you now? We can't send you chasing after him.'
He ordered me to report again in a few days time.
But how Archangel had changed, how unlike itself, while still itself, it
had become.
American sailors strolled about the streets in their little caps, bell-
bottomed trousers and woollen jumpers, fitting close round the waist
and falling loosely over the trousers. British sailors, with the initials
'H.M.S.' on their caps, were somewhat more reserved in their manner,
but they, too, had that easy-going air about them which distinguished
them so strongly from our own sailors and struck me as strange. One
encountered Black sailors at every step. Chinese, washing shirts in the
Northern Dvina, right under the quay, and laying them out in the sun
among the rocks, chattered loudly in their softly guttural tongue.
And the Dvina, so spacious, so Russian, that it seemed there could be
no other river like it in the world, bore its brimming waters onward.
Motor launches, cleaving the sparkling wave as with a knife, passed in
one direction, towards the cargo port.
But it was not the foreigners who engaged my attention those days,
though I regarded them with keen but detached curiosity. This was the
city of Sedov and Pakhtusov. At the cemetery in Solombala I stood for a
long time at the grave of 'Lieutenant Pyotr Kuzmich Pakhtusov,
Cavalier of the Corps of Navigators, who died at the age of 36 from the
trials and tribulations sustained on his voyages'. From here Captain
Tatarinov had taken his white schooner on her long voyage. Here
Navigating Officer Klimov, the only surviving member of the expedition
to reach the mainland, had died in the town hospital. The St. Maria
expedition had an entire section devoted to it in the local museum, and
among the familiar exhibits I found something new and interesting-the
recollections of artist P., a friend of Sedov's, describing how Klimov had
been found on Cape Flora.
Early in the morning, after writing my regular letter to Yaroslavl, I
found myself at a loose end and went down to Kuznechikha. The pine
wood spread its sharp tang over the river. The drawbridge was open and
a little steamboat, weaving its way among the endless timber rafts, was
carrying people to the dock. Wherever you looked was wood, everything
was wooden-the narrow sidewalks along the fronts of the squat old
buildings dating from Nicholas I's time and now housing hospitals and
schools, the road paving, and fantastic edifices built of stacks of fresh-
sawn planks along the river banks. This was Solombala, and here I
found the house in which Captain Tatarinov had lived in the summer of
1912 when the St. Maria was being fitted out.
He had descended the steps of that little log-house and walked
through the front garden-tall, broad-shouldered, in his white naval
jacket, with moustaches turned up in the old-fashioned way. With stiffly
bent head, he had listened to some Demidov of a merchant, who
317
demanded money from him for salt junk or for the 'preparation of
ready-made clothing'. And out there, in the cargo port, barely visible
among the heavy merchantmen with side paddles, stood the slim and
graceful schooner-too slim and graceful to make the voyage from
Archangel to Vladivostok along the coast of Siberia.
One incident, insignificant in itself but important for me, brought
these misty scenes oddly to life.
The day before a convoy had arrived I had gone to B. Port to see the
foreign ships unload.
Oho, how big this ancient port had grown, how spacious! I must have
walked a couple of kilometres along the wharves but still saw no end to
the cranes, which were piling military and general cargoes in tall,
rectangular stacks. And extensions were still being made to the port. I
came to the end and stopped to take in the panorama of the wharves,
which curved back in a smooth arc. At that very moment the little
steamboat, puffing vigorously, steered clear of a big American vessel
with a Hurricane in the bows and approached the wharf. I glanced at her
name, Lebedin, and remember thinking that this pretty name had
become sort of traditional in northern waters. It had been the name of
the boat in which Tatarinov's friends and relations had gone out to his
schooner to give the captain a last embrace and wish him a pleasant
cruise and happy landfall. Could this be the same Lebedin, which had
been called in one article 'the first Russian icebreaker'? Surely not!
I asked a sailor who was rolling a barrel of fuel down the gangway to
call his captain, and a minute later a ruddy-cheeked young fellow of
about twenty-five, clad in ordinary work blues, came up on deck, wiping
his hands, which were black with oil, on a rag.
'I have an historical question to ask you, Captain,' I said. 'Do you
know by any chance whether this tug of yours was called Lebedin before
the revolution as well?' 'She was.' 'When was she launched?' 'In 1907'
'And always had the same name?' 'Always.'
I told him what it was about, and he surveyed his craft with an air of
cool pride, as though he had never doubted that she would take her
destined place in the history of the Russian fleet. It may sound rather
funny, but the fact is that my encounter with the Lebedin cheered me up
immensely. Although I had read the life of Captain Tatarinov, the last
page of it still remained closed to me.
'This is not the end yet,' that old tugboat with her ruddy-cheeked young
skipper seemed to be saying to me. 'Who knows, the time may yet come
when you will succeed in turning that page and reading it.'
On my third visit to the Personnel Officer I asked him to post me to a
regiment, or, if that was impossible, to place me under the orders of the
Northern Fleet Air Arm HQ.
He was obviously in the know as regards my personal affairs and service
record, because, after a pause, he asked me in a kindly tone:
'What about your health?'
I told him I was as fit as a fiddle. It was the truth or pretty near the
truth, for I always felt better in the North than I did in the South, the
West or the East.
'Ah well, I suppose you'd better be put to use rather than hang about
doing nothing at such a time,' the Personnel Chief said reasonably if
