Two Captains (68 page)

"D'you know what I've been thinking most of the time? That I didn't love you enough and kept forgetting how hard you had it with me."

"And I was thinking how hard you had it with me," Katya said. "When you used to go away and I worried about you I was still happy, despite all those anxieties, cares and fears."

While we were talking she went on arranging things, as she always did in hotels, even in trains, wherever we went together. It was the habit of a woman accustomed to moving with her husband from place to place-and what a pity, tenderness and remorse I felt towards her for that pathetic habit.

God, how I had missed her! I had forgotten everything! Forgotten, for instance, how she did her hair for the night, plaiting it into pigtails. Her hair was still short, and the pigtails were comical little things. Yet she plaited them, uncovering her beautiful little ears-even these I had forgotten.

We talked on after a long silence, now in whispers and about quite another matter. This other matter was Romashov.

I remember having read somewhere about palimpsests, that is, ancient parchments from which later scribes erased the text to write bills and receipts on them, and years later scholars discovered the original writings, which sometimes belonged to the pen of poets of genius.

It was like a palimpsest, when Katya gave me Romashov's version of what had happened in the aspen wood, and I erased this lie as if with a rubber and beneath it the truth came through. I saw and explained to her this dirty trick of his, which he had used twice-first to prove to Katya that he had saved my life, then to show me that he had saved hers.

I related to her word for word our last conversation at his flat, and Katya was astonished at Romashov's confession, which explained the cause of all my failures and resolved the riddles which had always weighed upon her heart.

"Did you put it all down in writing?"

"Yes. I set it out like an examination record and made him sign it."

I repeated his account of how he had been watching my every step in life, tormented by envy, which has racked his mean, restless soul ever since his schooldays. I said nothing, however, about the magnificent portrait of Katya hanging over his desk. I said nothing because this love of his was an insult to her.

She listened to me with a sombre face, her eyes burning. She took my hand and pressed it hard to her bosom. She was pale with emotion. She hated Romashov twice or thrice as much perhaps for the very thing I did not want to talk about. As for me, he was remote and insig-. nificant, and it was cheering to think that I had got the better of him.

My wife was asleep, her cheek pillowed on her hand. My clever, lovely wife, who, heavens knows why, had always loved me with this undying love.

She was sleeping, and I could gaze my till at her, thinking that we were alone now and though this short, happy night would end all too soon, we had wrested it from the raging blizzard that was sweeping through the world.

I had to be up at six and had prevailed upon Katya not to have me waken her. We had even kissed goodbye to each other the night before. But when I opened my eyes I found her already washing up, clad in her dressing gown and propping the wet plates against the electric fire. She knew what military service I was doing, but we never talked about it. Only when I bestirred myself, leaving my glass of tea unfinished, did she ask, as she used to do, whether I was taking my parachute. I said I was.

On leaving the house I gave Katya the Captain's letters. Once before, at Ensk, in Cathedral Gardens, I had left her alone to read one of the letters which Aunt Dasha and I had found in the bag of the drowned postman.

I had stood beneath St. Martin's tower and turned cold as I mentally went through that letter with her line by line.

Now I would not be seeing her for several days. Even so, we would be reading together again, and I knew that Katya would feel me breathing at her shoulder.

Here are the letters.

Captain 1st Class P.S. Sokolov, Hydrographical Board, St. Petersburg

My dear Pyotr Sergeyevich,

I hope this letter reaches ycm. I am writing it at the moment when our voyage is nearing its end, and, I regret to say, I am finishing it in solitude. I do not think anybody in the world could have coped with what we have had to endure. All my companions have died one after the other, and the reconnaissance party which I sent to Gal-chikha did not return.

I am leaving Maria and your god-daughter in difficult straits. If I knew that they were provided for I would not be greatly distressed at leaving this world, because I feel that our country has no reason to be ashamed of us. We were very unlucky, but we made up for it by returning to the land we had discovered and studying it to the best of our ability.

My last thoughts are of my wife and child. I dearly hope that my daughter makes a success of her life. Help them, as you helped me. Dying, I think with deep gratitude of you and of the best years of my youth when I worked under your guidance.

I embrace you. Ivan Tatarinov.

To: His Excellency, the Head of the Hydrographical Board, From: I. L.

Tatarinov, Chief of the St. Maria Expedition

Report

I herewith beg to bring to the notice of the Hydrographical Board the following:

On March 16th, 1915, in observed latitude 79°08' 30" and longitude 89°55' 00" East of Greenwich, from the drifting ship St. Maria, in good visibility and a clear sky, there was sighted east of the ship an unknown large stretch of land with high mountains and glaciers. Signs indicating the presence of land in this area had been observed prior to this: as early as August, 1912, we had seen large flocks of geese flying from the North in a N.N.-E-S.S.-E direction. At the beginning of April 1913 we had seen a sharp-cut silvery strip of the N.E. horizon, and above it clouds of a very queer shape, resembling distant mountains shrouded in mist.

The discovery of land stretching in a meridional direction gave us the hope of abandoning ship at the first favourable opportunity in

order, on coming ashore, to follow the coastline in the direction of the Taimyr Peninsula and beyond, as far as the first Siberian settlements at the mouths of the rivers Khatanga and Yenisei as the case may be. By now the direction of our drift was clear beyond doubt. Our ship was drifting together with the ice on a general course North 7° by West. Even in the event of this course changing to a more westerly one, that is, parallel to the drift of Nansen's Fram, we should not get free of the ice before the autumn of 1916, and our provisions would last only until the summer of 1915.

After numerous difficulties irrelevant to this report we succeeded on May 23, 1915, in stepping ashore on the newly discovered land in latitude 81°09' and longitude 58°36'. This was an ice-covered island, indicated by the letter A on the attached chart. It was not until five days later that we succeeded in reaching the second, very large, island, one of three or four comprising the newly discovered land. The astronomical position finding made on a jutting cape of this island and marked by the letter G, gave the co-ordinates 80°26' 30" and92°08'00".

Moving southward along the shores of this unknown land I explored the coast between parallels 81 and 79. In its northern part the coast is a low-lying stretch under an extensive icecap. Farther south it rises and becomes free of ice. Here we found driftwood. At latitude 80° we found a broad strait or bay extending from the point indicated by the letter S in an E.S.-E. direction.

From the point marked by the letter F. the coastline turns sharply S.S.-W. I intended to explore the southern shore of the newly discovered land, but by that time it was decided that we proceed along the coast of Khariton Laptev in the direction of the Yenisei.

In informing the Board of my discoveries I consider it necessary to point out that the observation for longitude may not be quite reliable, as the ship's chronometers, though carefully looked after, have not been corrected for more than two years.

Ivan Tatarinov

Enclosed: 1. A certified copy of the St. Maria's log.

2. Copy of chronometric record.

3. Canvas-bound notebook with calculations and survey data.

4. Map of the surveyed land. June 18th, 1915, Camp on Island 4 in Russian Archipelago.

Dear Maria,

I'm afraid it's all up with us. I am not even sure that you will ever read these lines. We cannot go any further, we freeze as we move or halt, and cannot get warm even when we eat. My feet are very bad, especially the right one, and I don't even know how and when it got frost-bitten. By force of habit I write "we", though it is three days now since poor Kolpakov died.

I can't even bury him because of the blizzard. Four days of blizzard has proved too much for us.

It will soon be my turn, but I am not the least afraid of death, evidently because I have done all I could and more to stay alive.

I feel very guilty about you, and this thought is the most painful, though there are others not much easier.

How much anxiety and sorrow you have suffered these years- and now this, the greatest blow of all, on top of them. I don't want you to consider yourself tied down for life. If you meet a man with whom you feel you will be happy, remember that this is my wish. Tell Nina Kapitonovna this. I embrace her and ask her to help you as much as she can, especially with Katya.

We had a very hard voyage, but we stood up to it well and would probably have coped with our task had we not been delayed by supply problems and had not these supplies been so bad.

My darling Maria, how will you get along without me! And Katya, Katya!

I know who could help you, but in these last hours of my life I do not want to name him. I didn't have a chance to tell him to his face everything that had been rankling in my breast all these years. He personified for me that force that kept me bound hand and foot, and it makes me feel bitter to think of all I could have accomplished if I had been-I would not say helped-but at least not hindered. What's done cannot be undone. My one consolation is that through my labours Russia has discovered and acquired large new territories.

I cannot tear myself away from this letter, from my last conversation with you, dear Maria. Look after our daughter, don't let her grow up lazy. That is a trait of mine. I was always lazy and too trustful.

Katya, my little daughter! Will you ever learn how much I thought about you and how I wanted to have at least one more look at you before I died?

But enough. My hands are cold, otherwise I would go on writing and writing. I embrace you both.

Yours forever.

Looking back on the winter of 1943-1944 at Polarnoye I see that it was the happiest winter we had ever had together. This may seem strange considering that nearly every other day I flew out to bomb German ships. But it was one thing to fly on missions without knowing what had become of Katya, and quite another, to know that she was at Polarnoye, alive and well and that in a day or two I would see her pouring out tea at table. A green silk lampshade to which Ivan Ivanovich had pinned the little paper devils cut out of thick paper hung over his table, and everything that Katya and I took delight in that memorable winter is floodlit by that bright circle cast by the green shade, leaving all the fret and worry hidden away outside in the dark corners.

I remember our evenings, when, after long, vain attempts to get in touch with the doctor, I caught the first launch that came along and went to Polarnoye, where friends gathered within that circle of light, no matter how late the hour. Who thought of night when the day was night too!

Never before had I talked, drunk and laughed so much. The feeling that had come over me when I first saw Katya here seemed lodged in my heart now for all time-and the whole world went hurtling along. Whither? Who knows! I believed that it was towards happiness.

The three of us-the doctor, Katya and I-spent all our free time studying and sorting the records of the St. Maria expedition.

I don't know which was the more difficult-developing the films or reading the documents of the expedition. A film, as we know, is liable to fade with the years, and that is why the makers usually indicate the date limit after which they cannot guarantee full quality. For the St. Maria films this date was February 1914. Moreover, the metal containers were full of water and the films were soaked through and had evidently been in that condition for years. The Navy's best photographers declared it to be a hopeless case, and even if they (the photographers) were wizards they would never be able to develop the film. I persuaded them to try. As a result, out of hundred and twelve photographs, dried with infinite precautions, about fifty were adjudged "worth further handling". After repeated printings we succeeded in obtaining twenty-two clear pictures.

I had once succeeded in deciphering Navigator Klimov's diary, written in a crabbed, illegible, sprawling hand and smeared with seal-oil. Still they had been separate pages in two bound notebooks. Not so Tatarinov's papers. Apart from his farewell letters, which were better preserved, his papers were found in the form of a compact pulpy mass, and transforming this into a chronometric record, a logbook, maps, charts and survey data, was, of course, beyond my powers. This was done in a special laboratory under expert supervision. No room will be found in this book for a detailed account of what was found in the canvas-bound notebook which Captain Tatarinov had listed among his enclosures. I will only say that he managed to draw deductions from his observations and that the formulas which he put forward enabled us to calculate the speed and direction of the ice drift in any part of the Arctic Ocean. This seems