Two Captains (55 page)

"Been over to Ladoga?"

Grisha nods and goes on eating.

"Well?"

"Nothing new."

"Been at Zvanka?"

He goes on eating. Says nothing. He's been over to Zvanka too.

The two Leningraders look into each other's faces. It is the first night of the Leningrad blockade.

I see the message-bag dropping over the side of my plane-that's the way we saved men who mistakenly believed that they were surrounded.

I see the first grave, which we decorated with dud shells laid out to look like iron flowers. We flew over them as low as we could when returning from missions.

The lake, too, appears before me-that same lake, in whose sleepy morning frame I had seen the last vision of the old life. Now it is sombre and sullen. The water, filled to the brim of its shores, glints dully, and grey-blue smoke creeps across the misted mirror of its surface. The forest is burning, set alight by the Germans.

In the evenings we come out of the dugout built into the hillside.

Patrol boats lay hidden among the bushes. We race across the dark water amid spray and foam. Planes come out of the forest like huge sea birds. This is Lake L., our third and fourth base.

I see lots of things. But everything I see passes before me, as it were, against the backcloth of the map which unfolds every day beneath the wings of my plane-a map with the breaking lines in the front and the widening black wave of the German offensive.

Every day new pilots arrived, most of them from the Civil Air Fleet.

With some of them I had worked together in the North, with others in the Far East. They were experienced. First and Second Class pilots, and three of them even "millionaires", that is, men who had notched up over a million kilometres, and it was amusing to watch the comical blunders these civilians made in the process of becoming fighting flyers. We talked about this very often, both in the canteen and at home, in the dugout, where the three of us lived together -I, Luri and mechanic. Perhaps the reason we talked about it so often was because we had tacitly agreed not to talk about "other things".

The newspapers did that for us.

In September my crew and I were ordered to report for duty to the Air Force Command of the Southern Front.

It was just an ordinary fight as air fights go, and I do not intend to describe it, the more so as it was very soon over. We succeeded right away in bringing down one of the Messers-he crashed in the very act of making a stall-turn. The two others hoicked and got in each other's way as they tried to settle on our tail. It was smart of them but not smart enough; we were not the kind to let someone get in behind us. They tried it once, but it didn't work. Then they came in again and very nearly got caught in our gun sights. To cut a long story short, we kept them at bay until they gave up and I headed straight for the front-line, which was not far off.

This was easier said than done, what with a quarter of my port wing shot away and the tanks being holed. I was wounded in the leg and in the face, and the blood was running into my eyes.

I suddenly felt strangely weak. It was at that moment, I believe, that I recalled the fearful dreams of childhood in which I was being killed or drowned-and the joyous sense of relief when you wake up to find yourself alive.

"But now"-the thought was a very calm one-"now I won't wake up."

I must have lost consciousness, but not for long, because I came to at the sound of my own voice. It was as though I had started to speak before I had regained consciousness. I ordered the crew to bale out. The radio operator-gunner complied immediately, but Luri grumbled:

"Oh, all right!", as though I were suggesting some tiresome jaunt to which he reluctantly agreed in deference to me.

The hardest thing was to fight this mist which made my eyes close and my arms go limp and helpless. Only once in a thousand years, it seemed, did I manage to fight it off and become aware that something, something most important, had to be put right immediately. A thousand years-and only a moment in which to regain control of my machine, struggling only with my left hand. Another thousand-and far below me I saw the Junkers, two Junkers, lumbering towards me like large, heavy bulls. This was the end, of course.

And they took their time about it-1 saw that at a glance.

Luri baled out, and they started shooting at him. Killed, I suppose.

Then they came back and drew alongside me.

What did that German look like? Was he handsome or ugly, old or young?

Who cares. This was no soldier flying alongside me, but a murderer.

I don't know how to explain it, but it seemed to me that I saw both him and myself as from a distance. Myself, clutching at the controls with feeble hands, the blood streaming down my face, in a plane that was falling to pieces. And he, goggles raised, studying me with cold curiosity and a sense of his complete power over me. I may have said something to Luri, forgetting that he had baled out and they had probably killed him. The German passed under me, and the wing with the yellow cross on it appeared on my left. I pulled the stick over, trod on the pedal and hurled myself at that wing.

I don't know where the blow struck-probably on the cockpit, because the German didn't even open his parachute. I had killed him outright. Was I happy!

I found myself in the grip of an overwhelming, glorious feeling. To live! To live! I was wounded, I knew that they had got me, but no, my one thought was-to live! I saw the earth-it was quite close now- the ploughfield and the white dusty road.

Some part of me was burning-my jacket and my boots, but I felt no heat.

Incredibly, I somehow managed to flatten out just above ground-level. I undid the straps-it was the last thing I managed to do that day, that week, that month, those four months... But let us not forestall events.

I was very thirsty, and all the way to the village I kept asking for a drink and about Luri. When we got to the village I was given a bucket of water, and I couldn't understand what made the women cry when I put my head into the bucket and began to drink, seeing -^ and hearing nothing around me.

My face was singed, my hair matted, my leg crippled and I had two gaping wounds in my back. I must have been a sight. A blissful feeling stole through my body, waxing bigger and stronger. I was lying on some hay in a farmyard, by the wall of a barn, and it seemed to me that this feeling came from the prickly touch of the grass, from the scent of the hay, from the earth, where no one could kill me. I had been carted down, and the old white horse was now tied to a paling a little way off, and the tears gathered in my eyes at this sense of bliss, at the happiness I felt looking at that horse. We had done all we could, I thought. I wasn't worried about the radio operator-gunner and the aerial gunner. I only asked them not to move me from here until they had all turned up-Luri was alive, too, I thought happily, he must be, seeing how lucky we had been in beating them off. He was alive and I would soon see him.

I did. The horse snorted and shied when they brought him in, and an austere old woman-the only person whom I remember-went up to it and punched it on the nose.

His face was serene and quite untouched, but for a scratched cheek, caused, no doubt, by the parachute dragging him along when he landed. His eyes were open. At first I couldn't understand why all the men took their hats off when he was laid on the ground. The old woman knelt beside him and began to arrange his arms...

Afterwards I was jolting along in a cart on my way to the casualty clearing station. Some other woman now, not a countrywoman, was holding my hand, feeling my pulse and repeating: "Careful, careful."

I was wondering, "Why careful? Am I dying then?" I must have said it aloud, for the woman smiled and answered: "You'll live."

And again the cart jolted along, bumping. My head was lying in somebody's lap, I saw Luri lying near the doorstep with dead, folded arms, and I tried to go to him, but they held me back.

We travelled in railway trucks, and there were only two passenger coaches in front. I must have been in a bad way if that little doctor with the intelligent harassed face ordered me after Ms first round to be transferred to one of those coaches. I was swathed in bandages-my head, chest and leg-and lay motionless like a fat white doll. Orderlies were talking outside our window on the station platform: "Get some of it from the dangerous car." I was a dangerous case. Something was beating inside me, I couldn't make out whether it was in my head or heart. It seemed to me that this was life beating and stirring in me, busy building something with hands which were tenacious, though still weak.

Only a few days had passed since I had looked out from my plane on what no other combatant in this war, I thought, had ever seen. Our retreat had appeared to me in terms of algebraic formulas as it were, but now these formulas had been translated into real living facts.

I was no longer viewing our retreat from a height of eighteen thousand feet. I was retreating myself now, tormented by my wounds, my thirst, the heat, and not least by the dismal thoughts, which were as persistent as those blue, hard flies which settled on my bandages with revoltingly loud buzzings.

Evening was drawing in, and evidently we were no longer standing still, because my "cradle" was swinging rhythmically in time with the carriage's movement. The setting sun glanced through the window and the dusty, heavy air laden with the smell of iodine could clearly be seen in its slanting rays. Somebody was moaning in a low but harrowing manner, or rather droning monotonously through clenched teeth like a buzzer. Where had I heard that dreary voice before? And why was I trying so hard to remember where I had heard it?

Then suddenly school desks ranged themselves in rows before me and, as in a waking dream, I saw a lot of lively laughing children's faces. The lesson was an interesting one-about the manners and customs of the Chukchi people. But who cared about the lesson when a bet had been made and a ginger boy with wide-set eyes was holding my finger and coolly sawing it with a penknife?

"Romashka!" I said aloud.

The droning stopped.

"Is that you, Owl?"

He took a long time threading his way under the suspended cots and between the wounded lying on the floor until he emerged at last amidst protruding bandaged legs.

"What is it?" he said guardedly, looking straight at me without recognising me.

I thought he looked a little more human, though he was still "no oil painting", as Aunt Dasha would have said. At any rate, the lordly manner he had lately assumed was now gone. He was scrawny and pale, his ears stuck out like Petrushka's and his left eye squinted warily.

"Don't you recognise me?"

"No."

"Try again."

He had never been able really to conceal his feelings, and I could now read them in the order, or rather disorder, in which they appeared.

Bewilderment. Dismay. Horror, which made Ms lips quiver. Then again bewilderment. Disappointment.

"But you were killed, weren't you?" he mumbled.

The Destiny theme figures largely in old Russian songs, and though I am no fatalist, the word came to my mind despite myself when I read a report of my own death in the newspaper Red Falcons. I remember it word for word:

"While returning from a mission the aircraft piloted by Captain Grigoriev was overtaken by four enemy fighter planes. In the unequal combat Grigoriev shot down one lighter and put the other to flight. Though his machine was damaged, Grigoriev flew on. Not far from the front-line he was attacked again, this time by two Junkers. Grigoriev, his machine in flames, rammed one of the Junkers. The men of the X air unit will forever cherish the memory of their brave comrades, Captain Grigoriev, Navigator Luri, Radio Operator-Gunner Karpenko and Aerial Gunner Yershov, who fought for the country to their last breath."

What happened was this: A war correspondent came to the village -1

learned of this only in the summer of 1943-soon after I had been removed from there. The farmers had witnessed the air fight and he questioned them about it. He photographed the wreckage of the burnt-out aircraft. He was told that I was in a hopeless condition.

Whether it was because I had escaped death by nothing short of a miracle, or because it was the first time in my life that I had occasion to read my own obituary, but this report had the effect of an insult on me. My thoughts ran off at a tangent. I pictured Katya-not the Katya, who, as I knew, would suddenly wake up and wander about the room, thinking of me, but a different Katya, a sad and aged one, who, upon reading this report, would put the newspaper down on the table, and go on doing things for a while as though nothing had happened, perhaps plaiting or letting down her hair with a stony face, and then suddenly topple over like a doll.

"Ah, well," I said. "These things happen."

And I crushed the newspaper and flung it out of the window. Romashov gasped. While we were talking the train had been standing. Afterwards he picked up the paper-apparently it gave him pleasure at least to read that I was dead, now that he had seen evidence to the contrary.

"So you're alive! I can't believe it! My dear chap!"

That was what he said-"dear chap".

"Christ, am I glad! Is it just a coincidence? Somebody with the same name? But what does it matter! The thing is you're alive."

He began to ask me where I had been hit, whether badly, whether any bones were broken, and so on. I disappointed him again, saying that I was wounded lightly and a doctor of my acquaintance had fixed me up in this passenger coach.