"Grown-ups have to have official travel papers," he said with
assurance. "But we don't need anything."
He was no longer silent. He remonstrated with me, teased me,
accused me of cowardice, and sneered. Everything that was happening
on Earth, merely went to prove, in his view, that we had to make tracks
for Turkestan without a moment's delay. Old Skovorodnikov proclaimed
himself a Bolshevik and made Aunt Dasha take down the icons. Pyotr
cashed in on this situation by arguing that life in the yard would now be
impossible.
I don't know whether he would have succeeded in the end in taking
me into the venture had not Aunt Dasha and Skovorodnikov
decided in family council to place Sanya and me into an orphanage.
With tears in her eyes Aunt Dasha declared that she would visit us at the
orphanage every day, that she would put us in there only for the winter,
and we would return for sure in the summer. In the orphanage we
would be fed, taught and clothed. They would give us new boots, two
shirts each, an overcoat and cap, stockings and drawers. I remember
asking her, "What are drawers?"
We knew the orphanage children. They were sickly looking kids in
grey jackets and crumpled grey trousers. They were ever so smart at
shooting birds with their catapults; they afterwards roasted and ate the
birds in their garden. That's how they were fed in the orphanage!
Altogether they were a "bad lot", and we had scraps with them, and now
I was to become one of them!
I went to Pyotr the same day and told him I was willing. We had very
little money—only ten rubles. We sold Mother's boots in the second-
hand market for another ten. That made it twenty. With the utmost
precautions we removed a blanket from the house; with equal
precaution we returned it; nobody had wanted to buy it, though we
asked very little for it—four fifty, I believe. That was just the amount we
had spent on food as we hawked our blanket round the market. Totaclass="underline"
fifteen rubles fifty kopecks.
Pyotr wanted to flog his books, but luckily nobody bought them. I say
"luckily", because those books now occupy a place of honour in my
40
library. On second thought, we did manage to sell one of them-Yuri
Miloslavsky, I believe. Totaclass="underline" sixteen rubles.
We figured that this money would get us to Pyotr's uncle, and once
there we had the thrilling prospect of life aboard a railway engine to
look forward to. I remember the question whether we should carry arms
or not caused no little argument. Pyotr had a knife; which he called a
dagger. We made a sheath for it out of an old boot. Everything else was
in order: stout boots, overcoats in good condition (Pyotr's even had a fur
collar) and a pair of trousers apiece.
I was very gloomy that day and Aunt Dasha made several attempts to
cheer me up. Poor Aunt Dasha! If she only knew that we had put off our
departure because we were counting on her cookies. The next day she
was to take Sanya and me down to the orphanage, and she spent the day
baking cookies "for the road". She was baking them all day and kept
taking off her glasses and blowing her nose.
She made me give a solemn promise not to steal, not to smoke, not to
be rude, not to be lazy, not to get drunk, not to swear or fight—more
taboos than there were in the Ten Commandments. To my little sister,
who was very sad, she gave a magnificent ribbon of pre-war
manufacture.
Of course, we could have simply slipped out of the house and
disappeared. But Pyotr decided that this was too tame, and he drew up a
rather intricate plan which had an air of fascinating mystery about it.
In the first place, we were to swear to each other a "blood-oath of
friendship". It ran like this:
"Whoever breaks this oath shall receive no mercy until he has counted
all the sand grains in the sea, all the leaves in the forest, all the
raindrops falling from the sky. When he tries to go forward, he will go
back, when he wants to go left he will go right. The moment I fling my
cap to the ground thunderbolts shall strike him who breaks this oath. To
strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
We had to utter this oath in turn, then shake hands and fling our caps
down together. This was performed in Cathedral Gardens on the eve of
our departure. I recited the oath by heart, while Pyotr read it "off the
cuff. After that he pricked his finger with a pin and wrote "P.S." on the
paper in blood, the letters standing for Pyotr Skovorodnikov. I scrawled
with some difficulty the initials "A.G.", standing for Alexander
Grigoriev.
Secondly, I was to go to bed at ten and pretend to be asleep, though
nobody was curious to know whether I was asleep or only pretending. At
three in the morning Pyotr was to give three whistles outside the
window—the prearranged signal that all was in order, the coast was
clear and we could decamp.
This was far more dangerous than it would have been in the daytime,
when things really were in order, the coast clear, and nobody would
have noticed that we had run away. In the night we risked being grabbed
by the patrols—the town was under martial law—and the dogs were let
loose at night all along the river bank. But Pyotr commanded and I
obeyed. And then came the crucial night, my last night in the paternal
home.
Aunt Dasha was sitting at the table, mending my shirt. Though they
provided you with linen at the orphanage, here was one shirt more, to
be on the safe side. In front of her was the lamp with the blue shade
41
which had been Aunt Dasha's wedding presence Mother. It looked sort
of abashed now, as though it felt ill at ease in our deserted house. It was
dark in the corners. The kettle hung over the stove, but its shadow
looked more like a huge upturned nose than a kettle. From a crack
under the window came whiffs of cool air and the tang of the river. Aunt
Dasha was sewing and talking. She took something from the table and
the circle of light on the ceiling began to quiver. It was ten o'clock. I
pretended to be asleep.
"Now mind, Sanya, you must always do as your brother tells you,"
Aunt Dasha was telling my sister. "Being a girl, you must lean on him.
We womenfolk always lean on the men. He'll stand up for you."
My heart was wrung, but I tried not think of Sanya. "And you, too,
Sanya," Aunt Dasha said to me, and I could see a tear creep down from
under her glasses and fall on my shirt, "take care of your sister. You'll be
in different sections, but I'll ask them to allow you to visit her every
day."
"All right, Aunt Dasha."
"Ah, my God, if only Aksinya were alive..."
She turned up the wick, threaded her needle and took up her work
again with a sigh.
I am not asleep, I am pretending to be asleep. Half past eleven.
Twelve. Aunt Dasha gets up. For the last, the very last time I see her
kind face above the lamp, lit up from below. She places her hand over
the rim of the glass and blows. Darkness. She makes the sign of the
cross over us in the dark and lies down. She is spending that night with
us.
It's all very well to pretend you're asleep when you're not sleepy! I
open my eyes with an effort. What's the time? Three o'clock is still a