“And also, you look far too happy,” Smolyaninov went on. “People might think this is some kind of game.”
I had no choice but to relinquish my brush.
Offended, I set off down below. As I passed three ladies I didn’t know, I heard one of them say my name.
“Yes, I’ve heard she’s here on our boat.”
“You don’t say!”
“I’m telling you, she’s here on this boat. Not like the rest of us, of course. She’s got a cabin to herself, a separate table, and she doesn’t want to do any work.”
I shook my head sadly.
“You’re being terribly unfair!” I said reproachfully. “She’s just been scrubbing the deck. I saw her with my own eyes.”
“They got her to scrub the deck!” exclaimed one of the ladies. “That’s going too far!”
“And you saw her?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Well? What’s she like?”
“Long and lanky. A bit like a gypsy. In red boots.”
“Goodness me!”
“And nobody’s breathed a word to us!”
“That must be very hard work, mustn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “A lot harder than just stroking a fish with a knife.”
“So why’s she doing it?”
“She wants to set an example.”
“And to think that nobody’s breathed a word to us!”
“Do you know when she’ll be scrubbing next? We’d like to watch.”
“I’m not sure. I’ve heard she’s put her name down to work in the boiler room tomorrow, but that may just be a rumor.”
“Now that really is going too far!” said one of the ladies, with concern.
“It’s all right,” said one of her companions reassuringly. “A writer needs to experience many things. It’s not for nothing that Maxim Gorky worked as a baker when he was young.”
“But that,” said the other lady, “was before he became a writer.”
“Well, he must have known he’d become a writer. Why else would he have gone to work in a bakery?”
Late that evening, when I was sitting alone in our bathroom-cabin, there was a quiet knock at the door.
“May I?”
“You may.”
In came a man in uniform. I had never seen him before. He looked around the cabin.
“You’re alone? Perfect.”
And, turning round, he called out, “Come in, gentlemen, we’ll be on our own.”
In came a few other men. Among them was O the engineer.
“Well?” asked O. “What is it we’ve come here to discuss?”
“A very serious matter indeed,” whispered the man in uniform. “We’re being deceived. They say we’re going to Sebastopol, but really we’re heading for Romania, where the captain will hand us over to the Bolsheviks.”
“Why on earth would there be Bolsheviks in Romania? You’re talking nonsense.”
“By the time you know for sure that I’m not, it will be too late. I can only tell you that the Shilka is at this very moment heading toward Romania. There’s only one thing we can do: Go to the captain tonight and confront him. Then we must hand over the command to Lieutenant F. He’s a man we can trust. I know him well, and what’s more, he’s related to a very well-known public figure. So, we must act straightaway. Please make your decision.”
Everyone fell silent.
“Gentlemen,” I began, “none of this is substantiated and it is all extremely unclear. Why don’t we just wait till tomorrow? We could simply go to the captain and ask him why we’re no longer heading for Sebastopol. Confronting him in his cabin at night would be outright mutiny.”
“So that’s where you stand, is it?” said the ringleader—and fell ominously silent.
There we were in the half-dark little cabin, whispering together like inveterate conspirators. Clattering above our heads was the tiller chain—our traitorous little captain steering the boat toward Romania. All straight out of an adventure novel.
“You’re right,” said O the engineer. “Best to wait till tomorrow.”
And the ringleader unexpectedly agreed: “Yes, maybe. Perhaps that will be best of all.”
In the morning O told me that he had been to see the captain. And the captain had gladly given him a very simple explanation: He had changed course in order to avoid some minefields.
How surprised the poor man would have been had we burst into his cabin in the middle of the night, clenching daggers between our teeth.
Later I saw Lieutenant F. A tall, melancholy neurotic, he seemed not to have known about the plan to proclaim him the ship’s dictator. Or maybe he had known… When we reached Sebastopol, he left the ship.
21
LIFE ON board was settling into a routine.
Those first days of heroics, when Colonel S had stood on the deck, rolled up his sleeves, and kneaded dough for flatbreads, a gold bracelet jingling on his handsome white wrist, while a famous statistician sat beside him and calculated in a loud voice the total weight of the bread to be baked, in proportion to the number of working souls on board, and then half-souls and quarter-souls—those first days of heroic amateurism were long gone.
Now our rations were being supervised by the cook, Chinese Misha.
Misha was a consumptive, an old man with the face of a startled old maid. When he had no work to do and felt like a rest, he would squat down and puff on a special pipe that allowed the smoke to be drawn through a bowl of water. A kind of hookah.
Another Chinese, a rather foolish young man by the name of Akyn, said that until only recently Misha had been fit and healthy, but that he had once got so very angry and carried on swearing so long and so loudly that he had “torn his throat.”
And there was a third Chinese man—a general servant and laundry hand.
I began to take an interest in the Chinese language.
“Akyn, how do you say ‘old man’ in Chinese?”
“Tasolomanika,” Akyn replied.
“And ‘glass’?”
“Tasagalasika.”
Chinese sounded surprisingly similar to Russian.
“And how do you say ‘captain’?”
“Tasakapitana.”
Hm… The words seemed to be almost the same.
“And ‘ship’?”
“Tasashipa.”
Astonishing!
“And ‘hat’?”
“Tasahata.”
We were joined by a midshipman I knew.
“I’m learning Chinese. It sounds remarkably like Russian.”
The midshipman began to laugh.
“Yes, I overheard. He thinks you’re getting him to learn Russian. What he’s been saying to you is his idea of Russian. You’re a fool, Akyn!”
“Tusafulaka!” Akyn readily agreed.
The days passed monotonously by.
We ate rice with corned beef. We drank disgusting water from the desalinator.
We didn’t talk about the past, we didn’t think about the future. We knew that, in all probability, we would indeed reach Novorossiisk, but who and what we would meet there we did not know.
The Shilka was supposed to be going all the way to Vladivostok. I very much hoped it would. I could meet up there with my friend M, then return to Moscow by way of Siberia. There was no reason for me to remain in Novorossiisk. And what would I find to do there?
In the meantime I used to wander about the deck at night. I would stand for a while on the moonlit side, then cross over to where it was dark.
I had grown accustomed to the steamer’s various sounds. Lying on my narrow bench in our bathroom-cabin, I would listen to the clatter of the tiller chain and the stamping of the cadets’ feet as they swept the deck.
The passengers had shaken down, each finding his or her place like potatoes in a sack. An old dignitary who looked like a fat Tatar had attached himself to a young woman from Kiev, a plump little teacher.