We held our sides with laughter.
In short, the housekeeper lost her shoes, and the result was that
Nikolai Antonich invited Grandma in for a serious talk.
'I'm this, I'm that!' said Grandma, puffing herself up the way Nikolai
Antonich did when talking about himself. 'Why don't you keep quiet if
you're better than the next man. Let other people say it. Showed me the
flat. 'Take your choice, Nina Kapitonovna!' '
Nikolai Antonich had been given a flat in a new house in Gorky Street
and had offered poor old Grandma the choice of any room she liked in
this splendid flat. He had been running around Moscow a whole month,
selecting furniture. The old flat, Nikolai Antonich said, was to be turned
into a 'Captain Tatarinov Museum'. The fact that Captain Tatarinov had
never set foot in this flat did not seem to bother him.
'And I bowed to him and said: 'Much obliged, I'm sure. But I've never
yet lived in other people's homes.' '
It was after this conversation that Grandma got the idea of leaving
Nikolai Antonich and coming to live with us. But her fear of him was so
great that instead of simply packing up and going away, she first made
her peace with him and even with the housekeeper. She devised a
cunning psychological plan based on Nikolai Antonich's departure for
Bolshevo to spend his holiday at the Scientists' Rest Home. For the first
time in twenty years she left home and sneaked out of Moscow,
umbrella in one hand and travelling-bag in the other.
Sanya always got up after six and we'd go for a swim before breakfast.
We did the same that morning, which looked no different from any
other Sunday morning.
No different. Then why do I remember it so well? Why do I see, as
though it were yesterday, Sanya and myself tripping down the hill hand
in hand, and he balancing as he glides along the aspen tree thrown
across the brook, while I take off my shoes and wade across, feeling the
thick folds of the sandy bed with my feet? Why is it that I can repeat
every word of our conversation? Why do I still feel the dreamy, misty
delight of the river in the slanting beams of the sun? Why, with a
tenderness that wrings my heart, do I remember every trivial detail of
that morning - the drops of water on Sanya's tanned face, shoulders and
chest and the wet tuft of hair on the back of his head when he comes out
of the water and sits down beside me clasping his knees? And that boy,
with his trousers rolled up, and carrying a home-made net, whom Sanya
255
had taught how to catch crabs with the aid of a campfire or a bait of
rotten meat?
Because before some three or four hours had passed all this-our
wonderful swim together, the dreamy pool of the river with its
motionless banks reflected in it, the boy with the net and a thousand
other thoughts, feelings and impressions—all this was suddenly gone,
swept miles and miles away, looking small, insignificant and infinitely
remote as if seen through the wrong end of binoculars.
September 3, 1941. If time could be made to stand still, I would have
done it the moment when, running back to town and no longer finding
Sanya there, I had got off the tram in Nevsky Prospekt and stopped in
front of a huge shop window displaying the first communiquй issued by
the High Command. Standing close to the window I read the
communiquй, then turned to see the grave anxious faces behind me,
and a curious feeling took hold of me, as if this reading of mine was
taking place in some new strange life. That evening, the first warm
evening that summer, the pale shadows walking the pavements, the
moon riding the sky above the Admiralty spire with the sun still up—all
these belonged to that mysterious new life. The first words in that life
were written in heavy letters across the whole width of the window.
People kept coming up to read them, and there was nothing you could
do about it, however desperately you wanted to.
Rosalia had given me Sanya's note and I kept taking it out of my bag
and reading it.
'Darling Pi-Mate,' ran the hastily scribbled note on the bluish sheet
from his pocket-diary, 'I embrace you. Remember, you believe.'
When we lived in the Crimea we had a dog named Pirate, who used to
follow me about whenever I went. Sanya used to laugh and invented the
name 'Pi-Mate' for the two of us. 'Remember, you believe'-those were
my words. I had once said that I believed in his life. He was in excellent
spirits. Though we didn't say goodbye to each other, he did not even
mention it in his note, it didn't mean anything.
I returned to the dacha and spent the night there, but I don't think I
slept a wink. I must have done, though, because I suddenly woke up
dismayed, with a wildly beating heart. 'It's war. And there's nothing you
can do about it.'
I got up and woke Nanny.
'We must pack up. Nanny. We're leaving tomorrow.'
'You do keep changing your mind,' Nanny said crossly, yawning.
She was sitting on the bed in a long white nightgown, grumbling
sleepily, while I paced up and down the room, not listening to her, then
flung the windows open. Out there, in the young, smiling wood, such a
stillness reigned, such a joyous peace!
Grandma heard us talking and called me.
'What's the matter, Katya?' she demanded.
'We didn't say goodbye. Grandma! I don't know how it happened, but
we didn't!'
She looked at me and gave me a kiss, then furtively made a sign of the
cross.
'It's a good thing that you didn't. It's a good sign. It means that hell
come back soon,' she said, and I cried and felt that I couldn't bear it,
just couldn't bear it.
256
Pyotr arrived by the evening train, looking tired and worried, but
determined, which was quite unlike him.
It was from him that I first heard that children were to be evacuated
