might catch us. Return home?
At that moment a bearded coupler all covered with grease, crawled
out from under a freight train and came towards us, stepping over the
sleepers.
42
'Please, mister,' Pyotr accosted him boldly, 'how do we get to
Moscow from here-on the right or on the left!'
The man looked at him, then at me. I turned cold. 'Now he'll hand us
over to the commandant's.'
'It's three hundred miles to Moscow, my lads.'
'Please, mister, we only want to know-is it on the right or on the left?'
The coupler laughed.
'On the left.'
'Thank you. Come along to the left, Sanya!'
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
TO STRIVE. TO SEEK, TO FIND AND NOT TO YIELD
All journeys are much alike when the travellers are eleven or twelve
years old, when they travel under the carriages and do not wash for
months. You only have to scan a few books dealing with the life of waifs
to see this for yourself. That is why I am not going to describe our
journey from our town of Ensk to Moscow.
Aunt Dasha's commandments were soon forgotten. We swore, fought
and smoked (sometimes dried dung, to keep warm); sometimes it was
an aunt travelling to Orenburg for salt who had lost us on the way; at
other times we were refugees who were going to join our grandma in
Moscow. We gave ourselves out to be brothers—this made a touching
impression. As we couldn't sing, I recited on the trains the letter from
the navigating officer. I remember how, at Vyshny Volochok station, a
young-looking though grey-haired naval man made me repeat the letter
twice.
'Very strange,' he said, looking at me closely with his stern grey eyes.
'Lieutenant Sedov's expedition? Very strange.'
We were not waifs, though. Like Captain Hatteras (Pyotr told me
about him with a wealth of detail which Jules Verne himself had never
suspected), we were going forward, forever forward. Not only because in
Turkestan there was bread, while here there were none. We were going
out to discover a new land of sunny cities and rich orchards. We had
sworn an oath to each other.
What a help that oath was to us!
Once at Staraya Russa we strayed from the road and lost our way in
the forest. I lay down in the snow and closed my eyes. Pyotr tried to
scare me with talk about wolves, he swore and even hit me, but all in
vain. I couldn't take another step. So then he took off his cap and flung
it down in the snow.
'You swore an oath, Sanya,' he said, 'to strive, to seek, to find and not
to yield. D'you mean to say you've sworn falsely? Didn't you say
yourself-no mercy for whoever breaks the oath?'
I started to cry, but I got up. Late that night we arrived at a village. It
was a village of Old Believers, but one old woman nevertheless took us
in, fed us and even washed us in the bathhouse.
And so, passing from village to village, from station to station, we at
last reached Moscow.
43
On the way we had sold or bartered for food nearly everything that we
had brought with us. Even Pyotr's knife and its sheath, I remember, was
sold for two pieces of meat-jelly.
The only things that remained unsold were the papers with the oath
written on them in blood 'P.S.' and 'A.G.' and the address of Pyotr's
uncle.
That uncle! How often we had talked about him! In the end I -came to
see him as a sort of Grand Patriarch of Steam Engines-beard streaming
in the wind, funnel belching smoke, boiler ejecting steam...
And then, at last, Moscow! One frosty February night we clambered
out through the window of the lavatory in which we had been travelling
during the last stage of our journey, and jumped down on to the track.
We couldn't see Moscow, it was hidden in the dark, and besides, we
weren't interested in it. This was just Moscow, whereas that Uncle lived
at Moscow Freight Yard, Depot 7, Repair Shop. For two hours we
blundered amidst the maze of diverging tracks. Day began to break by
the time we reached Depot 7, a bleak building with dark oval windows
and a tall oval door on which hung a padlock. The uncle wasn't there.
And there wasn't anybody you could ask about him. Later in the
morning we learned at the Depot Committee that Uncle had gone off to
the front.
So that was that! We went out and sat down on the platform.. It was
goodbye to the streets where oranges grew, goodbye to the nights under
the open sky, goodbye to the knife under the girdle and the curved
sword ornamented in silver!
Just to make sure, Pyotr went back to the committee to ask whether
his uncle was married. No, Uncle was a single man. He lived, it
transpired, in a railway truck and had gone off to the front in the same
truck.
It was quite light by this time and we could now see Moscow-houses
upon houses (they all looked like railway stations to me), great heaps of
snow, an occasional tramcar, then again houses and houses.
What was to be done! The weeks that followed were about the
toughest we had known. The things we did for a living! We took up
queues for people. We did jobs for ex-bourgeois, shovelling snow off the
pavements in front of the houses when 'compulsory labour service' was
introduced. We cleaned the stables at the circus. We slept on landings,
in cemeteries and in attics.
Then, suddenly, everything changed.
We were walking, I remember, down Bozhedomka Street, yearning
only for one thing—to come across a bonfire somewhere; in those days
