Two Captains (16 page)

I tore pell-mell into the dormitory. Empty! The beds were made- the boys must have been preparing to turn in.

"Uncle Petya!" I yelled and saw the cook coming out of the kitchen in a new suit, with his hat in his hand. "What's happened?"

"I'm invited to the meeting," he informed me in a mysterious whisper. I heard no more, as I was running upstairs into the school.

The assembly hall was packed to overflowing and boys and girls crowded round the doorway and in the corridor. But I got in all right. 1 sat down in the front row, not on a seat, but on the floor right in front of the platform.

It was an important meeting chaired by Varya. Very red, she sat among the platform party with a pencil in her hand, tossing back a lock of hair which kept tumbling over her nose. Other boys and girls from the Komsomol Group sat on either side of her, busily writing something down. And over the heads of the platform party, facing the hall, hung my poster. I caught my breath. It was my poster-an aeroplane soaring among the clouds, and over it the words: "Young People, Join the S.F.A.F.!" What my poster had to do with it I couldn't make out for quite a time, because all the speakers to a man were talking about some ultimatum or other. It wasn't until Korablev took the floor that the thing became clear to me.

"Comrades!" he said quietly but distinctly. "The Soviet Government has had an ultimatum presented to it. On the whole, you have taken the proper measure of this document. We must give our own answer to that ultimatum. We must set up at our school a local group of the Society of Friends of the Air Force!"

Everyone clapped, and thereafter clapped after each phrase Korablev uttered. He ended up by pointing to my poster and it made me feel proud.

Then Nikolai Antonich took the floor, and he, too, made a very good speech, and after that Varya announced that the Komsomol Group were joining the S.F.A.F. in a body. Those who wished to sign on could do so at her office tomorrow from ten to ten, meanwhile she proposed taking a collection for Soviet aviation and sending the money in to Pravda.

I must have been very excited, because Valya, who was also sitting on the floor a little way off, looked at me in surprise. I got out the silver fifty-kopeck piece and showed it to him. He twigged. He wanted to ask me something, probably something about the spinning-tackle, but checked himself and just nodded.

I jumped up on to the platform and gave the coin to Varya.

"Ivan Pavlovich," I said to Korablev, who was standing in the corridor smoking a cigarette in a long holder, "at what age do they take on airmen?"

He looked at me gravely.

"I don't know, Sanya. I don't think they'd take you yet."

Not take me? I thought of the oath Pyotr and I had once sworn to each other in Cathedral Gardens: "To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield".

I did not say it out loud, though. Korablev would not have understood anyway.

As in the old silent films, I see a big clock with the hand showing years instead of hours. One-full circle and I see myself at lesson-time with Korablev, sharing the same desk with Romashka. We have made a bet, a bet that I will not cry out or pull my hand away if Romashka slashes me across the fingers with a penknife. It is a test of willpower. According to the

"rules for developing willpower" I must learn "not to give vent to my feelings". Every evening I repeat these rules over and over, and now at last I have a chance of putting myself to the test.

The whole class is watching us. Nobody is listening to Korablev, though today's lesson is an interesting one; it's a lesson about the manners and customs of the Chukchi people. "Come on!" I say to Romashka.

And that cold-blooded beast saws at my finger with his penknife. I do not cry out, but I can't help pulling my hand away and I lose the bet.

A gasp and a whisper ran round the desks. Bleeding, I purposely give a loud laugh to show that I don't feel the slightest pain, and suddenly Korablev orders me out of the classroom. I leave the room with my hand thrust in my pocket. "You needn't come back."

But I do come back. It is an interesting lesson and I listen to it outside the door, sitting on the floor.

Rules for developing willpower! I had spent a whole year over them. I had tried not only to "conceal my feelings", but "not to care for the opinion of people I disdain". I don't remember which of these rules was the harder-the first one, probably, because my face always gave me away.

"Sleep as little as possible, for in sleep the will is absent - this was no hard task either, not for a man like me. I leamt to make my "plan for the whole day first thing in the morning", and have been following this rule all my life. As for the main rule, "remember the purpose of your existence", I did not have to repeat that too often, as this purpose was clear to me even in those days.

Another full circle: an early winter morning in 1925. I wake up before anyone else, and I lie there thinking, not quite sure whether I am awake or still asleep. I am thinking of the Tatarinovs. I had not been to see them for two years. Nikolai Antonich still hates me. There isn't a single sibilant in my name, yet he contrives to hiss it. Nina Kapitonovna still loves me; the other day Korablev passed on to me her "regards and greetings". I wonder how Maria Vasilievna is getting on? Still sitting on the couch and smoking? And Katya?

I look at the clock. Getting on for seven. Time to get up. I had made a vow to get up before the bell goes. I run on tiptoe to the washroom and do my exercises in front of the open window. It is cold, snowflakes fly in at the window, whirling, settling on my shoulders, melting. I wash down to my waist, then start reading my book. That wonderful book of Amundsen's about the South Pole, which I am reading for the fourth time.

Yet another full circle, and I see myself in a small familiar room in which, for three years, I have spent nearly all my evenings. I have been given my first assignment by the Komsomol Group-to take charge of the collective reading of the newspapers. The first time is rather terrifying, because you have to answer questions too. I know "the present situation",

"the national policy" and "world problems". Best of all, though, I know the world flying records for altitude, endurance and duration. What if I am suddenly asked about price cuts? But everything goes off smoothly.

Another full circle, and I am seventeen.

The whole school is assembled in the hall. Behind a long red table sit the members of the court. On the left-counsel for the defence;

on the right-the public prosecutor. In the dock-the defendant.

"Defendant, what is your first name?"

"Eugene."

"Surname?"

"Onegin."

That was a memorable day.

(Tr.Eugene Onegin-the title and principal character of Pushkin's poem) At first no one in the school took any interest in the idea. But when one of the actresses of our school theatre suggested staging "The Trial of Eugene Onegin" in costume, the whole school started talking about it.

Grisha Faber was invited to play the leading role. He was studying now at the Theatrical School, but would sometimes come to see our first nights for old times' sake. Our own actors were to play the part of witnesses. No period costume could be found for the Larin's nurse and so we had to let ourselves be persuaded that nurses in Pushkin's day dressed much the same as they did in ours. The defence was entrusted to Valya, our tutor Sutkin was to be the public prosecutor and I the judge.

The offender, wearing a wig, a blue tail-coat, shoes with bows on them and knee-length stockings, sat in the dock, coolly cleaning his nails with a broken pencil. Every now and then he would pass a remote supercilious eye over the public and the members of the court. That must have been his idea of how Eugene Onegin would have borne himself in similar circumstances.

Old Mrs Larina and her daughters and the nurse sat in the witnesses'

room (what used to be the teachers' room). They, on the contrary, were all in a dither, especially the nurse, who was remarkably youthful and pretty for her years. Counsel for the defence was excited too. He kept nervously tapping a bulky file with documents. The material evidence-two old pistols-lay on the table before me. At my back I could hear the producers whispering hurriedly among themselves.

"Do you plead guilty?" I asked Grisha. "Guilty of what?"

"Of murder under guise of a duel," the producers prompted in a whisper.

"Of murder under guise of a duel," I said, adding, after consulting the charge-sheet, "of the poet Vladimir Lensky, aged eighteen."

"Never!" Grisha said haughtily. "One has to distinguish between a duel and murder."

"In that case, we shall proceed to examine the witnesses," I said.

"Citizeness Larina, what evidence can you give in this affair?"

At rehearsal this had gone off smoothly, but here everyone felt that it did not work. Everyone except Grisha, who was quite in his element. At one moment he produced a comb and started to groom his side-burns, the next he tried to stare at the members of the court out of countenance, or tossed his head proudly with a defiant smile. When the witness, old Mrs Larina, spoke about Onegin having been treated in their home like one of the family, Grisha covered his eyes with one hand and placed the other on his heart to show how he was suffering. He acted wonderfully and I noticed that the female witnesses, especially Tatiana and Olga, just couldn't keep their eyes off him. I don't blame Tatiana-after all, she was in love with him in the story-but Olga, now, she was completely out of character. The audience, too, had eyes only for Grisha and no one paid the slightest attention to us.

I called the next witness-Tatiana. My, she talked nineteen to the dozen! She was absolutely unlike Pushkin's Tatiana, and the only point of resemblance, if there was one, were the curls falling to her shoulders and the heel-length gown. To my question whether she considered Onegin guilty of murder, she gave the evasive reply that Onegin was an egoist.

I called on the defence counsel, and from then on everything was topsy-turvy. For one thing, because the defence counsel talked sheer drivel.

Secondly, because I had caught sight ofKatya.

Of course, in four years she had changed a lot. But her hair, worn in plaits, had the same ringlets on the forehead. She screwed her eyes up in the same old independent way and had the same purposeful nose-I think I should have recognised her by that nose if she lived to a hundred.

She was listening attentively to Valya. It was our biggest mistake, giving the defence to Valya, whose only interest in life was zoology. He started off with the very strange statement that duels were to be observed also in the animal kingdom, but nobody considered them as murder. Then he warmed to the subject of rodents and became so carried away that you kept wondering how he would find his way back to the defence of Eugene Onegin.

Katya, though, was listening to him with interest. I knew from former years that when she began to chew on her plait, it meant she was interested. She was the only girl who took no notice of Grisha.

Valya finished rather abruptly, and then came the prosecutor's turn. He was as dull as ditch-water. He spent a whole blessed hour trying to prove that although it was the nineteenth-century society of landowners and bureaucrats who had killed Lensky, nevertheless Eugene Onegin was fully responsible for this murder, "since all duels are murder, premeditated murder".

To cut a long story short, the prosecutor held that Eugene Onegin should be sentenced to ten years' imprisonment with confiscation of his property.

Nobody had expected such a demand, and laughter broke out in the hall.

Grisha sprang to his feet proudly, I gave him permission to speak.

Actors are said to feel the mood of an audience. That is what Grisha must have felt, because he led off, shouting at the top of his voice, in order, as he afterwards explained, to "enthuse the audience". This he failed to do. His speech had one fault-you couldn't tell whether he was speaking for himself or for Onegin. Onegin would hardly have said that "even today his hand would not falter in sending a bullet into Lensky's heart".

Anyway, everyone drew a sigh of relief when he sat down, wiping his brow and very pleased with himself.

"The court is retiring to confer."

"Hurry up, you fellows."

"What a bore."

"Dragging it out."

These comments were perfectly justified, and we decided, by tacit consent, to rush through our verdict. To my astonishment, the majority of the members of the court agreed with the public prosecutor. Ten years with confiscation of property. It was clear that Eugene Onegin had nothing to do with it. The sentence was intended for Grisha, who had bored everyone to death, everyone except the witnesses Tatiana and Olga. But I said that it was not fair: Grisha had acted well and without him the whole show would have been a wash-out. We agreed on five years.

"Stand!" the usher called. The members of the court filed in.

Everyone stood up. I read the sentence.

"It isn't right!" .

"Acquit him!"

"Shame!"

"All right, comrades," I said morosely. "I think it's wrong too. I consider that Eugene Onegin should be acquitted, and Grisha should have a vote of thanks. Who's in favour?"

All raised their hands, laughing.

"Adopted unanimously. The meeting is closed."

I was furious. I shouldn't have taken on this thing. Perhaps we should have treated the whole trial as a joke. But how? I felt that everyone saw how lacking in resource and wit I was.