allowed; of having gone off without a wireless man. He was accused of
thoughtlessness in selecting his crew, among whom 'there was not a
single man who could handle a sail'. They made sneering remarks about
'this preposterous adventure, which reflected, as in a drop of water, this
present-day, pretentious, muddled life of ours.'
Within a few days of the St. Maria's sailing a violent storm broke out
in the Kara Sea and immediately rumours spread that the expedition
had been shipwrecked off the coast of Novaya Zemlya. 'Who is to
blame?' 'The Fate of the St. Maria', 'Where is Tatarinov?'- the first
chilling impressions of my childhood came back to me as I read these
articles. Mother came quickly into my little room at Ensk with a
newspaper in her hand. She was wearing that lovely black rustling dress.
She did not see me, though I spoke to her, and I jumped out of bed and
ran up to her in my bare feet and nightgown. The floor was cold, but she
did not tell me to go back to bed nor did she pick me up from the floor.
She just stood by the window with the newspaper in her hand. I tried to
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reach up to the window, too, but all I could see was our garden strewn
with wet maple leaves, and wet paths and puddles in which the
raindrops were still falling. 'Mummy, what are you looking at?' She was
silent. I asked again. I wanted her to take me in her arms, because her
continued silence was frightening me. 'Mummy!' I began to cry, and
that made her turn round and bend down to pick me up, but something
was the matter with her-she sat down on the floor, then lay down and
kept quite still, stretched out on the floor in her lovely black, rustling
dress. And all of a sudden wild, unreasoning terror seized me and I
started to scream. I screamed madly and banged at something with
hands and feet. Then I heard Mother's frightened voice, but I went on
screaming, unable to stop myself. Afterwards, back in bed I heard
Grandma talking to Mother, and Mother saying: 'I frightened her.'
I pretended to be asleep and did not say anything, because after all
she was Mummy and because she was talking and crying in her usual
voice.
Only now, on reading these articles, did I realise what made her act
that way.
The rumours proved to be false, however, and from Yugorsky Shar
Captain Tatarinov telegraphed a message of 'hearty greetings and best
wishes to all who had made donations to the expedition and to all its
well-wishers'.
This message was printed in facsimile under an unfamiliar portrait of
Father in naval uniform-regulation jacket with white shoulder-straps-an
elegant officer with an old-fashioned moustache turned up at the ends.
In sending 'best wishes to those who had made donations' he was
hoping that their contributions would enable the Committee for the
Exploration of Russia's Arctic Territories to support the families of the
crew. He wrote about this in his dispatch sent through the Yugorsky
Shar Dispatch Service, which was published in the newspaper Novoye
Vremya:
'I am confident that the Committee will not leave to the mercy of fate
the families of those who have dedicated their lives to the common
national interests.'
Vain hopes! In the issue of the same newspaper for June 27, I read a
report of the Committee's meeting: 'According to N. A. Tatarinov, the
Committee's Secretary, the recent collection has yielded negligible
results. Neither have many other methods, such as the organisation of
entertainments, etc., produced the hoped-for profits. Therefore, the
Committee finds itself unable to render to the families of the crew the
proposed assistance of 1,000 rubles.'
This phrase about 'donations from well-wishers' sounded so queer
and grotesque to me. Maybe Mother and I, too, had been living like
beggars on this almsgiving?
But what surprises me most in these old newspapers is the way they
all declared with one voice, that the schooner St. Maria was doomed.
Some figured out, pencil in hand, that she would scarcely make Novaya
Zemlya. Others believed she would be trapped in the first icefield and
would perish somewhat later, after passing Franz Josef Land as a
'captive of the Arctic Sea'.
That she would fail to navigate the Northern Sea Route, either in one,
two or three seasons, nobody had any doubt.
The only exception was a poet who published some verses 'To I. L.
Tatarinov' in an Archangel newspaper. He was of a different mind:
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He is well! God watches over him! The man's astounding energy and
risk Have unlocked the Arctic's frozen disk. The icefield crumbles and
retreats before him.
I had known a good deal before reading these clippings. In the letter
which Sanya had found at Ensk, Father wrote that 'most of the sixty
dogs had had to be shot at Novaya Zemlya'. Vyshimirsky's statement
which Sanya had taken down spoke about rotten clothing and damaged
chocolate. In the newspaper Arkhangelsk I read the letter of a merchant
named E. V. Demidov, who stated that 'the curing of meat and the
preparation of ready-made clothes were not my line of business' and
that 'in the present instant I acted as an agent. Moreover, as I had a big
business of my own to attend to, I naturally could not examine every
piece of meat and every fish that went into the barrel. Besides, Captain
Tatarinov kept wiring: 'Stop purchases, no money'. And so on. Why start
fitting out an expedition when you have no money? If there was
anything faulty in such hurried preparations, then those to blame for it
should be sought not among the local businessmen, but higher up...'
What I didn't know-nor Sanya either, and I can't understand why
Mother never mentioned it-was that 'three days before St. Maria set
sail it was discovered that in the forepeak, below the second deck and
well below the waterline, on both sides of the collision-bulkhead there
were gashes right through the ribs and shell to the outer sheathing,
which made the ship unseaworthy. These holes that bore the telltale
