come to be in Polarnoye?
'My God, I've been writing to you every day!' she said. 'We just
missed each other in Moscow. When you called on Valya Zhukov I was
queuing for bread in Arbat.'
'No?'
'You left him a letter, and I dashed off to look for you-but where?
Who could have imagined that you would be going to see Romashov!'
'How do you know I went to see Romashov?'
'I know everything, darling!'
She kissed me. 'I'll tell you everything.'
And she told me that Vyshimirsky, frightened to death, had sought
out Ivan Pavlovich and told him that I had had Romashov
arrested.
'But who's this Rear-Admiral R.?' she said. 'I wrote to you, care of
him, and then to him personally, but he never answered. Didn't you
know that you were coming here? Why did I have to write to you
through him?'
'Because I didn't have an address of my own. I left Moscow to look for
you.'
'Where?'
'At Yaroslavl. I was in Yaroslavl.'
'Why didn't you write to Korablev when you came here?'
'I don't know. My God, is it really you? Katya?'
We were walking up and down with our arms round each other,
stumbling over things, again and again asking 'why?' 'why?' and there
were as many of these 'whys' as there were causes which had parted us
at Leningrad, prevented us from running into each other in Moscow,
and now thrown us together in Polarnoye, where I had now come for the
first time and where only half an hour ago it was impossible to imagine
Katya being.
She had heard about my discovery of the expedition from the TASS
reports which appeared in the newspapers. She had got in touch with
the doctor and he had helped to get a permit to come to Polarnoye. But
they did not know where to write to me-even if they did know, it is
hardly likely that any mail would reach me at the camp site of Captain
Tatarinov's expedition!
The doctor disappeared, then reappeared with a hot kettle, and
though he couldn't stop the speed with which the world was whirling
around us, he did make us sit down side by side on the sofa, and treated
us to some tooth-breaking hardtack. Then he fetched a billy-can of
condensed milk and set it on the table, apologising for the tableware.
Then he went away. I did not detain him this time, and we were left
alone in that cold house, with its kitchen cluttered with empty tins and
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dirty dishes, its hallway covered with snow that did not melt. Why were
we in this house, through the windows of which we could see the rolling
hills and the slack water moving importantly between the steep, snowy
shores? But this was yet another 'why?' to which I did not bother to
seek an answer.
On going out the doctor had handed me some electric gadget. I
immediately forgot about it and remembered it only when, laughing at
something, I saw dense steam billowing from my mouth and melting
slowly in the air, like from a horse standing out in the frost. The gadget
was an electric fire, obviously of local workmanship, but a very good
one. The room quickly got warm. Katya wanted to tidy up, but I did not
let her. I gazed at her. I held her hands in a tight grip, as though fearing
that she might disappear as suddenly as she had appeared.
On my way to the doctor's I had noticed that the weather was
changing, and now, when I left the house—because it was already a
quarter to ten—the cold, humming wind had dropped, the air was no
longer limpid, and soft snow fell heavily and quickly-all signs of coming
snowstorm.
To my surprise, they already knew at HO that Katya had arrived. The
commander knew it, too-why else should he have greeted me with a
smile? Very briefly I told him how we had sunk the raider. He did not
ask me any questions, merely said that I was to give a report about it
before the War Council that evening. What he was interested in was the
St. Maria expedition.
I began in a restrained, rather embarrassed manner-though the fact
that the expedition had been found during the performance of a combat
mission would not have struck anyone who knew the story of my life as
being odd. How was I to convey this idea to the fleet commander in a
few words? But he was listening with such rapt attention, with such
sincere, young interest, that I finally dismissed the thought of 'a few
words' and began telling my story simply— and quite unexpectedly, the
effect was an authentic account of what really happened.
We parted at last, and then only because the admiral bethought
himself of Katya.
I don't know how much time I spent with him-it must have been no
more than an hour-but when I came out I did not find Polarnoye. It was
hidden in a pall of whirling, blinding, whistling snow.
Luckily I was wearing burki (*Burki-high felt boots.-Tr.) -even so I had to
turn the tops back above my knees. Talk about terraces-there wasn't a
trace of them! Only a fantastic imagination could picture houses
somewhere behind those black clouds of whipped snow, and in one of
those houses, in Row 5, Katya laying the hardtack out on the electric fire
to warm them, as I had advised her. In the end I got to the house, of
course. The hardest thing was to recognise it. In little more than an hour
it had turned into a fairy-tale dwarfie hut, standing lopsided and
snowed up to the windows. Like a god of snowstorm I burst into the
hall, and Katya had to brush me down with a whisk broom, starting
from the shoulders, which were caked with frozen snow.
We had talked everything over, it seemed; twice we had approached
the subject of the Captain's letters of farewell-I had brought them with
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