Two Captains (45 page)

I run into the writer of these letters the same way. He used to be a very busy man, and I just can't make out how he finds the time to stand about in the street whenever I come out of the house. I meet him in shops and at the theatre, and it's very unpleasant, because he bows to me and I ignore him. When he makes a movement to come up, I turn away.

He called on Valya, and cried, and yelled at him like mad when Valya jokingly cited a similar example of unrequited love among the chimpanzees.

Altogether he has begun to loom so large in my life that I am beginning to feel morbid about it. The moment I close my eyes I see him in front of me in his new grey coat and soft hat, which he has taken to wearing on my account-he told me as much himself one day.

July 12, 1935. Of course, it was a very strange idea of mine-to go to Romashov and get from him those papers which Vyshimirsky had handed over to him. It was a cruel thought-to go to him after all those letters and the flowers which I sent back. But the more I thought of it the more the idea appealed to me. I saw myself coming in and him staring at me, bewildered, without saying a word, then turning pale, dashing down the corridor and flinging open the door of his room, while I said coolly: "Misha, I've come to see you on business."

The curious thing about it is that everything happened exactly as I had pictured it. I have just come away from Mm.

He was wearing a warm suit of blue pyjamas and hadn't had time to comb his hair yet. It was wet-apparently after a bath-and hung down his forehead in yellow strands. He stood pale and silent, while I took my coat off. Then he stepped swiftly towards me.

"Katya!"

"Misha, I've come to see you on business," I repeated coolly. "Get dressed and comb your hair. Where can I wait?"

"Yes, of course..."

He ran down the corridor and flung open the door of his room.

"In here, please. Excuse me..."

"On the contrary. Excuse me."

We had visited him the previous year, the three of us-Nikolai Antonich, Grandma and myself, and Grandma, by the way, had kept throwing out hints all the evening that he had borrowed forty rubles from her and not given it back.

I had liked his room at the time, but I thought it looked even better now. It was done up in pleasing light-grey tones, the door and built-in cupboard somewhat of a lighter shade than the walls. The upholstered furniture was soft and comfortable, and everything was attractively arranged. The window looked out on Dog Place-my favourite spot in Moscow. I have loved Dog Place ever since a child-that little square with its monument to dogs that had died, and all the quaint little turnings that ran off it.

"Misha," I said when he had come back, combed, scented, and wearing a new blue suit which I had not seen before, "I have come to answer all your letters. What's that nonsense you write about my repenting it later if I didn't marry you! It's silly schoolboy behaviour to keep writing me every day when you know that I do not even read your letters. You know perfectly well that I never intended to marry you, and you have no reason to write that I misled you."

It was rather frightening to watch the way his face changed. He had come in with an eager, happy look, as if hoping, yet scarcely able to believe it-and now hope was dying with every word I uttered and his face drained slowly of life. He turned away and looked down on the floor.

"It's too long to explain why I allowed you to speak about it before.

There were many reasons. But you are an intelligent man. You could not have made the mistake of believing that I loved you."

"But you won't be happy with him!"

His knees were shaking, and he covered his eyes several times in a strange way. I was reminded of what Sanya had said about him sleeping with his eyes open.

"I'll kill myself and you," he whispered.

"You can kill yourself for all I care," I said very calmly. "I don't want to quarrel with you, but really, what right have you to talk that way?

You started an intrigue, as though girls in our day can be won by means of idiotic intrigues! You haven't a shred of self-esteem, otherwise you wouldn't be dogging my steps every day. The best thing you can do is listen to me and say nothing, because I know everything you are going to say. And now, to come to the point: what are those papers you took from Vyshimirsky?"

"What papers?"

"Don't pretend, Misha. You know perfectly well what I am talking about.

The papers you used to threaten Nikolai Antonich with, papers which showed him up as having been a stock-jobber and which you afterwards offered to let Sanya have if he gave me up and went away. Hand them over to me this minute.

Do you hear-this minute!"

He closed his eyes several times and sighed. Then he made a motion to get down on his knees. But I said very loudly: "Misha, don't you dare!"

He didn't do it, just clenched his teeth, and such a look of despair came into his face that my heart was wrung despite myself.

Not that I felt sorry for him. I had a sort of guilty feeling that I was making him suffer in that dumb way. I would have felt better if he had started cursing me. But he just stood there saying nothing.

"Misha," I began again with some agitation. "Don't you see those papers are of no use to you any more. You can't change anything, and I feel ashamed that I know practically nothing about my father at a time when all the newspapers are writing about him. I need them-1 and nobody else."

I don't know what he imagined when I uttered the words "I and nobody else", but an ugly look suddenly came into his eyes and he threw his head up and took a turn about the room. He was thinking of Sanya.

"I won't give you anything!" he said brusquely.

"Yes you will! If you don't it will mean it was all lies-everything that you wrote to me."

Suddenly he went out and I was left alone. It was very quiet. I could hear children's voices from the street and once or twice the tentative hoot of a motor car. It was disturbing, his going out and not coming back for so long. What if he did do something to himself? My heart went cold and I stepped out into the corridor, listening. Not a sound except that of water running somewhere.

"Misha!"

The door of the bathroom was ajar. I looked in and saw him bending over the bath. For a moment I couldn't see what he was doing-it was dark in there, for he had not switched the light on.

"I shan't be long," he said clearly, without turning round.

He stood bent up almost double, holding his head under the tap. The water was pouring over his face and shoulders, and his new suit was drenched.

"What are you doing? Are you crazy!"

"Go along, I'll soon be back," he repeated gruffly.

A few minutes later he did come back-collarless, red-eyed- bringing four ordinary blue scrap-books.

"There they are," he said. "I have no other papers. Take them."

This may have been another lie for all I knew, because, on opening one of the books at random, I found that it contained some sort of printed matter, like a page torn out of a book, but you couldn't talk to him any more, and so I merely thanked him very politely.

"Thanks, Misha."

And went home.

July 12. Night. There they lie in front of me, four thick, blue scrap-books, old ones, that is, from before the revolution because they all have on them the trademark "Friedrich Kahn". The first page of the first book bears the inscription in ornamental lettering with shading to each letter: "Whereof I have been witness in real life" and the date-"1916.

Memoirs." Further on there are simply cuttings from old newspapers, some of which I have never heard of, such as: The Stock Exchange Gazette, Zemshchina, Gazeta-Kopeika. The cuttings were pasted in lengthways in columns, but in some places also crosswise, for instance this one:

"Tatarinov's expedition. Buy postcards: (1) Prayer before sailing; (2) The St. Maria in the roadsteads."

When I came home I quickly looked through each book from cover to cover. There were no "papers" here, as far as I understood this word from my conversation with Korablev, only articles and news items concerning the expedition from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok along the coast of Siberia.

What sort of articles were they? I started to read them and could not tear myself away. The whole of life in the old days was unfolded before me and I read on with a bitter sense of irreparable doom and resentment.

Irreparable because the schooner St. Maria was doomed before she set sail-that is what I gathered from these articles. And resentment because I now learnt how treacherously my father had been deceived, and how badly his trustful and guileless nature had let him down.

This was how one "eye-witness" described the sailing of the St. Maria:

"The masts of the schooner, bound on her distant voyage are poorly flagged. The hour for setting sail draws near. The last 'prayer for seamen and seafarers', the last farewell speeches. Slowly the St. Maria gets under way. The shore recedes farther and farther until houses and people merge in a single colourful strip. A solemn moment! The last link with land and home is severed. But we feel sad and ashamed at this poor send-off, at these indifferent faces which register merely curiosity. Evening draws in. The St.

Maria stops in the mouth of the Dvina. The people who are seeing her off drink a glass of champagne to the success of the expedition. A last handshake, a last embrace, then back to town aboard the waiting Lebedin, the women standing by the rail of the little steamboat, waving and waving, brushing the tears away to wave again. We can still hear the nervous barking of the dogs aboard the receding schooner. She grows smaller and smaller until nothing but a dot can be seen on the darkening horizon. What lies in store for you, brave men?"

Now the schooner was off on her long voyage and the lighthouse at Archangel sent her its farewell signal: "Happy sailing and success!"-but ashore, what was happening ashore, my God! What sordid squabbling among the ship chandlers who had serviced the schooner, what lawsuits and auctions-some of the supplies and victuals had had to be left behind and were all sold by auction. And the accusations-what didn't they accuse my father of! Within a week of the schooner setting sail he was accused of having failed to insure either himself or his men; of having sailed three weeks later than the conditions of Arctic navigation allowed; of having gone off without a wireless man. He was accused of thoughtlessness in selecting his crew, among whom "there was not a single man who could handle a sail".

They made sneering remarks about "this preposterous adventure, which reflected, as in a drop of water, this present-day, pretentious, muddled life of ours."

Within a few days of the St. Maria's sailing a violent storm broke out in the Kara Sea and immediately rumours spread that the expedition had been shipwrecked off the coast of Novaya Zemlya. "Who is to blame?" "The Fate of the St. Maria", "Where is Tatarinov?"-the first chilling impressions of my childhood came back to me as I read these articles. Mother came quickly into my little room at Ensk with a newspaper in her hand. She was wearing that lovely black rustling dress. She did not see me, though I spoke to her, and I jumped out of bed and ran up to her in my bare feet and nightgown. The floor was cold, but she did not tell me to go back to bed nor did she pick me up from the floor. She just stood by the window with the newspaper in her hand. I tried to reach up to the window, too, but all I could see was our garden strewn with wet maple leaves, and wet paths and puddles in which the raindrops were still falling. "Mummy, what are you looking at?" She was silent. I asked again. I wanted her to take me in her arms, because her continued silence was frightening me. "Mummy!" I began to cry, and that made her turn round and bend down to pick me up, but something was the matter with her-she sat down on the floor, then lay down and kept quite still, stretched out on the floor in her lovely black, rustling dress. And all of a sudden wild, unreasoning terror seized me and I started to scream. I screamed madly and banged at something with hands and feet. Then I heard Mother's frightened voice, but I went on screaming, unable to stop myself.

Afterwards, back in bed I heard Grandma talking to Mother, and Mother saying: "I frightened her."

I pretended to be asleep and did not say anything, because after all she was Mummy and because she was talking and crying in her ususal voice.

Only now, on reading these articles, did I realise what made her act that way.

The rumours proved to be false, however, and from Yugorsky Shar Captain Tatarinov telegraphed a message of "hearty greetings and best wishes to all who had made donations to the expedition and to all its wellwishers".

This message was printed in facsimile under an unfamiliar portrait of Father in naval uniform-regulation jacket with white shoulder-straps-an elegant officer with an old-fashioned moustache turned up at the ends.

In sending "best wishes to those who had made donations" he was hoping that their contributions would enable the Committee for the Exploration of Russia's Arctic Territories to support the families of the crew. He wrote about this in his dispatch sent through the Yugorsky Shar Dispatch Service, which was published in the newspaper Novoye Vremya:

"I am confident that the Committee will not leave to the mercy of fate the families of those who have dedicated their lives to the common national interests."

Vain hopes! In the issue of the same newspaper for June 27, I read a report of the Committee's meeting: "According to N. A. Tatarinov, the Committee's Secretary, the recent collection has yielded negligible results.

Neither have many other methods, such as the organisation of entertainments, etc., produced the hoped-for profits. Therefore, the Committee finds itself unable to render to the families of the crew the proposed assistance of 1,000 rubles."