was thinking at the moment-not that strange, happy feeling about Sanya
being my husband and I his wife, but our former young meetings, as
though he saw us at the school ball, when Sanya had kissed me for the
first time.
'Youth continues,' played the red-haired boy, whom I had thought so
ugly. 'After sorrow comes joy, after parting, reunion. Do you remember
commanding, in your heart, that you find him, and now there he stands,
grey-headed, erect, and the joy and excitement of it are enough to drive
one mad. Tomorrow you start out, and everything will be as you have
commanded. Everything will be fine, because the fairy-tales we believe
in still come true on this earth.'
246
I lay down on the carpeted floor, listening and weeping, half-ashamed
of myself for those foolish tears. But I hadn't cried for so long, and had
always taken pains to pretend that I could not.
I woke Sanya at six o'clock and told him that V. had phoned during the
night.
'You're not angry, are you?'
'What about?'
He sat up on the sofa and looked at me sleepily first with one eye, then
with the other.
'At my not waking you.'
'I'm furious,' he said, and laughed. 'You look younger. Yesterday V.
asked how old you were, and I told him eighteen.'
He kissed me, then ran into the bathroom, came out in bathing trunks
and started to do his exercises. He had made me do morning exercises,
too, but I did them by fits and starts, whereas he did them regularly,
even twice a day-morning and evening.
Still wet, wiping his chest with a rough towel, he went over to the
telephone and lifted the receiver, though I said it was too early to phone
V. I was doing something, lighting the spirit-lamp, I believe, to make
coffee. Sanya asked for V. Then, in a queer voice, he said, 'What?' I
turned to see the towel slip from his shoulder to the floor without him
making any attempt to pick it up. He stood there, very straight, with the
blood ebbing from his face.
'All right, I'll send an express telegram,' he said and hung up.
'What's the matter?'
'Oh, nothing. Some nonsense or other,' Sanya said slowly, picking up
the towel. 'V. got a wire last night saying that the search party was off.
I've been ordered to report to Moscow immediately, at Civil Air Fleet
Headquarters, to take up a new appointment.'
August 19, 1936. Sanya used to say that life was always like that:
everything goes well, then suddenly a sharp turn sends you into
'Barrels' and 'Immelmanns'. This time, though, you could say that the
machine had gone into a spin.
'It's all over, Katya,' he said savagely when he had returned from V.
'The Arctic, expeditions, the St. Maria— don't want to hear anything
more about them. It's all fairy-tales for children, time we forgot them.'
And I promised to be with him in forgetting those 'fairy-tales',
though I was sure that he never would forget them.
I still had a slender hope that Sanya would succeed in Moscow in
getting the order revoked. But the telegram I got from him, sent not
from Moscow but from somewhere on the way to Saratov, killed that
hope. The very appointment which he had received put the seal, as it
were, to the cancellation of the expedition. He had been transferred to
the Agricultural Aviation Service, known as the S.P.A.— Special Purpose
Aviation—and his job now was to sow wheat and spray reservoirs. 'Very
well, I'll be what they take me for,' he wrote in his first letter from some
farm, where he had been spending over a week now 'co-ordinating and
fixing' things with the local authorities. 'To hell with illusions, for they
were illusions really! C. was right after all-if a thing's worth doing at all,
do it well. Don't imagine that I've thrown my hand in. The future is still
ours.'
247
'Let's be grateful for that old story,' he wrote in another letter, 'if only
because it helped us to find and love each other. I am confident, though,
that very soon these old private reckonings will prove important not
only to us.'
Nothing seemed to be working out the way I had thought and dreamt.
I had come to Leningrad for two or three weeks to meet Sanya and
follow him wherever he might go, and now he was far away from me
again. I now found myself with a family—Pyotr junior, Pyotr senior and
Nanny, who had to be taken care of, and it was I who had to do all the
thinking.
I continued my studies of Arctic geology, though I had promised
Sanya to think no more of the North. Being hard up for money, I took
up some dreary work at the Geological Institute.
Ordinarily, I would probably have taken it badly, cursed myself, and
thought about myself a thousand times more than need be. But a
curious inward composure had suddenly taken possession of me. It was
as though, together with the 'fairy-tales', I had seen the last of my
vanity, my pride, my sense of personal grievance at things not having
turned out the way I so passionately wanted them to. 'It can't be helped,
dearest!' I answered Sanya when he blamed himself in one of his letters
for having dragged me out to Leningrad and abandoned me there, and
with a whole family on my hands into the bargain. 'As our old judge
says, you can't have things your own way in life.'
I wrote to him often, long letters about our 'learned' Nanny, about
how quick little Pyotr was changing, about how Pyotr senior all of a
sudden had thrown himself eagerly into his work and his design for a
Pushkin monument was going splendidly.
But not a word did I write about how, one day, while shopping at a
grocery store in October 25th Prospekt, I saw through the window a
familiar figure in a grey overcoat and soft hat, the very hat which had
been bought for my benefit and which sat so awkwardly on the big
