Two Captains (21 page)

In less than half an hour I was in Gogolevsky Street at the Marcouse house. The lions' heads were eight years older, but as impressive and fearsome as ever. I stood irresolute at the wide covered entrance door.

Should I ring or not? Or should I ask a policeman where the Address Bureau was?

Muslin curtains in Aunt Dasha's taste hung in the windows and that decided me. I rang the bell.

The door was opened by a girl of about sixteen in a blue flannel dress, her smoothly brushed hair parted in the middle. She was of a dark complexion, and that puzzled me. "Do the Skovorodnikovs live here?" "Yes."

"And is ... er ... Darya Gavrilovna at home?" I said, giving Aunt Dasha her full title.

"She'll soon be in," the girl said, smiling and regarding me with curiosity. She smiled just like Sanya, but Sanya was fair and had curly hair and blue eyes. No, this wasn't Sanya. "May I wait?" "Certainly."

I took my coat off in the hall and she showed me into a large well-furnished room. The place of honour in it was occupied by a grand piano. This did not look much like Aunt Dasha.

I was gazing about me with what must have been a rather sheepish and happy expression, because the girl was staring at me with all her eyes. All of a sudden she tilted her head and cocked up an eyebrow exactly the way Mother used to do. I realised that it was Sanya after all. "Sanya?" I queried, somewhat uncertainly. She looked surprised. "Yes."

"But you were fair," I went on in a shaky voice. "How comes it? When we lived in the village you were quite fair. But now you're all on the darkish side."

She was dumbfounded, even her mouth fell open. "What village?"

"When Father died!" I said, and laughed. "Don't say you've forgotten !

Don't you remember me?"

I felt choky in the throat. After all I had loved her very much and hadn't seen her for eight years, and she looking so much like Mother.

"Sanya," she brought out at last. "My God! Why, we had given you up for dead long ago." She embraced me.

"Sanya, Sanya! Is it really you! But sit down, why are you standing?

Where have you come from? When did you arrive?"

We sat down side by side, but she jumped up the next moment and ran into the hall to get my box.

"Wait a minute! Don't go away. Tell me how you're getting on. How's Aunt Dasha?"

"How about yourself? Why didn't you write to us? We've been searching for you. We even put notices in the papers." "I didn't see them," I said remorsefully.

Only now did I fully realise how beastly I had behaved. Fancy forgetting that I had such a sister. And such a wonderful Aunt Dasha, who couldn't even be told that I had come back, because she was likely to die of joy, as Sanya explained to me.

"And Pyotr's been looking for you too," she went on. "He wrote to Tashkent not long ago. He thought maybe you were living in Tashkent."

"Pyotr?"

"Why, yes."

"Skovorodnikov?"

"Who else?"

"Where is he?"

"In Moscow," Sanya said.

I was amazed.

"Has he been there long?"

"Ever since you two ran away."

Pyotr in Moscow! I couldn't believe my ears.

"But, Sanya, I live in Moscow myself!"

^'No?"

"Yes, really. How is he, what's he doing?"

"He's all right. He's finishing school this year."

"The devil he is! I'm finishing too. Have you got any photos of him?"

I thought Sanya was somewhat embarrassed when I asked for a photo of him. She said: "In a minute" and went out, returning almost immediately, as if she had taken Pyotr's photo out of her pocket.

"My, isn't he handsome," I said and started laughing. "Ginger?"

"Yes."

"Gee, isn't it grand! And the old man? How's the old man? Is it true?"

"Is what true?"

"That he's a judge?"

"Why, he's been a judge these last five years."

We kept asking questions and interrupting each other and asking more questions. We started the samovar going and made up the stove, and then the bell tinkled in the hall.

"Aunt Dasha!"

"You stay here," Sanya whispered. "I'll break the news to her. She has a heart condition, you know."

She went out and I heard the following conversation in the next room.

"Now don't get excited, Aunt Dasha, please. I have very good news so there's no need to be upset."

"Well, out with it then!"

"You decided not to bake any pies today, Aunt Dasha, but you'll have to."

"Pyotr has arrived?"

"That would be nice too, but no, it's not Pyotr. You won't get excited, Aunt Dasha, will you?"

"I won't."

"Honestly?"

"Drat the girl! Honestly."

"That's who's come!" Sanya announced, throwing open the kitchen door.

The remarkable thing is that Aunt Dasha recognised me at first glance.

"Sanya," she said quietly.

She embraced me. Then she sat down and closed her eyes. I took her hand.

"My darling boy! Alive? Where have you been? We've been searching the world for you."

"I know, Aunt Dasha. It's all my fault."

"His fault! Good heavens! He comes back and talks about his fault!

Dear, dear boy. What a bonny lad you've grown! And so handsome!"

Aunt Dasha had always thought me a good looker.

Then the judge came in. The guard had been right-the old man had shaved off his moustache. He looked ten years younger and it was now hard to believe that he had once boiled skin-glue and built such hopes upon it.

He knew that I had come back, as Sanya had telephoned him.

"Well, prodigal son," he said, hugging me. "Aren't you afraid I'll have your head off, you rascal, you?"

What could I say for myself? I only grunted penitently.

Later that night he and I were left alone. The old man wanted to know what I had been doing and how I had been living since I had left the town.

Like the judge he was, he questioned me rigorously about all my affairs, school and private.

I told him I wanted to be an airman, and he gazed at me long and steadily from under his bushy eyebrows.

"The air force?"

"An Arctic pilot. In the air force, if necessary."

"A dangerous, but interesting job," he said after a pause.

One thing I didn't tell him, though that I had come to Ensk in the wake of Katya. I couldn't bring myself to tell him that if it hadn't been for Katya it would very likely be a long time before I came back to my home town, to my home.

I slept until eleven. Sanya had gone a long time ago, the old man was at work and Aunt Dasha had already put the dinner on, as she informed me.

While I drank my tea she kept making horrified comments on how little I was eating.

"So that's how they feed you!" she said tartly. "The gypsy fed his horse better, and that croaked."

"You know, Aunt Dasha, I was looking for you at the old place. The houses have been pulled down I see?"

"Yes," Aunt Dasha said with a sigh.

"Aunt Dasha, do you know the Bubenchikovs?"

The Bubenchikovs were relations of Nina Kapitonovna, and I had no doubt that Katya had gone to them.

"The people who were pronounced? Who doesn't know them?"

"Pronounced?"

"The priest pronounced the ban on them," said Aunt Dasha. "They sent him packing, so he pronounced 'em. That was a long time ago, before the Revolution. You were a little boy then. Why do you ask?"

"People in Moscow asked me to give them their regards," I lied.

Aunt Dasha shook her head doubtfully.

"Ah, I see..."

I asked Aunt Dasha for an envelope and some paper and sat down to write a letter. "I'll write to Katya and Sanya will deliver it."

"Katya," I wrote. "As you see, I am back in Ensk, and I'm dying to see you. Come down to Cathedral Gardens at four. This note will be delivered to you-guess by whom? By my sister. A. Grigoriev."

"Aunt Dasha, Pyotr used to have some interesting books. Where are they?

Where do you keep books, anyway?"

Pyotr's books were discovered in Sanya's room, on a bric-a-brac stand.

Evidently no great store was set by them, because they stood on the bottom shelf among all sorts of junk. I felt a bit sad when I picked up The Ghastly Night or the Most Marvellous Adventures of a Don Cossack in the Caucasus Mountains. Dammit, what a wretch of a little fellow I was then!

A package wrapped in a yellowed newspaper dropped on the floor during my energetic search for A Guide To Letter Writing. It was the batch of old letters. I recognised them immediately. They were letters which the river had one day washed up into our yard in a post bag. Those long winter evenings, when Aunt Dasha used to read them to us, came back to me. How wonderful, how delightful those readings had seemed to me!

Other people's letters! And who knows where these people now were? This letter, for instance, in its thick yellowed envelope. Maybe somebody had not slept nights, waiting for it?

Mechanically I opened the envelope and read several lines:

"Dear Maria Vasilievna,

"I hasten to inform you that Ivan Lvovich is alive and well. Four months ago, on his orders, I left the schooner along with thirteen of the crew..."

I read on and could not believe my eyes. It was the letter of the navigating officer, which I used to know by heart and which I had recited on the trains on my way to Moscow! But it was not this that struck me.

"The St. Maria," I read on, "became icebound in the Kara Sea and since October 1912 has been drifting steadily north with the Arctic icefields."

The St. Maria'. Why, that was the name of Captain Tatarinov's schooner!

I turned back the sheet and read the letter again.

"Dear Maria Vasilievna"-Maria Vasilievna! I hasten to inform you that Ivan Lvovich..." Ivan Lvovich! Katya was called Katerina Ivanovna-the patronimic was from the name Ivan!

Aunt Dasha decided that I had gone crazy, because I suddenly emitted a yell and started frantically to search among the old letters.

I knew what I was after, though. Aunt Dasha had once read to me another of those letters describing the life amid the icefloes and about the sailor who had fallen to his death and how they had to chop the ice away in the cabins.

"Aunt Dasha, are they all here?" "Goodness gracious, what's happened?"

"Nothing, Aunt Dasha. There should be one particular letter here." I didn't hear myself speak. Ah, here it was! "My darling, my own dear, sweet Maria,

"It's nearly now two years since I sent you a letter through the telegraph dispatch office on Yugorsky Shar. And what a lot of changes '

there have been since then, I can't tell you! To begin with, we were standing on a straight set course, but since October 1912 have been drifting slowly north with the Arctic ice. Willy-nilly, we had to abandon our original plan of making Vladivostok along the coast of Siberia. But this proved to be a blessing in disguise. It has given me quite a new idea. I hope it does not strike you, as it does some of my companions, as childish or foolhardy..."

The first sheet ended here. I turned it over, but could make out nothing except a few disconnected words which stood out amid the smudges and stains.

The second sheet started with a description of the schooner:

"...in some places reaching a considerable depth. Amid one such icefield stands our St. Maria snowed up to the gunwale. At times a garland of hoarfrost breaks off the rigging and comes down with a soft swishing sound. As you see, dear Maria, I've become a poet. We have a real poet on board, though-our cook Kolpakov. A cheerful soul! He goes about all day long singing his poem. Here are four lines from it for a keepsake:

Under the flag of Mother Russia, In the good ship Saint Maria, We shall sail the Siberian coast along With our Captain brave and strong.

"I read this endless letter of mine over and over again, and find that I am simply gossiping when I have so many important things to tell you. I am sending with Klimov a packet addressed to the head of the Hydrographical Board, containing my observations, official letters and a report giving the story of our drift. Just in case, I am writing you, too, about our discovery: north of the Taimyr Peninsula the map shows no land whatever. But situated in latitude 79°35', between meridians 86 and 87 east of Greenwich, we observed a sharply defined silvery strip, slightly convex, running out from the very horizon. On April 3rd this strip became an opaque patch of moonlight, and the next day we saw clouds of a very queer shape, resembling a mist enveloping distant mountains. I am convinced that this is land.

Unfortunately, I couldn't leave the ship in her present plight in order to explore it. But its turn will come. Meantime, I have named it after you, so now you will find on every map a heartfelt greeting from your..."

Here ended the reverse side of the second sheet. I laid it aside and started on the third. The first few lines were washed away. Then came:

"It's galling to think that everything could have turned out differently. I know he will try to put himself right with you, perhaps he will even persuade you that it is all my own/fault. One thing I beg of you: do not trust that man. It can positively be said that we owe all our misfortunes to him alone. Suffice it to say that most of the sixty dogs he sold to us at Archangel had to be shot while we were still at Novaya Zemlya.

That's the price we had to pay for that good office. Not I alone, but the whole expedition send him our curses. We were taking a chance, we knew that we were running a risk, but we did not expect such a blow. It remains for us to do all we can. What a lot I could tell you about our voyage! Stories enough to last Katya a whole winter. But what a price we are having to pay, good God! I don't want you to think that our plight is hopeless. Still, you shouldn't look forward too much..."