square head.
It was getting dark, and I may have been mistaken. No, it was
Romashov all right. Aloof, pale, leaning slightly forward, he slowly
walked past the shop window and was lost in the crowd.
248
PART SEVEN
FROM THE DIARY OF KATYA TATARINOVA
SEPARATION
September 2, 1941. I once read some verses in which the years were
compared to lanterns hanging 'on the slender thread of time drawn
through the mind'. Some of these lanterns burn with a bright, beautiful
light, others flicker smokily in the darkness.
We live in the Crimea and in the Far East. I am the wife of an airman
and I have many new acquaintances, all airmen's wives, in the Crimea
and the Far East. Like them, I worry when new aircraft are received in
the detachment. Like them, I keep telephoning detachment
headquarters, to the annoyance of the duty-officer, whenever Sanya
goes aloft and doesn't come back in time. Like them, I am sure that I
shall never get used to my husband's job, and like them, end up by
getting used to it. Almost impossible though it is, I have not given up my
geology. My old professor, who still calls me 'dear child', assures me
that had I not got married, and to an airman at that, I should long ago
have won my M. Sc. degree. She went back on these words when, in the
late autumn of 1937, I came back to Moscow from the Far East with a
new piece of research done together with Sanya. Aeromagnetic
prospecting, the subject was. Searching for iron-ore deposits from an
airplane.
We are in a sleeping-car compartment of the Vladivostok-Moscow
express. It is almost unbelievable-we have actually been together under
the same roof for ten whole days, without parting day or night. We have
breakfast, dinner and supper at the same table. We see each other in the
daytime-there are said to be women who do not find this strange.
'Sanya, now I know what you are.'
'What am I?'
'You're a traveller.'
249
'Yes, a sky chauffeur-Vladivostok-Irkutsk, take-off from Primorsky
Airport, seven forty-four.'
'That doesn't mean anything. You don't get a chance. All the same
you're a traveller by vocation, it's your grand passion. You know, it has
always seemed to me that every person has a characteristic age of his
own. One person is born forty, while another remains a boy of nineteen
all his life. C. is like that, and so are you. Lots of airmen, in fact.
Especially those who go in for ocean hops.'
'You think I'm one of them?'
'Yes. You won't throw me over when you're hopped across, will you?'
'No. But they'll call me back mid-way.'
I said nothing. 'They'll call me back'—now that was quite a different
story. A story of how my father's life, which Sanya had pieced together
from fragments scattered between Ensk and Taimyr, had fallen into
alien hands. The portraits of Captain Tatarinov hang in the
Geographical Society and the Arctic Institute. Poets dedicate verses to
him, most of them very poor ones. The Soviet Encyclopaedia has a big
article about him signed with the modest initials N.A.T. His voyage is
now history, the history of Russia's conquest of the Arctic, along with
names like Sedov, Rusanov and Toll.
And the higher this name rises, the more often does one hear it
uttered alongside that of his cousin, the distinguished Arctic scientist,
who gave his whole fortune to organise the expedition of the St. Maria
and devoted his whole life to the biography of that great man.
Nikolai Antonich's admirable work has received appreciative
recognition. His book Amid the Icy Wastes is reprinted every year in
editions designed both for children and adults. The newspapers carry
reports of various scientific councils which he chairs. At these councils
he delivers speeches, in which I find traces of the old dispute which
ended that day and hour when a woman with a very white face was
carried out into a cold stone yard and taken away from home for ever.
But that dispute had not ended yet, no! It is not for nothing that that
worthy scientist never tires of repeating in his books that the people
responsible for Captain Tatarinov's death were the tradesmen, notably
one named von Vyshimirsky. It is not for nothing that this worthy
scientist uses arguments with which he had once tried to give the lie to
the words of a schoolboy who had discovered his secret.
Now he is silent, that schoolboy. But the future is still ours.
He is silent, and works tirelessly day and night. On the Volga he
sprays reservoirs. He carries the mail between Irkutsk and Vladivostok
and is happy when he succeeds in delivering Moscow newspapers to
Vladivostok within forty-eight hours. He is promoted to Pilot, Second
Class, and it is I, not he, who feels outraged when, after he had asked-for
the nth time—to be sent to the North, he receives by way of reply a
reappointment as sky chauffeur, this time between Simferopol and
Moscow. What is this secret shadow that keeps falling across his path? I
don't know. Nor does he.
He works and is appreciated, but I alone realise how tired he is of the
monotony of those dreary flights, each one resembling the other like a
thousand brothers...
In the winter of 1937 Sanya is transferred to Leningrad. We stay with
the Berensteins, and all would be well but for one thing: I wake up in the
night to find Sanya lying with his eyes wide open...
250
We stand in the Berensteins' tiny hallway among some old winter
