Two Captains (10 page)

In the evening she read to us. It was from her that I first heard the fairy-tale about Sister Alyonushka and Brother Ivanushka.

Sister, dear sister, Swim out, swim out to me. Fires are burning high, Pots are boiling, Knives are ringing, And lam going to die.

All Baba and the Forty Thieves made a particularly strong impression upon me. "Open Sesame!" It grieved me to learn, years later, upon reading the Thousand and One Nights in a new translation, that the word should be Simsim and not Sesame, which was a plant, something like hemp. Sesame had magic, it was a wonder-working word. I was terribly disappointed to learn that it was just ordinary hemp.

Without exaggeration it can be said that these tales simply knocked me flat. More than anything else in the world now I wanted to learn to read, like Serafima Petrovna.

On the whole, I liked the life in the children's home. It was snug and warm there, and they fed and taught you in the bargain. It wasn't dull, at least not very. The other boys treated me well-probably because I was a small chap.

At the very outset I made friends with two boys and we did not waste a minute of our spare time.

One of my new chums was Romashov whom we nicknamed Ro-mashka which means "a daisy". He was a skinny lad with a big head on which grew yellow matted hair. He had a flattened nose, unnaturally round eyes and a square chin-altogether a wicked-looking piece of work for a face. We became friends over some picture puzzles. I was good at guessing them and this won his admiration.

The other one was Valya Zhukov, a lazy boy with a headful of plans. At one moment he was all for getting a job at the Zoo, learning to tame lions, the next he was raving to join the fire brigade. After a visit to the bakery he wanted to become a baker; he would come away from the theatre with the firm intention of becoming an actor. Valya was fond of dogs. All the dogs in the neighbourhood treated him with great respect.

But all the same, Valya was just Valya, and Romashka was just Romashka.

Neither of them came anywhere near Pyotr.

I can't describe how I missed him.

I went round all the places we had roamed together, inquired about him from all the street waifs and strays, and hung round the reception centres and children's homes. He was nowhere to be found. Had he gone to Turkestan, travelling in some box under an International Sleeping Car, I wondered. Or had he returned home on foot from hungry Moscow? Who could say?

It was then, during my daily wanderings, that I came to know Moscow and to love it. It was mysterious, vast, snowed-up, preoccupied with hunger and war. Maps were hung up in public places, and the red thread held by little flags passed somewhere between Kursk and Kharkov and was nearing Moscow.

Okhotny Ryad, the old shopping centre, was a long, low row of painted wooden stalls and shops. Futurist artists had daubed strange pictures on its walls-people with green faces, churches with falling cupolas. Similar pictures decorated the tall fence on Tverskaya. ROSTA placards (Caricatures, often with verse, put on the walls in the street for propaganda purposes in the '20s) hung in the shop windows, saying:

Munch your pineapples,

Chew your grouse,

Your last day is coming,

Bourgeois louse/

These were the first verses I learned to read by myself.

I believe I have already mentioned that the Education Department regarded our children's home as a sort of hatchery for budding talent. The Department considered that we were distinguished by having gifts for music, painting or literature. Therefore, after lessons we were allowed to do as we pleased. We were supposed to be freely developing our talents. And so we were. Some of us ran down to the Moskva River to help the firemen catch fish in the ice-holes, while others loitered about the Sukharevka Market, helping themselves to anything that lay in temptation's way.

I spent most of my time indoors, however. We lived on the floor below the school rooms and all school life passed before my eyes. It was an odd, puzzling, complex life. I hung around groups of senior pupils, giving an ear to their conversation. New attitudes, new ideas, new people. All this was as unlike life in Ensk, my home town, as Ensk was unlike Moscow. For a long time it all baffled me and kept me wondering.

One day I happened upon a meeting of fifth-formers, who were discussing the question of whether or not to study. One scruffy-looking schoolboy, who was greeted with cries of "Go it, Shrimpy!", argued that on no account should they be forced to study. Attendance at school should be voluntary, and marks given only by a majority vote.

"Bravo, Shrimpy!"

"Hear, hear!"

"Generally speaking, comrades, it's just a question of teaching staff.

Now take those teachers whose lessons are attended by an absolute minority.

I suggest that we set them a limit of five pupils. If less than five come to the lesson, the teacher should get no rations that day."

"Hear, hear!"

"Sap!"

"Go and eat coke!"

"Bravo!"

Evidently they had in mind not all the teachers, but only one of them, because they all suddenly turned their heads, whispering and nudging one another, at the sight of a tall man with walrus moustache who appeared in the doorway, and stood with folded arms, listening attentively to the speaker.

"Who's that?" I asked Varya, a fat girl with thick plaits.

"That's Whiskers, my boy," Varya answered.

"What do you mean, whiskers?"

"Fancy not knowing that!"

I was soon to discover who it was that everyone in School 4 called

"Whiskers".

He was the geography teacher, Korablev, whom the whole school heartily disliked. For one thing, the consensus of opinion was that he was a fool and an ignorant one at that. Secondly, he turned up for his lesson every blessed day and sat it out, even though there might be only three pupils in his class. This simply got everyone's goat.

I looked at Korablev. I must have been staring, because all of a sudden he stared back at me, ever so faintly aping my goggled look. I even fancied that he smiled into his moustache. But Shrimpy was holding forth again, and Korablev, turning his twinkling eye away from me, listened to him with close attention.

I remember that day distinctly-a sunny day, with spring rain that kept coming and going-the day I met the thin old lady in the green velvet coat in Kudrinskaya Square. She was carrying a shopping bag full of all kinds of things-potatoes, sorrel leaves, onions-and in her other hand a big umbrella.

Though she obviously found the bag heavy, she walked along briskly with an air of preoccupation, and I could hear her counting to herself in a whisper:

"Mushrooms-half a pound-five hundred rubles; washing blue-a hundred and fifty; beetroot-a hundred and fifty; milk-a pint-a hundred and fifty; prayer for the dead-seven hundred and sixty rubles; three eggs-three hundred rubles; confession-five hundred rubles." Prices were like that in those days.

Finally, she drew a light sigh and put the bag down on a dry stone to recover her breath.

"Let me help you, Grandma," I said.

"Go away, you rascal! I know your kind!"

She shook a threatening finger at me and picked up her bag.

I walked on. But we were both going in the same direction and presently drew level with each other again. The old lady was obviously anxious to get rid of me, but her burden made it difficult for her to get away.

"Look here. Grandma, if you think I'm going to steal anything, then I'll help you for nothing," I said. "Cross my heart I will, I just can't see you dragging that load."

The old lady got angry. She clutched her bag to her with one arm and began to wave her umbrella at me with the other as though fighting off a bee.

"Get along with you! I've had three lemons* stolen already. I know you."

"Just as you like. It was the street boys who stole them from you, but I'm from a children's home."

"You're just as bad a lot as the others."

She looked at me and I at her. Her nose was slightly tilted and had a purposeful look about it. She seemed a kind old soul. Maybe she took a fancy to me too, because she suddenly stopped brandishing her umbrella and demanded: "Who are your parents?"

"I haven't any."

"Where d'you come from? Moscow?"

I realised at once that if I said I was a Muscovite, she would chase me away. She probably thought it was Moscow boys who had stolen her money.

"No," I said, "I'm from Ensk."

Would you believe it, she was from Ensk too! Her eyes lit up and her face grew kinder still.

"You're fibbing, you little liar," she said sternly. "The one who stole the lemon from me said he wasn't from Moscow either. If you're from Ensk, where did you live there?"

"On the Peshchinka, back of the Market Square."

"I don't believe you." This without conviction. "Peshchinka, you say?

There may be Peshchinkas in other places too. I don't remember you."

"You must have left the town a long time ago, when I was still little."

"It wasn't long ago, it was only recently. Come on, take the bag by one handle, I'll take the other. Don't jerk it."

We carried the bag and chatted. I told her how Pyotr and I had headed for Turkestan and got stranded in Moscow. She listened with interest.

"Hoity-toity! What cleverdicks! Globe-trotters, eh? Of all the crazy ideas!"

As we passed our street I pointed out our school to her.

"We do belong to the same places, I see," the old lady said enigmatically.

She lived in the Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya, in a little brick-built house. I knew it by sight.

"That's where our headmaster lives," I said. "Maybe you know him-Nikolai Antonich."

(*In those days of inflation a million ruble treasury note was popularly called a "lemon". -Tr.).

"Is that so!" the old lady said. "And what's he like? Is he a good Head?"

"Rather!"

I couldn't make out why she laughed. We went upstairs and stopped in front of a door upholstered in clean oilcloth. There was a name on the doorplate written in fanciful lettering which I hadn't time to read.

Whispering to herself, the old woman drew a key from her coat. I turned to go, but she stopped me.

"I did it for nothing. Grandma."

"Then sit with me a bit for nothing."

She tiptoed into the little entrance hall and began to take her coat off without putting on the light. She removed the coat, a tasselled shawl, a sleeveless jacket, then another smaller shawl, a kerchief and so on. Then she opened her umbrella and after that she disappeared. The next moment the kitchen door opened and a little girl appeared in the doorway. I was almost ready to believe that this was my old lady who had magically turned into a little girl. But the next moment the old lady herself reappeared. She stepped out of a cupboard in which she had been hanging up her shawls and things.

"And this is Katerina Ivanovna," she said.

Katerina Ivanovna was about twelve, no older than I. But what a difference! I wish I had the same poise she had, the same proud set of the head, the same way of looking one straight in the face with her dark bright eyes. She was rosy, but demure and had the same purposeful nose as the old lady. All in all, she was pretty, but gave herself airs-you could tell that at once.

"You can congratulate me, Katerina Ivanovna," the old lady said, peeling off more clothes. "They've pinched a lemon again."

"Didn't I tell you to keep your money in your coat pocket," Katerina Ivanovna said with annoyance.

"Coat pocket, you say? That's just where they pinched it from."

"Then you've been counting again. Grandma."

"No I wasn't! I had this young man here escorting me."

The girl looked at me. Till then she hadn't seemed to notice me.

"He carried my bag for me. How's your mother?"

"We're taking her temperature now," the girl said, regarding me coolly.

"Tut, tut!" the old lady said, thrown into a flutter. "Why so late? You know the doctor said she was to have it taken at noon."

She hurried out and the girl and I were left by ourselves. For two minutes or so we said nothing. Then frowning, she asked me gravely:

"Have you read Helen Robinson'!"

"No."

"Robinson CrusoeT

"No."

"Why not?"

I was about to tell her that it was only six months since I had learned to read properly, but checked myself in time.

"I haven't got them."

"What form are you in?"

"I'm not in any form."

"He's a traveller," said the old lady, coming back. "Ninety-eight point seven. He was footing it to Turkestan. Treat him nicely, Katya."

"Footing it? What d'you mean?"

"What I say. He hoofed it all the way."

In the hall, under the mirror, stood a little table, and Katya drew a chair up to it, settled herself in it with her head resting on her hand and said, "Well, tell me about it."

I had no desire to tell her anything-she gave herself such airs. If we had made it and got to Turkestan that would be a different matter. I therefore answered politely, "Oh, I don't feel like it. Some other time perhaps."

The old lady put bread and jam in front of me, but I declined it, saying, "I told you I did it for nothing."

I don't know why, but I got upset. I was even pleased that Katya had reddened when I refused to tell her my story and made for the door.

"Come, come, don't be angry," the old lady said as she saw me out.

"What's your name?"

"Grigoriev, Alexander."

"Well, Alexander Grigoriev, goodbye, and thank you."

I stood for a while on the landing, trying to make out the name on the doorplate. Kazarinov ... no, it wasn't Kazarinov...