304
emerged a very cool and deliberate young man in a smart cap, who gave
me a close look.
I had to go back into the street to get to the entrance, and at the street
door I hesitated for a moment. I had no gun, and was thinking whether I
ought not have a word with the militiaman standing on the corner. I
dismissed the idea, however. 'He won't get away,' I thought.
I never for a moment doubted that he was in Moscow, probably not in
the army. Even if he was in the army he would still be living in his flat.
Or in a summer cottage. In the mornings he would walk about in his
pyjamas. I could see him as large as life in Ms pyjamas, after a bath,
with the yellow tufts of wet hair sticking up on his head. It was a vision
that set purple circles spinning before my eyes. I had to compose myself,
which meant thinking of something else. I recalled that at five o'clock R.
would be waiting for me at the Hydrographical Department.
'Who's there?'
'May I speak to Romashov?'
'Call back in an hour.'
'Couldn't I wait for him inside,' I said very politely. 'I shan't be able
to call again, unfortunately. I'm afraid he'll be disappointed at not
seeing me.'
The door-chain clinked. It was not slipped off, though. On the
contrary, it was being fastened, so that the person inside could have a
peep at me through the slit. Then with another clink it was taken off. An
old man in an unbuttoned shirt and baggy trousers held up by braces let
me into the hallway. He stared at me suspiciously. There was something
aristocratically haughty and at the same time pitiful about that
weazened, hook-nosed face. A yellow-grey tuft of hair stuck up from his
bald forehead. The skin hung over his Adam's apple in long folds, like
stalactites.
'Von Vyshimirsky?' I said, wonderingly. He started. 'I mean
Vyshimirsky without the 'von'-you're Nikolai Ivanovich Vyshimirsky,
aren't you?'
'What?'
'My dear Nikolai Ivanovich, don't you remember me?' I proceeded
cheerfully. 'I came to see you once.'
He started breathing hard.
'I've had lots of people coming to see me, thousands,' he answered
sullenly. 'As many as forty used to sit down at my table.'
'You were working at the Moscow Drama Theatre and used to wear a
jacket with brass buttons. My friend Grisha Faber played the red-haired
doctor, and Korablev introduced us in Grisha's dressing-room.'
I wonder why I felt so light-hearted? Here I was standing in
Romashov's flat as though I were the master there. He would be here
within an hour. I took a deep breath with half-open mouth. What would
I do to him?
'I don't know! What name did you say?'
'Captain Grigoriev at your service. So you are living here now? In
Romashov's Hat?'
Vyshimirsky glanced at me suspiciously.
'I live where I'm registered,' he said. 'Not here. And the house-
manager knows I live there, and not here.'
'I see.'
305
I took out my cigarette-case, flipped open the lid and offered him a
cigarette. He took one. The door leading into the next room was open.
The place was clean and tidy, all light-grey and dark-grey-walls and
furniture. A round table stood before a divan. And over the divan
somebody's portrait, a large one in a smooth light-grey frame.
'Everything to match,' I thought.
'You mean Ivan Pavlovich, the teacher?' Vyshimirsky suddenly
asked.
'Yes.'
'Yes, of course, Korablev. A fine man. Valya was a pupil of his. Nyuta
wasn't, she graduated from the Brzhozovskaya Girls' School. But Valya
was a pupil of his. To be sure! He was a help, yes, he was...' And the
glimmerings of a kindly feeling flitted across his bewhiskered old face.
Then, pretending to recollect himself, the old man invited me into the
rooms-we had been standing all this time in the hallway-and even asked
me whether I had just arrived in town.
'If you have,' he said, 'there's an army canteen where you can get
quite a decent meal with bread for next to nothing on your travel
warrant.'
But I wasn't listening to his chatter. I had stopped in the doorway,
astounded. That portrait over the divan in the light-grey frame was of
Katya-a splendid portrait, which I had never seen before. It was a full-
length photograph of Katya in the squirrel coat, which looked so nice on
her and which she had made just before the war. I remember how hard
she had been trying to get it done by some famous furrier named Manet,
and was cross with me because I couldn't understand that the cap and
the muff had to be made of fur too. What could this mean, my God?
At least a dozen thoughts jostled in my mind, one of them so absurd
that the memory of it today makes me feel ashamed. I imagined almost
everything except the truth, a truth which proved to be even more
absurd than that absurd idea!
'I must say I never expected to meet you here, Nikolai Ivanovich,' I
said when the old man had told me how, after leaving the theatre, he
had been employed at a mental hospital as a cloak-room attendant, and
had been dismissed because the inmates had 'unlawfully notified the
matron that I stole soup and ate it at night'.
'Are you working for Romashov? Or just keeping up the
acquaintance?'
'Yes, keeping up the acquaintance. He suggested that I help him out
in his business, and I agreed. I was employed as secretary to the
Metropolitan Isidore, and I don't conceal the fact; on the contrary, I
state the fact in my personnel questionnaires. It was a big job, an
