"I've had lots of people coming to see me, thousands," he answered
sullenly. "As many as forty used to sit down at my table."
"You were working at the Moscow Drama Theatre and used to wear a
jacket with brass buttons. My friend Grisha Faber played the red-haired
doctor, and Korablev introduced us in Grisha's dressing-room."
I wonder why I felt so light-hearted? Here I was standing in
Romashov's flat as though I were the master there. He would be here
within an hour. I took a deep breath with half-open mouth. What would
I do to him?
"I don't know! What name did you say?"
"Captain Grigoriev at your service. So you are living here now? In
Romashov's Hat?"
Vyshimirsky glanced at me suspiciously.
"I live where I'm registered," he said. "Not here. And the house-
manager knows I live there, and not here."
"I see."
305
I took out my cigarette-case, flipped open the lid and offered him a
cigarette. He took one. The door leading into the next room was open.
The place was clean and tidy, all light-grey and dark-grey-walls and
furniture. A round table stood before a divan. And over the divan
somebody's portrait, a large one in a smooth light-grey frame.
"Everything to match," I thought.
"You mean Ivan Pavlovich, the teacher?" Vyshimirsky suddenly
asked.
"Yes."
"Yes, of course, Korablev. A fine man. Valya was a pupil of his. Nyuta
wasn't, she graduated from the Brzhozovskaya Girls' School. But Valya
was a pupil of his. To be sure! He was a help, yes, he was..." And the
glimmerings of a kindly feeling flitted across his bewhiskered old face.
Then, pretending to recollect himself, the old man invited me into the
rooms-we had been standing all this time in the hallway-and even asked
me whether I had just arrived in town.
"If you have," he said, "there's an army canteen where you can get
quite a decent meal with bread for next to nothing on your travel
warrant."
But I wasn't listening to his chatter. I had stopped in the doorway,
astounded. That portrait over the divan in the light-grey frame was of
Katya-a splendid portrait, which I had never seen before. It was a full-
length photograph of Katya in the squirrel coat, which looked so nice on
her and which she had made just before the war. I remember how hard
she had been trying to get it done by some famous furrier named Manet,
and was cross with me because I couldn't understand that the cap and
the muff had to be made of fur too. What could this mean, my God?
At least a dozen thoughts jostled in my mind, one of them so absurd
that the memory of it today makes me feel ashamed. I imagined almost
everything except the truth, a truth which proved to be even more
absurd than that absurd idea!
"I must say I never expected to meet you here, Nikolai Ivanovich," I
said when the old man had told me how, after leaving the theatre, he
had been employed at a mental hospital as a cloak-room attendant, and
had been dismissed because the inmates had "unlawfully notified the
matron that I stole soup and ate it at night".
"Are you working for Romashov? Or just keeping up the
acquaintance?"
"Yes, keeping up the acquaintance. He suggested that I help him out
in his business, and I agreed. I was employed as secretary to the
Metropolitan Isidore, and I don't conceal the fact; on the contrary, I
state the fact in my personnel questionnaires. It was a big job, an
enormous task. Our daily mail alone was over fifteen hundred letters.
The same here. But here I work as a favour. I get a worker's ration,
because Romashov has fixed me up at his institution. And the
institution knows I am working here."
"Isn't Romashov in the army now? When we last met he was in army
uniform."
"No, he's not in the army. Reserved for the duration. Indispensable or
something."
"What sort of mail are you getting?"
"Oh, business letters, very important," Vyshimirsky said. "Extremely
important. We have an assignment. At the present moment we are
306
under instructions to find a certain woman, a lady. But I suspect it's not
an assignment, but a private affair. A love affair, so to speak."
"What woman is it?"
"The daughter of an historic personage, a man I knew very well,"
Vyshimirsky said proudly. "You may have heard of him perhaps—
Tatarinov? We are searching for his daughter. We'd have found her long
ago, but it's such a frightful muddle. She's married and has a double
name."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
"YOU WON'T KILL ME"
It was as though life had suddenly pulled up sharply, jolting my head
foremost into an imaginary wall. That was how I felt as I stared at the
old man, just an ordinary old man, standing before me in an ordinary
room and telling me that Romashov was looking for Katya, that is, doing
the same thing I was doing.
Our conversation, however, proceeded as though nothing had
happened. From Katya the old man switched over to some member of
T.U. committee who had had no right to call him "a hangover from the
old regime", because he, Vyshimirsky, had a work record ~of fifty years,
then he wandered off into reminiscences, relating how in the old days,
back in 1908, when he came out of the theatre the commissionaire
would cry out: "Vyshimirsky's carriage! "-and the carriage would roll up.
He wore a top hat and cloak in those days, but now people did not wear
such things, which was "a great pity, because it was elegant".
"When did he die?" he suddenly asked.
"Who?"
"Korablev."
"Who said he died? He's alive and well," I said in a jocular tone,
though I was quivering in all my being, thinking: "You'll know
everything in a minute, but tread carefully."
"So it's a private affair you say? Concerning a lady?"
"Yes, private. But very serious, very. Captain Tatarinov is an historical
personage. Mr Romashov was in Leningrad. He was there during the
siege and starved so bad that he ate paste off the wallpaper. He tore
down old wallpaper, and boiled and ate it. Afterwards he went on a meat
foraging assignment, and when he came back she was no longer there.
She'd been moved out."
"Where to?"
"That's just the question," Vyshimirsky said. "You know what that
evacuation was like? Go and find anybody! It's not as if she'd been
moved out by special train. You could trace it then. Take the Gold
Storage Plant, for instance. Where did its train go? To Siberia? Then
she'd be in Siberia. But she was evacuated by aeroplane."
307
"By aeroplane?"
"Yes, exactly. As a privileged person, I suppose. And now, who knows
where she is? All we know is that the plane flew via Khvoinaya that is,
the very place where Mr Romashov was getting meat."
I must have sensed instinctively when it was necessary to hold my
tongue and when to put in two or three words. Everything was as it
should be. Here was an army man, seemingly just out of hospital, thin
and peaky, who had called on a friend with whom he had parted at the
front, asking how his friend was getting on, what he was doing. "You'll
know everything in a minute, step warily."