Two Captains (48 page)

My last letters had not reached him and he had not heard the news about the Pakhtusov, which-it had just been decided- would go through Matochkin Strait, and then, rounding Severnaya Zemlya, make for the Lyashkov Islands.

"Well, we'll have more time, that's all," Sanya said. "It's the time factor that worries me most."

We talked about the make-up of the search party and he said that he had recommended a radio man from Dikson, Doctor Ivan Ivano-vich and his mechanic Luri, about whom he had often written to me from Zapolarie.

"The radio man's a splendid chap. Do you know who he is?" "No."

"Korzinkin," Sanya solemnly announced. "None other." I had to confess that I had never heard the name before, and Sanya explained that Korzinkin was one of the two Russians who had gone with Amundsen to the South Pole, and that Amundsen mentions him in his book.

"Ripping, eh? I'll be the fifth. And you the sixth. I suggested you as being the daughter."

"Oh, you did? I thought I was entitled to join the expedition not merely as the daughter of Captain Tatarinov. Is that what you wrote-'profession-daughter'?" Sanya was taken aback. "I don't see that it matters," he muttered. "D'you think it was silly?"

"Very silly."

"Otherwise it would look as if I was trying to get my wife in. Rather awkward."

"I did not ask you to try to get me in, Sanya," I said composedly.

"Daughter, wife! I'm a niece and granddaughter, too. I'm an old geologist, Sanya, and I asked the Chief of the N.S.R.A. to include me in the expedition as a geologist, and not as your wife. By the way, I'm not your wife yet, and if you're going to carry on in this silly way I'll go and marry someone else. We haven't been to the registrar's yet, have we?"

I even began to feel sorry for him as he stood there blinking, laughing awkwardly, taking off his cap and wiping his forehead with his hand.

"I'm sorry, Katya, honestly!" he muttered.

I gave him a quick kiss, though we happened to be standing in the courtyard facing the building of the Arctic Institute, and said: "Good luck."

He promised to ring me at six or drop in at Pyotr's place, if he could manage it.

May 7, 1936. He returned that day not at six but at eleven, and not to Pyotr's but to the Astoria and phoned demanding that we come down straight away and have supper with him, as he had had nothing to eat and was as hungry as a wolf, and wanted company.

But Pyotr felt done up after an anxious day, and besides, he had had some vodka to buck him up and was now lying on the sofa, blinking sleepily, and looking like Punch with that fantastic nose of his and ungainly legs and arms.

I remember the dates of all my meetings with Sanya and of our letters too. We met in the garden in Triumfalnaya Square on April 2 and outside the Bolshoi Theatre on June 13. And that evening on May 4, when he rang me up on his return from the Arctic Institute and I went over to see him-that day, too, I shall remember as long as I live.

We have known each other since childhood and I thought that I knew him better by now than he perhaps knew himself. But never before had I seen him the way he was that evening. When we were having supper I even told him as much.

His plan had been fully approved and he had received lots of compliments. He had met Professor V., the man who had discovered the island by tracing the drift of the St. Maria, and the Professor had been very nice to him. And he was in Leningrad, that great, beautiful city, which he had loved ever since his flying school days-in Leningrad after the silences of the Arctic! Everything was fine!

This happiness of his, this success, showed so clearly in his face, in his every gesture, even in the way he ate. His eyes shone, he sat erect and at the same time at his ease. If I were not already in love

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with him I would certainly have fallen in love with him that evening.

We sat eating and drinking for God knows how long, then we went for a walk after I had mentioned that I hadn't yet seen the sights of Leningrad.

Sanya was all eagerness to show me himself "what kind of a city this was".

It was past two, the darkest hour of the night, but when we came out of the Astoria it was so light that I purposely stopped in Gogol Street to read a newspaper in one of the wall stands.

Leningrad of the Midnight Sun! But Sanya said these white nights were nothing new to him and the one good thing about the Leningrad brand was that it did not last six months.

It grew cold and I was lightly clad, so we both wrapped ourselves in Sanya's raincoat and sat for a long time in utter silence with our arms round each other.

We were sitting on a semi-circular granite seat on the Neva embankment, and somewhere down below a wave slapped gently against the stone facing.

Then we went back to the Astoria and made coffee in Sanya's room. Sanya always carried a coffee-pot and spirit lamp about with him when travelling.

"Doesn't it frighten you to feel so happy?" he said, taking me in his arms. "Your heart's going pit-a-pat! So's mine, you just listen."

He took my hand and placed it over his heart.

"We're terribly excited-isn't it funny?"

He was saying something, without hearing what he was saying, and his voice grew strangely deep with emotion...

We did not go to the Skovorodnikovs until about one o'clock in the afternoon. One of the elegant little old ladies opened the door and said that Pyotr was not at home.

"He has gone to the Clinic."

"So early?"

"Yes."

She looked worried.

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing. He telephoned there and they told him that Alexandra was slightly worse."

May 21, 1936. Then began days which I shall probably remember all my life with horror and impotent despair. We went to the Schroder Clinic three times a day and stood for a long time in front of the board which displayed the patients' temperature charts: "Skovorod-nikova-98;99,2;101;103.8".

Then the temperature dropped sharply and rose again after several hours to as high as 104.9. I suspected that this was not a case of pneumonia, as we had been told at the Clinic, and I called on the professor at his flat.

But he confirmed the diagnosis-the area of inflammation could be clearly detected by auscultation, and there were several areas in both lungs.

I hardly saw Sanya those days. He rang me up sometimes at night and once I dropped in to see him at the Institute, in the little office set apart for the organisation of the search party. He was sitting at a desk piled with weapons, cameras, mittens and fur stockings. A man with a grave whiskered face, wearing a leather coat, was assembling a doublebarrelled gun on his desk and swearing because the barrels would not fit into the stock.

"Well, how is she? Did you see her? What do the doctors say?"

The telephone kept ringing every minute. Annoyed, he lifted the receiver and threw it down on the desk.

"Same as before," I answered.

"And the temperature?"

"This morning it was a hundred and five."

"Hell! Isn't there anything they can do?"

His face looked drawn, anxious and tired, and he was quite unlike himself, especially the self he was on the day of his arrival.

I had seldom had occasion to nurse sick people, especially people as ill as Sasha was, but having been given permission to watch at her bedside, I learned to do it. It was hard, because Sasha practically never slept, and if she did fall asleep she would wake up on the instant and one had to listen to her breathing all the time.

There were days when she rallied, and very strongly too. I remember one such day, the fourth day of my stay at the hospital. She had slept well during the night and woke up in the morning saying she was hungry. She drank some tea with milk and ate an egg, and when we were tucking her in to air the ward she suddenly said: "Katya, darling, have you been with me all the time? And sleeping here too?"

My face must have given me away, because she showed surprise.

"Have I been as ill as that?"

"Darling, we're going to open the window. You just lie still and keep quiet. You were ill and now you are getting better and everything will be fine."

She complied without demur, and only kept my hand in hers for a little while when I started to wipe her face and hands with toilet vinegar. Then they brought the baby and we watched him while he fed, his eyes wide open with such a serious, silly expression.

"He looks like him, doesn't he?" Sasha said from behind her mask.

She was pleased that the boy resembled Pyotr. As a matter of fact he did have that longish sort of profile. He had a profile already, though he was only ten days old.

Towards the evening Sasha felt slightly worse, but it did not worry me very much, because she usually got worse towards the evening. I sat reading, holding the book close under the lamp which stood on the bedside table with a kerchief thrown over the shade to keep the light out of Sasha's eyes.

Sanya had sent me several books the day before and I was reading Stefansson's The Friendly Arctic.

My candidature as a member of the-expedition had been finally approved, precisely as a geologist, and the books which Sanya had sent me were basic and had to be read.

It must have been round about three when I got up to listen to Sasha's breathing and saw that she was lying with her eyes open. "What is it, darling?"

She was silent. Then, quietly, she said: "Katya, I'm dying." "You're getting better. Today you are much better." "It wouldn't be so terrible if it weren't for the baby." Her eyes were full of tears and she tried to turn her head to wipe them on the pillow.

I dried her eyes and kissed her. Her forehead was very hot. The nurse came in and I sent her to fetch the oxygen pad How can I describe the horror which began that night! What a lot you learn about a person when he dies!

Listening to the speeches at the memorial service in the Academy of Arts I thought that Sasha had not had half as many nice things said about her during her life as those they were saying now after her death.

The coffin stood on a dais, and there were lots of flowers, so many that her pale face could hardly be seen amidst them. People made speeches, saying what "a fine artist" and "a fine person" she had been and that

"sudden death had torn the thread of a noble life" and so on. And how feeble all those speeches were before the dead, austere face lying in that coffin!

Pyotr was all right, though his pale, impassive face struck me as odd.

He seemed to be waiting patiently for this whole long procedure to end at last and then Sasha would be with him again and everything would be fine once more. Old Skovorodnikov, who had arrived the day before to attend the funeral, stood behind him, tears rolling down his cheeks into his neat grey moustache. Then a mist rose before my eyes again and I have no further memory of how the ceremony ended.

May 28, 1936. Once in conversation with me, C. had used the expression

"getting the North into your blood". And only now, while helping Sanya to fit out the search party,, did I get to know what it really meant. Not a day passes without Sanya being visited by some persons who had contracted that malady. One of them is P., an old artist, a friend and companion of Sedov, who had warmly acclaimed Sanya's article in Pravda and subsequently published his own reminiscences of how the St. Phocas, on her way back to the mainland, had picked up Navigation officer Klimov at Cape Flora.

Boys come, asking Sanya to take them on as stokers, cooks-any old job.

Ambitious men come, seeking easy paths to honour and fame;

also disinterested dreamers, to whom the Arctic is a sort of wonderland, full of magic and glamour.

And yesterday, when I fell asleep, waiting for Sanya, curled up in an armchair, a man came to see Sanya. A naval man-1 couldn't say what rank-a bluff, hearty man with a Cossack's forelock and dark mocking eyes. Whether he had come alone or with Sanya, I couldn't say, but waking up in the middle of the night I found them engaged in earnest conversation and quickly closed my eyes, pretending to be asleep. It was pleasant to listen and doze, or pretend that you were dozing-you didn't have to introduce yourself, or do your hair, or change.

"It's all very well to say that a search for Captain Tatarinov has nothing in common with the basic tasks of the N.S.R.A. That's nonsense, of course. You only have to remember the search for Franklin. Searching for people is a jolly good thing-it helps to improve the map. But I'm talking of a different thing."

Pencil in hand, he began figuring out the mineral resources of the Kola Peninsula. Now here I was on my own ground. But the nocturnal visitor counted all these peaceful minerals as "strategic raw material" needed in the event of war, and mentally I started arguing with him, convinced as I was that there would be no war.

"I assure you," the man said, "that Captain Tatarinov understood perfectly well that at the back of every Arctic expedition there must be some military purpose."

"Of course he did," I mentally retorted in that queer state of drowsiness when you can think and speak, which is the same as not speaking and not thinking. "But there won't be any war!"

"It is high time we set up defensive bases all along the route of our convoys. I'd like to see a good long-range battery on Novaya Zemlya, say..."

He went on talking and talking, and all of a sudden, from this quiet hotel room, where I lay curled in an armchair and where Sanya had just covered the lamp with the end oftablecloth to keep the light out of my eyes, I was transported to some strange town half-destroyed by fire. Here, too, it was quiet, but with a tense, deathly hush. Everyone was waiting for something to happen, talking in whispers, and one had to go down into a basement, groping for the damp walls in the dark. I didn't go. I was standing on the front steps of a dark, empty wooden house with the clear mysterious sky stretching above me. Where was he now? The plane was hurtling through this fearful starlit void, its engine stuttering, its ice-laden wings growing heavier every moment. It was the decree of fate, nothing could alter it. The sound of the engine grew muffled, the machine quivered, and the call-signs from the distant stations could no longer be heard...