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.
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CHAPTER TEN
THE VERDICT
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."
292
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. "(These are the names of pilots who took part in the rescue of
the Chelyuskin expedition in 1934. —Tr.)
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.
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
293
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