Two Captains (13 page)

Her classmates, however, she treated rather high-handedly. There was one little girl by the name of Kiren-at least that was what the Tatarinovs called her-whom she ordered about more than anybody else. Katya got cross because Kiren was not fond of reading. "Have you read Dubrovsky, Kiren?"

"Yes." "Don't tell lies." "Spit in my eye."

"Then why didn't Masha marry Dubrovsky - tell me that." "She did."

"Fiddlesticks!" "But I read that she did marry him."

Katya tried the same thing on me when I returned Helen Robinson, but there was nothing doing. I could go on reciting word for word from any point. She did not like to show surprise and merely said:

"Learned it off by heart, like a parrot."

I daresay she considered herself as good as Helen Robinson and was sure that in a similar desperate plight she would have been just as brave. If you ask me, though, a person who was preparing herself for such an extraordinary destiny ought not to have spent so much time in front of the mirror, especially considering that no mirrors are to be found on desert islands.

And Katya did stand a lot in front of mirrors.

The winter I started visiting the Tatarinovs Katya's latest fad was explosions. Her fingers were always burnt black and she had a smell of percussion cap and gunpowder about her, like Pyotr once had. Potassium chlorate lay in the folds of the books she gave me. Then the explosions stopped abruptly. Katya had settled down to read The Century of Discovery.

This was an excellent book which gave the life-stories of Christopher Columbus, Hernan Cortes and other famous seafarers and conquerors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Amerigo Vespucci, after whom America is named, was pictured in front of a globe, with a pair of compasses, which he held over an open book-a bearded, jolly-looking man. Vasco Nunez de Balboa, armour-clad, with plumed helmet, was knee-deep in the water. He looked to me like some Russian Vaska who had turned up in the Pacific. I was keen on the book too. But Katya! She was simply mad on it. She mooned about like one in a dream, only awakening to impart the information that "Cortes, accompanied by the good wishes of the Tiascalans, set out on his expedition and within a few days reached the populous capital city of the Incas."

The cat, who before The Century of Discovery was called simply Vasena, she renamed Ixtacihuatl - it appears that there is a mountain by the name in Mexico. She tried Popocatepetl - the name of another mountain-on Nina Kapitonovna, but it wouldn't work. The old lady refused to answer to any name but "Grandma".

In short, if there was anything that Katya regretted at all seriously, it was that she had not conquered Mexico and discovered Peru.

But there was more to this, as the future showed. I knew what she was dreaming about. She wanted to become a ship's captain.

CHAPTER EIGHT KORABLEV PROPOSES

Now what but good, one would think, could I expect from this acquaintance? Yet in a little less than six months I was kicked out.

It was a Sunday and the Tatarinovs were expecting visitors. Katya was drawing a picture of "the Spaniards' first encounter with the Indians" from The Century of Discovery, and Nina Kapitonovna drafted me into the kitchen.

She was rather excited and kept listening and saying to me: "Sh-sh, there goes the bell."

"It's out in the street, Nina Kapitonovna."

But she kept listening.

In the end, she went out into the dining-room and missed the bell when it did ring. I opened the door. Korablev came in wearing a light overcoat and a light-coloured hat. I had never seen him looking so smart.

His voice shook slightly as he inquired whether Maria Vasilievna was at home. I said she was. But he stood there for several more seconds without taking his things off. Then he went in to Maria Vasilievna and I saw Nina Kapitonovna tiptoeing back from the dining-room. Why the tiptoes and that excited mysterious air?

From that moment on everything started to go wrong with us. Nina Kapitonovna, who was peeling potatoes, found the knife slipping from her fingers. She kept running out into the dining-room, as though to fetch something, but returned empty-handed. At first she returned in silence, making sundry mysterious signs with her hands, which could be interpreted roughly as: "Goodness gracious, what's going to happen?"

Then she started muttering. After that she sighed and broke the news.

And amazing news it was! Korablev had come to propose to Maria Vasilievna. I knew, of course, what "propose" meant. He wanted to marry her and had come to ask whether or not she would have him.

Would she accept or would she not? If I had not been in the kitchen Nina Kapitonovna would have debated this point with her pots and pans. She could not keep silent.

"He says, I'll give my all, my whole life," she reported on her third or fourth trip to the dining-room. "I'll live for you."

"Is that so?" I threw in.

"I'll live for you," Nina Kapitonovna solemnly repeated. "I see the life you lead. It's unenviable, I can't bear to see it."

She started on the potatoes, but soon went out again and returned with moist eyes.

"He's always yearned for a family, he says. I was a lonely man, and I need nobody but you, he says. I've been sharing your grief for a long time.

Something like that."

The "something like that" was Nina Kapitonovna's own contribution. Ten minutes later she went out again and came back looking puzzled.

"I'm tired of these people," she said blinking. "They don't let me get on with my work. You know who I mean. Believe me, he's a terrible man."

She sighed and sat down.

"No, she won't marry him. She's heartbroken and he's getting on in years."

For nothing better to say, I could only repeat: "Is that so?"

"Believe me, he's a terrible man," Nina Kapitonovna repeated thoughtfully. "Maybe! Good Lord! Maybe!"

I sat as quiet as a mouse. The dinner was forgotten. White beads of water rolled over the stove as the water in which the potatoes were swimming kept boiling and boiling.

The old lady went out again and this time spent some fifteen minutes in the dining-room. She came back frowning and threw up her hands.

"She's turned him down!" she announced. "Rejected him. My God! Such a man!"

I don't think she quite knew herself whether to be glad or disappointed that Maria Vasilievna had refused Korablev.

"It's a pity," I said.

She looked at me in astonishment.

"She could marry," I added. "She's still young."

"Stuff and nonsense!" Nina Kapitonovna began angrily. Then suddenly becoming sedate and dignified, she sailed out of the kitchen and met Korablev in the hall. He was very pale. Maria Vasilievna stood in the doorway silently watching him as he put on his coat. Her eyes showed that she had recently been crying.

"Poor man, poor man!" Nina Kapitonovna said as though to herself.

Korablev kissed her hand and she kissed him on the forehead, for

which she had to stand on tiptoe and he had to bend down.

"Ivan Pavlovich, you are my friend and our friend," Nina Kapitonovna said gravely. "I want you to know that this house is like your own home. You are Maria's best friend, too, I know. She knows it

too."

Korablev bowed in silence. I felt very sorry for him. I simply couldn't understand why Maria Vasilievna had refused him. I thought

them a suitable pair.

The old lady must have been expecting Maria Vasilievna to call her in and tell her all about it-how Korablev had proposed and how she had refused him. But Maria Vasilievna did not call her. On the contrary, she locked herself in her room and could be heard pacing the floor inside.

Katya finished her drawing of "the Spaniards' first encounter with the Indians" and wanted to show it to her mother, but Maria Vasilievna said from behind the closed door: "Later on, darling."

Somehow the place became dreary after Korablev had left and drearier still when Nikolai Antonich came home and briskly announced that there would be six for dinner, and not three as he had expected.

Willy-nilly, Nina Kapitonovna was obliged to set about it in earnest.

Even Katya was called in to help cut out little rounds of dough for the meat pastries with a tumbler. She fell to work with a will, getting flushed and covering herself with flour-nose, hair and all - but she soon tired of it and decided to cut out the rounds with an old inkwell instead of the tumbler, because it made star-shaped rounds.

"It's so much prettier. Grandma," she pleaded.

Then she heaped the stars together and announced that she was going to bake a pie of her own. In short, she was not much of a help.

Six people to dinner! Who could they be? I looked out of the kitchen and counted them coming in.

The first to arrive was the Director of Studies Ruzhichek, nicknamed the Noble Thaddeus. I don't know where he got that nickname-everybody knew only too well how noble he was! Next came the teacher Likho, a stout, bald man with a peculiar elongated head. Then the German-cum-French teacher, herself a German. Our Serafima arrived with the watch on her breast, and last of all an unexpected guest in the person ofVozhikov from the eighth form. In fact, we had here nearly all the members of the School Council.

This was rather odd, inviting particularly the whole School Council to dinner.

I sat in the kitchen, listening to their conversation. The doors were open. They started talking about Korablev. Would you believe it! It appeared that he was sucking up to the Soviets. He was trying his damnest "to carve out a career" for himself. He had dyed his moustache. He had organised a school theatre only to "win popularity". He had been married and had driven his wife into an early grave. At meetings, they said, he shed "crocodile tears".

So far this had been conversation, until I heard the voice of Nikolai Antonich and realised that it wasn't conversation but a conspiracy. They wanted to kick Korablev out of the school.

Nikolai Antonich worked up to his subject from afar:

"Pedagogics has always envisaged art as an external factor in education..."

Then he got round to Korablev and first of all "gave him his due for his gifts". It appeared that "the cause of his late wife's death" was nothing to do with us. All that concerned us was "the measure and extent of his influence upon the children". "What worries us is the harmful trend which Ivan Pavlovich is giving to the school, and that is the only reason why we should act as our pedagogic duty prompts us to act-do our duty as loyal Soviet teachers."

Nina Kapitonovna raised a chatter of empty plates and I could not catch exactly what his pedagogic duty prompted Nikolai Antonich to do. But when Nina Kapitonovna served the second dish I gathered from the general conversation what it was they were after.

First, at the next meeting of the School Council Korablev was to be asked to "confine himself to the teaching of geography as prescribed by the syllabus". Second, his activities were to be assessed as "a vulgarisation of the idea of manual education". Third, the school theatre was to be closed down. Fourth and fifth, something else. Korablev, of course, would resent it and would leave. As the Noble Thaddeus said: "Good riddance."

Yes, this was a mean plan and I was surprised that Nina Kapitonovna said nothing. But I soon realised what it was. Round about the middle of the second course she started lamenting the fact that Maria Vasilievna had rejected Korablev. She thought of nothing else, heard nothing else. She kept muttering and shrugging her shoulders, and once even said out aloud: "Well, well! Who asks Mother these days?"

She must have felt sore about Maria Vasilievna not having sought her advice before refusing Korablev.

The guests had gone, but I still couldn't make up my mind what to do.

What beastly luck that Korablev had come to propose on that day of all days. He would have done better to stay at home. I would then have been able to tell Maria Vasilievna all I had heard. But now it was awkward, even impossible, because she had not come out for dinner; she had locked herself in and would not admit anyone. Katya had sat down to her homework. Nina Kapitonovna suddenly announced that she was dog tired and sleepy. She lay down and fell asleep at once. I sighed and took my leave.

Lame Japhet, the duty man at the Children's Home, had looked in twice to see if we were asleep or larking about.

The night lamp had been switched on in the corridor. Valya Zhukov's eyelids quivered in his sleep like a dog's. Maybe he was dreaming about dogs? Romashka was snoring. I was the only one awake, thinking all the time.

Each thought more daring than the other. I saw myself getting up at the meeting of the school and denouncing Nikolai Antonich, revealing to everyone the mean plan to drive Korablev out of the school. Or I saw myself writing a letter to Korablev. While composing it I fell asleep.

Strangely enough, when I woke up (while the rest were still asleep) I continued the letter from the very point I had left off. I started to recollect the letters which Aunt Dasha had once read to me. At last I made up my mind.

It was still quite early-just gone seven o'clock and it was as dark as night outside. But that did not deter me, of course. Lame Japhet tried to stop me, but I dodged past him and ran out by the back way.

Korablev lived in Vorotnikovsky Street, in a one-storey wooden annex with shutters and a veranda like a summer bungalow. For some reason I was sure that he was not asleep. Obviously, a rejected suitor who had received his rebuff from Maria Vasilievna only the day before, could not be asleep.

As a matter of fact, he wasn't. A light was burning in the room and he was standing at the window staring out into the yard-staring so hard that one would think there was God knows what out there. So hard and absorbed that he did not notice me, though I was standing right under the window and making signs to him with my hands.