Two Captains (58 page)

They were shining at the moment when, with arms hanging down his sides and back bent, he stopped beside my bed.

"The German detachment has been routed," he said. "We surrounded them at Shchelya Novaya and mopped them all up to a man."

Then he gazed at me silently with a frown, and I thought that I must be in a bad way indeed if people looked at me with such kindly eyes, asked me my full name and rank, and pinned the slip of paper with these details to the wall so as not to lose it. There was no harm in that, though; let him do it; I didn't have to look at that paper. I took the man's hand and started earnestly to tell him what a reception his boys had given me. I may have been spinning it out too long, repeating myself and getting confused, because he put something cold on my forehead and said I was to go to sleep.

I knew that he would be pleased if I did, so I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. But the picture I had been describing to him remained-somewhere in an interminable perspective, between wide-spaced walls.

Thousands of little houses loomed before me. Thousands of boys knelt behind stools on which lay thousands of guns. Thousands of other boys hid behind curtains, knife in hand. From horizon to horizon, in every house, in the depth of dark rooms, boys were lying in wait for the enemy, waiting to kill him as he entered.

If, like the poets, one compares life to a road, it can be said that at the sharpest turns in this road I have always encountered traffic-regulators, who showed me the right direction. This particular turn in the road differed from the others merely in fact that I was helped out by a pointsman, that is, by a professional traffic-regulator.

I lay in his house for two days and nights, now coming to myself, now losing consciousness, always opening my eyes to the sight of that sombre man standing by my bed, never moving away, as though to keep me from taking the turn where the road drops away into the abyss. Sometimes he turned into a boy with the same amazingly bright eyes, and the boy, too, stood steadfast at his post and kept me there in that room with the little windows and the low ceiling, away from the place where (if the report in Red Falcons was to be believed) I had already gone to.

The remarkable thing was that never, either awake or in delirium, did I think of Romashov. Could that have been an instinct of self-preservation?

Probably it was-the memory of it would not have done me any good.

But when traffic was restored, when the family took me to Zao-zorye by railcar-no doubt the very one which the nurses had failed to reach-and three pairs of shining blue eyes shyly took leave of me, when I found myself in another hospital train, this time a real one with a bathroom, a radio and a library; when, bathed, rebandaged and fed, with my leg hitched to the ceiling according to all the rules of medical science, I had slept my way through the whole of Central Russia, to find myself somewhere beyond Kirov in a strange world of unblacked-out windows-it was then that I remembered and went in my mind over everything that had occurred between me and Romashov.

I recollected our talk on the evening before the German tanks had gunned our train.

"Admit that you have committed some base actions in your life," I had said. "Base from your own point of view, I mean."

"Maybe," he had said coolly. "But what do you call a base action? I regard life as a game. Even now, for instance. Hasn't fate itself put the cards in our hands?"

It was the war, not fate, that had dealt the cards. Not the war either, but the retreat. If not for the retreat he would never have dared to steal my gun and papers from me and leave me in the wood alone.

I went over the whole history of our relationship, a very complicated one, bearing in mind (a thing now almost fantastic) that he had once seriously contemplated marrying Katya.

Was he reconciled to the fact that he had lost her for ever? I don't know. He had married somebody by the name of Alevtina Sergeyevna, and Nina Kapitonovna said that he had got terribly drunk at the wedding and had wept.

Katya had listened to the story with a blush. Did she guess, then, that Romashov still loved her? I don't know, I don't know...

I had written to Katya while still in the train, and I wrote to her from the hospital almost every day. I wrote to the Berensteins' address, and to Pyotr through the field post, and to the Military Medical Academy where Katya was working with Varya Trofimova, as she had written to me in September. There was no railway communication with Leningrad, but the mail was delivered by plane, and I could not understand why my letters did not reach them. I comforted myself with the thought that if anything had happened to Katya somebody was sure to answer me.

That unhappy day, February 21, 1942, will always stick in my memory.

One of the volunteer nurses told me that she had met a train from Leningrad at the station with trade-school pupils who were being evacuated from the starving city. She was a stern-faced woman who had mentioned one day, with a calmness that astonished me, that her husband and son had been killed at the front. Yet when she told me about the boys, so weak from dystrophy that they had to be carried out of the carriages, she wept.

I had to force myself to eat my dinner that day. My leg, which had been in a plaster cast for over a month now, had suddenly begun to give me an excruciating pain. The doctor ordered an X-ray, and that was when I "let it get me", as Aunt Dasha was fond of saying.

For one thing, the X-ray showed that the leg had knitted wrong and would have to be removed from the plaster and have some bones or other broken. That meant starting the treatment all over again. Secondly, it was devilishly cold in the X-ray room and I was kept there for an hour and a half. I must have caught a cold, because towards the evening I noticed that I was talking nonsense-a first sign with me that I was running a temperature.

In short, I contracted pneumonia. This meant putting off the second operation, and the doctors feared that I would be left lame.

I am afraid I am making too much of my ailments-dull stuff, especially considering that I had been wounded in the third month of the war without having done anything worth mentioning. And that at a time when the "miracle at the gates of Moscow", as the foreign newspapers headlined it, had already been accomplished; when for two hundred miles west of Moscow stiff legs clad in ridiculous ersatz valenki stuck out from every snowdrift. That at a time when work was in full swing on the build-up of a long-range naval air force-without me, who had spent fifteen years crisscrossing the skies over the sea in all directions? I even had a feeling as though the war mentality were wearing off, submerged in the senseless trivialities of hospital life.

I had always thought of a medical board as a sort of tribunal, one at which I had always had to plead guilty of not having been created a tall, broad-shouldered man with a square jaw and muscles capable of lifting a hundred and fifty pounds. It was with this unpleasant feeling that I found myself standing utterly naked before the medical board at M-v. I did knee-bends, shut my eyes and stretched my arms out in front of me, careful not to let them tremble, performed leg jerks and recognised the smallest letters at a great distance with faultless accuracy. Then an old, grey-haired lady doctor listened to my heart. There was something in my chest she didn't quite like, judging by the way she paused, frowned, then tapped me over again, as though practising scales on a piano. Then she said:

"Breathe in, breathe out, hold it!"

It wasn't my lungs that had been worrying me when I went before the board. Whenever I got nervous I started to limp on my wounded leg, and this was a nuisance. It set me thinking how my leg would behave during a combat flight. I had always had sound lungs, though I had contracted the Spanish flu and afterwards had severe pleurisy as a boy. But it was my lungs that seemed to make an unfavourable impression on this grumpy old medical officer. She tapped me all over, turned me round and tapped again, then made me lie down, seemingly determined to prove at all costs that I was ill, ill, ill... That I was unfit and would never fly again.

Nearly six months had passed since I had hidden this horrible thought away somewhere deep down within me-hidden it and covered it up with any old thing. But it had not died or left me, it was merely lurking somewhere along with another anxious thought-about Katya.

And now, as I stood naked before the board, with scars from my wounds on my legs and back, I could no longer hide this thought either from myself or from others. The doctor must have read this in my eyes, because, picking up her pen, she hesitated to write down her decision, and passed me over to the chairman of the medical board, a short, stout doctor in horn-rimmed spectacles, who started tapping me vigorously on the ribs and shoulder blades with a little hammer instead of his fingers. The hammer gave off sounds now clear, now dulled, as though asking: "Aren't you ill, ill, ill?

Unfit, and will never fly again?"

"There's nothing to worry about, Captain," the doctor said after a glance at my face as he stuck the rubber tubes into his big hairy ears.

"You'll be all right after a little treatment."

He made a note in my case papers and repeated in a kindly tone: "You'll be all right.

" But he put me down for six months' leave, and I knew how bad one had to be for a medical board to give such an opinion of a combatant officer in the year 1942.

I whistled softly, not to attract the attention of passers-by, as I walked down the tree-lined street leading to the Kama. On the wall of the town's best building housing the flying school I read for the thousandth time the marble plaque, which said: "Popov, the inventor of radio and eminent Russian scientist, went to school here."

I climbed, limping, to the top of the high bank, and the Kama, still turbid, yellow-grey from the spring spate, spread before me with its wharves and steamboats, hauling huge barges, with its whistles and shouts resounding over the broad expanse of water.

The sight of a group of boys on the bank reminded me of the time Katya and I had visited Ensk after my return from Spain. The boys in Ensk had followed me about, doing everything that I did. When I had stopped to buy some cigarettes at a kiosk, they, too, had stopped and bought the same cigarettes. I felt like taking a dip. Leaving Katya in Cathedral Gardens, I went down to the river, undressed and dived in. They, too, undressed a little way off and plunged into the water just as I had done. No wonder-here was an airman who had fought in Spain and come home with the Order of the Red Banner pinned to his chest! And now?

My fingers shook slightly as I rolled myself a cigarette. Lighting up, I stood for a while motionless on the bank, taking in the unfamiliar sights and varied activities of the great river. A grey passenger steamer went past. I read its name: Lyapidevsky. "You didn't become a Lyapidevsky," I thought. "Nor a Kamanin either," when I read the name on the side of a similar small steamer that passed by. Farther out, by a wharf, lay the Mazuruk and I couldn't help smiling at the thought that all the vessels of the Kama Steamship Line bore the names of famous airmen, good friends of mine too.*

Anyway, there was nothing to prevent me now from flying to Leningrad, in order to find my wife or reassure myself that I had riot lost her forever.

"These are the names of pilots who took part in the rescue of the Chelyuskin expedition in 1934. -Tr.

I waited three weeks for a plane. Whether it was because I had got used to the idea of being ill, or because hope had crept stealthily into my heart, whispering assurance that all would come right yet, but little by little I recovered from the shock and put my thoughts and feelings in order.

It was not myself I was thinking of now, but of Katya. I thought of her when I heard "Nina's Romance" on the radio-she had liked it. I thought of her when seeing a show put on by the wounded. We had so seldom gone to shows! I thought of her when everybody was asleep in the vast ward, and only here and there could be heard an occasional moan or quick, hoarse mutterings.

A major of my acquaintance, who had flown to M-v on some mission from Leningrad front HQ, readily agreed to take me back with him.

CHAPTER ELEVEN I LOOK FOR KATYA

I had been grounded now for over six months. How can I convey the feeling with which I took the air again? It was galling to think that for the first time in my life I was flying as a passenger. Over the years I had become accustomed to feeling more at home in the air than on the ground. I looked out of the window with pleasure, as if checking whether any harm had come to this vast countryside with its black spring fields, its bright, winding streams and the dark-green velvet of its forests. It was with pleasure that I went into the cockpit, feeling its familiar, ordered compactness with my whole body. With pleasure I waited to see how the pilot would steer clear of the storm-we ran into one over Cherepovets, a magnificent mass of thunderclouds resembling palaces, with walls riven by lightning. I was reminded of my impressions of first flights, before the sky had become for me simply an air route.

At the airport in Leningrad I got a lift in a car that had come down for Pravda matrixes. It took me as far as Liteiny Prospekt. From there I would have to walk or take a tram. The only tram running to the Petrogradskaya was a No. 3, but the Leningraders who had settled themselves round the tram stop in a home-like way, said that I should have to wait perhaps an hour. The major, who had to get to the Petrogradskaya too, tried to persuade me to wait, seeing that I had a heavy knapsack-I had brought some food for Katya. But how could I wait, when I had to catch my breath at least twenty times at the mere thought that Katya and I were at last together in the same city, that at this very moment, perhaps, she was-I don't know what-waiting for me, sick, dying?