Two Captains (54 page)

I went out onto the landing, where there was more light, and began to spell out the writing. "If it's worth..." I read. A white sharp light flashed before my eyes and stabbed my very heart. The writing on the photograph read: "If it's worth doing at all, do it well."

I don't know what happened to me. I screamed, then found myself sitting on the landing, groping about for that photograph. Through a darkness that clouded my eyes I read the inscription and recognised C. in a flying helmet, which made him look like a woman. C. with his large eagle-like face and kind sombre eyes looking out from under his heavy eyebrows. It was the photograph of C., which Sanya had always carried about with him. He kept it in his pocket-book together with other documents, though I had told him a thousand times that the photograph would be worn away in his pocket and that it should be framed and placed on his desk.

In a fury, I rushed back into the hall, tore the coat off the hanger and flinging it out on to the landing, turned the pockets out. Sanya was dead, killed. I don't know what I was looking for. Romashov had killed him.

The other pocket contained some money. I crushed the notes and threw them down the stair-well. Killed him and taken the photograph. I did not cry.

Stole the documents, all the papers, maybe the disk as well, so that nobody should know that this dead man in the wood, this corpse in the wood, was Sanya. "Other papers, very important ones, in the dispatch-case"-the words rang in my ears and it seemed as if someone had lighted a lantern in front of every word of Romashov's.

This photograph had been in the dispatch-case. Other papers and the newspaper Red Falcons had been there, too, but they had got soaked and were ruined-hadn't Romashov said, "The newspaper had become wet pulp"? But the photograph was intact, maybe because Sanya had always carried it wrapped in tracing-paper.

Voices could be heard below. Rosalia was calling me. I slipped the photograph in my bosom and put the tobacco-pouch back into the pocket. I hung the coat up again, went downstairs and gave the bread to Romashov.

"What's the matter?" he said. "Aren't you well?"

"No, I'm all right."

There was nothing. No empty, soundless streets through which people walked in silence, slowly dragging their feet as in a frightful slow dream.

No ice-encrusted tramcars stranded in the middle of the streets with thick ledges of snow hanging from them like from the eaves of country cottages. No narrow tracks running away behind us as we dragged the hand sled on which, swaddled like a child, lay a small body. I recollected then that Romashov had had the coffin left behind because there was no room for it on the sled.

"That's all right, we'll sell it," he had said.

As for Rosalia, she must have gone mad, because she said it was the proper rite to have no coffin. I remembered this, then immediately forgot it. A little girl with a tiny old woman's face stepped into the snow to let us pass-there was no room for two on the narrow path trodden down Pushkarskaya Street. Someone passed us in an oddly loose dangling overcoat-a man with a briefcase slung across his shoulder on a string. This, too, I saw and immediately forgot it. I saw everything-the snowed-up streets, the swaddled body on the little sled, and another body some woman was towing on the other side of the road, and who kept stopping and finally dropped behind. Like traceless shadows that glide noiselessly across glass, the freezing city passed before me all white, buried in snow.

I was seeing another scene, one that smote my heart cruelly. Legs stretched out in dirty bandages yellow with blood, lay Sanya with his cheek to the ground and his murderer standing over him-alone, all alone in a wet little aspen wood. Shoulders hunched, blue with cold, my arm in that of Rosalia's, who could barely move-she had so many clothes on-I trudged along behind the sled which moved far ahead, then, drew near when the boys stopped to have a smoke. Two lonely pathetic old women-we looked much the same, she and I. The similarity must have struck Romashov, too, for he caught up with us and said irritably: "Why did you have to go? You'll catch your death of cold. Go back, Katya, go home!"

I looked at him-alive and hale. In his white new sheepskin coat, shoulder harness and holster at his belt. Alive! I caught the air with open mouth. And hale! I bent down and put some snow in my mouth. The spade tied to the body glinted, and I stared and stared at its hypnotic glitter.

The cemetery. We waited for a long time in a small, dirty office with white strips of hoarfrosted tow running between the logs of the timbered walls. The clerk, a woman with a bloated face, sat by an iron little stove, her feet, wrapped in rags, thrust out close to the fire. Romashov for some reason was shouting at her. Then they called us- the grave was ready. The boys, leaning on their spades, stood on a mound of earth and snow. What a shallow resting-place they had made for poor Bertha! Romashov sent them for the body. Soon they came back with her. The long mournful Jew walked behind the sled and from time to time commanded a halt to read a short prayer.

Romashov laid ropes out on the snow, deftly lifted the body and kicked the sled away. Now she was lying on the ropes. Rosalia gave her sister a last kiss. The Jew sang, now raising his voice with surprising stresses, now dropping to a low tone, like a mournful old bird.

We went back to the office to warm up-1 and Romashov. He made mysterious signs to me and slapped his pocket as we approached the door.

Inside he drew out a bottle.

"Have some?" he said.

Oh, how my heart began to burn and swell, what hot waves surged through my arms and legs! I felt hot. I undid my coat, threw off my warm shawl. I walked, walked about the office, on light, springy feet.

"Some more?"

The woman with the bloated face looked at us hungrily, and I told Romashov to pour some out for her. He did so-"Ah well, in for a penny!"-gay, pale, with red ears, fur cap tilted back at a rakish angle. I, too, felt gay, in jocular mood. I picked up from the desk one of the black painted grave plates and held it out to Romashov.

"This is for you."

He laughed.

"Now that's more like my old Katya!"

"Not yours!"

He came over and took hold of my hands. His mouth began to quiver, a small, childlike mouth that revealed his teeth-strange that I never noticed before what sharp small teeth he had.

"Yes, mine," he said huskily.

I drew my right hand away. There was a hammer on the window' sill-I suppose it was used for nailing the plates to the crosses. Very slowly I picked up the hammer. It was a small but heavy one, with an iron handle.

Had the blow struck his temple, I daresay I would have killed him. But he recoiled and the hammer slid down and cut open his cheek-bone. The woman sprang to her feet, screaming, and made a dash for the door. Romashov leapt after her and hustled her back into the room, slamming the door. Then he went up to me.

"Leave me alone!" I said with despair and loathing. "You're a murderer!

You killed Sanya."

He was silent. The blood was gushing from his gashed cheek. He rubbed it with his hand, but it kept dripping down onto his shoulder and chest, and his sheepskin coat was covered with wet pink stains.

"I must stanch it," he muttered without looking at me. "Have you a clean handkerchief, Katya?"

"All right, let's say I killed him! In that case why should I have saved that photograph of his? We wanted to bury the documents. Sanya was holding them in his hands and the photo must have dropped out. I didn't tell you I had found it-1 was afraid you wouldn't believe me. My God, you can't imagine what war is like! What a crazy idea- to think that I could have killed one of our own men! No matter who it was, how I felt about him! To kill a wounded man-Katya! Why, it's crazy, nobody would believe it!"

This was not the first time Romashov had repeated those words:

"Nobody would believe it." He was afraid that I would write of my suspicions to the Military Tribunal or the Procurator. He gave all his money and bread to the woman in the cemetery office, and I heard him say to her:

"Not a word to anybody." He did not go to the hospital. Rosalia stopped the blood and put a plaster on the big gash in his cheek.

"I had no love for him, it's true, and I don't intend to conceal the fact," Romashov went on. "But when I found him with those crippled legs, with the pistol at his head, lying in that filthy truck, it wasn't him I was thinking of, it was you. No wonder he was glad to see me-he realised that I was his salvation. And it wasn't my fault that he strayed away when I went to fetch someone to help with a stretcher."

He paced the little kitchen, talking and talking without a stop. He clutched his head and when he did that two funny big-nosed faces grew out of the shadows which flitted across the wall. A forgotten memory of childhood touched me like a muted string. "And here's a cow with horns"-that was Mother speaking. I was lying in my cot, and Mother was sitting beside me, holding her hands up to the wall and laughing because I was looking at her hands instead of at the wall. "And here's bearded Billy Goat..." My eyes were wet, but I did not wipe the tears away-it was too cold to take your hands out of all those blankets, overcoats and the old fox fur.

"Just my rotten luck-I had to meet him on that train! I could have killed him easily. Several corpses were carried out of the trucks every day and no one would have been surprised if that airman, who was so miserable that he wanted to shoot himself, had been found one morning with a bullet through his head. But I couldn't kill him," Romashov shouted, "I couldn't because it would have been you, and not him, who would have been found in the morning with a bullet in your head! I realised this when he asked one of the girls what her name was and she answered 'Katya'. His face lighted up. I realised what a paltry, petty figure I was in contrast to him, with my thoughts about the happiness I was to win through his death. And I decided to do everything I could to save him for you. And now you dare to accuse me of having killed him! No." Romashov said solemnly, "I swear by the mother that bore me for this life of pain and misery! I swear by what I hold most sacred-my love for you. If he has died, I am not guilty of his death either in word or deed."

He started to do up his sheepskin coat but couldn't get the hooks into the eyes, his hands were trembling so.

If only I could have believed him, if only I could have dared believe him again! I gazed dispassionately at that gaunt face with the sunken eyes, at the yellow matted hair falling over his forehead, and the ugly patch of plaster which disfigured and tightened his cheek.

"Go away!"

"You're not feeling well, let me stay."

"Go away."

I don't know whether he had ever cried before, but his face now was wet with tears as, sinking on his knees, he buried it in the bedclothes, his body shaken with smothered sobs. "Sanya is alive," came the sudden thought, and my heart leapt with joy. "Unless this man standing on his knees before me is not human, but a fiend? No, no. It's impossible, unthinkable, that anyone can dissemble like that."

"Go away."

I don't know where I expected him to go. He had been living with us for nearly a month now-Rosalia having registered him for some reason as a resident. It was night time, too, and an alert was on. But he went out, and I was left alone.

"Tick-tock" went the metronome. I remember someone telling me that it was only in Leningrad that they broadcast the sound of a metronome during an alert. The window-panes shook together with the yellow tongue of the

"blinker" standing on the table. What had really happened out there, in the wet little aspen wood?

Lying under the heap of sheepskins and blankets, I did not hear the all-clear. Almost immediately, it was followed by another alert. "Tick-tock"

the metronome started again. "Believe-not believe".

It was my heart beating and praying on a wintry night, in the starving city, in the tiny kitchen of a freezing house barely lit up by the yellow flame of an oil "blinker", which flickered feebly, battling with the shadows that crept out of the comers. May my love keep you alive! May my hope be yours. May it stand beside you,

look into your eyes, breathe life into your blanched lips! Press its face to the blood-stained bandages on your legs. Say: It is I, your Katya! I have come to you, whereveryou may be. I am with you, whatever happens to you. That somebody else who tends you, supports you, gives you food and drink-is me, your own Katya. And should Death bend over your couch and should you have no strength left to fight him, only a tiny flicker of strength remaining in your heart-that, too, will be me, and I will save you.

TO STRIVE. TO SEEK

With an odd sense of poweriessness to convey the things I see, my mind drifts back to fragmentary scenes from the early days and weeks of the war.

The old life had gone for good and its place was instantly taken by a quite different life, which took command of everything, of me and Katya, of all our thoughts, feelings and impressions. This different life was the war, and I would probably not have written about it merely because it was different, had it not been for the fact that what happened to me in the war was interwoven in such a surprising way with the affair of Captain Tatarinov and the St. Maria.

I see a large, dark room in a peasant cottage, a table dimly lit by a candle-end, and windows curtained off with ground-sheets. The door opens, and a man comes in, his tunic undone. He rummages about in the stove and eats hungrily. He is Grisha Trofimov. Another man gets up from the bunk and joins him at the table. He is Luri. I hear their quiet talk, which makes my heart beat slow and strong.