fancy getting such a thing muddled
up! My memory's gone weak, you know, it's because I don't have any sugar.
I've remembered it though, sugar or no sugar. And I tell you-Yaroslavl's the
place where you'll find her."
R.'s plane was leaving at midnight. I rang him up and arrived ten
minutes before the take-off.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
FRIENDS
WHO WERE NOT AT HOME
If my movements on that day were to be traced on the map of Moscow, one
would think I had deliberately gone out of my way to avoid meeting any of
those I was so keen on seeing. "Keen" is the word, though I wanted to see
different people for quite different reasons. Both lots were in Moscow.
Another glance at the map, perhaps, would reveal that their route that day
ran alongside my own. Or crossed it two minutes later. Or ran parallel with
mine along the next street, behind a narrow line of buildings. Be that as it
may, my luck was out, and with one exception, I found no one at home and
went straight from the airfield to Vorotnikovsky Street where Korablev
lived, seeing that my luggage consisted of one small suitcase.
The tumbledown wooden annexe, lost amid the tall built-up houses,
looked tike a summer cottage, what with its shutters and its veranda.
Korablev no longer had held the ground floor to himself, and though Moscow
had struck me, at first sight as being oddly empty, here, in this little
house, I found a head sticking out of nearly every window. Women were
sitting round the doorsteps, knitting, and the moment I appeared I found at
least a dozen pairs of eyes scrutinising me with curiosity. I might have
been back at Ensk, in our old courtyard. ' "Who d'you want?" "Korablev."
"Ah, Ivan Pavlovich? Second door on the left down the corridor." "I
know that," I said, mounting the steps. "Is he at home?" "Knock. I think he
is."
The last time I saw Korablev was before the war. Katya and I had
dropped in on the old man without warning, bringing a cake and a bottle of
French wine. He was a long time shaving and talking to us from the next
room, while we looked at some old school photographs.
At last he had come out, wearing a new suit with a starched collar, his
moustache twisted up with a youthful swagger. That was how I saw him as I
walked down the dark corridor, just as he had been on that wonderful,
memorable evening. In a moment he would come out and recognise me at once.
"Is that you, Sanya?"
But I knocked two or three times at the familiar felt-padded door
without getting an answer. Korablev was not at home.
"Dear Ivan Pavlovich," I wrote, moving aside because the women were
watching me and I did not want them to see how agitated I was. "I don't know
whether I'll have time to call again. I'm leaving for Yaroslavl today, where
Katya was evacuated in January. I may travel still farther from there until
I have found her. I can't in this note explain what happened to me and how
we lost each other. Should you (or Valya, whom I hope to see today) happen
to have heard anything of her, please let me know immediately at the
following address: c/o Rear-Admiral R., Political Department, Polarnoye, the
Arctic. Dear Ivan Pavlovich, in case you have read about my death, here I am
writing to you, your Sanya."
A dozen hands reached out simultaneously for my letter. I took the
Metro, which looked more beautiful and imposing than ever before, to the
Palace of Soviets station. The war might have ended long ago, the way the
old men sat about on Gogol Boulevard, leaning on their gnarled old sticks.
Children were playing. Preoccupied with my own thoughts and cares, it
suddenly dawned on me-why, this is Moscow, Moscow!
The brass plate on Valya's door read: "Professor Valentin Zhukov". Oho!
A professor! I rang, knocked, then kicked the door.
There was nothing surprising in the fact that in the summer of 1942,
when nearly all Moscow's inhabitants spent most of their lives ''a! work, I
should not find Professor Zhukov at home during working hours. But the fact
that Valya, my old pal Valya, was poking around somewhere when I needed him
so badly, made me wild. I kicked the door again, and suddenly it yielded, as
though alive, with a plaintive squeak. I pulled the handle, and the door
opened.
The flat was empty, of course, and the faint hope that Valya might be
asleep was dashed at once. I went into the "all-purpose kitchen", which had
once served as both dining-room and nursery. Strange to say, the place had
been tidied up. The table was covered with a cloth, and white paper with
scalloped edges lay on the shelves. It looked as if a woman's hand had been
over those clean-swept walls, over those windows with the fresh
lilies-of-the-valley on the sills. Valya buying flowers? One would have to
be a great artist to imagine such a scene. In another room a narrow iron cot
stood against the wall and over the foot of it lay a neatly folded dress.
Katya had once had a dress like that-white polka dots on a blue ground. What
could a woman be doing in Valya's bachelor flat? Kiren and the children had
gone away at the beginning of the war-I learnt that from Katya's first
letters. "I wonder who's hooked you, old chap?" I recalled a letter of
Katya's in which she poked fun at Kiren for being jealous of her husband,
engrossed though he was in the study of cross-bred silver foxes. The cause
of her jealousy was a "Zhenka Kolpakchi, who has eyes of different colour".
It looked as if that Zhenka hadn't lost much time! Anyhow, I had not found
Valya in.
"Dear old Valya," I wrote, "on my way to Yaroslavl, where I hope to
find Katya or at least find out where she is, I dropped in on you but
unfortunately did not find you in. I've had no news of Katya for the last
six months. She corresponded with Kiren when she was in Leningrad, so maybe
Kiren or you know something about her? I was wounded and was in hospital at
M-v. I wrote to you but got no reply. I've been through a lot, but how much
easier it would have been if Katya and I had met, or at least if each of us
knew that the other was alive. Write to me, care of Rear-Admital R.,
Northern Fleet, Political Department, Polarnoye. This is a tentative address
as I have no other yet. Keep well, dear friend. The door was open. You'll
have to break it down now-at least that's better than leaving the flat open.
I'll drop in again before I leave, if I can manage it."
I put this note on the kitchen table. Then I placed the door-hook in
position so that it would drop into the eye when I shut the door, and I
slammed the door. The hook fell straight into the eye.
I had one more important errand in that neighbourhood. Not far from
Valya there lived a man whom I had to see, whether he relished the prospect
of such a visit or not. This visit of mine was long overdue!
During my sleepless nights in hospital, tossing about in delirium, I
had thought about this encounter. I needed it so much that I felt I had to
keep alive until I had seen him!
I had often pictured to myself this meeting. I wanted to appear before
him at some relaxed moment in his life, at the theatre, say, when the
thought of me would be farthest from his mind. Or somewhere in a hotel, say,
when I would lock the door and eye him with a smile. Sometimes, in the gloom
of pre-dawn, I would see him on the bed next to mine, sitting his legs
tucked under him and a look of strange indifference in his flat, half-closed
eyes.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE.
KATYA'S PORTRAIT
One day, as we were passing through Dogs' Place, Katya had remarked:
"Romashov lives here." She had pointed to a grey-green building, which
looked no different from its neighbours on either side. Yet both then and
now I thought there was something indefinably mean about those peeling
walls.
There was no list of tenants at the entrance, as before the war, and I
had to go to the house-manager's office to find out the number of the flat.
And this is what took place in the office: the registration clerk, a
dour, prim lady in pince-nez, started and looked at me with round eyes when
I asked for Romashov. In a cubbyhole partitioned off with boards, men
wearing aprons-evidently yardkeepers-sat and stood about. There was a slight
stir among them too.
"Why don't you phone him," the clerk suggested. "His phone was
connected yesterday."
"No, I'd rather call without phoning," I said, smiling. "A sort of
surprise. You see, I'm an old friend of his whom he thinks dead."
Though this was a quite ordinary conversation, the clerk reacted with
an oddly forced smile, and from the adjoining room there slowly emerged a
very cool and deliberate young man in a smart cap, who gave me a close look.
I had to go back into the street to get to the entrance, and at the
street door I hesitated for a moment. I had no gun, and was thinking whether
I ought not have a word with the militiaman standing on the corner. I
dismissed the idea, however. "He won't get away," I thought.
I never for a moment doubted that he was in Moscow, probably not in the
army. Even if he was in the army he would still be living in his flat. Or in
a summer cottage. In the mornings he would walk about in his pyjamas. I
could see him as large as life in Ms pyjamas, after a bath, with the yellow
tufts of wet hair sticking up on his head. It was a vision that set purple
circles spinning before my eyes. I had to compose myself, which meant
thinking of something else. I recalled that at five o'clock R. would be
waiting for me at the Hydrographi-cal Department.
"Who's there?"
"May I speak to Romashov?"
"Call back in an hour."
"Couldn't I wait for him inside," I said very politely. "I shan't be
able to call again, unfortunately. I'm afraid he'll be disappointed at not
seeing me."
The door-chain clinked. It was not slipped off, though. On the
contrary, it was being fastened, so that the person inside could have a peep
at me through the slit. Then with another clink it was taken off. An old man
in an unbuttoned shirt and baggy trousers held up by braces let me into the
hallway. He stared at me suspiciously. There was something aristocratically
haughty and at the same time pitiful about that weazened, hook-nosed face. A
yellow-grey tuft of hair stuck up from his bald forehead. The skin hung over
his Adam's .apple in long folds, like stalactites.
"Von Vyshimirsky?" I said, wonderingly. He started. "I mean Vyshimirsky
without the 'von'-you're Nikolai Ivanovich Vyshimirsky, aren't you?"
"What?"
"My dear Nikolai Ivanovich, don't you remember me?" I proceeded
cheerfully. "I came to see you once."
He started breathing hard.
"I've had lots of people coming to see me, thousands," he answered
sullenly. "As many as forty used to sit down at my table."
"You were working at the Moscow Drama Theatre and used to wear a jacket
with brass buttons. My friend Grisha Faber played the red-haired doctor, and
Korablev introduced us in Grisha's dressing-room."
I wonder why I felt so light-hearted? Here I was standing in
Roma-shov's flat as though I were the master there. He would be here within
an hour. I took a deep breath with half-open mouth. What would I do to him?
"I don't know! What name did you say?"
"Captain Grigoriev at your service. So you are living here now? In
Romashov's Hat?"
Vyshimirsky glanced at me suspiciously.
"I live where I'm registered," he said. "Not here. And the
house-manager knows I live there, and not here."
"I see."
I took out my cigarette-case, flipped open the lid and offered him a
cigarette. He took one. The door leading into the next room was open. The
place was clean and tidy, all light-grey and dark-grey-walls and furniture.
A round table stood before a divan. And over the divan somebody's portrait,
a large one in a smooth light-grey frame. "Everything to match," I thought.
"You mean Ivan Pavlovich, the teacher?" Vyshimirsky suddenly asked.
"Yes."
"Yes, of course, Korablev. A fine man. Valya was a pupil of his. Nyuta
wasn't, she graduated from the Brzhozovskaya Girls' School. But Valya was a
pupil of his. To be sure! He was a help, yes, he was..." And the glimmerings
of a kindly feeling flitted across his bewhiskered old face.
Then, pretending to recollect himself, the old man invited me into the
rooms-we had been standing all this time in the hallway-and even asked me
whether I had just arrived in town.
"If you have," he said, "there's an army canteen where you can get
quite a decent meal with bread for next to nothing on your travel warrant."
But I wasn't listening to his chatter. I had stopped in the doorway,
astounded. That portrait over the divan in the light-grey frame was of
Katya-a splendid portrait, which I had never seen before. It was a
full-length photograph of Katya in the squirrel coat, which looked so nice
on her and which she had made just before the war. I remember how hard she
had been trying to get it done by some famous furrier named Manet, and was
cross with me because I couldn't understand that the cap and the muff had to
be made of fur too. What could this mean, my God?
At least a dozen thoughts jostled in my mind, one of them so absurd
that the memory of it today makes me feel ashamed. I imagined almost
everything except the truth, a truth which proved to be even more absurd
than that absurd idea!
"I must say I never expected to meet you here, Nikolai Ivanovich," I
said when the old man had told me how, after leaving the theatre, he had
been employed at a mental hospital as a cloak-room attendant, and had been
dismissed because the inmates had "unlawfully notified the matron that I
stole soup and ate it at night".
"Are you working for Romashov? Or just keeping up the acquaintance?"
"Yes, keeping up the acquaintance. He suggested that I help him out in
his business, and I agreed. I was employed as secretary to the Metropolitan
Isidore, and I don't conceal the fact; on the contrary, I state the fact in
my personnel questionnaires. It was a big job, an enormous task. Our daily
mail alone was over fifteen hundred letters. The same here. But here I work
as a favour. I get a worker's ration, because Romashov has fixed me up at
his institution. And the institution knows I am working here."
"Isn't Romashov in the army now? When we last met he was in army
uniform."
"No, he's not in the army. Reserved for the duration. Indispensable or
something."
"What sort of mail are you getting?"
"Oh, business letters, very important," Vyshimirsky said. "Extremely
important. We have an assignment. At the present moment we are under
instructions to find a certain woman, a lady. But I suspect it's not an
assignment, but a private affair. A love affair, so to speak."
"What woman is it?"
"The daughter of an historic personage, a man I knew very well,"
Vyshimirsky said proudly. "You may have heard of him perhaps- Tatarinov? We
are searching for his daughter. We'd have found her long ago, but it's such
a frightful muddle. She's married and has a double name."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
"YOU WON'T KILL ME"
It was as though life had suddenly pulled up sharply, jolting my head
foremost into an imaginary wall. That was how I felt as I stared at the old
man, just an ordinary old man, standing before me in an ordinary room and
telling me that Romashov was looking for Katya, that is, doing the same
thing I was doing.
Our conversation, however, proceeded as though nothing had happened.
From Katya the old man switched over to some member of T.U. committee who
had had no right to call him "a hangover from the old regime", because he,
Vyshimirsky, had a work record ~of fifty years, then he wandered off into
reminiscences, relating how in the old days, back in 1908, when he came out
of the theatre the commissionaire would cry out: "Vyshimirsky's carriage!
"-and the carriage would roll up. He wore a top hat and cloak in those days,
but now people did not wear such things, which was "a great pity, because it
was elegant".
"When did he die?" he suddenly asked.
"Who?"
"Korablev."
"Who said he died? He's alive and well," I said in a jocular tone,
though I was quivering in all my being, thinking: "You'll know everything in
a minute, but tread carefully."
"So it's a private affair you say? Concerning a lady?"
"Yes, private. But very serious, very. Captain Tatarinov is an
historical personage. Mr Romashov was in Leningrad. He was there during the
siege and starved so bad that he ate paste off the wallpaper. He tore down
old wallpaper, and boiled and ate it. Afterwards he went on a meat foraging
assignment, and when he came back she was no longer there. She'd been moved
out."
"Where to?"
"That's just the question," Vyshimirsky said. "You know what that
evacuation was like? Go and find anybody! It's not as if she'd been moved
out by special train. You could trace it then. Take the Gold Storage Plant,
for instance. Where did its train go? To Siberia? Then she'd be in Siberia.
But she was evacuated by aeroplane."
"By aeroplane?"
"Yes, exactly. As a privileged person, I suppose. And now, who knows
where she is? All we know is that the plane flew via Khvoinaya that is, the
very place where Mr Romashov was getting meat."
I must have sensed instinctively when it was necessary to hold my
tongue and when to put in two or three words. Everything was as it should
be. Here was an army man, seemingly just out of hospital, thin and peaky,
who had called on a friend with whom he had parted at the front, asking how
his friend was getting on, what he was doing. "You'll know everything in a
minute, step warily."
"Well? And did you find her?"
"Not yet. But we will," said Vyshimirsky, "following my plan. I wrote
to Buguruslan and to the Central Inquiry Bureau, but that was useless. They
sent us a dozen Tatarinovs and a hundred Grigo-rievs, and we don't know what
name we have to give as her first. So then I wrote personally to the
chairmen of the executive committees of all the regional cities. It was a
big job, a big assignment. But Captain Tatarinov was a friend of mine and
for his daughter's sake I sp