an appears at first sight.
She listened to my story, and though still an interrogator, she was now
an interrogator who, together with me, read the letters which had been
carried into our yard with the spring freshet, who together with me had
copied out passages from polar exploration reports, and together with me had
flown teachers, doctors and party functionaries out to remote Nenets areas.
Navigator Klimov's diaries had already been perused and the old boat-hook
found-the final touch, as I had then believed, completing the picture of
evidence. Then I came to the war and fell silent, because everything we had
lived through rose before me in a boundless panorama, in the depths of which
there just glimmered that idea which had stirred me so strongly all my life.
It was hard to explain this to an outsider, but I explained it.
"Captain Tatarinov appreciated what the Northern Sea Route meant for
Russia," I said. "And it's no mere accident that the Germans tried to cut it
off. I was a soldier when I flew to the place where the St. Maira expedition
had perished, and I found it because I was a soldier."
CHAPTER EIGHT
MY PAPER
Everybody came to hear my paper, even Kiren's mother. Unfortunately, I
do not remember the exact words of the little speech of welcome, with
quotations from the classics, with which she greeted me. The speech was a
bit longish, and it amused me to see the look of resignation and despair on
Valya's face as he listened to it.
I seated Korablev in the front row, directly facing the speaker's
desk-1 was accustomed to looking at him when I made speeches.
"Well, Sanya," he said gaily, "I'll hold my hand like this, palm
downward, and you keep an eye on it when you speak. When I start drumming my
fingers, it means you are getting excited. If I don't you're not."
"Ivan Pavlovich, you're a dear."
I wasn't in the least excited, though I did feel a bit nervous,
wondering whether Nikolai Antonich would come or not.
He did. After hanging up my maps I turned round and saw him in the
front row, not far from Korablev. He sat with his legs crossed, looking
straight in front of him with an immobile expression. I thought he had
changed these last few days-his face had a hangdog sort of look, with
sagging jowls and a thin, wrinkled neck showing high above the collar. It
was very pleasant, of course, when the chairman, an old, distinguished
geographer, before calling on me to speak, himself said a few words about
me. I even regretted that he had such a quiet voice. He said that it was to
my "talented tenacity" that Soviet Arctic science owed one of the most
interesting pages-and I took no exception to this either, especially as the
audience applauded, loudest of all Kiren's mother.
I ought not, perhaps, have made such a long preamble dealing with the
history of the Northern Sea Route, even though it was an interesting
history.
I spoke about this rather lamely, often halting and forgetting the
simplest words, and generally humming and hawing, as Kiren said
afterwards.
But when I came to our own times and gave a general outline of the
military significance of the North, I caught a glimpse of Katya far down the
dark isle. She had been indisposed-having caught a cold-and had promised to
stay indoors. But what a good thing, how splendid it was that she had come!
It cheered me up immensely and I began to speak with greater confidence and
assurance.
"It may seem strange to you," I said, "that in a time of war I should
be talking to you about an old expedition, which ended nearly thirty years
ago. It's now history. But we have not forgotten our history, and perhaps
our main strength lies in the fact that war has not negated or arrested a
single one of the great ideas which have transformed our country. The
conquest of the North by the Soviet people is one such idea."
I hesitated for a moment, as I wished to speak of how Ledkov and I had
surveyed the Arctic region, but this was remote from the subject, so I
switched over, none too skilfully, to the Captain's life story.
I spoke about him with an indescribable feeling. As if it were I, not
he, who had been that boy, the son of a poor fisherman, born on the shores
of the Sea of Azov. As if it were I, not he, who had sailed before the mast
in oil-tankers plyingbetween Batum and Novorossiisk. As if it were I, not
he, who had passed his examination for sub-lieutenant and had then served in
the Hydrographical Board, suffering the slighting arrogance of the
aristocratic officers with proud indifference. As if it were I, not he, who
had made notes in the margins of Nansen's books and by whose hand was
written down that brilliant idea: "The ice itself will solve the problem."
As if his was not a story of ultimate defeat and obscure death, but, on the
contrary, of victory and joy. The story of friends, enemies, and love was
repeated, but life was different now, and it was friends and love, not
enemies, who had won the day.
As I spoke I experienced a mounting sense of exhilaration verging
on inspiration. It was as though I were looking at a distant screen and
had sighted beneath the open sky a dead schooner buried in snow. But was she
dead? No, there was a sound of hammering: skylights were being boarded up
and ceilings covered with tarred felt in preparation for wintering.
Naval men standing in the aisle made way for Katya as she passed
to her seat, and I thought it was only right that they should make way
respectfully for the daughter of Captain Tatarinov. Besides, she was the
best one there, especially in that simple tailored suit. She was the best,
and she, too, in a manner of speaking, had a share in that fervour and
exhilaration with which I spoke about the voyage of the St. Maria.
But it was time I passed on to the scientific aspects of the drift, and
I prefaced it with the statement that the facts established by Captain
Tatarinov's expedition had lost none of their significance today. Thus, from
a study of the drift, Professor V., the well-known Arctic scientist, deduced
the existence of an unknown island between the 78th and 80th parallels, and
this island was actually discovered in 1935 just where V. had figured it
should be. The constant drift-current shown by Nansen was confirmed by the
voyage of Captain Tatarinov, whose formulae of the comparative movement of
ice and wind were a notable contribution to Russian science.
A stir of interest ran through the hall when I began to relate how we
had developed the expedition's photographic films, which had lain in the
earth for nearly thirty years.
The light went out, and on the screen appeared a tall man in a fur cap
and fur boots strapped under the knees. He stood with head doggedly bent,
leaning on his rifle, and at his feet lay a dead bear, its paws folded like
a kitten's. It was as though he had stepped into that hall-a strong intrepid
soul, who had been content with so little! Everyone stood up when he
appeared on the screen, and the hush that fell upon the hall was so deep and
solemn that not a soul dared breathe, let alone utter a word. And in this
solemn silence I read out the Captain's report and his letter of farewell:
" 'It makes me feel bitter to think of all I could have accomplished if
I had been-Iwould not say helped-but at least not hindered. What's done
cannot be undone. My one consolation is that through my labours Russia has
discovered and acquired large new territories...'
"But there is a passage in this letter," I continued when everybody had
sat down, "to which I want to draw your attention. Here it is:
'I know who could help you, but in these last hours of my life I do not
want to name him. I didn't have a chance to tell him to his face everything
that had been rankling in my breast all these years. He personified for me
all that force that kept me bound hand and foot...' Who is that man whose
name the Captain did not want to utter at his dying hour? It was to him that
he referred in another letter: 'It can positively be said that we owe all
our misfortunes to him alone.' It was of him that he wrote: 'We were taking
a chance, we knew that we were running a risk, but we did not expect such a
blow.' It was of him that he wrote: 'Our main misfortune was the mistake for
which we are now having to pay every hour, every minute of the day-the
mistake I made in entrusting the fitting out of our expedition to
Nikolai...'"
Nikolai! But there are many Nikolais in the world!
There were even no few in this auditorium, but only one of them
suddenly stiffened and looked round him when I uttered that name in a loud
voice; and the stick on which he was leaning dropped with a clatter. Someone
picked it up and gave it to him.
"If today I am going to give the full name of that man it is not
because I wish to clinch an old argument between him and me. Life itself has
settled that argument long ago. But he continues to claim in his articles
that he has always been Captain Tatarinov's benefactor, and that even the
idea itself of 'following in the steps of Nordensk-jold', as he writes, was
his. He is so sure of himself that he had the audacity to come here today
and is now in this hall."
A whisper ran through the hall, then there was a hush, followed by more
whispering. The chairman rang his little bell.
"Strangely enough, he has gone through life without ever having had his
name spelled out in full. But among the Captain's farewell letters we found
some business papers. There was one, which the Captain evidently never
parted with. It was a duplicate of a bond under which: (1) On the
expedition's return to the mainland all the spoils of their hunting and
fishing belonged to Nikolai Antonich Tatari-nov-named in full. (2) The
Captain renounced in advance any claims whatever to any remuneration. (3) In
the event of the loss of the vessel the Captain forfeited all his property
to Nikolai Antonich Tatarinov-named in full. (4) The ship itself and the
insurance belonged to Nikolai Antonich Tatarinov-named in full.
"Once, in conversation with me, this man said that he recognised only
one witness-the Captain himself. Let him deny those words now before all of
us here, because the Captain himself now names him-in full!"
Pandemonium broke loose in the hall the moment I finished my speech.
People in the front row stood up and those behind shouted at them to sit
down, because they could not see him. He was standing, holding up his hand
with the stick in it, and shouting: "I ask for the floor, I ask for the
floor!"
He got the floor, but the audience would not let him speak. Never in my
life had I heard such a furious uproar as that which broke out the moment he
opened his mouth. Nevertheless he did say something, though nobody caught
what it was, and then, thumping the floor with his stick, he stepped down
from the platform and made for the exit. He passed down the hall in an utter
emptiness, and the space through which he passed remained empty for a long
time, as if nobody wanted to go where he had just passed, thumping his
stick.
CHAPTER NINE
AND THE LAST
The carriage in this train was going only as far as Ensk, and that
meant that all these people in the crowded, dimly lit carriage, who occupied
every inch of free space, including the floor and the upper berths, would be
getting out at Ensk. In the old days this would nearly have doubled its
population.
We made the acquaintance of our travelling companions. They were girl
students from Moscow colleges, who said they were going to Ensk to work.
"What sort of work?"
"We don't know yet. In the mines."
Not counting the old tunnel in Cathedral Gardens, which Pyotr had once
assured me ran under the river with "skeletons at every step", I had never
heard of anything like a mine there. But the girls were quite definite about
their going to the mines.
After two or three hours, as usual, each compartment settled down to a
life of its own, unlike that of its neighbours, as though the ceiling-high
wooden partition divided not so much the carriage as people's thoughts and
feelings. Some compartments were gay and noisy, others dull. Ours was gay
because the girls, after mildly lamenting the fact that they had not
succeeded in staying in Moscow for their summer field work and saying
something catty about a certain Masha who had succeeded in doing so, started
to sing and all the evening Katya and I were regaled with modern war songs,
some of which were very amusing. In fact, the girls sang all the way to
Ensk, even in the night-for some reason they decided to go without sleep.
The thirty-four-hour journey passed quickly enough as we dozed on and off to
the sound of these young voices, singing songs now sad, now gay.
The train used to arrive early in the morning, but now it arrived
towards the evening, so that when we got out, the little station struck me,
in the dusk, as being nice and cozy in an old-fashioned sort of way. But the
Ensk of former days stopped where the broad avenue of lime trees leading to
the station ended. Coming out onto the boulevard, we saw in the distance a
dark mass of buildings over which sped glowing clouds lit up from below.
This, for Ensk, was such a strange townscape that I found myself saying to
the girls that there must be a fire somewhere across the river, and they
believed me because I had been boasting during the journey that I was a
native of Ensk and knew every stone in the place. As it turned out, it
wasn't a fire, but an ordnance factory which had been built at Ensk during
the war.
I had seen the striking changes that had taken place in some of our
towns during the war-those at M-v, for instance-but I had not known those
towns as a child. Now, as Katya and I walked quickly down the darkening
Zastennaya and Gogolevsky streets it seemed to me that these streets, which
used to stretch lazily along the ramparts, now ran hastily upwards to join
the ceaseless glowing motion of the clouds over the factory buildings. This
was our first (and true) impression-that of war-geared town. To me, of
course, it was still my old, native Ensk, but now I met it as one does an
old friend, when one looks at the altered yet familiar features, and laughs
with affection and emotion, at a loss for words.
We had written to Pyotr from the Arctic that we would be visiting the
old folks and he counted on being able to arrange his long-promised leave
for the same time.
No one met us at the station, though I had wired from Moscow, and we
decided that Pyotr had not arrived. But the first person we ran into at the
lion-guarded entrance to the Marcouse house was none other than Pyotr. I
recognised him at once for all that he had been transformed from an
absent-minded, woolgathering old thing with a permanent question-mark
expression into a bronzed dashing officer. "Ah, here they are!" he said as
though he had found us at last after a long search.
We embraced, then he strode over to Katya and took her hands in his.
They had their Leningrad in common, and as they stood there gripping hands,
even I was far away from them, though there was probably not a person in the
world nearer to them than I was.
Aunt Dasha was asleep when we burst into her room and must have thought
she was dreaming. She raised herself on her elbow and regarded us with a
pensive air. We started laughing and that brought her down to earth.
"Good heavens, Sanya!" she said. "And Katya! And the old'un is away
again!"
The "old 'un" was the judge, and "away again" referred to that visit of
ours five years ago when the judge had been out on circuit somewhere in the
district.
I hardly need describe how Aunt Dasha fussed and bustled round us, how
she grieved that the pie had to be made with dark flour and on some
"outlandish lard". In the end we had to make her sit down while Katya took
charge of the household and Pyotr and I volunteered to help her, and Aunt
Dasha shrieked with horror when Pyotr dumped some food concentrates into the
dough-"for flavour", as he put it-and I all but popped in some washing soda
instead of salt. Oddly enough, the pastry rose well, and though Aunt Dasha
tasted a piece and announced "not rich enough", the pie was not at all bad
as a wartime product.
After dinner Aunt Dasha demanded that we tell her everything, beginning
from the day and hour when we had parted from her at the Ensk railway
station five years before. I persuaded her, however, that such a detailed
report ought to be put off until the judge came home. Instead, we made Pyotr
tell us about himself.
I listened to his story with emotion. I had known him for over
twenty-five years, and he did not strike me at all as being now a different
person as Katya had described him to me. The "artistic vision" that had
always intrigued me in Pyotr and which distinguished him from the ordinary
run of men, had now deepened, if anything.
He showed us his albums-for the last year Pyotr had been serving as a
scenic artist with a frontline theatre. Here were sketches of military life,
often hastily dashed off. But the moral fibre of our people, which everyone
knows who has spent even a few days in the army, was caught in them with
remarkable fidelity.
I had often stopped before unforgettable scenes of war, regretting that
they vanished without a trace as one gave place to another. Now I was seeing
them in bare outline, but none the less faithfully and brilliantly
reproduced.
"There," Pyotr said with a good-natured smile when I had congratulated
him, "and the judge says they're no good. Not heroic enough. My son draws
too," he added, pushing out his lower lip, as he always did when pleased.
"He's not bad, he has a gift, I think."
Katya got Nina Kapitonovna's letters out of the suitcase-the old lady
was still living near Novosibirsk with little Pyotr-and Aunt Dasha, who had
always been interested in Grandma, demanded that some of them be read out
aloud.
Grandma was still living on her own after her quarrel with the Farm
Manager, despite the fact that he had offered her apologies and asked her to
come back. She had "thanked him and declined, as I had never been taught to
sue for a favour", as she wrote. Having had the satisfaction of declining
this invitation, she astonished the whole district by suddenly taking on a
job in the local Recreation Hall.
"I am teaching dress-making," she wrote briefly, "and I congratulate
you and Sanya. I sized him up long ago, when he was a little fellow. I fed
him buckwheat porridge to make him grow. He's a fine boy. Don't you bully
him, you've got a nasty temper."
This was in answer to our letter telling her that we had found each
other.
"I didn't sleep all night for thinking of poor Maria," she wrote on
receiving the news that the remains of the expedition had been found. "I
thought it was for the best, her not knowing the terrible fate your father
suffered."
Little Pyotr was quite well, and had grown a lot, to judge by his
photograph. He resembled his mother more than ever. We thought of her and
sat in silence for a long time, reliving as it were, the anguish of that
senseless death. As far back as the spring Katya had taken steps to get a
pass for Grandma and the boy to come to Moscow, and there was a hope that we
should see them on our way back.
Our old idea, Katya's and mine, of all of us settling down in Leningrad
as one family was repeated that evening more than once. A single family-with
Grandma and the two Pyotrs. Pyotr Senior looked rather confused when,
speaking of the flat which we had already received in imagination-and not
just anywhere but in Kirovsky Prospekt-we assigned to him a studio in a
quiet part of the flat where nobody would be in his way. I knew of one woman
he did not mind being in his way, a woman of whom Katya spoke with
enthusiasm. But that evening of course, nobody said a word about her.
The house was still asleep when the judge returned. He gave such a
fierce growl when Aunt Dasha made to wake us that we had to pretend being
asleep for another half hour. Just like five years ago, we heard him
snorting and grunting in the kitchen as he washed and splashed about.
Katya fell asleep again, but I dressed quietly and went into the
kitchen, where he was drinking tea, sitting barefooted, in a clean shirt,
his head and moustache still wet from washing.
"I woke you up after all," he said, stepping up to me and hugging me.
Whenever I turned to my hometown and my old home he always met me with
that stern: "Well, let's hear all about it!" The old man wanted to know what
I had been doing and whether I had been living right during the years since
we last met. Regarding me sternly from' under his tufted eyebrows, he
interrogated me like the real judge he was, and I knew that nowhere in the
world would I receive a fairer sentence. But on this occasion, for the first
time in my life, the judge demanded no account from me.
"Four, I see?" he said, eyeing my decorations with a pleased look.
"Yes."
"And a fifth for Captain Tatarinov," he went on gravely. "It's hard to
word it, but you'll get it."
It really was hard to word it, but apparently the old man had decided
to tackle that in earnest, because the same evening, when we again met round
the table, he delivered a speech in which he attempted to sum up what I had
done. "Life goes on," he said. "You have come back to your hometown as
grown-up, mature people, and you say you have difficulty in recognising it,
it has changed so much. It has not merely changed, it has matured, the way
you have matured and discovered within yourselves the strength to fight and
win. But other thoughts, too, come to my mind when I look at you, dear
Sanya. You have found Captain Tatarinov's expedition. Dreams come true, very
often truth is stranger than fiction. It is to you that his farewell letters
are addressed-to the man who would carry on his great work. And it is you
that I see standing by right at his side, because captains such as he and
you advance mankind and science."
And he raised his glass and drained it to my health.
We sat round the table until late into the night. Then Aunt Dasha
announced that it was time to go to bed, but we did not agree and went out
instead for a walk by the river.
The fiery-black clouds were still chasing each other over the factory.
We went down to the river and walked to the Gap, beside which a thin, dark
boy in a baggy trousers had once caught blue crabs with meat bait. Time
seemed to have stood still, waiting patiently for me on this bank, between
the two ancient towers at the confluence of the Peshchinka and the
Tikhaya-and here I was back again, and we looked into each other's face.
What lay ahead for me? What new trials, new labours, new dreams, happiness
or unhappiness? Who knows. But I did not lower my eyes under that
incorruptible gaze.
It was time to go back. Katya felt cold. We walked along the quayside,
which was cluttered with timber, and made our way home.
The town was quiet and somehow mysterious. We walked along in silence,
our arms round each other. I recollected our flight from Ensk. The town had
been just as dark and quiet, and we so small, unhappy and brave, facing the
unknown, frightening life that lay ahead of us.
My eyes were wet, but I did not wipe away those tears of joy. I was not
ashamed of them.
EPILOGUE
A lovely scene unfolds from this high cliff, at the foot of which wild
Arctic poppies thrust up their slender stems between the rocks. By the shore
one can still see the mirror-like water, and farther out, open lanes amid
the lilac-tinted icefields running out into the mysterious distance. Here
the Arctic air seems extraordinarily limpid. Silence and vast open spaces.
Only a hawk sometimes comes flying over the solitary grave.
The ice-floes drift past it, jostling and circling, some slowly, others
faster, assuming fantastic shapes.
There, sailing along, appears the head of a giant in a silver gleaming
helmet. One can make out everything-the green shaggy beard trailing in the
sea, the flattened nose and the narrowed eyes under grey, bushy brows.
And here comes a house of ice from which the water rolls off with a
tinkle of innumerable little bells. And following it, great festive boards
covered with clean tablecloths.
They keep coming and coming without end!
Ships putting in at the Yenisei Bay can see this grave from afar. They
pass it with flags at half-mast and their guns fire a salute whose echo
rolls on and on.
The grave-stone is white, and it gleams dazzlingly in the beams of the
Arctic's midnight sun.
At the height of a man these words are carved upon it:
"Here rests the body of Captain I. L. Tatarinov, who made one of the
most daring voyages and perished in June 1915 on Us way back from Severnaya
Zemlya, which he had discovered.
"To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield!"