up in Leningrad. For where there is a home there are children.
The shell bursts drew nearer and nearer. One exploded quite close,
flinging open the doors and bringing a cheery tinkle of splintered glass.
In the ensuing silence footsteps echoed hollowly in the street. I looked
out of the window and saw two boys, with what looked to me like
ghastly faces, running towards the house. When they drew level one of
the boys touched the other on the back and with a loud laugh, turned
and ran back again. They were playing tag.
R. would be coming back at three and I would say to him: "Yes".
It would be as though those six months of frustrating idleness had
never been. I would go to the North. The farther away from me it had
been all those years, the closer and more alluring it had grown. Had I
not fought as best I could in the West and the South? But up there, in
the North-that was where I had to be, defending a land which I knew
and loved.
Then suddenly I stopped still and said to myself: "Katya."
To go away and leave her? To go far away, for a long time? To make
no attempt to find Pyotr, whose field post number may simply have
been changed? To undertake no other search here, in Leningrad and at
the Leningrad front? Wherever Katya might have been evacuated she
was sure to try and join Nina Kapitonovna and little Pyotr. Was I to lose
this trail I had picked up, faint though it was, but which might lead me
to where she was, numb with grief because that damned newspaper
report could not but have reached her?
My decision was made. I would stay in Leningrad for a few more days.
I would find Katya, then go to the North.
R. returned at three o'clock. I told him of my decision. He heard me
out and said that in my place he would have done the same. "But we
must go to Moscow together. I'll arrange for you to be put on strength at
Headquarters, and then Slepushkin will give you a fortnight's leave for
family considerations. A wife after all. And what a wife! I remember
Ekaterina Ivanovna very well. A sensible girl, kind-hearted, and talk
about charming-one in a thousand!"
I shall not describe how, the next day, I went back to the Petrogradskaya
and made another round of all the tenants of house No. 79; how, at the
Academy of Arts, I tried to find out where Pyotr was, only to learn that
he had been wounded and had been in the clearing hospital on
Vasilyevsky Island. The sculptor Kostochkin had visited him, but that
sculptor had died of starvation and Pyotr, rumour had it, had returned
to the front. Or how I discovered why my letters had never reached the
children's camp of the Artists' Union, which had been re-evacuated to a
place near Novosibirsk; or how Doctor Ovanesyan went with me to the
District Soviet and shouted at an indifferent fat man who declined to
make any inquiries about Katya.
Evacuee trains in January had been routed to Yaroslavl, where special
hospitals had been set up for Leningraders. This was the only solid fact I
301
had been able to establish, and it was the opinion of all the Leningraders
I met that I must look for Katya in Yaroslavl.
Two circumstances combined to convince me that this was so. For one
thing, the children's camp of the Artists' Union before its re-evacuation
had been in the Yaroslavl region, in a village called Gniloi Yar. Secondly,
Lukeria Ilyinichna, as the typist of the Stomatology Clinic was called,
suddenly remembered that Doctor Trofimova had sent Katya to
Yaroslavl.
"My God!" she said with vexation. "Fancy getting such a thing
muddled up! My memory's gone weak, you know, it's because I don't
have any sugar. I've remembered it though, sugar or no sugar. And I tell
you-Yaroslavl's the place where you'll find her."
R.'s plane was leaving at midnight. I rang him up and arrived ten
minutes before the take-off.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
FRIENDS WHO WERE NOT AT HOME
If my movements on that day were to be traced on the map of
Moscow, one would think I had deliberately gone out of my way to avoid
meeting any of those I was so keen on seeing. "Keen" is the word,
though I wanted to see different people for quite different reasons. Both
lots were in Moscow. Another glance at the map, perhaps, would reveal
that their route that day ran alongside my own. Or crossed it two
minutes later. Or ran parallel with mine along the next street, behind a
narrow line of buildings. Be that as it may, my luck was out, and with
one exception, I found no one at home and went straight from the
airfield to Vorotnikovsky Street where Korablev lived, seeing that my
luggage consisted of one small suitcase.
The tumbledown wooden annexe, lost amid the tall built-up houses,
looked like a summer cottage, what with its shutters and its veranda.
Korablev no longer had held the ground floor to himself, and though
Moscow had struck me, at first sight as being oddly empty, here, in this
little house, I found a head sticking out of nearly every window. Women
were sitting round the doorsteps, knitting, and the moment I appeared I
found at least a dozen pairs of eyes scrutinising me with curiosity. I
might have been back at Ensk, in our old courtyard. ' "Who d'you want?"
"Korablev."
"Ah, Ivan Pavlovich? Second door on the left down the corridor." "I
know that," I said, mounting the steps. "Is he at home?" "Knock. I think
he is."
The last time I saw Korablev was before the war. Katya and I had
dropped in on the old man without warning, bringing a cake and a
bottle of French wine. He was a long time shaving and talking to us from
the next room, while we looked at some old school photographs.
At last he had come out, wearing a new suit with a starched collar, his
moustache twisted up with a youthful swagger. That was how I saw him
302
as I walked down the dark corridor, just as he had been on that
wonderful, memorable evening. In a moment he would come out and
recognise me at once. "Is that you, Sanya?"
But I knocked two or three times at the familiar felt-padded door
without getting an answer. Korablev was not at home.
"Dear Ivan Pavlovich," I wrote, moving aside because the women were
watching me and I did not want them to see how agitated I was. "I don't
know whether I'll have time to call again. I'm leaving for Yaroslavl
today, where Katya was evacuated in January. I may travel still farther
from there until I have found her. I can't in this note explain what
happened to me and how we lost each other. Should you (or Valya,
whom I hope to see today) happen to have heard anything of her, please
let me know immediately at the following address: c/o Rear-Admiral R.,
Political Department, Polarnoye, the Arctic. Dear Ivan Pavlovich, in case
you have read about my death, here I am writing to you, your Sanya."
A dozen hands reached out simultaneously for my letter. I took the
Metro, which looked more beautiful and imposing than ever before, to
the Palace of Soviets station. The war might have ended long ago, the
way the old men sat about on Gogol Boulevard, leaning on their gnarled
old sticks. Children were playing. Preoccupied with my own thoughts