Two Captains (65 page)

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."

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.