e, 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."
CHAPTER FOUR
RANGING WIDE
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.
Indeed, nothing in life is done in vain. Life turns this way and that,
plunges down, forcing its way like an underground river in the darkness and
silence of eternal night, and suddenly emerges into the open, into the
sunshine and light of day, just as my machine now has emerged from the
welter of clouds. Aye, nothing in life is done in vain.
Always uppermost in my mind was the thought of what my life would have
been in the North if I had found Katya and we had been living together at N.
She would wake up when, at three in the morning, I came home before
setting out on a flight. She would be rosy, warm and sleepy. Perhaps, on
coming in, I would kiss her in a way that would somehow be different, and
she would understand at once how important and interesting was the task
which the admiral had entrusted me with.
I had seen this a thousand times, but would it ever be like that again?
"Navigator, bearings!"
The pilot's course and the navigator's were three degrees out, but
coincided to a T when cigarette-cases, pocket torches and lighters were
turned out of pockets,
What had I been thinking about? About Katya. About the factthat I was
flying to places where we had once planned to go together and from which I
had been kept away for so long. Had I not known for certain, beyond doubt,
that the time would come when I should be flying in these parts? Had I not
charted to within half a degree the route which, as in a child's dazzling
dream, the men from the St. Maria had trudged, breathing heavily, with eyes
shut against the blinding glare? And in the lead, a big man, a giant in fur
boots.
But this was romancing. I drove the thought away. Novaya Zemlya was
close at hand.
You would be bored if I started telling in detail how we hunted that
surface raider. To detect a camouflaged warship, a barely visible streak
amid the boundless wastes of the Arctic seas, was no easy task. We flew from
base to base for over a fortnight. One of the flights lasted seven hours.
After scouring the Kara Sea in both directions we returned to Novaya Zemlya,
but could not find it. It was as though these great islands had up till now
been marked on the map by mistake. While the fuel lasted we flew around over
the place in the black fog, and if the wind had not, to our good fortune,
torn a small bright hole in the fog, I should probably not have been able to
finish this book.We made for this gap, and landed safely with the engine cut
off.
Altogether it was a hard fortnight we spent on Novaya Zemlya. Every
time we started out in the hope of finding the raider, though it had been
plain to me for some time that we ought to be seeking it much farther East.
We scoured the sea until fuel gave out and the navigator inquired
phlegmatically: "Home?"
And "home" would unfold to our gaze-rugged, tumbling mountains, blue
glaciers split lengthways, as it were, and ready to slide down into the
bottomless snowy gorges.
Then came the moment when our stay on Novaya Zemlya end-ed-a wonderful
moment, which is worth going into in somewhat greater detail.
I was standing outside a storehouse the roof of which was covered with
birds' carcasses and on its walls were stretched the skins of seals. Two
little Nentsi, looking like penguins in their fur garments with blind
sleeves, were playing on the beach and I was chatting with their parents-a
little girl of a mother and a father of similar stature with a brown head
sticking out of his anorak. We were discussing international affairs, I
remember, and although the analysis of Germany's hopeless position which I
was giving them had been taken from a very old backnumber of Pravda, the
Nenets was going to pass it on that same day to a friend of his who lived
quite near-a mere two hundred kilometres away. His little wife, who was
quite at sea in politics, nodded her shiny black head with its pudding-basin
haircut and kept saying: "Velly good, velly good."
"Would you like to go to the front?" I asked the man.
"I like, I like."
"Aren't you afraid?"
"Why afraid, why?"
That was the moment when I saw my navigator running towards me-not just
walking, but running along the shore from the point of land on which our
plane stood.
"We're being assigned to a new base."
"Where?"
"To Zapolarie."
He had said "to Zapolarie", and though there was nothing impossible
about our being reassigned to Zapolarie, that is, to the very area where I
thought the raider had to be sought, I was flabbergasted. Why, this was my
own Zapolarie.
"It can't be."
The navigator had reassumed his old imperturbable, unhurried manner.
"Shall I check it?"
"No need."
"When do we take off?"
"In twenty minutes."
CHAPTER FIVE
BACK AT ZAPOLARIE
It was some time before I found Doctor Pavlov's street, for the simple
reason that in my day this street had had only one house standing in it-the
doctor's, all the others existing only on the plan that hung in the office
of the District Executive Committee. Now the little house in which I had
once spent my evenings poring over the diaries of Navigating Officer Klimov
was lost amid its tall neighbours. What pleasant, youthful evenings those
had been! Those creaking floor-boards in the next room under the light tread
of Volodya. Mrs Pavlova coming in-large, determined, open-hearted-and
setting before me in silence a plate with a huge piece of pie.
Still unbent, unyielding to sorrow, she had only turned grey, and two
deep creases hung over her down-drooping mouth.
"What am I to call you now?" she said, when we met in the little front
garden. "You were a boy then. How many years is it? Fifteen[7
]Twenty?"
"Only nine, Anna Stepanovna. And call me Sanya. I'll always be Sanya to
you."
"A naval airman, with decorations," she said, as though she shared with
me the pride of my being a naval airman with decorations. "Where have you
come from now? From what front?"
"Just now from Novaya Zemlya, but before that from Polar-noye. And
straight from Ivan Ivanovich."
"No, really?"
"My word of honour."
After a pause she said: "So you have seen him?"
"Seen him? Why, we used to meet very often. Didn't he write you about
it?"
"He did," Anna Stepanovna admitted, and I realised that she knew about
Katya.
But I did not need to check her as she had checked me when I started to
speak about Volodya. She did not use any words of comfort, did not compare
her grief to mine. She merely embraced me and kissed me on the head, and I
kissed her hand.
"Well, and how's my old man? Is he well?"
"Quite well."
"D'you mind if I tell my friends that you've arrived. How much time
have you got?"
I said that I was free till night. She placed before me bread, fish and
a tankard of homebrewed wine, which they were very good at making in
Zapolarie, put on a shawl, excused herself and went out.
It was rather thoughtless of me, though, to let Mrs Pavlova tell her
friends that I had arrived. Within less than half an hour a car drew up
outside the house and I was surprised to see all my crew in it.
"Sanya," the navigator said, "Comrade Ledkov has sent for us. Jump in
and let's be off. We'll have breakfast at his place and then-"
"Ledkov? Just a minute... Ah, yes, of course! Ledkov!"
This was the District Executive Committee member for whom the doctor
and I had flown to Camp Vanokan, where Ledkov lay with a wounded leg. He was
as well known among the Nentsi in the North as the famous Dya Vilka was
among the inhabitants of Novaya Zemlya.
"Incidentally," the doctor had once told me, "he was interested to know
whether you had found Captain Tatarinov. Remember, when we were expecting
you with the expedition, well, he even rode out to some nomad camps to make
inquiries of the Nentsi. According to his information a legend about the St.
Maria should have been preserved in one of the clans."
It is not difficult to imagine how warmly we were welcomed to Zapolarie
by Ledkov. My memory of him was vague, and I was surprised to find that the
man who came out onto the porch to meet us was anything but old. After
dinner we drove down to the sawmill, then visited the new health-centre, and
so on. Everywhere we had something to eat and drink, and everywhere I spoke
about Ivan Ivanovich. In the end I began to believe myself that without Ivan
Ivanovich's contribution the defence of our northern sea routes might well
have met with disaster.
Before take-off there were some things I had to attend to. I sent the
navigator and gunners to the airfield, while I remained with Ledkov in his
office at the D.E.C.
"Now tell me frankly," Ledkov said, "how's our old friend getting on
out there? We need him here ever so badly. It could easily be arranged, you
know." "What could?"
"To have him recalled and demobbed. He's above age." "No, he wouldn't
stay," I said, remembering how sore Ivan Ivano-vich had been when the
flotilla commander had not allowed him to join a submarine crew on a
dangerous mission. "He might agree to come on leave. But not to stay.
Especially now."
The "now" was an intimation that the war would soon be over, but Ledkov
interpreted it to mean "now that Volodya has been killed".
We were sitting in armchairs by a wide window, which presented a
panorama of new streets running from the riverside to the taiga. Smoke rose
from the sawmill, electric trolleys ran in and out among the timber stacks
at the lumber yard, and a way out, untrodden, bluish-grey, stood forest upon
virgin forest.
I asked him about his visit to the Nentsi camps where they were said to
have preserved some legends about the men from the St. Maria. Was it true
that he had gone there and questioned the Nentsi? "Yes, I went there. It was
the camp of the Yaptungai clan." "Did you learn anything?" "I did."
I might have been seventeen again, the way my heart leapt. "What
exactly?" I asked coolly.
" "I got the legend and wrote it down. I don't remember now where I put
those notes," he said, running his eye over the revolving bookstand loaded
with folders and rolled-up papers. "It runs roughly like this: In the old
days, when 'father's father was alive', a man came to the Yaptungai family
who called himself a sailor off a schooner that was wrecked in the ice of
the Kara Sea. This sailor related that ten men were saved who wintered on an
island north of the Taimyr. Then they made for the mainland, but on the way
'many, many die'. But he 'at one place not want to die' and he pushed on.
And so he reached the Yaptungai camp." "Do they remember his name?"
"No. He died shortly. I took it down like this: 'He come, he say-I will
live. He finish speaking and die.' "
A map of the Nenets region and part of the Kara Sea hung in Led-kov's
office. I found the familiar route-to Russian Islands-Cape Sterlegov-the
mouth of the Pyasina.
"Where do the Yaptungai have their grazing grounds?" Ledkov pointed
them out. But even before he did so I had found the district's northern
boundary and measured the distance with my eye.
"It was a sailor from the St. Maria."
"You think so?"
"Just figure it out. He said that ten men were saved."
"Yes, ten."
"Thirteen went off with Navigator Klimov. That leaves twelve in the
schooner. Two of them-the engineer Tisse and the sailor Skach-kov-died in
the first year of drift. That leaves ten. But that's not the point. Even
before, I could have shown you the route they took to within half a degree.
The only thing I was not clear about was whether they had succeeded in
reaching the Pyasina."
"And now?"
"Now I'm sure."
And I pointed to the spot where the rest of Captain Tatarinov's
expedition would be found, if they were ever to be found anywhere on land.
"Anna Stepanovna, I'm so sorry, I shouldn't have stayed so long with
Ledkov," I said, calling at her house that night and finding her waiting for
me, the table laid. "But I must be going. I'll just give you a kiss and be
off."
We embraced.
"When will you be coming back?"
"Who knows? Maybe tomorrow. Maybe never."
" 'Never' is a dreadful word, I know it," she said with a sigh and made
the sign of the cross over me. "You should never say it. You'll come back
and you'll be happy, and we old people will warm ourselves again at your
happiness."
Late that night-that it was late night you could only discover by
consulting your watch-we started out from Zapolarie. A reddish sun stood
high in the sky. Fleecy clouds raced past, piling up, like steam from an
enormous locomotive.
Could I ever have imagined that the day I had been waiting for all my
life was now coming? I could not! The crew had checked the engines while I
was away, but I was worried whether the check had been thoroughly carried
out.
CHAPTER SIX VICTORY
We took off at two in the morning, and at half past four we sank the
raider. True, we did not see it sink. But after our torpedo hit it it lost
steerageway and was swallowed up in a cloud of steam.
Briefly, it happened something like this: the ship was cruising in such
a nonchalant manner that the navigator and I started an argument (which had
better not be quoted in this book) as to whether the ship did not belong to
our Northern Fleet. Having settled that it did not, we drew away from it-my
navigator's favourite way of doing the job-then banked steeply to port and
made straight for the target.
It's a pity I can't give a drawing of the rather intricate stunt I had
to perform in order to drop my torpedo as accurately as possible. I had to
make a second run-up, as my first sttack was unsuccessful. Then we started
to creep away. Creep is the word, because, as it soon became clear, the
Germans had not lost time either.
During my first target run the gunner had shouted: "Cabin full o'
smoke!"
We felt three jarring shocks during my second run, but there was no
time to think of that, as I was already on top of the raider, my teeth
clenched. Now, however, I had enough time to realise that our aircraft was
crippled. Petrol and oil were syphoning away through holes and but for the
navigator, who set going a new gadget in the nick of time, we would have
been in flames long ago. The starboard propeller had changed over, while we
were still on the target, from a little pitch to a big pitch, then to a very
big one-a gigantic one, you might say.
We had our emergency boats, of course, and I could have ordered the
crew to bale out. But we had tested these boats near Archangel on a quiet
little inland lake, and had had to clamber out of the water, shivering like
dogs. And here we had below us an inhospitable, cold sea covered with sludge
ice.
I shall not list the brief reports concerning the state of the machine
which my crew made to me. There were many of them, too many to my liking.
After one of them, a pretty gloomy one, the navigator asked: "Sticking it
out, Sanya?"
"You bet!"
We had entered a cloud, and in the double ring of a rainbow I saw below
the clear-etched shadow of our plane. Unfortunately it was losing height.
Without my having a hand in it, the plane suddenly turned sharply over on
its wing, and if it were possible to see Death, we should undoubtedly have
seen it on that wingtip pointed perpendicular to the sea.
I don't know how I did it, but I managed to right the machine. To
lighten it I ordered the gunner to jettison the machine-gun drums. Ten
minutes later the guns themselves followed them, toppling, into the sea.
"Sticking it out, Sanya?"
"Sure!"
I asked the navigator how far it was to the shore, and he answered that
it wasn't far, about twenty-six minutes. He lied, of course, to cheer me
up-it would take us all of thirty minutes to reach the shore.
This was not the first time in my life that I was called upon.to count
the minutes. There had been occasions when I had counted them with despair
and rage. There had been occasions when they had lain upon my heart like
round heavy stones, and I had waited in an agony of suspense for one more
crushing minute-stone to roll off and away into the past.
Now I was not waiting. With a furious abandon that sent an exultant
thrill through my heart I hurried and goaded them on.
"Will we make it, Sanya?"
"You bet we will!"
And we did. Some half a kilometre from the shore, which we did not even
have time to look at, we pancaked into the water, and, strange to say, we
did not go to the bottom. We had hit a sandbank. On top of all our troubles
we now had icy waves drenching us from head to foot. But what did these
waves matter or the fact that our aircraft had been staggering about in the
sky for over an hour till we reached the shore, or the thousand and one new
labours and troubles that awaited us, compared with that laconic phrase in
the current communique of Sovinformbureau: "One of our aircraft failed to
return."
What made me think that this was Middendorf Bay, and that consequently
we had landed far from any habitation? I don't know. The navigator had had
no time to work it out while we were passing over the sea-the only course
that interested him was the shoreward one. And now he was too busy, as I had
ordered the machine to be made secure, and we worked at this until we
dropped from sheer exhaustion on dry patches of the beach among the
sun-warmed rocks. We lay there quietly, gazing up at the sky-a clear, wide
sky without a cloudlet in it-each occupied with his own thoughts. But each
one's thoughts were tinctured by the same common feeling-victory.
We were so exhausted that we did not even have the strength to brush
the clinging sand from our faces, and it dried in the sun and fell away in
pieces. Victory. The navigator's dead pipe lay on his chest. He suddenly
gave a loud snore and it rolled off. Victory. We wanted nothing but to gaze
at the radiant blue majesty of the sky and feel the warm pebbles under our
hands. Victory.
Everything was victory, even the fact that we were ravenously hungry
and I couldn't force myself to get up and fetch the sandwiches from the
plane which Anna Stepanovna had given me for the journey.
There is no need to describe how carefully we looked over the plane.
Evidently the cause of the smoke which the gunner had reported was a shell,
which had exploded in the cabin. Apart from a couple of hundred shot holes,
the aircraft seemed in fairly decent shape, at least compared with the heaps
of scrap iron I had often had occasion to land. The only thing wrong with it
was that it could no longer be flown, and we did not have the means to put
the engine right.
Over our dinner-we had an excellent meal: the first course, a soup made
of dried milk, chocolate and butter, and second course, the same soup in dry
form-it was decided:
(a) that the aircraft be made fast where it lay, embedded deep in the
sand-in any case we could not raise it on to the shelving beach;
(b) that the gunner be left to guard the machine;
(c) that we go in search of people and assistance.
I forgot to mention that while we were limping across the sea one of
us-I believe it was the radioman-noticed on the shore what looked like a
house or a wooden towerlike structure. It disappeared round a bend when we
came inshore. It may have been a landmark, one of those structures raised on
a shore which is seldom visited by ships. If so, it could be of little use
to us. But if it was not?
On the other hand, we could stay where we were, and after our meal, lie
down again among the rocks, choosing a cozy, sheltered spot, relaxing and
gazing at the bluish ice-floes drifting past with the water running off
them, glistening and tinkling. But our radio, worse luck, was smashed, and
no matter what the dogged radioman did to it, it stayed mute as a stone.
In short, there was nothing for it but to push on. Where to? Obviously,
towards the landmark, which might prove to be an electric lighthouse or a
fog-warning station or something else of that kind.
"But first of all," I said to the navigator, "where are we?"
It took him no less than a quarter of an hour to answer that question;
he gave coordinates which though differing from those I had named when
Ledkov had asked me where I thought the remains of Captain Tatarinov's
expedition could be found, were so close to that point-the point on which I
had put my finger on Ledkov's map- that I couldn't help looking round me, as
if expecting to see the Captain himself standing within two paces of me,
behind that rock there...
PART TEN
THE LAST PAGE
CHAPTER ONE
THE RIDDLE IS SOLVED
Another book would have to be written to fully describe how Captain
Tatarinov's expedition was found. Strictly speaking I had very many clues,
much more than, for instance, the famous Dumont d'Urville had, when, as a
boy, he showed with amazing accuracy where he would find La Perouse's
expedition. I had it easier than he, because the life of Captain Tatarinov
was closely interwoven with my own, and the conclusions which these clues
led to concerned me as well as him.
This is the route he must have taken if it be accepted that he returned
to Severnaya Zemlya, which he had named Maria Land: from 79°35' latitude,
between meridians 86 and 87, to Russian Islands and the Nordenskjold
Archipelago. And then, probably after wandering around a good deal, from
Cape Sterlegov to the mouth of the Pyasina, where the old Nenets had come
across the boat on the dog-sledge. Then to the Yenisei, because the Yenisei
was his only hope of finding people and assistance. He had kept to the
seaward of the offshore islands, going in as straight a line as possible.
We found the expedition, or rather what remained of it, in an area over
which our planes had flown dozens of times, carrying mail and passengers to
Dickson, and machinery and merchandise to Nord-vik, and conveying parties of
geologists prospecting for coal, oil and ores. If Captain Tatarinov were to
come to the mouth of the Yenisei today he would meet dozens of great
seagoing ships. On the islands which he passed he would have seen today
electric lighthouses and radar installations, he would have heard
nautophones guiding ships during a fog. Some three or four hundred
kilometres farther upstream he would have come on the Arctic Circle Railway
linking Dudinka with Norilsk. He would have seen new towns which had sprung
up around oil fields, mines and sawmills.
I mentioned earlier that I had been writing to Katya from the moment I
arrived in the North. A heap of unposted letters were left at N. Base which
I had been hoping we would read together after the war. These letters were
like a diary kept, not for myself, but for Katya. I will quote from them
only those passages which describe how we found the camping site.
"1. I was astonished to learn how close life had come up to this place,
which had always seemed to me so infinitely far away. It lies within a
stone's throw of the Great Sea Route and you were quite right when you said
that they had not found your father because they had never looked for him.
Between the lighthouse and the radio station there is a telephone line, a
permanent one on poles. Mines are being worked ten kilometres to the south,
and if we hadn't discovered the camp site the miners would have stumbled
upon it sooner or later.
"It was our navigator who first picked up the piece of canvas from the
ground. Nothing surprising about it! You can pick up all kinds of stuff on a
seashore. But this was a canvas strap you harnessed yourself in to haul a
sledge. But when the gunner found the aluminium lid of a saucepan, and a
dented tin containing balls of string, we divided the hollow between the
hills and the ridge into a number of squares and started going over
them-each man his own square.
"I remember reading somewhere that a single inscription carved on a
stone had helped scholars to reveal the life of a whole country which had
perished long before our own era. Now this place, too, gradually came to
life before our eyes. I was the first to spot the canvas boat, or rather to
guess that this flattened pancake thicking out of the eroded earth was a
boat; moreover, a boat resting on a sledge. In it lay two guns, a skin of
some kind, a sextant and a pair of field-glasses, all rusty, covered with
mould and moss. By the ridge which protected the camp from the sea, we found
various articles of clothing, among them a mouldering sleeping-bag made of
reindeer-skin. Evidently a tent had been pitched there, because the drift
logs lay at an angle forming a square enclosure with the rocks. In this
"tent" we found a food basket fastened with a strip of sailcloth and
containing several woollen stockings and shreds of a blue and white blanket.
We also found an axe and a "fishing-rod", that is, a length of twine with a
hook at the end made from a bent pin. Some of the articles lay scattered
round the "tent"-a spirit lamp, a spoon, a small wooden box containing
various odds and ends, including several thick sail-needles, also home-made.
On some of these objects the rubber stamp "Trapping Schooner St. Maria" or
the inscription "St. Maria" could still be made out. But this camp site was
completely deserted-there was not a soul there, living or dead.
"2. It was a home-made cookstove-a tin casing enclosing a bucket with a
lid. Usually an iron tray was placed underneath for burning bear or seal
fat. But there stood an ordinary primus heater. I shook it and found that it
still contained some paraffin oil. I tried to pump it up, and the oil
squirted up in a thin stream. Next to it we found a tin marked "Borsch.
Vikhorev Cannery. St. Petersburg, 1912". Had we wished to, we could have
opened that tin of borsch and heated it up on the primus-stove, which had
been lying in the earth for nearly thirty years.
"3. We returned to the camp after a fruitless search in the direction
of Galchikha. This time we approached it from the southeast, and the hills,
which we had previously seen as an unrelieved undulating line, now presented
quite an unexpected appearance. It was a single large scrap running into
stony tundra intersected by deep notches, as though excavated' by human
hands. We walked along one of these hollows, and none of us at first paid
any attention to the caved-in stack of driftwood between two huge boulders.
There were only a few logs, not more than half a dozen, but one of them had
a sawn end. It was this sawn log that struck us. Up till now we had believed
that the camp had been situated between the rocky ridge and the hills. It
could have been shifted, however, and before long we found that this was so.
"It would be difficult to enumerate half the things we found in this
hollow. We found a watch, a hunting knife, several ski-sticks, two
single-barrelled Remingtons, a leather vest and a tube containing some kind
of ointment. We found the rotted remains of a bag containing photographic
film. And finally, in the lowest part of the hollow, we found a tent, and
under that tent, its edges still held down by drift logs and whalebone to
prevent it being blown away in a gale-under this tent, which we had to hack
out of the ice with axes, we found him whom we were looking for...
It was still possible to guess in what attitude he had died-his right
arm flung out, body stretched out as if listening to something. He lay on
his face, and the satchel in which we found his farewell letters was under
his chest. Obviously, he had hoped that the letters would be better
preserved under cover of his body.
"4. There could have been no hope for our ever seeing him alive. But
until the word Death had been pronounced, until I had seen it with my own
eyes, this childish thought had still lingered in my heart. Now it was gone,
but in its stead another light burned up brightly-the thought that it was
not for nothing, not in vain, that I had been seeking him, that for him
there would be no death. An hour ago the steamer came alongside the electric
lighthouse and the sailors, with heads bared, carried the coffin aboard
covered with the tattered remains of the tent. A salute was fired and the
ship flew its flag at half-mast. Alone, I wandered around the deserted camp
of the St. Maria and here I am, writing to you, my own, dear Katya. How I
wish I were with you at this moment! It will soon be thirty years since that
brave struggle for life ended, but I know that for you he died only today. I
am writing to you from the front, as it were, telling you about your father
and friend, who had fallen in battle. Sorrow and pride for him fill my soul,
which is stirred to its depths by this spectacle of immortality..."
CHAPTER TWO
THE UNBELIEVABLE
"How I wish I were with you at this moment"-I read and reread these
words, and they seemed to me so cold and empty, as if I were in a cold,
empty room, addressing my own reflection. It was Katya I needed, and not
this diary-the living, bright, sweet Katya, who believed in me and loved me.
Once, shaken by the fact that she had turned her back on me at her mother's
funeral, I had dreamt of coming to her, like the Gadfly, throwing at her
feet the evidence that proved me to have been right. Afterwards the whole
world had learnt of her father through me and he had become a national hero.
But for Katya he remained her father-who, if not she, was to be the first to
learn that I had found him? Who, if not she, had told me how wonderful
everything would be if the fairy-tales we believed in still came true on
earth? Amid the cares, labours and perturbations of the war I had found him.
Not a boy, fascinated by a dim, glamorous vision of the Arctic which
illumined his mute, half-conscious world, not a youth striving with youth's
stubbornness to have his own way-no, it was as a mature man, who had
experienced everything, that I stood confronting a discovery destined to
become part of the history of Russian science. I was proud and happy. But a
surge of bitterness rose up inside me at the thought that it could all have
been different.
I did not get back to my regiment until the end of January, and the
very next day I was summoned to Polarnoye to report to the commander of the
Northern Fleet.
Our launch entered the bay, and the town unfolded to my gaze, all
white, pink and snowy. It stood on the steep, grey hillside as if on a
pedestal of beautiful granite rocks. White little houses with porch steps
running out in different directions were arranged in terraces, while along
the bay front, forming a semi-circle, stood big stone houses. In fact, as I
found out afterwards, they were called "compass houses", as though a
gigantic compass had described this semi-circle over Catherine's Bay.
I climbed the flight of steps which passed under an arch thrown between
these houses and saw the whole bay from shore to shore. The inexplicable
agitation under which I had been labouring all that morning gripped me anew
with extraordinary farce. The bay was dark green and impenetrable, with only
a faint glimmer shed by the sky. There was something very remote, southern,
reminiscent of a highland lake in the Caucasus, about this land-locked
bay-except that on the far side a line of low hills, covered with snow, ran
out into the distance with low trees making here and there a delicate black
tracery against their dazzling background.
I do not believe in intuition, but that was the word that sprung to my
mind as, stirred by the beauty of Polarnoye and Catherine's Bay, I stood by
the compass houses. It was as if the town that appeared before me were my
home, which until then I had only seen in dreams and sought in vain for so
many long years. I found myself thinking with a thrill of excitement that
something was bound to happen here, something good for me, perhaps the best
thing to happen to me in all my life.
There was nobody at HQ yet. I had come before office hours. The
night-duty officer said that, as far as he knew, I had been ordered to
report at 10 p.m., whereas it was now only seven-thirty.
I went to look up the doctor-not at the hospital, but in his rooms.
Of course, he lived in one of those white little houses arranged in
terraces on the hillside. They had looked much prettier from the sea. Here
was Row One, but I needed Row Five, House No. 7.
Like the Nentsi, I walked along thinking all but aloud of what I was
seeing. A group of Englishmen overtook me. They wore funny winter caps
resembling those our old Russian coachmen used to wear and long, khaki
robe-like affairs and it set me thinking how little they knew our Russian
winters. A boy in a white fluffy fur coat walked along, grave and chubby,
with a toy spade over his shoulder. A be-whiskered sailor caught him up and
carried him on a few steps, and it set me thinking that there were probably
very few children in Polarnoye.
House No. 7, Row 5, differed in no way from any of its neighbours on
the right or left, except perhaps that its front steps were barely visible
under a coating of slippery ice. I took them at a run and collided with some
naval men, who came out onto the porch at that moment. One of them slid
carefully down the steps, remarking that "inability to take one's bearings
in a Polar-night situation points to a deficiency of vitamins in the body".
They were doctors. This was Ivan Ivanovich's home all right.
I went into the hall, pushed one door, then another. Both rooms were
empty, smelt of tobacco, had unmade beds in them and things lay scattered
about, masculine-like. There was something hospitable about those rooms, as
if their occupants have purposely left the doors open.
"Anybody here?"
There was no need to ask. I went out into the street again.
A woman with her skirt hitched up was rubbing her bare feet with snow.
I asked her whether this was house No 7.
"Who may you be wanting?"
"Doctor Pavlov."
"I daresay he's still asleep," the woman said. "You go round the house,
that's his window over there. Knock hard!"
It would have been simpler to knock at the doctor's door, but I
complied nevertheless and walked round to the window. The house stood on a
slope and the window at the back stood rather low over the ground. It was
covered with hoarfrost, but when I knocked and peered in, shading my eyes
with my hand, I thought I saw a shape like a woman's figure. Like a woman
bending over a basket or a suitcase. She straightened up when I knocked and
came over to the window. She, too, shaded her eyes with her hand, and
through the blurred frostwork of the window I saw a blurred face.
The woman's lips stirred. She did nothing, just moved her lips. She was
barely visible behind that snowy, misted, murky glass. But I recognised her.
It was Katya.
CHAPTER THREE
IT WAS KATYA
How can I describe those first minutes, the speechless rapture with
which I gazed into her face, kissed it and gazed again, asked questions only
to interrupt myself, because everything I asked about had happened ages ago,
and terrible though it was to know how she had suffered and starved, almost
to death, in Leningrad, and had given up hope of ever seeing me again, all
this was over and done with, and now there she stood before me and I could
take her in my arms-God, I could hardly believe it!
She was pale and very thin, and something new had come into her face,
which had lost its former severity.
"You've had your hair cut, I see?"
"Yes, a long time ago," she said. "Back in Yaroslavl, when I was ill."
She had not only had her hair cut, she was a different woman. But just
now I did not want to think about that-everything was whirling around, the
whole world, we, this room, w