"Ah, that! It reads: 'I beg of you, do not trust that man.' "
Katya called on us that evening, but we did not speak about the old
letters—we had agreed on that beforehand. Katya was very sad.
Everyone was nice to her, especially Sanya, who had become attached to
her immediately as only girls know how. Afterwards Sanya and I saw
her home.
The old folks were still up when we got back. The judge, somewhat
belatedly, was scolding Aunt Dasha for not having delivered that mail—
"at least those letters where the address could be made out"— and could
find only one extenuating circumstance: that it had happened ten years
ago. Aunt Dasha was talking about Katya. My fate, she thought, was
decided.
"I think she's very nice," she said, sighing. "Beautiful and sad. Healthy
girl."
I asked Sanya for the map of the Soviet North and showed her the
route which Captain Tatarinov was to have taken from Leningrad to
Vladivostok. Only then did I remind myself of his discovery. What land
could that be lying north of the Taimyr Peninsula? "Why, that must be
Severnaya Zemlya!" Sanya said. What the devil! It was Severnaya
Zemlya (Northern Land) discovered in 1913 by Lieutenant Vilkitsky.
Latitude 79°35,' between 86 and 87 longitude. Very strange!
"Hold on!" I said, and must have gone a bit pale, because Aunt Dasha
looked at me anxiously. "I've got it! First it was a silvery strip running
out from the very horizon. On April 3rd the strip became an opaque
patch. April 3rd!"
"Sanya," Aunt Dasha began in alarm.
"Hold on! April 3rd. Now Vilkitsky discovered Severnaya Zemlya in
the autumn, I don't remember when, but it was in the autumn, some
time in September or October. In the autumn, six months later! That's
to say he discovered nothing at all, dammit, because it had already been
discovered."
"Sanya!" It was the judge speaking now.
"Discovered and named after Maria Vasilievna," I went on, pressing
my finger hard on Severnaya Zemlya as though afraid there might be
some other mistake about it. "Named after Maria Vasilievna. Maria
Land, or something like that. Now sit down and I'll explain it all to you."
Talk about sleep after a day like that! I drank water and studied the
map. The dining-room was hung with pictures of the town, and I
studied them, too, for a long time without realising that they were
Sanya's paintings and that she was studying painting and dreamt of
going to the Academy of Arts. I looked at the map again. I recollected
that the name Severnaya Zemlya had been given to these islands only
recently and that Vilkitsky had named them Nicholas II Land.
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Poor Captain Tatarinov! He had been surprisingly, extraordinarily
unlucky. There was not a single mention of him in any geography book
and nobody in the world knew what he had done.
I felt a cold shiver of pity and rapture, and went to bed, as it had gone
five and from outside in the street came the sounds of a sweeping
broom. But I couldn't fall asleep. Disjointed phrases from the Captain's
letter haunted me, and I could hear Aunt Dasha's voice reading the
letter and see her peering over her spectacles, sighing and faltering. I
recollected a scene, which had once presented itself to my imagination-a
scene of white tents in the snow, huskies harnessed to sledges, a giant of
a man in fur boots and a tall fur cap—and I wished that this had all
happened to me, that I had been on board that ship which was slowly
moving to her doom with the drifting ice and that I had been the
Captain who wrote that farewell letter to his wife, and could not finish
it. "I have named it after you, so now you will find on every map a
heartfelt greeting from your..."
I wondered how that sentence ended? Then something slowly passed
through my head, very slowly, almost reluctantly, and I sat' up in bed,
half incredulous, feeling that in another minute I would go mad. Go
mad remembering this: "greeting from your Mongotimo Hawk's Claw,
as you used to call me. God, how long ago that was! I am not
complaining , though..."
"I am not complaining, though," I repeated, muttering, fumbling and
groping among my memories for some missing word. "I am not
complaining. We shall see each other again and all will be well. But one
thought, one thought torments me!"
I jumped up, switched on the light and rushed over to the table on
which lay the pencils and maps.
"It's galling to think," I was now writing on one of the maps, "that
everything could have turned out differently. Misfortunes dogged us,
but our main misfortune was the mistake for which we are now having
to pay every hour, every minute of the day-the mistake I made in
entrusting the fitting out of our expedition to Nikolai." Nikolai? Was it
Nikolai? Yes, it was!
I paused at this point; beyond it there was a sort of gap in my
memory, and after that there had come something-I remembered that
now quite clearly-something about a sailor named Skachkov, who had
fallen into a crevasse and been crushed to death. But this was not the
thing. This was the general context of the letter, not the actual text, of
which I could recall nothing more, except a few disconnected words.
I got no sleep at all. The judge was up at eight and got a fright when
he saw me sitting in my underwear over a map of the North, from which
I had managed to read all the details of the ill-fated voyage of the St.
Maria— details which would have astonished Captain Tatarinov himself
had he returned.
We had arranged the previous evening to go to the town's museum.
Sanya was keen on showing us this museum, which was the pride of
Ensk. It was housed in an old mansion, once the residence of a rich
merchant. On the second floor was an exhibition of paintings by Sanya's
teacher, the artist Tuva, and she took us to see these first of all. The
artist was there in person-a genial little man in a velvet blouse a la
Tolstoy and with a mop of black hair in which gleamed thick grey
strands. His paintings were not bad, though rather monotonous—all
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Ensk and Ensk. Ensk by day and by night, in moonlight and sunlight,
the old town and the new town. We praised them fulsomely, though—
this Tuva was such a nice man and Sanya gazed at him with such
adoration.
She must have guessed that Katya and I wanted to have a talk,
because she suddenly excused herself and stayed behind on some
trifling pretext, while we went downstairs into a large hall in which
stood knights in chain-mail, which stuck out from under their
breastplates like a shirt under a man's waistcoat.
Naturally, I was all eagerness to tell Katya about my nocturnal
discoveries. She saved me the trouble of starting the conversation by
starting it herself.
"Sanya," she said, when we stopped in front of a Stephen Bathori
man-at-arms, who somehow reminded me of Korablev. "I've been
thinking about who he meant in that phrase: 'Don't trust that man.' "
"Well?"
"I've come to the conclusion that it ... it's not him."
We were silent. She stared fixedly at the man-at-arms.
"But it was about him," I retorted grimly. "By the way, your father