girls sang all the way to Ensk, even in the night-for some reason they
decided to go without sleep. The thirty-four-hour journey passed
quickly enough as we dozed on and off to the sound of these young
voices, singing songs now sad, now gay.
The train used to arrive early in the morning, but now it arrived
towards the evening, so that when we got out, the little station struck
me, in the dusk, as being nice and cosy in an old-fashioned sort of way.
But the Ensk of former days stopped where the broad avenue of lime
trees leading to the station ended. Coming out onto the boulevard, we
saw in the distance a dark mass of buildings over which sped glowing
clouds lit up from below. This, for Ensk, was such a strange townscape
that I found myself saying to the girls that there must be a fire
somewhere across the river, and they believed me because I had been
boasting during the journey that I was a native of Ensk and knew every
stone in the place. As it turned out, it wasn't a fire, but an ordnance
factory which had been built at Ensk during the war.
I had seen the striking changes that had taken place in some of our
towns during the war—those at M—v, for instance—but I had not known
those towns as a child. Now, as Katya and I walked quickly down the
darkening Zastennaya and Gogolevsky streets it seemed to me that these
streets, which used to stretch lazily along the ramparts, now ran hastily
upwards to join the ceaseless glowing motion of the clouds over the
factory buildings. This was our first (and true) impression-that of war-
geared town. To me, of course, it was still my old, native Ensk, but now I
met it as one does an old friend, when one looks at the altered yet
familiar features, and laughs with affection and emotion, at a loss for
words.
We had written to Pyotr from the Arctic that we would be visiting the
old folks and he counted on being able to arrange his long-promised
leave for the same time.
No one met us at the station, though I had wired from Moscow, and we
decided that Pyotr had not arrived. But the first person we ran into at
the lion-guarded entrance to the Marcouse house was none other than
Pyotr. I recognised him at once for all that he had been transformed
from an absent-minded, wool-gathering old thing with a permanent
question-mark expression into a bronzed dashing officer. 'Ah, here they
are!' he said as though he had found us at last after a long search.
We embraced, then he strode over to Katya and took her hands in his.
They had their Leningrad in common, and as they stood there gripping
hands, even I was far away from them, though there was probably not a
person in the world nearer to them than I was.
Aunt Dasha was asleep when we burst into her room and must have
thought she was dreaming. She raised herself on her elbow and
regarded us with a pensive air. We started laughing and that brought
her down to earth.
'Good heavens, Sanya!' she said. 'And Katya! And the old'un is away
again!'
The 'old 'un' was the judge, and 'away again' referred to that visit of
ours five years ago when the judge had been out on circuit somewhere in
the district.
356
I hardly need describe how Aunt Dasha fussed and bustled round us,
how she grieved that the pie had to be made with dark flour and on
some 'outlandish lard'. In the end we had to make her sit down while
Katya took charge of the household and Pyotr and I volunteered to help
her, and Aunt Dasha shrieked with horror when Pyotr dumped some
food concentrates into the dough—'for flavour', as he put it-and I all
but popped in some washing soda instead of salt. Oddly enough, the
pastry rose well, and though Aunt Dasha tasted a piece and announced
'not rich enough', the pie was not at all bad as a wartime product.
After dinner Aunt Dasha demanded that we tell her everything,
beginning from the day and hour when we had parted from her at the
Ensk railway station five years before. I persuaded her, however, that
such a detailed report ought to be put off until the judge came home.
Instead, we made Pyotr tell us about himself.
I listened to his story with emotion. I had known him for over twenty-
five years, and he did not strike me at all as being now a different person
as Katya had described him to me. The 'artistic vision' that had always
intrigued me in Pyotr and which distinguished him from the ordinary
run of men, had now deepened, if anything.
He showed us his albums—for the last year Pyotr had been serving as
a scenic artist with a frontline theatre. Here were sketches of military
life, often hastily dashed off. But the moral fibre of our people, which
everyone knows who has spent even a few days in the army, was caught
in them with remarkable fidelity.
I had often stopped before unforgettable scenes of war, regretting that
they vanished without a trace as one gave place to another. Now I was
seeing them in bare outline, but none the less faithfully and brilliantly
reproduced.
'There,' Pyotr said with a good-natured smile when I had
congratulated him, 'and the judge says they're no good. Not heroic
enough. My son draws too,' he added, pushing out his lower lip, as he
always did when pleased. 'He's not bad, he has a gift, I think.'
Katya got Nina Kapitonovna's letters out of the suitcase-the old lady
was still living near Novosibirsk with little Pyotr-and Aunt Dasha, who
had always been interested in Grandma, demanded that some of them
be read out aloud.
Grandma was still living on her own after her quarrel with the Farm
Manager, despite the fact that he had offered her apologies and asked
her to come back. She had 'thanked him and declined, as I had never
been taught to sue for a favour', as she wrote. Having had the
satisfaction of declining this invitation, she astonished the whole district
by suddenly taking on a job in the local Recreation Hall.
'I am teaching dress-making,' she wrote briefly, 'and I congratulate
you and Sanya. I sized him up long ago, when he was a little fellow. I fed
him buckwheat porridge to make him grow. He's a fine boy. Don't you
bully him, you've got a nasty temper.'
