stayed whenever we came to Leningrad, and whenever we came we were
received here as the nearest and dearest of friends. In this house Katya
had lived for more than a year when I was fighting in Spain. In this
house she had lived during the blockade, suffering hunger and cold,
working and helping others, bestowing upon them the light of her clean,
brave spirit. Where was she? Terror gripped my throat. I clenched my
teeth to still the quivering of my body.
At that moment I heard the voice of a child, and in a gap in the wall
overhead there appeared a boy of about twelve, dark-complexioned,
with high cheekbones.
'Who do you want, Comrade Officer?'
'Do you live here?'
'Yes.'
'Alone?'
'Of course not. With my mother.'
'Is your mother at home just now?'
'Yes.'
He showed me how to go up-at one spot there was a narrow plank
bridging a gap in the staircase-and within a few minutes I was talking to
295
his mother, a tired-looking woman-a Tatar, as I realised the moment
she spoke. She was the yardwoman of House No. 79. To be sure, she
knew Rosalia and Katya well.
'When Nine was hit she go dig,' she said, speaking of Katya. The boy,
who spoke good Russian, explained that 'Nine' was the house where the
food store had been. 'She dug man out, him friend. Ginger man. He
lived her flat.'
'She dug out a friend of hers,' the boy quickly translated. 'Afterwards
he lived in her flat.'
'Second old lady die. Hakim go bury him.'
'The second old lady was Rosalia's sister,' the boy explained.
'Hakim's me. When she died we took her down to the cemetery. The
ginger one was there too. He hired us for the job. Military man, too-a
major.'
I now had to ask about Katya. I steeled myself and did so. With an
angry shake of the head the yardwoman said that she herself had been
laid up in hospital for three months. 'I call for mullah, no mullah in
Leningrad, all mullah die.' And when she returned home Rosalia's flat
was already empty.
'Must ask house management,' she said on second thoughts. 'But
him die too. Maybe she go away? She dig out ginger man, he have bread.
Big sack, carry himself, not let me. I say to him: 'You greedy fool. We
save your life. Don't think about bag, pray to God, read Koran.' '
Katya was not living at Rosalia's when the bomb hit the house— that
was all she knew. I spoke to a number of other women. They wept as
they told me how Katya had helped them. Hakim brought his pals, and
they complained that the ginger major had promised them three
hundred grams per head for the burial, but had 'diddled' them by
giving them only two hundred.
Who the devil could that ginger major be? Pyotr? But Pyotr wasn't a
major, and it was impossible to imagine him doing starving boys out of a
hundred grams of bread. Ah, well, whoever the man was, he had helped
Rosalia bury her sister. Who knows but that he may have helped Katya
in her need. She had been at the funeral with him, and evidently could
not have been so weak if she had managed to walk all the way to the
cemetery. Since then, however, no one had seen her, either alive or
dead.
It was past five when, tired out and with a splitting headache, I started
for the Military Medical Academy. The Academy itself had been
evacuated, but the clinics, turned into hospitals from the first day of the
war, still remained. The Stomatology Department, where Katya worked,
was still there. I was sent to the office, where an elderly typist, who
somehow reminded me of Aunt Dasha, said that Katya had been in a
bad way and Doctor Trofimova had arranged for her to be evacuated
from Leningrad.
'Where to?'
'That I can't say. I don't know.'
'Is Doctor Trofimova herself in Leningrad?'
'As soon as she sent your wife off she went to the front,' the typist
said. 'Since then we've had no news from either of them.'
296
CHAPTER TWELVE
I MEET HYDROGRAPHER R.
I realised now that it had been naive of me to write to Katya in the
course of six months without getting a word in answer, and then expect
that I only had to turn up in Leningrad for her to meet me on her
doorstep with outstretched arms. As if there had not been that cruel
hungry winter of nineteen forty one, with its trainloads of dying children
and special hospitals for Leningraders in cities throughout the land. As
if there had not been those sickly faces with the clouded eyes. As if the
rumble of gunfire could not still be heard in the city coming now from
the East, now from the West.
I was thinking of this as I sat in the office of the Stomatology Clinic,
listening to the typist's story of the young sailor, the spit image of her
own son killed in the war, who had suddenly come and given her three
hundred grams of bread when she no longer had the strength to rise
from her bed.
'You'll find Katerina all right,' she said. 'She dreamt of a flying eagle.
Your husband, I told her. She wouldn't believe me. Now, wasn't I right?
I'm telling you now, too-you'll find her.'
Maybe. She was dying while I had been living in clover in M-v, I
thought, staring dully at this old woman, who was trying to convince me
that I would find Katya, that she would come back to me. 'I was taken
care of and nursed. And she didn't have the hundred grams of bread to
pay the boys with for burying Bertha.' With despair and fury I thought
