"Yes," I said drearily.
She looked at me.
"Fancy making all that fuss over a silly thermometer," she said
contemptuously. "If you like I'll say it was me who did it. I don't care.
Wait a minute."
She ran off and was back in a few minutes wearing a small hat and
looking quite different, sort of impressive, and with ribbons in her
plaits.
"I told Grandma you'd been here. She's sleeping. She asked why you
didn't come in. It's a good thing that lactometer is broken, she says. It
was such a nuisance, having to stick it into the milk every time. It didn't
show right anyway. It's Nikolai Antonich's idea, but Grandma can
always tell whether the milk's good or not by tasting it."
The nearer we got to the school the more pronounced became Katya's
gravity of manner. She walked up the stairs, head thrown back, eyes
narrowed, with an aloof air.
Nikolai Antonich was in the teachers' room where I had left him.
"Don't say anything, I'll tell him myself," I muttered to Katya.
She gave a contemptuous sniff, one of her plaits arching out from
under her hat.
It was this conversation that started off the string of riddles of which I
shall write in the next chapter.
The thing was that Nikolai Antonich, that suave Nikolai Antonich
with his grand air of patronage, whom we were accustomed to regard as
lord and master of School 4-vanished the moment Katya crossed the
threshold. In his place was a new Nikolai Antonich, one who smiled
unnaturally when he spoke, leaned across the table, opening his eyes
wide and raising his eyebrows as though Katya were speaking of God
knows what extraordinary things. Was he afraid of her, I wondered?
"Nikolai Antonich, you sent him for the lactometer, didn't you?"
Katya said motioning to me with her eyes in an offhand manner.
"I did, Katya."
"Very well. I've broken it."
Nikolai Antonich looked grave.
"She's fibbing, " I said glumly. "It exploded."
"I don't understand. Shut up, Grigoriev! What's it all about, Katya,
explain."
"There's nothing to explain," Katya answered with a proud toss of her
head. "I broke the lactometer, that's all."
60
"I see. But I believe I sent this boy for it, didn't I?"
"And he hasn't brought it because I broke it."
"She's fibbing," I repeated.
Katya's eyes snapped at me.
"That's all very well, Katya," Nikolai Antonich said, pursing his lips
benignly. "But you see, they've delivered milk to the school and I've put
off breakfast in order to test the quality of this milk before deciding
whether or not to continue taking it from our present milk women. It
seems I have been waiting for nothing. What's more, it appears that a
valuable instrument has been broken, and broken in circumstances
which are anything but clear. Now you explain, Grigoriev, what it's all
about."
"What a frightful bore! I'm going, Nikolai Antonich," Katya
announced.
Nikolai Antonich looked at her. Somehow it struck me at that
moment that he hated her.
"All right, Katya, run along," he said in a mild tone. "I'll have it out
here with this boy."
"In that case I'll wait."
She settled herself in a chair and impatiently chewed the end of her
plait while we were talking. I daresay if she had gone away the talk
would not have ended so amicably. The lactometer affair was forgiven.
Nikolai Antonich even recalled the fact that I had been sent to his school
as a sculptor-to-be. Katya listened with interest.
From that day on we became friends. She liked me for not letting her
take the blame on herself and not mentioning the firedamp explosion
when telling my story.
"You thought I was going to catch it, didn't you?" she said, when we
came out of the school.
"Mmm."
"Not likely! Come and see us. Grandma's invited you."
CHAPTER SIX
I GO VISITING
I woke up that morning with the thought: should I go or not? Two
things worried me - my trousers, and Nikolai Antonich. The trousers
were not exactly picture-look, being neither short nor long, and patched
at the knees. As for Nikolai Antonich, he was Head of the school, you
will remember, that's to say a rather formidable personage. What if he
suddenly started questioning me about this, that and the other?
Nevertheless, when lessons were over, I polished my boots, and wetted,
brushed and parted my hair. I was going to pay a visit!
How awkward I felt, how shy I was! My confounded hair kept sticking
up on the top of my head and I had to keep it down with spit. Nina
Kapitonovna was telling Katya and me something, when all of a sudden
61
she commanded: "Shut your mouth!" I had been staring at her open-
mouthed.
Katya showed me round the flat. In one of the rooms she lived herself
with her mother, in another Nikolai Antonich, and the third was used as
a dining-room. The desk-set in Nikolai Antonich's room represented "a
scene from the life of Ilya of Murom", as Katya explained to me. In fact,
the inkwell was made in the shape of a bearded head wearing a spiked
helmet, the ashtray represented two crossed, ancient Russian gauntlets,
and so on. The ink was under the helmet, which meant that Nikolai
Antonich had to dip his pen right into the hero's skull. This stuck me as
odd.
Between the windows stood a bookcase; I had never seen so many
books together. Over the bookcase hung a half-length portrait of a naval
officer with a broad brow, a square jaw and dancing grey eyes.
I noticed a similar but smaller portrait in the dining-room and a still
smaller one in Katya's room over the bed.
"My Father," Katya explained, glancing at me sideways. And I had been
thinking that Nikolai Antonich was her father! On second thoughts,
though, she would hardly have called her own father by his name and
patronymic. "Stepfather," I thought, but the next moment decided that
he couldn't be. I knew what a stepfather was. This did not look like it.
Then Katya showed me a mariner's compass—a very interesting
gadget. It was a brass hoop on a stand with a little bowl swinging in it,
and in the bowl, under a glass cover, a needle. Whichever way you
turned the bowl, even if you held it upside down, the needle would still
keep swinging and the anchor at the tip would point North. "Such a
compass can stand any gale." "What's it doing here?" "Father gave it to
me." "Where is he?"
Katya's face darkened.
"I don't know."
"He divorced her mother and left her," I decided immediately. I had
heard of such cases.
I noticed that there was a lot of pictures in the flat, and very good
ones, too, I thought. One was really beautiful-it showed a straight wide
path in a garden and pine trees lit up by the sun.
"That's a Levitan," Katya said in a casual, grown-up way.
I didn't know at the time that Levitan was the name of the artist, and
decided that this must be the name of the place painted in the picture.
Then the old lady called us in to have tea with saccharin.
"So that's the sort you are, Alexander Grigoriev," she said. "You went
and broke the lactometer."