they told me how Katya had helped them. Hakim brought his pals, and
they complained that the ginger major had promised them three
hundred grams per head for the burial, but had "diddled" them by
giving them only two hundred.
Who the devil could that ginger major be? Pyotr? But Pyotr wasn't a
major, and it was impossible to imagine him doing starving boys out of a
hundred grams of bread. Ah, well, whoever the man was, he had helped
Rosalia bury her sister. Who knows but that he may have helped Katya
in her need. She had been at the funeral with him, and evidently could
not have been so weak if she had managed to walk all the way to the
cemetery. Since then, however, no one had seen her, either alive or
dead.
It was past five when, tired out and with a splitting headache, I started
for the Military Medical Academy. The Academy itself had been
evacuated, but the clinics, turned into hospitals from the first day of the
war, still remained. The Stomatology Department, where Katya worked,
was still there. I was sent to the office, where an elderly typist, who
somehow reminded me of Aunt Dasha, said that Katya had been in a
bad way and Doctor Trofimova had arranged for her to be evacuated
from Leningrad.
"Where to?"
"That I can't say. I don't know."
"Is Doctor Trofimova herself in Leningrad?"
"As soon as she sent your wife off she went to the front," the typist
said. "Since then we've had no news from either of them."
296
CHAPTER TWELVE
I MEET HYDROGRAPHER R.
I realised now that it had been naive of me to write to Katya in the
course of six months without getting a word in answer, and then expect
that I only had to turn up in Leningrad for her to meet me on her
doorstep with outstretched arms. As if there had not been that cruel
hungry winter of nineteen forty one, with its trainloads of dying children
and special hospitals for Leningraders in cities throughout the land. As
if there had not been those sickly faces with the clouded eyes. As if the
rumble of gunfire could not still be heard in the city coming now from
the East, now from the West.
I was thinking of this as I sat in the office of the Stomatology Clinic,
listening to the typist's story of the young sailor, the spit image of her
own son killed in the war, who had suddenly come and given her three
hundred grams of bread when she no longer had the strength to rise
from her bed.
"You'll find Katerina all right," she said. "She dreamt of a flying eagle.
Your husband, I told her. She wouldn't believe me. Now, wasn't I right?
I'm telling you now, too-you'll find her."
Maybe. She was dying while I had been living in clover in M-v, I
thought, staring dully at this old woman, who was trying to convince me
that I would find Katya, that she would come back to me. "I was taken
care of and nursed. And she didn't have the hundred grams of bread to
pay the boys with for burying Bertha." With despair and fury I thought
that I should have flown to Leningrad in January, I should have
insisted, demanded that they discharge me from hospital. Who knows-I
might have come out then in better shape than I was now, and could
have found and saved my Katya.
But it was too late in the day now to have regrets about things that
could no longer be mended. "I'm no worse off than anybody else," Katya
had written from Leningrad. Only now did I realise what those simple
words meant.
The old woman, who had probably been through much more than I
had, kept trying to comfort me. I asked her for some boiling water and
treated her to some pork fat and onions-things that were still scarce in
Leningrad.
From then on a chill lodged in my heart. No matter what I was
thinking or doing, always the question "Katya?" obtruded itself.
While at M-v I had conned over the telephone numbers of nearly all
my Leningrad acquaintances. But none of those I rang up from the clinic
answered the call. The ringing seemed to be lost in the mysterious
emptiness of Leningrad. I tried the last number in my memorised list,
the only one I was not sure of. I held the receiver to my ear for a long
time, listening to some far-off rustling sounds, and behind them, still
fainter impatient voices.
"Hullo," suddenly came a deep masculine voice.
297
"Can I speak to-"
I gave the name.
"Speaking."
"This is Air Pilot Grigoriev."
Silence.
"Not Alexander Grigoriev, surely?"
"Yes."
"Would you believe it! My dear Alexander Ivanovich, I've been
racking my brains these three days where to look for you."
About six years ago, when the Tatarinov search expedition was
decided upon and I was engaged in organising it, Professor V. had
introduced to me a naval man, a hydrographer, who taught at the
Frunze School. We had spent only one evening together in Leningrad,
but I was often to recall that man, who had painted for me with such
remarkable clarity a picture of the future world war.
He had come late. Katya was asleep, curled up in an armchair. I
wanted to wake her, but he would not let me, and we had a drink with
some olives for a snack; Katya always had a stock of olives.
He was deeply interested in the North. He was sure that the North,
with its inexhaustible resources of strategic raw materials, would be
called upon to play a very important part in the coming war. He
regarded the Northern Sea Route as a naval highway and declared that
the Russo-Japanese campaign had gone wrong because of the failure to
grasp this idea, which had been put forward by Mendeleyev. He had
urged that naval bases should be set up along all convoy routes.
I remember that, at the time, this idea struck me as extremely
sensible. I appreciated it anew on June 14, 1942, a few days before I flew
to Leningrad, when, sitting on the bank of the Kama, I heard the far-off
voice of the radio announcer reading out the text of the treaty between
Great Britain and the Soviet Union. It was not difficult to guess what the
lines of communication mentioned in this treaty were, and my thoughts
went back to that "nocturnal visitor", as Katya had later called the
hydrographer.
I had run into him several times between 1936 and 1940 and read his
articles and his book Soviet Arctic Seas, which became famous and was
translated into all European languages. I followed his career with
interest, as he, I believe, followed mine. I knew that he had left the
Frunze School and was in command of a hydrographic vessel and then
served at the Hydrographical Department of the People's Commissariat
of the Navy. Shortly before the war he took his doctor's degree; I
remember reading the announcement about his thesis in a Moscow
evening paper. I shall call him R.
It was a rare occasion—"it happens once in a thousand years", as R.
put it-my finding him at home. The flat was sealed and he had unsealed
it and come in only a couple of minutes before I phoned, and that only
because he was leaving Leningrad for long. "Where are you going?"
"A long way away. Come over, I'll tell you all about it. Where are you