Aunt Dasha was asleep when we burst into her room and must have
thought she was dreaming. She raised herself on her elbow and
regarded us with a pensive air. We started laughing and that brought
her down to earth.
"Good heavens, Sanya!" she said. "And Katya! And the old'un is away
again!"
The "old 'un" was the judge, and "away again" referred to that visit of
ours five years ago when the judge had been out on circuit somewhere in
the district.
356
I hardly need describe how Aunt Dasha fussed and bustled round us,
how she grieved that the pie had to be made with dark flour and on
some "outlandish lard". In the end we had to make her sit down while
Katya took charge of the household and Pyotr and I volunteered to help
her, and Aunt Dasha shrieked with horror when Pyotr dumped some
food concentrates into the dough—"for flavour", as he put it-and I all
but popped in some washing soda instead of salt. Oddly enough, the
pastry rose well, and though Aunt Dasha tasted a piece and announced
"not rich enough", the pie was not at all bad as a wartime product.
After dinner Aunt Dasha demanded that we tell her everything,
beginning from the day and hour when we had parted from her at the
Ensk railway station five years before. I persuaded her, however, that
such a detailed report ought to be put off until the judge came home.
Instead, we made Pyotr tell us about himself.
I listened to his story with emotion. I had known him for over twenty-
five years, and he did not strike me at all as being now a different person
as Katya had described him to me. The "artistic vision" that had always
intrigued me in Pyotr and which distinguished him from the ordinary
run of men, had now deepened, if anything.
He showed us his albums—for the last year Pyotr had been serving as
a scenic artist with a frontline theatre. Here were sketches of military
life, often hastily dashed off. But the moral fibre of our people, which
everyone knows who has spent even a few days in the army, was caught
in them with remarkable fidelity.
I had often stopped before unforgettable scenes of war, regretting that
they vanished without a trace as one gave place to another. Now I was
seeing them in bare outline, but none the less faithfully and brilliantly
reproduced.
"There," Pyotr said with a good-natured smile when I had
congratulated him, "and the judge says they're no good. Not heroic
enough. My son draws too," he added, pushing out his lower lip, as he
always did when pleased. "He's not bad, he has a gift, I think."
Katya got Nina Kapitonovna's letters out of the suitcase-the old lady
was still living near Novosibirsk with little Pyotr-and Aunt Dasha, who
had always been interested in Grandma, demanded that some of them
be read out aloud.
Grandma was still living on her own after her quarrel with the Farm
Manager, despite the fact that he had offered her apologies and asked
her to come back. She had "thanked him and declined, as I had never
been taught to sue for a favour", as she wrote. Having had the
satisfaction of declining this invitation, she astonished the whole district
by suddenly taking on a job in the local Recreation Hall.
"I am teaching dress-making," she wrote briefly, "and I congratulate
you and Sanya. I sized him up long ago, when he was a little fellow. I fed
him buckwheat porridge to make him grow. He's a fine boy. Don't you
bully him, you've got a nasty temper."
This was in answer to our letter telling her that we had found each
other.
"I didn't sleep all night for thinking of poor Maria," she wrote on
receiving the news that the remains of the expedition had been found. "I
thought it was for the best, her not knowing the terrible fate your father
suffered."
357
Little Pyotr was quite well, and had grown a lot, to judge by his
photograph. He resembled his mother more than ever. We thought of
her and sat in silence for a long time, reliving as it were, the anguish of
that senseless death. As far back as the spring Katya had taken steps to
get a pass for Grandma and the boy to come to Moscow, and there was a
hope that we should see them on our way back.
Our old idea, Katya's and mine, of all of us settling down in Leningrad
as one family was repeated that evening more than once. A single
family—with Grandma and the two Pyotrs. Pyotr Senior looked rather
confused when, speaking of the flat which we had already received in
imagination-and not just anywhere but in Kirovsky Prospekt-we
assigned to him a studio in a quiet part of the flat where nobody would
be in his way. I knew of one woman he did not mind being in his way, a
woman of whom Katya spoke with enthusiasm. But that evening of
course, nobody said a word about her.
The house was still asleep when the judge returned. He gave such a
fierce growl when Aunt Dasha made to wake us that we had to pretend
being asleep for another half hour. Just like five years ago, we heard him
snorting and grunting in the kitchen as he washed and splashed about.
Katya fell asleep again, but I dressed quietly and went into the
kitchen, where he was drinking tea, sitting barefooted, in a clean shirt,
his head and moustache still wet from washing.
"I woke you up after all," he said, stepping up to me and hugging me.
Whenever I turned to my hometown and my old home he always met
me with that stern: "Well, let's hear all about it!" The old man wanted to
know what I had been doing and whether I had been living right during
the years since we last met. Regarding me sternly from' under his tufted
eyebrows, he interrogated me like the real judge he was, and I knew that
nowhere in the world would I receive a fairer sentence. But on this
occasion, for the first time in my life, the judge demanded no account
from me.
"Four, I see?" he said, eyeing my decorations with a pleased look.
"Yes."
"And a fifth for Captain Tatarinov," he went on gravely. "It's hard to
word it, but you'll get it."
It really was hard to word it, but apparently the old man had decided
to tackle that in earnest, because the same evening, when we again met
round the table, he delivered a speech in which he attempted to sum up
what I had done. "Life goes on," he said. "You have come back to your
hometown as grown-up, mature people, and you say you have difficulty
in recognising it, it has changed so much. It has not merely changed, it
has matured, the way you have matured and discovered within
yourselves the strength to fight and win. But other thoughts, too, come
to my mind when I look at you, dear Sanya. You have found Captain
Tatarinov's expedition. Dreams come true, very often truth is stranger
than fiction. It is to you that his farewell letters are addressed-to the
man who would carry on his great work. And it is you that I see standing
by right at his side, because captains such as he and you advance
mankind and science."
And he raised his glass and drained it to my health.
We sat round the table until late into the night. Then Aunt Dasha
announced that it was time to go to bed, but we did not agree and went
out instead for a walk by the river.