Catherine's Bay.
I climbed the flight of steps which passed under an arch thrown
between these houses and saw the whole bay from shore to shore. The
inexplicable agitation under which I had been labouring all that
morning gripped me anew with extraordinary farce. The bay was dark
green and impenetrable, with only a faint glimmer shed by the sky.
There was something very remote, southern, reminiscent of a highland
lake in the Caucasus, about this land-locked bay-except that on the far
side a line of low hills, covered with snow, ran out into the distance with
low trees making here and there a delicate black tracery against their
dazzling background.
I do not believe in intuition, but that was the word that sprung to my
mind as, stirred by the beauty of Polarnoye and Catherine's Bay, I stood
by the compass houses. It was as if the town that appeared before me
were my home, which until then I had only seen in dreams and sought
in vain for so many long years. I found myself thinking with a thrill of
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excitement that something was bound to happen here, something good
for me, perhaps the best thing to happen to me in all my life.
There was nobody at HQ yet. I had come before office hours. The
night-duty officer said that, as far as he knew, I had been ordered to
report at 10 p.m., whereas it was now only seven-thirty.
I went to look up the doctor-not at the hospital, but in his rooms.
Of course, he lived in one of those white little houses arranged in
terraces on the hillside. They had looked much prettier from the sea.
Here was Row One, but I needed Row Five, House No. 7.
Like the Nentsi, I walked along thinking all but aloud of what I was
seeing. A group of Englishmen overtook me. They wore funny winter
caps resembling those our old Russian coachmen used to wear and long,
khaki robe-like affairs and it set me thinking how little they knew our
Russian winters. A boy in a white fluffy fur coat walked along, grave and
chubby, with a toy spade over his shoulder. A be-whiskered sailor
caught him up and carried him on a few steps, and it set me thinking
that there were probably very few children in Polarnoye.
House No. 7, Row 5, differed in no way from any of its neighbours on
the right or left, except perhaps that its front steps were barely visible
under a coating of slippery ice. I took them at a run and collided with
some naval men, who came out onto the porch at that moment. One of
them slid carefully down the steps, remarking that 'inability to take
one's bearings in a Polar-night situation points to a deficiency of
vitamins in the body'. They were doctors. This was Ivan Ivanovich's
home all right.
I went into the hall, pushed one door, then another. Both rooms were
empty, smelt of tobacco, had unmade beds in them and things lay
scattered about, masculine-like. There was something hospitable about
those rooms, as if their occupants have purposely left the doors open.
'Anybody here?'
There was no need to ask. I went out into the street again.
A woman with her skirt hitched up was rubbing her bare feet with
snow. I asked her whether this was house No 7.
'Who may you be wanting?'
'Doctor Pavlov.'
'I daresay he's still asleep,' the woman said. 'You go round the house,
that's his window over there. Knock hard!'
It would have been simpler to knock at the doctor's door, but I
complied nevertheless and walked round to the window. The house
stood on a slope and the window at the back stood rather low over the
ground. It was covered with hoarfrost, but when I knocked and peered
in, shading my eyes with my hand, I thought I saw a shape like a
woman's figure. Like a woman bending over a basket or a suitcase. She
straightened up when I knocked and came over to the window. She, too,
shaded her eyes with her hand, and through the blurred frostwork of the
window I saw a blurred face.
The woman's lips stirred. She did nothing, just moved her lips. She
was barely visible behind that snowy, misted, murky glass. But I
recognised her. It was Katya.
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CHAPTER THREE
IT WAS KATYA
How can I describe those first minutes, the speechless rapture with
which I gazed into her face, kissed it and gazed again, asked questions
only to interrupt myself, because everything I asked about had
happened ages ago, and terrible though it was to know how she had
suffered and starved, almost to death, in Leningrad, and had given up
hope of ever seeing me again, all this was over and done with, and now
there she stood before me and I could take her in my arms-God, I could
hardly believe it!
She was pale and very thin, and something new had come into her
face, which had lost its former severity.
'You've had your hair cut, I see?'
'Yes, a long time ago,' she said. 'Back in Yaroslavl, when I was ill.'
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She had not only had her hair cut, she was a different woman. But just
now I did not want to think about that—everything was whirling
around, the whole world, we, this room, which was an exact replica of
those other two, with its things scattered about, with Katya's open
suitcase, from which she had been taking something out when I
knocked, and the doctor too, who, it appears, had been there all the
time, standing in a corner wiping his beard with his handkerchief, and
now started to tiptoe out of the room, but I stopped him. But the main
thing, the most important thing-Katya was in Polarnoye! How had she
