tly.. A groan escaped me as my weight fell on my wounded leg.
A young fellow, with a clatter of crutches, dashed, yelling, down the
carriage. Somebody knocked him down and he slumped in a corner beside me.
Through the window I saw the first of the wounded, who had jumped out of the
trucks, running and falling as the tanks sprayed them with shrapnel.
The man lying next to me, also an airman by the name of Simakov, looked
out of the window too. His face was white when, turning away from the
window, we looked into each other's eyes.
"We must get out!"
"I suppose so," I said. "All you need for that is a pair of legs."
Nevertheless, we ma-naged somehow to crawl out of our berths and the
rush of wounded men swept us out onto the platform at the end of the
carriage.
I shall never forget the feeling that gripped me with such scorching
intensity when, stifling the agonising pain, I descended the steps and
crawled under the carriage. It was a feeling of contempt and even hatred for
myself such as I had never experienced in my life before. Men lay all round
me with arms thrown out in queer attitudes. They were corpses. Others ran
and dropped with a cry, while I was sitting under the carriage, helpless,
tormented with fury and pain.
I drew my pistol, but not to shoot myself, though the idea may have
flitted through my mind together with the thousands of thoughts that swilled
back and forth in it. Someone grasped my wrist.
It was one of the nurses. Her name was Katya. I pointed to Simakov, who
was lying a little way off, his cheek pressed to the ground. She glanced at
him and shook her head.
He was dead.
"Hell, I'm not going anywhere!" I said to the second girl, who had
suddenly appeared from nowhere. She was remarkably unhurried amid the din
and turmoil. "Leave me alone! I've got a pistol, they won't take me alive."
But the girls grabbed me and the three of us rolled down the
embankment. I caught a momentary glimpse of Romashov ahead of me, crawling
along on his belly, yellow, looking like a Chinese. He was crawling along
the same ditch as we were; a muddy, clayey ditch running parallel with the
track. The embankment ran into a marsh.
It was hard on the girls, and I asked them several times to leave me.
Katya, I believe, shouted to Romashov, asking him to stop and help us, but
he just looked back and went on crawling forward on all fours like a monkey.
That's how it was, except that it happened a thousand times more slowly
than I am telling it.
We managed with difficulty to get across the marsh and lay down in a
small aspen wood. "We" were the girls, myself, Romashov and two soldiers who
had joined us on the way. They were slightly wounded, one in the right arm,
the other in the left.
I sent the two soldiers out to reconnoitre and they came back reporting
that there were as many as forty vehicles in various directions and some
field-kitchens had even appeared. Apparently the tanks which had gunned our
train were part of a large force that had broken through.
"We can get away, of course. But since the captain can't walk, we'd
better make use of the railcar."
They had found a railcar under the embankment by a switch-track.
I remember it was while discussing whether the railcar could be raised
and placed on the track that Romashov lay down on his back, groaning and
complaining of the bad pain. He may really have had an attack, because when
the girls undid his tunic we saw that the left side of his body was all red.
Until then I had never heard of such contusions. Anyway, in such a state he
obviously couldn't go to the switch-track with the soldiers. The girls went
instead, just as unhurried and resolute, carrying on a leisurely
conversation in their low, melodious Ukrainian voices.
Romashov and I were left alone in the little, wet aspen wood.
Was he feigning or was he really feeling bad? I wasn't quite sure.
Several times he twitched like an epileptic, then bleated and fell silent.
"Romashov!" I said.
He lay on his back, his chest arched high, with a perfectly white,
dead-looking nose. I called him again, and he answered in such a feeble
voice as though he had already departed this life and was now returning with
great reluctance to this aspen wood in an area where a German tank force was
operating.
"Pretty bad this time!" he muttered, attempting a smile.
He raised his eyelids and stood up with difficulty, mechanically
removing the aspen leaves that had stuck to his face.
I find it hard to give an account of that day, possibly because,
despite the predicament we were in, it was rather dull, especially compared
with the events of next morning. We waited and waited without an end. I lay
on a heap of last year's leaves beside a scattered wood-stack. Romashov sat
Turkish-fashion, with his legs tucked under him, and who knows what he was
thinking, with those bird-like eyes half-closed and his hands resting on his
bony knees.
The wood was damp and a recent rain had left large drops on the
branches and spiders' webs, which quivered under the weight. The glittering
raindrops fell to the ground with a plop. At least, we did not suffer from
thirst.
Once or twice the sun peeped out at us. At first it was on our right,
then, having described a semi-circle, it appeared on our left. That meant
that three hours had gone since the girls and the soldiers went off to fix
up the railcar.
Before going away the one called Katya had put her knapsack under my
head. Judging by the sound it gave off when I punched it up it must have
contained rusks. Romashov started to whine that he was dying of hunger, but
I silenced him sharply.
"They won't come back," he said nervily after a while. "They've
deserted us."
He had recovered from his attack and started to saunter around at the
risk of betraying our whereabouts, since the wood was a sparse one and all
was open terrain as far as the track.
"It's your fault," he said, coming back and squatting down beside me.
"You sent them all away. One of the girls sinuld have stayed behind."
"As a hostage?"
"Yes, as a hostage. And now you can whistle for them. Catch them coming
back for us! That railcar is worked by hand and it can only take four people
in any case."
I must have been in a bad temper, for I drew my pistol and told
Romashov I'd kill him if he didn't stop whining. He shut up. His ungly face
twisted and it was all he could do to keep from blubbering.
The outlook was pretty blue. Dusk was beginning to creep through the
wood, but there was no sign of the girls. Of course, I never for a moment
believed that they could go away in the railcar without us, as Romashov
suspected.
Lying on my back, I looked up at the sky, which was darkening and
receding from me among the thin, trembling aspens. I was not thinking of
Katya, but something light and tender went through me. I felt: "Katya." It
was half-dream, half-sleep, and but for Katya I would have driven it away,
because I dare not sleep, I felt that I dare not, though I couldn't yet say
why. I dreamt of Spain or of the letter I had written from Spain-something
very youthful and muddled, not about the fighting, but about the tiny
orchards near Valencia, where the old women, when they learnt that we were
Russians, did not know where to seat us, how to regale us. "Whatever
happens," I had written to Katya, though I had felt her beside me, "remember
that you are free, without any obligations."
I dreaded having to part with this dream, though my drenched leg felt
cold and my greatcoat had slipped far down from my shoulders and was
crumpled under me. I was holding Katya's hands, not letting go off my dream,
but already something frightful had happened and I had to force myself
awake.
I opened my eyes. A mist, lit up by the early rays of the sun, was
drifting lazily among the trees. My face was wet and so were my hands.
Romashov was sitting a little way off in the same pose of drowsy unconcern.
Everything looked the same as before, but in fact everything was quite
different.
He was not looking at me. Then he stole a glance at me out of the tail
of his eye, and I understood at once why I was lying so uncomfortably. He
had pulled the knapsack with the rusks from under my head. What's more, he
had taken my flask containing vodka and my pistol.
The blood rushed to my face. He had taken my pistol!
"Give me back my gun this minute, you fathead!" I said calmly.
He did not answer.
"D'youhear!"
"You'll die all the same," he said hastily. "You don't need a gun."
"Whether I'm going to die or not is my own business. You give me back
my gun if you don't want to face a court martial. Get me?"
His breath was coming quick and short.
"Court martial!" he sneered. "We're alone and no one will know
anything. As a matter of fact you've long been dead. Nobody knows that
you're still alive."
He was staring me straight in the face now, and his eyes looked very
queer-sort of solemn and wide-open. I wondered whether he had gone mad.
"I tell you what," I said calmly, "take a swig out of that flask and
pull yourself together. Then we'll decide whether I'm alive or dead."
But Romashov was not listening.
"I've stayed behind to tell you that you've always been in my way
everywhere. Every day, every hour of my life. I'm sick and tired of it! I've
had a thousand years of you!"
Definitely, he was not quite normal at that moment. That last phrase of
his spoke for itself.
"But that's all finished with now!" Romashov plunged on. "You would
have died anyway, you've got gangrene. You'll die now all the quicker."
"That may be." There was not more than three paces between us. If I
took good aim and threw my crutch at him I could stun him perhaps. My voice
was still calm, though. "But why have you taken my map-case? My papers are
in there."
"Why? To have them find you just as you are. Who? Unidentified. (He was
omitting words). Just another corpse lying about.
You'll be a corpse," he said arrogantly, "and no one will know that I
killed you."
Looking back, this scene is almost fantastic. But I have not altered or
added a single thing.
CHAPTER SIX
NOBODY WILL KNOW
As a boy I was very quick-tempered and I remember what a dangerous
sense of exhilaration came over me when I let myself go. It was with just
this feeling, which had gone slightly to my head, that I found myself
listening to Romashov. I had to keep perfectly calm, and I forced myself to
do this, while my hand slid slowly behind my back and rested on my crutch.
"You may be interested to know that I've sent a letter off to my unit,"
I said in a steady voice, "so it's no use your relying on that report."
"What about the hospital train?"
He looked at me exultantly. He meant that the attack on the hospital
train would easily explain my disappearance. At that moment I realised how
long he had been wishing my death, ever since our schooldays perhaps.
"All right. But, strangely enough, you gain nothing by it," I said
this, or words to this effect, just to gain time.
The wood stack prevented me from swinging my arm back. I had to move
away from it unobserved and strike from the side to make sure of hitting his
head.
"Whether I gain by it or not doesn't matter. You have lost anyway. Ãò
going to shoot you. There!"
He pulled out my pistol.
Had I believed him really capable of shooting me he might have found it
in him to do so. I had never seen him so worked up. But I just spat in his
face and said: "Shoot, damn you!"
My God, how he howled and twisted about, gnashing his teeth and even
snapping! The sight would have been terrifying had I not known that behind
these antics was only cowardice and bluster. A struggle with himself-whether
to shoot or not-that was the meaning of his wild dance. The pistol burned
his hand. He kept flourishing the gun at me and shivering, until I began to
fear that he might press the trigger without meaning to.
"Damn you!" he shouted. "You've always tormented me! If only you knew
to whom you owe your life, you rotter, you nobody! If only I could do it, my
God! Why should you live, why? All the same they'll saw your leg off. You
won't fly any more."
It may sound silly, but of all the idiotic curses he hurled at me one
that struck home was his saying that I would never fly again.
"Anyone would think I was mostly in your way up in the air," I said. My
voice had acquired a deadly quality, but I was trying to keep it calm. "But
down on the ground we were Orestes and Pyla-des."
He was now standing sideways to me, covering his eyes with Ms left
hand, as though despairing of persuading me to die of my own accord. It was
a good opportunity, and I hurled my crutch. It had to be thrown like a
spear, the body drawn hard back then flung forward with the arm thrown out.
I did the best I could, but unfortunately I missed his head and struck his
shoulder instead, not very hard.
Romashov was dumbfounded. He gave a great, clumsy jump, like a
kangaroo. Then he faced me.
"You would, eh!" he said and swore. "All right!"
Leisurely, he packed the knapsacks, tied them together the easier to
carry them and slipped one over each arm.
Just as unhurriedly, he walked round me, and bent down to pick up a
twig. Waving it about, he made for the marsh, and five minutes later his
stoop-shouldered figure could just barely be seen among the distant aspen
trees. I sat leaning my hands on the ground, my mouth dry, fighting an
impulse to cry out: "Romashov, come back!" as this, of course, was
impossible.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ALONE
To leave me in the lurch, hungry, unarmed and badly wounded, within a
stone's throw of the German detachment-this, I felt sure, had been carefully
planned in advance. All the rest of Romashov's performance was done on the
spur of the moment, probably in the hope of scaring and humiliating me.
Having failed in this, he had gone away, and this was tantamount to, if not
worse than, the murder from which he had flinched.
I could not say that this sobering thought made me feel any happier. I
had to keep moving if I did not want Romashov's prophecy about my remaining
in this little aspen wood for ever to prove true.
I stood up. The crutches were of different length. I took a step. It
was not the sort of pain that hits you in the back of the head and knocks
you out, but it was as though a thousand fiends were tearing my leg to
pieces and lacerating the half-healed wounds on my back with iron scrapers.
I took another step, then a third.
"Well," I said to the fiends.
I took a fourth step.
The sun stood fairly high in the sky by the time I reached the edge of
the wood, beyond which lay the marsh, intersected by a single strip of wet,
trampled grass. Green tussocks, like beautiful globes, were visible here and
there, and I remembered how they had turned over under the girls' feet
yesterday.
Some men were walking about on the embankment. I wondered who they
were-our own or Germans. Our train was still burning; the flames, pale in
the sunlight, licked the blackened walls of the trucks.
Should I go back to it? What for? The rolling thunder of gunfire
reached me, muffled by distance, coming seemingly from the East. The nearest
station along the line, some twenty kilometres distant, was Shchelya Novaya.
Fighting was going on there, and this meant our troops were there. I
directed my steps that way, if you could call that agony steps.
The wood came to an end, giving place to bushes of blue-black berries,
the name of which I had forgotten. They looked like bilberries, only much
bigger. A welcome sight, seeing that I had not had anything to eat since the
day before. Something dark and motionless lay in the field beyond the
bushes, probably a dead body, and every time I reached for a berry, leaning
on my crutches, that dark object worried me. After a time I forgot about it,
only to remember it again with a cold shiver. Several berries dropped into
the grass. I lowered myself carefully to look for them, and a stab went
through my heart-it was a woman. I made my way towards her as fast as I
could.
She was lying on her back with outspread arms. It wasn't Katya, it was
the other girl. She had been shot in the face, and her beautiful black
eyebrows were drawn together in a look of suffering.
It was then, I believe, that I first noticed I was talking to myself,
and saying rather odd things at that. I recollected the name of those
blue-black berries that resembled bilberries-whortleberries they were
called-and was overjoyed at the discovery. I began speculating aloud about
how this girl had been killed. Probably she had been going back to fetch me,
and the Germans on the embankment had fired a burst at her from a
submachine-gun. I said some kind words to her to buck her up, as though she
were not dead, hopelessly dead, with those eyebrows drawn together in an
expression of pain.
Then I forgot her. I hobbled along, babbling, and I didn't at all like
the way I was babbling. This was delirium, it had crept upon me unawares and
I did not even try to fight it because I needed every ounce of strength to
fight an irresistible desire to fling away my crutches, which had blistered
my armpits, and to lie down on the ground, where I would find peace and
happiness.
I must have stopped seeing anything around me long before I lost
consciousness, otherwise where could that fine pale-green head of cabbage
have come from alongside my own head? I was lying in a vegetable garden
gazing rapturously at the cabbage. Everything would have been fine if flot
for that scarecrow in the tattered black hat which wheeled slowly above me.
The crow sitting on its shoulder circled with it, and I thought that but for
that bird with the flat blinking eye everything in the world would be fine.
I shouted at it, but my voice was so hoarse and feeble, that it just looked
at me and stirred its wings, as though shrugging its shoulders.
Yes, everything would have been fine, if only I could stop the world
from making those slow circles round me. I would then perhaps have been able
to make out that unpainted log-built cottage at the top of the garden, with
the porch, and that tall well-sweep in the yard. One of the windows kept
darkening now and again. Somebody I couldn't see was walking about the
house, looking anxiously out of the window.
I got to my feet. The doorstep was about forty paces from me-a trifle
compared with the distance I had covered the previous day. But those forty
steps cost me dear. I dropped exhausted on the porch amid a clatter of my
crutches.
The door opened slightly. A boy of about twelve stood on his knee
behind a stool. Lying on the porch, it was some time before I could make him
out in the depths of the darkish room with its low ceiling and large
double-tiered bunks screened off from the rest of the room by cotton
curtains. He was aiming straight at me, one eye screwed up and the butt
pressed to his cheek.
"Look, I need help," I said, trying to stop the room, which was also
spinning round me in that slow accursed manner. "I'm a wounded airman from
the hospital train."
"Kirill, stop!" said the boy with the gun. "He's one of ours."
He appeared to become duplicated at that moment. Another boy exactly
like him peeped out from behind the curtains. He had a hunting knife in his
hand. He was still puffing and blinking with excitement.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE BOYS
I hardly remember what happened afterwards. The days I spent with the
boys are wreathed, as it were, in clouds of vapour. It was real vapour, too,
coming from a big kettle that boiled from morning till night on a trivet in
the Russian stove. But there was also another, visionary vapour, which made
my breathing rapid and hoarse and left me in a drenching sweat. Sometimes it
would clear a little, and then I would see myself in bed with a mound of
coloured pillows under my leg. The boys had done that to keep the flow of
blood away from the wound. I knew already that their names were Kirill and
Vladimir, that they were the sons of a pointsman named Ion Leskov and that
their father had gone to the station and told them to lock the door and let
nobody in. They were twins, and though I knew it, I got scared every time I
saw them together. They were so exactly alike that I thought I was being
delirious again.
It was as though two selves were struggling within me-one a cheerful,
blithe soul who tried to conjure up vivid memories of all the good things of
life, the other a sombre and resentful person harbouring a grievance and
brooding over his humiliation.
At times I saw a tall bearded man, so still with cold that he could not
even shut the door behind him, coming into the cottage where my sister and I
were living. It wasn't Doctor Ivan Ivanovich though. It was myself. I
dropped exhausted on the porch steps, the door was flung open, boys aimed a
gun at me, then said: "He's one of ours."
And I kept thinking that the reason they were so kind to me was because
once, many years ago, my sister and I-lonely, neglected children in a
remote, snowbound village-had helped the doctor.
At other times I saw myself with teeth bared in hatred, gun in hand,
crouching under a railway carriage. People lay all round me in queer
attitudes, with arms flung out. What had I done, what sin of omission was I
guilty of? What important thing, the most important thing in life, had I
overlooked? How had it happened that these men had come to us and dared to
shoot down wounded men, as though there were no justice in this world, no
honour, none of the things I had been taught at school, and learned to
respect and love ever since a child?
I tried to answer this question, but I couldn't, because I was fighting
for breath, and the boys looked at me anxiously and kept saying that if
their father came he would know what to do to make me feel better.
The father did come. There could be no doubt it was he-the same
ungainly figure as the boys, the same sombre face and shining blue eyes.
They were shining at the moment when, with arms hanging down his sides and
back bent, he stopped beside my bed.
"The German detachment has been routed," he said. "We surrounded them
at Shchelya Novaya and mopped them all up to a man."
Then he gazed at me silently with a frown, and I thought that I must be
in a bad way indeed if people looked at me with such kindly eyes, asked me
my full name and rank, and pinned the slip of paper with these details to
the wall so as not to lose it. There was no harm in that, though; let him do
it; I didn't have to look at that paper. I took the man's hand and started
earnestly to tell him what a reception his boys had given me. I may have
been spinning it out too long, repeating myself and getting confused,
because he put something cold on my forehead and said I was to go to sleep.
I knew that he would be pleased if I did, so I closed my eyes and
pretended to be asleep. But the picture I had been describing to him
remained-somewhere in an interminable perspective, between wide-spaced
walls.
Thousands of little houses loomed before me. Thousands of boys knelt
behind stools on which lay thousands of guns. Thousands of other boys hid
behind curtains, knife in hand. From horizon to horizon, in every house, in
the depth of dark rooms, boys were lying in wait for the enemy, waiting to
kill him as he entered.
CHAPTER NINE
DEALING WITH LOVE
If, like the poets, one compares life to a road, it can be said that at
the sharpest turns in this road I have always encountered
traffic-regulators, who showed me the right direction. This particular turn
in the road differed from the others merely in fact that I was helped out by
a pointsman, that is, by a professional traffic-regulator.
I lay in his house for two days and nights, now coming to myself, now
losing consciousness, always opening my eyes to the sight of that sombre man
standing by my bed, never moving away, as though to keep me from taking the
turn where the road drops away into the abyss. Sometimes he turned into a
boy with the same amazingly bright eyes, and the boy, too, stood steadfast
at his post and kept me there in that room with the little windows and the
low ceiling, away from the place where (if the report in Red Falcons was to
be believed) I had already gone to.
The remarkable thing was that never, either awake or in delirium, did I
think of Romashov. Could that have been an instinct of self-preservation?
Probably it was-the memory of it would not have done me any good.
But when traffic was restored, when the family took me to Zao-zorye by
railcar-no doubt the very one which the nurses had failed to reach-and three
pairs of shining blue eyes shyly took leave of me, when I found myself in
another hospital train, this time a real one with a bathroom, a radio and a
library; when, bathed, rebandaged and fed, with my leg hitched to the
ceiling according to all the rules of medical science, I had slept my way
through the whole of Central Russia, to find myself somewhere beyond Kirov
in a strange world of unblacked-out windows-it was then that I remembered
and went in my mind over everything that had occurred between me and
Romashov.
I recollected our talk on the evening before the German tanks had
gunned our train.
"Admit that you have committed some base actions in your life," I had
said. "Base from your own point of view, I mean."
"Maybe," he had said coolly. "But what do you call a base action? I
regard life as a game. Even now, for instance. Hasn't fate itself put the
cards in our hands?"
It was the war, not fate, that had dealt the cards. Not the war either,
but the retreat. If not for the retreat he would never have dared to steal
my gun and papers from me and leave me in the wood alone.
I went over the whole history of our relationship, a very complicated
one, bearing in mind (a thing now almost fantastic) that he had once
seriously contemplated marrying Katya.
Was he reconciled to the fact that he had lost her for ever? I don't
know. He had married somebody by the name of Alevtina Sergeyevna, and Nina
Kapitonovna said that he had got terribly drunk at the wedding and had wept.
Katya had listened to the story with a blush. Did she guess, then, that
Romashov still loved her? I don't know, I don't know...
I had written to Katya while still in the train, and I wrote to her
from the hospital almost every day. I wrote to the Berensteins' address, and
to Pyotr through the field post, and to the Military Medical Academy where
Katya was working with Varya Trofimova, as she had written to me in
September. There was no railway communication with Leningrad, but the mail
was delivered by plane, and I could not understand why my letters did not
reach them. I comforted myself with the thought that if anything had
happened to Katya somebody was sure to answer me.
That unhappy day, February 21, 1942, will always stick in my memory.
One of the volunteer nurses told me that she had met a train from Leningrad
at the station with trade-school pupils who were being evacuated from the
starving city. She was a stern-faced woman who had mentioned one day, with a
calmness that astonished me, that her husband and son had been killed at the
front. Yet when she told me about the boys, so weak from dystrophy that they
had to be carried out of the carriages, she wept.
I had to force myself to eat my dinner that day. My leg, which had been
in a plaster cast for over a month now, had suddenly begun to give me an
excruciating pain. The doctor ordered an X-ray, and that was when I "let it
get me", as Aunt Dasha was fond of saying.
For one thing, the X-ray showed that the leg had knitted wrong and
would have to be removed from the plaster and have some bones or other
broken. That meant starting the treatment all over again. Secondly, it was
devilishly cold in the X-ray room and I was kept there for an hour and a
half. I must have caught a cold, because towards the evening I noticed that
I was talking nonsense-a first sign with me that I was running a
temperature.
In short, I contracted pneumonia. This meant putting off the second
operation, and the doctors feared that I would be left lame.
I am afraid I am making too much of my ailments-dull stuff, especially
considering that I had been wounded in the third month of the war without
having done anything worth mentioning. And that at a time when the "miracle
at the gates of Moscow", as the foreign newspapers headlined it, had already
been accomplished; when for two hundred miles west of Moscow stiff legs clad
in ridiculous ersatz valenki stuck out from every snowdrift. That at a time
when work was in full swing on the build-up of a long-range naval air
force-without me, who had spent fifteen years crisscrossing the skies over
the sea in all directions? I even had a feeling as though the war mentality
were wearing off, submerged in the senseless trivialities of hospital life.
CHAPTER TEN
THE VERDICT
I had always thought of a medical board as a sort of tribunal, one at
which I had always had to plead guilty of not having been created a tall,
broad-shouldered man with a square jaw and muscles capable of lifting a
hundred and fifty pounds. It was with this unpleasant feeling that I found
myself standing utterly naked before the medical board at M-v. I did
knee-bends, shut my eyes and stretched my arms out in front of me, careful
not to let them tremble, performed leg jerks and recognised the smallest
letters at a great distance with faultless accuracy. Then an old,
grey-haired lady doctor listened to my heart. There was something in my
chest she didn't quite like, judging by the way she paused, frowned, then
tapped me over again, as though practising scales on a piano. Then she said:
"Breathe in, breathe out, hold it!"
It wasn't my lungs that had been worrying me when I went before the
board. Whenever I got nervous I started to limp on my wounded leg, and this
was a nuisance. It set me thinking how my leg would behave during a combat
flight. I had always had sound lungs, though I had contracted the Spanish
flu and afterwards had severe pleurisy as a boy. But it was my lungs that
seemed to make an unfavourable impression on this grumpy old medical
officer. She tapped me all over, turned me round and tapped again, then made
me lie down, seemingly determined to prove at all costs that I was ill, ill,
ill... That I was unfit and would never fly again.
Nearly six months had passed since I had hidden this horrible thought
away somewhere deep down within me-hidden it and covered it up with any old
thing. But it had not died or left me, it was merely lurking somewhere along
with another anxious thought-about Katya.
And now, as I stood naked before the board, with scars from my wounds
on my legs and back, I could no longer hide this thought either from myself
or from others. The doctor must have read this in my eyes, because, picking
up her pen, she hesitated to write down her decision, and passed me over to
the chairman of the medical board, a short, stout doctor in horn-rimmed
spectacles, who started tapping me vigorously on the ribs and shoulder
blades with a little hammer instead of his fingers. The hammer gave off
sounds now clear, now dulled, as though asking: "Aren't you ill, ill, ill?
Unfit, and will never fly again?"
"There's nothing to worry about, Captain," the doctor said after a
glance at my face as he stuck the rubber tubes into his big hairy ears.
"You'll be all right after a little treatment."
He made a note in my case papers and repeated in a kindly tone: "You'll
be all right.
" But he put me down for six months' leave, and I knew how bad one had
to be for a medical board to give such an opinion of a combatant officer in
the year 1942.
I whistled softly, not to attract the attention of passers-by, as I
walked down the tree-lined street leading to the Kama. On the wall of the
town's best building housing the flying school I read for the thousandth
time the marble plaque, which said: "Popov, the inventor of radio and
eminent Russian scientist, went to school here."
I climbed, limping, to the top of the high bank, and the Kama, still
turbid, yellow-grey from the spring spate, spread before me with its wharves
and steamboats, hauling huge barges, with its whistles and shouts resounding
over the broad expanse of water.
The sight of a group of boys on the bank reminded me of the time Katya
and I had visited Ensk after my return from Spain. The boys in Ensk had
followed me about, doing everything that I did. When I had stopped to buy
some cigarettes at a kiosk, they, too, had stopped and bought the same
cigarettes. I felt like taking a dip. Leaving Katya in Cathedral Gardens, I
went down to the river, undressed and dived in. They, too, undressed a
little way off and plunged into the water just as I had done. No wonder-here
was an airman who had fought in Spain and come home with the Order of the
Red Banner pinned to his chest! And now?
My fingers shook slightly as I rolled myself a cigarette. Lighting up,
I stood for a while motionless on the bank, taking in the unfamiliar sights
and varied activities of the great river. A grey passenger steamer went
past. I read its name: Lyapidevsky. "You didn't become a Lyapidevsky," I
thought. "Nor a Kamanin either," when I read the name on the side of a
similar small steamer that passed by. Farther out, by a wharf, lay the
Mazuruk and I couldn't help smiling at the thought that all the vessels of
the Kama Steamship Line bore the names of famous airmen, good friends of
mine too.*
Anyway, there was nothing to prevent me now from flying to Leningrad,
in order to find my wife or reassure myself that I had riot lost her
forever.
"These are the names of pilots who took part in the rescue of the
Chelyuskin expedition in 1934. -Tr.
I waited three weeks for a plane. Whether it was because I had got used
to the idea of being ill, or because hope had crept stealthily into my
heart, whispering assurance that all would come right yet, but little by
little I recovered from the shock and put my thoughts and feelings in order.
It was not myself I was thinking of now, but of Katya. I thought of her
when I heard "Nina's Romance" on the radio-she had liked it. I thought of
her when seeing a show put on by the wounded. We had so seldom gone to
shows! I thought of her when everybody was asleep in the vast ward, and only
here and there could be heard an occasional moan or quick, hoarse
mutterings.
A major of my acquaintance, who had flown to M-v on some mission from
Leningrad front HQ, readily agreed to take me back with him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN I LOOK FOR KATYA
I had been grounded now for over six months. How can I convey the
feeling with which I took the air again? It was galling to think that for
the first time in my life I was flying as a passenger. Over the years I had
become accustomed to feeling more at home in the air than on the ground. I
looked out of the window with pleasure, as if checking whether any harm had
come to this vast countryside with its black spring fields, its bright,
winding streams and the dark-green velvet of its forests. It was with
pleasure that I went into the cockpit, feeling its familiar, ordered
compactness with my whole body. With pleasure I waited to see how the pilot
would steer clear of the storm-we ran into one over Cherepovets, a
magnificent mass of thunderclouds resembling palaces, with walls riven by
lightning. I was reminded of my impressions of first flights, before the sky
had become for me simply an air route.
At the airport in Leningrad I got a lift in a car that had come down
for Pravda matrixes. It took me as far as Liteiny Prospekt. From there I
would have to walk or take a tram. The only tram running to the
Petrogradskaya was a No. 3, but the Leningraders who had settled themselves
round the tram stop in a home-like way, said that I should have to wait
perhaps an hour. The major, who had to get to the Petrogradskaya too, tried
to persuade me to wait, seeing that I had a heavy knapsack-I had brought
some food for Katya. But how could I wait, when I had to catch my breath at
least twenty times at the mere thought that Katya and I were at last
together in the same city, that at this very moment, perhaps, she was-I
don't know what-waiting for me, sick, dying?
I flew headlong down the avenue running alongside the Summer Garden. I
saw everything, took it all in-the allotments on Mars Field, with
camouflaged anti-aircraft guns in the middle of them; the riotous greenery,
which had never looked so lush in Leningrad before;
the general clean and tidy appearance of the city-I had read in /the
papers that in the spring of 1942 three hundred thousand Leningraders had
turned out to clean up their city. But everything I saw turned to me a
single side-where was Katya, would I find her? I thought I never would,
seeing that nearly all the houses had no window-panes in them and the houses
stood silent, sad-eyed. I never would, seeing that every wall was dented and
smashed by artillery shells. Yes, I would find her, seeing that even the
square round the Suvorov monument was planted with carrots and beetroot, and
the young shoots stood erect as though no better natural conditions for them
could be thought of. I came out on the Neva and involuntarily my eyes sought
the admiralty spire-I don't know how to explain it, but it was part of
Katya-the fact that it was slightly dulled, like an old engraving. We had
not been able to say goodbye to each other when the war started, but another
leavetaking, the one before I left for Spain, came back to me so vividly
that I almost saw her physically, standing in the dark hall of the
Berensteins' flat among the old coats and jackets. How could I bring all
that back again? To clasp her in my arms again? To hear her ask: "Sanya, is
that you? Can it be you?"
From afar I saw the house in which the Berensteins lived. It still
stood there, and strange to say it looked more beautiful than before. The
window-panes were intact, and the facade threw back a resplendent gleam like
that of fresh paint in the sunshine. But the closer I got to it the more was
I disturbed by this strange immobility and spruceness. Another ten, fifteen,
twenty paces-and something gripped my heart, then let go, and it began to
race wildly. There was no house. The facade had been painted on large sheets
of plywood.
All that long summer day the distant roar of the artillery pounded in
my ears like surf beating on a pebbly beach.
All day long I searched for Katya.
A woman with a triangular green face whom I met outside the wrecked
house sent me to Doctor Ovanesyan, who was a member of the District Soviet.
This old Armenian, a grey-black genial man with a three day's stubble, sat
in the office of the former Elite Cinema, now the district HQ of the Civil
Defence. I asked him whether he knew Ekaterina Tatarinova-Grigorieva. H