Two Captains (12 page)

"Nikolai Antonich, you sent him for the lactometer, didn't you?" Katya said motioning to me with her eyes in an offhand manner.

"I did, Katya."

"Very well. I've broken it."

Nikolai Antonich looked grave.

"She's fibbing, " I said glumly. "It exploded."

"I don't understand. Shut up, Grigoriev! What's it all about, Katya, explain."

"There's nothing to explain," Katya answered with a proud toss of her head. "I broke the lactometer, that's all."

"I see. But I believe I sent this boy for it, didn't I?"

"And he hasn't brought it because I broke it."

"She's fibbing," I repeated.

Katya's eyes snapped at me.

"That's all very well, Katya," Nikolai Antonich said, pursing his lips benignly. "But you see, they've delivered milk to the school and I've put off breakfast in order to test the quality of this milk before deciding whether or not to continue taking it from our present milk women. It seems I have been waiting for nothing. What's more, it appears that a valuable instrument has been broken, and broken in circumstances which are anything but clear. Now you explain, Grigoriev, what it's all about."

"What a frightful bore! I'm going, Nikolai Antonich," Katya announced.

Nikolai Antonich looked at her. Somehow it struck me at that moment that he hated her.

"All right, Katya, run along," he said in a mild tone. "I'll have it out here with this boy."

"In that case I'll wait."

She settled herself in a chair and impatiently chewed the end of her plait while we were talking. I daresay if she had gone away the talk would not have ended so amicably. The lactometer affair was forgiven. Nikolai Antonich even recalled the fact that I had been sent to his school as a sculptor-to-be. Katya listened with interest.

From that day on we became friends. She liked me for not letting her take the blame on herself and not mentioning the firedamp explosion when telling my story.

"You thought I was going to catch it, didn't you?" she said, when we came out of the school.

"Mmm."

"Not likely! Come and see us. Grandma's invited you."

I woke up that morning with the thought: should I go or not? Two things worried me - my trousers, and Nikolai Antonich. The trousers were not exactly picture-look, being neither short nor long, and patched at the knees. As for Nikolai Antonich, he was Head of the school, you will remember, that's to say a rather formidable personage. What if he suddenly started questioning me about this, that and the other? Nevertheless, when lessons were over, I polished my boots, and wetted, brushed and parted my hair. I was going to pay a visit!

How awkward I felt, how shy I was! My confounded hair kept sticking up on the top of my head and I had to keep it down with spit. Nina Kapitonovna was telling Katya and me something, when all of a sudden she commanded:

"Shut your mouth!" I had been staring at her openmouthed.

Katya showed me round the flat. In one of the rooms she lived herself with her mother, in another Nikolai Antonich, and the third was used as a dining-room. The desk-set in Nikolai Antonich's room represented "a scene from the life of Ilya of Murom", as Katya explained to me. In fact, the inkwell was made in the shape of a bearded head wearing a spiked helmet, the ashtray represented two crossed, ancient Russian gauntlets, and so on. The ink was under the helmet, which meant that Nikolai Antonich had to dip his pen right into the hero's skull. This stuck me as odd.

Between the windows stood a bookcase; I had never seen so many books together. Over the bookcase hung a half-length portrait of a naval officer with a broad brow, a square jaw and dancing grey eyes.

I noticed a similar but smaller portrait in the dining-room and a still smaller one in Katya's room over the bed.

"My Father," Katya explained, glancing at me sideways. And I had been thinking that Nikolai Antonich was her father! On second thoughts, though, she would hardly have called her own father by his name and patronymic.

"Stepfather," I thought, but the next moment decided that he couldn't be. I knew what a stepfather was. This did not look like it.

Then Katya showed me a mariner's compass-a very interesting gadget. It was a brass hoop on a stand with a little bowl swinging in it, and in the bowl, under a glass cover, a needle. Whichever way you turned the bowl, even if you held it upside down, the needle would still keep swinging and the anchor at the tip would point North. "Such a compass can stand any gale."

"What's it doing here?" "Father gave it to me." "Where is he?"

Katya's face darkened.

"I don't know."

"He divorced her mother and left her," I decided immediately. I had heard of such cases.

I noticed that there was a lot of pictures in the flat, and very good ones, too, I thought. One was really beautiful-it showed a straight wide path in a garden and pine trees lit up by the sun.

"That's a Levitan," Katya said in a casual, grown-up way.

I didn't know at the time that Levitan was the name of the artist, and decided that this must be the name of the place painted in the picture.

Then the old lady called us in to have tea with saccharin.

"So that's the sort you are, Alexander Grigoriev," she said. "You went and broke the lactometer."

She asked me to tell her all about Ensk, even the post-office there.

"What about the post-office?" she said. She was rattled because I hadn't heard of some people by the name of Bubenchikov.

"And the orchard by the synagogue! Never heard of it? Tell me another!

You must have gone after those apples scores of times."

She heaved a sigh.

"It's a long time since we left Ensk. I didn't want to move, believe me! It was all Nikolai Antonich's doing. He came down. It's no use waiting any longer, he says. We'll leave our address, and if need be they'll find us. We sold all our things, this is all that's left, and came here, to Moscow."

"Grandma!" Katya said sternly.

"What d'you mean-Grandma?"

"At it again?"

"All right. I won't. We're all right here."

I understood nothing-whom they had been waiting for or why it was no use waiting any longer. I did not ask any questions, of course, all the more as Nina Kapitonovna changed the subject herself.

That was how I spent my time at our headmaster's flat in Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street.

When I was leaving Katya gave me the book Helen Robinson against my word of honour that I would not bend back the covers or dirty the pages.

The Tatarinovs had no domestic help, and Nina Kapitonovna had a pretty hard time of it considering her age. I helped her. Together we kindled the stove, chopped firewood, and even washed up. I found it interesting there.

The flat was a sort of Ali Baba's cave to me, what with its treasures, perils and riddles. The old lady was the treasure, and Maria Vasilievna the riddle, while Nikolai Antonich stood for things perilous and disagreeable.

Maria Vasilievna was a widow-or maybe she wasn't, because one day I heard Nina Kapitonovna say of her with a sigh: "Neither widowed nor married." The odd thing about it was that she grieved so much for her husband. She always went about in a black dress, like a nun. She was studying at a medical institute. I thought it rather strange at the time that a mother should be studying. All of a sudden she would stop talking and going anywhere, either to her institute or to work (she was also working), but would sit with her feet up on the couch and smoke. Katya would then say:

"Mummy's pining," and everybody would be short-tempered and gloomy.

Nikolai Antonich, as I soon learnt, was not her husband at all, and was unmarried for all that he was forty-five. "What is he to you?" I once asked Katya. "Nothing."

She was fibbing, of course, for she and her mother bore the same surname as Nikolai Antonich. He was Katya's uncle, or rather a cousin once removed. He was a relative, yet they weren't very nice to him. That, too, struck me as odd, especially since he, on the contrary, was very obliging to everybody, too much so in fact.

The old lady was fond of the movies and did not miss a single picture, and Nikolai Antonich used to go with her, even booking the tickets in advance. Over the supper she would start telling enthusiastically what the film was about (at such times, by the way, she strongly resembled Katya), while Nikolai Antonich patiently listened, though he had just returned from the cinema with her.

Yet she seemed to feel sorry for him. I saw him once playing patience, his head bent low, lingers drumming on the table, and caught her looking at him with compassion.

If anyone treated him cruelly, it was Maria Vasilievna. What he did not do for her! He brought her tickets for the theatre, staying at home himself.

He gave her flowers. I heard him begging her to take care of herself and give up her job. He was no less attentive to her visitors. The moment anyone came to see her, he would be there on the spot. Very genial, he would engage the guest in conversation, while Maria Vasilievna sat on the couch, smoking and brooding.

He was his most amiable when Korablev called. He obviously looked at Whiskers as his own guest, for he would drag him off at once to his own room or into the dining-room and not allow him to talk shop. Generally, everybody brightened up when Korablev came, especially Maria Vasilievna. Wearing a new dress with a white collar, she would lay the table herself and do the honours, looking more beautiful than ever. She would even laugh sometimes when Korablev, after combing his moustache before the mirror, began paying noisy court to the old lady. Nikolai Antonich laughed too .and paled. It was an odd trait of his-he always turned pale when he laughed.

He did not like me. For a long time I never suspected it. At first he merely showed surprise at seeing me, then he started to make a wry face and became sort of sniffy. Then he started lecturing:

"Is that the way to say 'thank you'?" He had heard me thank the old lady for something. "Do you know what 'thank you' means? Bear in mind that the course your whole life will take depends upon whether you know this or not, whether you understand it or not. We live in human society, and one of the motive forces of that society is the sense of gratitude. Perhaps you have heard that I once had a cousin. Repeatedly, throughout his life, I rendered him material as well as moral assistance. He turned out to be ungrateful. And the result? It disastrously affected his whole life."

Listening to him somehow made me aware of the patches on my trousers.

Yes, I wore broken-down boots, I was small, grubby and far too pale. I was one thing and they, the Tatarinovs, quite another. They were rich and I was poor. They were clever and learned people, and I was a fool. Here indeed was something to think about!

I was not the only one to whom Nikolai Antonich held forth about his cousin. It was his pet subject. He claimed that he had cared for him all his life, ever since he was a child at Genichesk, on the shores of the Sea of Azov. His cousin came from a poor fisherman's family, and but for Nikolai Antonich, would have remained a fisherman, like his father, his grandfather and seven generations of his forefathers. Nikolai Antonich, "having noticed in the boy remarkable talents and a penchant for reading", had taken him to Rostov-on-Don and pulled strings to get his cousin enrolled in a nautical school. During the winter he paid him a "monthly allowance", and in the summer he got him a job as seaman in vessels plying between Batum and Novo-rossiisk. He was instrumental in getting his brother a billet in the navy, where he passed his exam as naval ensign. With great difficulty, Nikolai Antonich got permission for him to take his exams for a course at Naval College and afterwards assisted him financially when, on graduation, he had to get himself a new uniform. In short, he had done a great deal for his cousin, which explained why he was so fond of talking about him. He spoke slowly, going into great detail, and the women listened to him with something akin to awed reverence.

I don't know why, but it seemed to me that at those moments they felt indebted to him, deeply indebted for all that he had done for his cousin. As a matter of fact they did owe him an unpayable debt, because that cousin, whom Nikolai Antonich alternately referred to as "my poor" or "missing"

cousin, was Maria Vasilievna's husband, consequently Katya's father.

Everything in the flat used to belong to him and now belonged to Maria Vasilievna and Katya. The pictures, too, for which, according to the old lady, "the Tretyakov Gallery was offering big money", and some "insurance policy" or other for which eight thousand rubles was payable at a Paris bank.

The one person least interested in all these intricate affairs and relationships among the grown-ups was Katya. She had more important things to attend to. She carried on a correspondence with two girl friends in Ensk, and had a habit of leaving these letters lying about everywhere, so that anyone who felt like it, even visitors, could read them. She wrote her friends exactly what they wrote her. One friend, say, would write that she had dreamt of having lost her handbag, when all of a sudden Misha Kuptsov-

"you remember me writing about him"-came towards her with the bag in his hand. And Katya would reply to her friend that she dreamt she had lost, not a handbag, but a penholder or a ribbon, and that Shura Golubentsev - "you remember me writing about him"-had found it and brought it to her. Her friend would write that she had been to the cinema, and Katya would reply that so had she, though in fact she had stayed indoors. Later it occurred to me that her friends were older than her and she was copying them.