course.
Our mission, then, or, as the admiral called it, "special assignment"
was this: A German raider (evidently an auxiliary cruiser) had passed
into the Kara Sea and shelled the port of T. and was now lurking
somewhere far in the East. I was to hunt her down and sink her, the
323
sooner the better, as a convoy of ours with a cargo of war materials was
on its way through the Northern Sea Route and was now fairly close to
this port. It was not difficult to imagine what havoc a big warship could
cause in these peaceful waters.
I pulled up to five and a half thousand metres. But here, too, there
was nothing but the same dreary cloud hash, which the Almighty
himself seemed to be stirring up thick with a gigantic spoon.
So I had to find her and sink her. Doing the first was far and away the
more difficult of the two. How astonished the admiral had been when I
corrected almost all the islands of the eastern part of the Nordenskjold
Archipelago on his chart. "Have you been there?" "No."
He did not know that I had been there yet not been there. The map of
the Nordenskjold Archipelago had been corrected shortly before the war
by the Nord expedition. I had not been there. But Captain Tatarinov
had, and mentally I had followed in his wake a thousand times.
Indeed, nothing in life is done in vain. Life turns this way and that,
plunges down, forcing its way like an underground river in the darkness
and silence of eternal night, and suddenly emerges into the open, into
the sunshine and light of day, just as my machine now has emerged
from the welter of clouds. Aye, nothing in life is done in vain.
Always uppermost in my mind was the thought of what my life would
have been in the North if I had found Katya and we had been living
together at N.
She would wake up when, at three in the morning, I came home
before setting out on a flight. She would be rosy, warm and sleepy.
Perhaps, on coming in, I would kiss her in a way that would somehow be
different, and she would understand at once how important and
interesting was the task which the admiral had entrusted me with.
I had seen this a thousand times, but would it ever be like that again?
"Navigator, bearings!"
The pilot's course and the navigator's were three degrees out, but
coincided to a T when cigarette-cases, pocket torches and lighters were
turned out of pockets,
What had I been thinking about? About Katya. About the fact that I was
flying to places where we had once planned to go together and from
which I had been kept away for so long. Had I not known for certain,
beyond doubt, that the time would come when I should be flying in
these parts? Had I not charted to within half a degree the route which,
as in a child's dazzling dream, the men from the St. Maria had trudged,
breathing heavily, with eyes shut against the blinding glare? And in the
lead, a big man, a giant in fur boots.
But this was romancing. I drove the thought away. Novaya Zemlya
was close at hand.
You would be bored if I started telling in detail how we hunted that
surface raider. To detect a camouflaged warship, a barely visible streak
amid the boundless wastes of the Arctic seas, was no easy task. We flew
from base to base for over a fortnight. One of the flights lasted seven
hours. After scouring the Kara Sea in both directions we returned to
Novaya Zemlya, but could not find it. It was as though these great
islands had up till now been marked on the map by mistake. While the
fuel lasted we flew around over the place in the black fog, and if the
324
wind had not, to our good fortune, torn a small bright hole in the fog, I
should probably not have been able to finish this book. We made for this
gap, and landed safely with the engine cut off.
Altogether it was a hard fortnight we spent on Novaya Zemlya. Every
time we started out in the hope of finding the raider, though it had been
plain to me for some time that we ought to be seeking it much farther
East. We scoured the sea until fuel gave out and the navigator inquired
phlegmatically: "Home?"
And "home" would unfold to our gaze-rugged, tumbling mountains,
blue glaciers split lengthways, as it were, and ready to slide down into
the bottomless snowy gorges.
Then came the moment when our stay on Novaya Zemlya end-ed-a
wonderful moment, which is worth going into in somewhat greater
detail.
I was standing outside a storehouse the roof of which was covered
with birds' carcasses and on its walls were stretched the skins of seals.
Two little Nentsi, looking like penguins in their fur garments with blind
sleeves, were playing on the beach and I was chatting with their parents-
a little girl of a mother and a father of similar stature with a brown head
sticking out of his anorak. We were discussing international affairs, I
remember, and although the analysis of Germany's hopeless position
which I was giving them had been taken from a very old back number of
Pravda, the Nenets was going to pass it on that same day to a friend of
his who lived quite near-a mere two hundred kilometres away. His little
wife, who was quite at sea in politics, nodded her shiny black head with
its pudding-basin haircut and kept saying: "Velly good, velly good."
"Would you like to go to the front?" I asked the man.
"I like, I like."
"Aren't you afraid?"
"Why afraid, why?"
That was the moment when I saw my navigator running towards me-
not just walking, but running along the shore from the point of land on
which our plane stood.
"We're being assigned to a new base."
"Where?"
"To Zapolarie."
He had said "to Zapolarie", and though there was nothing impossible
about our being reassigned to Zapolarie, that is, to the very area where I
thought the raider had to be sought, I was flabbergasted. Why, this was
my own Zapolarie.
"It can't be."
The navigator had reassumed his old imperturbable, unhurried
manner.
"Shall I check it?"
"No need."
"When do we take off?"
"In twenty minutes."
325
CHAPTER FIVE
BACK AT ZAPOLARIE
It was some time before I found Doctor Pavlov's street, for the simple
reason that in my day this street had had only one house standing in it-
the doctor's, all the others existing only on the plan that hung in the
office of the District Executive Committee. Now the little house in which
I had once spent my evenings poring over the diaries of Navigating
Officer Klimov was lost amid its tall neighbours. What pleasant,
youthful evenings those had been! Those creaking floor-boards in the
next room under the light tread of Volodya. Mrs Pavlova coming in-
large, determined, open-hearted-and setting before me in silence a plate
with a huge piece of pie.
Still unbent, unyielding to sorrow, she had only turned grey, and two
deep creases hung over her down-drooping mouth.
"What am I to call you now?" she said, when we met in the little front
garden. "You were a boy then. How many years is it? Fifteen7 Twenty?"