about the Arctic scenery, and even my flight to Vanokan with the doctor.
Nina Kapitonovna wanted to know whether I flew very high, and this
reminded me of Aunt Dasha's letter which I had received when still at
school at Balashov: 'Since it's not your lot to walk on the ground like
other people, then I beg you, Sanya dear, to fly low.'
I told them how Misha Golomb had got hold of that letter and how,
ever since then, whenever I put on my flying-helmet, the boys at the
airfield used to shout from all sides: 'Sanya, don't fly high!'
Misha started a comic journal at the school entitled Fly Low. It ran a
special section called: 'Flying Techniques in Pictures' with verses like
this:
It's good to glide when you get height,
Don't try daisy-clipping, though,
Don't risk your life on any flight,
Take Auntie's advice and fly low.
I must have made it a good story, because everyone laughed, loudest
of all Nikolai Antonich. He held his sides with laughter. His face turned
pale - it always did when he laughed.
Katya hardly sat at the table. She kept getting up and disappearing for
long periods in the kitchen, and I had an idea that she went out in order
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to be alone and think things out. She had that sort of look when she
came back into the room. On one such occasion she went up to the
sideboard with a biscuit barrel and evidently forgot what she had gone
there for. I looked her straight in the eye and she answered with an
anxious puzzled look.
Nikolai Antonich must have noticed our exchange of glances. His face
clouded and he began to speak still more slowly and smoothly.
Then Romashka arrived. Nina Kapitonovna answered the doorbell and I
heard her say to him in the hall in a tone of timid malice:
'We have a visitor!'
He lingered in the hall for quite a time, preening himself, no doubt.
When he came in he did not show the slightest surprise at seeing me.
'Ah, so that's who your visitor is,' he said with a sour smile. 'Very
glad. Very glad to see you, very glad.' His face belied his words. If
anybody was glad it was me. From the moment he came in I watched his
every movement. I did not take my eyes off him. What kind of man was
he? How had he turned out? What was his attitude to Nikolai Antonich,
to Katya? He went up to her and started chatting, and every movement,
every word of his was a sort of riddle which I had to guess there and
then, while my eyes kept drilling his face and I kept thinking about him.
Now that I saw them together, him and Katya, I could have laughed—
so insignificant did he look beside her, so ugly and meanly. He sounded
very sure of himself when he talked to her, 'too sure' I made a mental
note. He passed some humorous remark to Nina Kapitonovna, but
nobody smiled. 'Not even Nikolai Antonich,' I made another mental
note.
The two started talking shop, something to do with a student's thesis,
which Nikolai Antonich considered poor, and Romashka considered
good.
This was done, of course, to stress the fact that my presence meant
nothing to them. I preferred it that way, if anything, because I was now
able to sit and watch them, listening and thinking.
'No,' I said to myself, 'this is not the old Romashka, who was even
proud of being at the complete beck and call of Nikolai Antonich. He
talks to him in a slighting tone, almost offensive, and Nikolai Antonich
answers wearily, wincing. Theirs is a difficult relationship, and Nikolai
Antonich finds it irksome. I was right. Romashka had not been acting on
his behalf. He had not taken those papers from Vyshimirsky in order to
destroy them. He had done it so that he could sell them to Nikolai
Antonich—that was more like him. And must have demanded a pretty
stiff price too. That is, if he had sold them and was not still haggling.'
Katya asked me something and I answered her. Romashka, who was
listening to Nikolai Antonich, glanced at us uneasily, and suddenly an
idea passed slowly through my mind and seemed to step a little to one
side of the others as if waiting for me to come up closer. It was a very
weird idea, but quite a valid one for anybody who had known Romashov
since childhood. At the moment, however, I could not dwell on it
because the thought was chilling and would not bear thinking of. I
merely glanced at it, as it were, from the side.
Then Nikolai Antonich went into his study with Romashka and we
were left with the old ladies, one of whom was deaf while the other
pretended to be deaf.
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'Katya,' I said quietly, 'Korablev asked you to call on him tomorrow
at seven. Will you come?'
She nodded.
'Was it all right, my coming here? I wanted to see you ever so badly.'
She nodded again.
'And please forget that evening when we last met. It was all wrong.
Consider that we haven't met yet.'
She looked at me in silence with a puzzled expression.
CHAPTER EIGHT
TRUE TO A MEMORY
What was that idea? I thought about it the whole evening until I fell
asleep. The next morning I awoke with a feeling that I had not slept at
all for thinking.
The whole day was like that. With this thought in my mind I went to
the Northern Sea Route Administration, to the Geographica Society and
to the office of a journal devoted to Arctic affairs. At times I forgot about
it, but only as though I had simply left it outside the door and then come
out and run into it again like an old acquaintance.
Towards the evening, tired and irritable, I arrived at Korablev's. He
was working when I came, marking exercise books. Two high stacks of
