Two Captains (64 page)

"Ah well, I suppose you'd better be put to use rather than hang about doing nothing at such a time," the Personnel Chief said reasonably if rather vaguely.

He had in mind, of course, my being used on the ground. "Catch me doing ground work. I'm going to fly," I said to myself as I watched his old but strong hand writing down and underlining my name on his desk diary.

I was appointed to an Arctic base within several kilometres of Polarnoye.

I am not going to say much about the air war in the North, though it was very interesting, since nowhere else were the qualities of the Russian airman displayed with such brilliance as here in the North, where, to all the difficulties and hazards of flying and fighting were added those of bad weather and six months of Arctic night. I heard one British officer say:

"Only Russians can fly here." This was a flattering exaggeration, of course, but we had earned the compliment.

Combat conditions in the North were much more difficult than in the other theatres of air warfare. The German transports usually hugged the coastline, keeping as close to the cliffs as their draught would permit. It was hard to sink them, not only because transports, generally speaking, are hard to sink, but because it is impossible or well-nigh impossible to get a clear run-in at a transport which is under a cliff.

In July I went to Kirkenes with a load of bombs-with fair success, as the photographs showed. At the beginning of August I persuaded my regimental commander to let me go out "hunting" in search of German convoys. Paired with some lieutenant we sank a transport of four thousand tons. Strictly speaking, it was the lieutenant who did the sinking, as my torpedo, launched at too close range, slipped under the keel and went wide. But in that fight everything was put to the test, including my wounded leg, which behaved splendidly. I was pleased, although during the debriefing the squadron commander proved incontestably that this was just the way transports "ought not to be sunk". Two or three days later he had occasion to repeat his arguments, as I flew still lower over a transport, so low that I came home with a piece of the ship's aerial embedded in my wing. The transport-my first-was sunk, so that his arguments, while losing none of their cogency, acquired merely a theoretical interest.

To be brief, I sunk a second transport in the middle of August, one of six thousand tons, escorted by a patrol vessel and a torpedo boat. This time I was accompanied by the squadron leader himself and I noticed with amusement that he attacked from still lower than I did. Needless to say, he did not give himself a reprimand.

And so life went on-on the whole, not at all badly. At the end of October the Air Force Commander congratulated me on the award of the Order of Alexander Nevsky.

I already had friends at the base-the placid, taciturn, pipe-smoking navigator in the wide trousers turned out to be an intelligent, well-read man. True, he had little to say for himself, and that little was reduced to nil when we were in the air, but when asked, "Where are we?" he always answered with astonishing accuracy. I liked his way of getting onto the target. We were unlike each other, but you cannot help getting to like a man who shares with you every day the hard and hazardous work of flying and making torpedo attacks. If we were to meet death, it would be together, the same day and hour. And those who face death together, face life together.

I had other friends at the base besides my navigator, but this was not the friendship my heart was yearning for. No wonder such a heap of unmailed letters had accumulated in those days-I was hoping that Katya and I would read them together after the war.

I dreamt all night that I had been wounded again, that Doctor Ivan Ivanovich was bending over me and I was trying to say to him:

"Abraham, saddle, drink", but I couldn't, I was struck dumb. This was a recurrent dream, but the first one in which this long-forgotten sensation of dumbness was so vividly real.

And so, waking up before reveille, I found myself thinking of the doctor and recollected Romashov telling me that the doctor had come to visit his son at the front. I don't quite know how to explain it, but I felt vaguely disturbed by this memory, which had been on my mind for a long time.

I went over it word for word and realised what it meant: Romashov had been telling me that the doctor was serving at Polarnoye.

The amazing thing is that the doctor, too, had been thinking about me on that very day and at that very hour. He assured me of it quite seriously.

He had read the order concerning my decoration the day before and at first had not thought it was me. "There are plenty of Grigorievs in the world," he had said to himself. But the next morning, while still in bed, he decided that it must be me, like me, he made for the telephone immediately.

"Ivan Ivanovich!" I cried, when a hoarse voice, which it was hard to associate with the doctor, reached me as though fighting its way through the howling autumn wind which raged that morning over Kola Bay. "This is Sanya Grigoriev speaking. Do you recognise me? Sanya!"

I remained in ignorance as to whether the doctor had recognised me or not, because the hoarse voice changed to a rather melodious whistling. I roared myself red in the face, and telephone operator, appreciative of my efforts, informed me that "Medical officer, Second Class, Pavlov was reporting".

"What's he reporting? Tell him this is Sanya speaking!"

"Very good," said the telephone girl. "He asks whether you'll be at N.

Base this evening and where can he find you?"

"I'll be here!" I yelled. "Let him come to the Officers' Club. Is that clear?"

The operator did not say anything, then something clicked in the earpiece and a voice, which did not sound like hers, growled:

"He'll come."

I was overjoyed, of course, to hear that the doctor was at Polarnoye and that I would be seeing him that night. Nevertheless, it remained a puzzle to me, why, on arriving at the club, I drank first a glass of white wine, then red wine, then white again, and so on. I kept within bounds, though, all the more so as the Air Arm Commander was dining in the next room with some war correspondent. But the girls of my acquaintance, who sat down at my table from time to time between foxtrots, laughed heartily when I tried to explain to them that if I had leamt to dance my life would have shaped quite differently. As it was, my life was a flop because I had never learnt to dance.

It was in this excellent, though slightly wistful mood that I sat in the Officers' Club, when a tall, elderly naval man with silver stripes appeared in the doorway and started to pick his way between the tables.

Doctor Ivan Ivanovich, I took it.

I may have been thinking how bent and old he looked and how grey his beard had grown, but that was only a mirage, of course. Actually, this was the mysterious old doctor of my childhood coming towards me with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, for all the world as though he were about to examine my tongue or peek into my ear.

"Sanya!"

We embraced, looked at each other, then embraced again.

"Have you been here long, Sanya?" the doctor was saying. "How is it we have not met all this time?"

"Three months. It's my fault, of course. May I pour you out a drink?" I reached for the bottle without waiting for his reply.

"You've had enough, Sanya," the doctor said gently, setting aside first his glass, then mine. "Tell me all about yourself. D'you remember Volodya?

He's been killed," he added quickly, as though to show me that I could now tell him everything. His eyes glistened with tears behind his glasses.

We sat with downcast heads in the brightly lit, noisy Officers' Club.

The band was playing foxtrots and waltzes, and the brass rang out too loudly in the small wooden rooms.

"Where's Katya, what's happened to her?"

I told him how we had lost track of each other.

"I'm sure she's alive and well," the doctor said. "And searching for you day and night. She'll find you all right-if I know anything about a woman in love. Now you can pour me a drink. Let's toast her health."

It was time to go. We were the only people left in the restaurant. The evening was over-that was a fact. But, God, how reluctant I was to admit it, when there was still so much left unsaid between us. But what could you do!

We went downstairs and got our overcoats. The warm, bright, slightly tipsy world was left behind us, and before us, pitch-black, lay N., over which a rude, bleak north wind ran riot.

Submariners were the big boys in those parts, not only because they had done so much at the beginning of the war, more perhaps than anyone else in the Northern Fleet, but because the peculiar routine of their lives, their attitudes, and the stresses of their combat activities placed an imprint upon the life of the whole township. Nowhere are men so equal in the face of death as among the crew of a submarine, where all either perish or vanquish.

All combat work is hard, but the work of submarine crews, especially in midgets, is such that I wouldn't care to barter a dozen of the most hazardous air missions for a single cruise in a midget submarine. Even as a boy I used to think that among men who went down so deep in the water there was sure to be some sort of secret compact, like the oath which Pyotr and I had once sworn to each other.

Flying in company with another captain I succeeded in sinking a third transport at the end of August 1942. A midget commanded by the famous F.

sank a fourth with my assistance. This would not be worth mentioning-I had no bomb-load at the time and merely reported to HQ the coordinates of a German vessel I had sighted-had not F. invited me to the "roast-pig party", which started off a train of events worth relating.

Who does not know the famous naval tradition of celebrating each sinking of an enemy ship with a gala dinner at which the commanding officer treats the victors to roast sucking-pig? The previous day a transport, patrol-vessel and a torpedo boat had been sent to the bottom, and the white-capped cooks, all hot and bothered, carried, not one, but three whole sucking-pigs into the spacious officers' mess where a "U" table was set out at the head of which sat the admiral commanding the Northern Fleet.

The pigs, appetising, delicately pink, with pale, sorrowful-looking snouts, lay on dishes and the three commanders stood over them with big knives in their hands. That, too, was a tradition-the victors had to do the carving with their own hands. And the portions they carved! A huge chunk, stuffed with buckwheat and trimmed with fanciful shavings of horse-radish sailed down the table towards me. And I had to put it away, on pain of offending my hosts.

The admiral rose, glass in hand. The first toast was to the victors-the commanders and their crews. I looked at him-he had visited my regiment and I remembered the quick, youthful gesture with which he had thrown Ms head back as he received the report of the regimental commander. He was a young man, only four years my senior. I had also known him from my Spanish days.

"To those at sea!" was the second toast. Glasses clinked. The sailors drank, standing, to their comrades who were braving the perils of the Arctic night in the watery wastes. To good luck in battle and a steady heart in the hour of danger and decision.

Now the admiral was looking at me across the table-1 was sitting on his right, among the journalist guests, to whom F. was demonstrating with the aid of knife and fork how the torpedo boat was sunk. His eyes on me all the time, the admiral said something to his neighbour, and the latter, the flotilla commander, got up to propose a third toast. "Here's to Captain Grigoriev, who skilfully vectored the submarine onto the German convoy." And the admiral made a gesture to show that he was drinking to me.

I shall not list all the toasts that were proposed, especially as the journalists I have mentioned told the story of the "three roast-pigs" in the press. I shall merely mention that the admiral disappeared quite unexpectedly-he suddenly got up and went out. In passing my chair he leaned over, and without letting me get up, said quietly: "Please come and see me today, Captain."

The machine took off, and within a few minutes that hash of rain and mist, which we thought nothing of on the ground, became an important part of the flight, which, like all flights, consisted of (a) the mission, and (b) everything that hindered the execution of the mission.

We made a flat turn, banking slightly, and swung round onto our course.

Our mission, then, or, as the admiral called it, "special assignment"

was this: A German raider (evidently an auxiliary cruiser) had passed into the Kara Sea and shelled the port of T. and was now lurking somewhere far in the East. I was to hunt her down and sink her, the sooner the better, as a convoy of ours with a cargo of war materials was on its way through the Northern Sea Route and was now fairly close to this port. It was not difficult to imagine what havoc a big warship could cause in these peaceful waters.

I pulled up to five and a half thousand metres. But here, too, there was nothing but the same dreary cloud hash, which the Almighty himself seemed to be stirring up thick with a gigantic spoon.

So I had to find her and sink her. Doing the first was far and away the more difficult of the two. How astonished the admiral had been when I corrected almost all the islands of the eastern part of the Nordenskjold Archipelago on his chart. "Have you been there?" "No."

He did not know that I had been there yet not been there. The map of the Nordenskjold Archipelago had been corrected shortly before the war by the Nord expedition. I had not been there. But Captain Tatarinov had, and mentally I had followed in his wake a thousand times.