and so on. The ink was under the helmet, which meant that Nikolai
Antonich had to dip his pen right into the hero's skull. This stuck me as
odd.
Between the windows stood a bookcase; I had never seen so many
books together. Over the bookcase hung a half-length portrait of a naval
officer with a broad brow, a square jaw and dancing grey eyes.
I noticed a similar but smaller portrait in the dining-room and a still
smaller one in Katya's room over the bed.
'My Father,' Katya explained, glancing at me sideways. And I had been
thinking that Nikolai Antonich was her father! On second thoughts,
though, she would hardly have called her own father by his name and
patronymic. 'Stepfather,' I thought, but the next moment decided that
he couldn't be. I knew what a stepfather was. This did not look like it.
Then Katya showed me a mariner's compass—a very interesting
gadget. It was a brass hoop on a stand with a little bowl swinging in it,
and in the bowl, under a glass cover, a needle. Whichever way you
turned the bowl, even if you held it upside down, the needle would still
keep swinging and the anchor at the tip would point North. 'Such a
compass can stand any gale.' 'What's it doing here?' 'Father gave it to
me.' 'Where is he?'
Katya's face darkened.
'I don't know.'
'He divorced her mother and left her,' I decided immediately. I had
heard of such cases.
I noticed that there was a lot of pictures in the flat, and very good
ones, too, I thought. One was really beautiful-it showed a straight wide
path in a garden and pine trees lit up by the sun.
'That's a Levitan,' Katya said in a casual, grown-up way.
I didn't know at the time that Levitan was the name of the artist, and
decided that this must be the name of the place painted in the picture.
Then the old lady called us in to have tea with saccharin.
'So that's the sort you are, Alexander Grigoriev,' she said. 'You went
and broke the lactometer.'
She asked me to tell her all about Ensk, even the post-office there.
'What about the post-office?' she said. She was rattled because I hadn't
heard of some people by the name of Bubenchikov.
'And the orchard by the synagogue! Never heard of it? Tell me
another! You must have gone after those apples scores of times.'
She heaved a sigh.
'It's a long time since we left Ensk. I didn't want to move, believe me!
It was all Nikolai Antonich's doing. He came down. It's no use waiting
any longer, he says. We'll leave our address, and if need be they'll find
us. We sold all our things, this is all that's left, and came here, to
Moscow.'
'Grandma!' Katya said sternly.
62
'What d'you mean-Grandma?'
'At it again?'
'All right. I won't. We're all right here.'
I understood nothing—whom they had been waiting for or why it was
no use waiting any longer. I did not ask any questions, of course, all the
more as Nina Kapitonovna changed the subject herself.
That was how I spent my time at our headmaster's flat in Tverskaya-
Yamskaya Street.
When I was leaving Katya gave me the book Helen Robinson against
my word of honour that I would not bend back the covers or dirty the
pages.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE TATARINOVS
The Tatarinovs had no domestic help, and Nina Kapitonovna had a
pretty hard time of it considering her age. I helped her. Together we
kindled the stove, chopped firewood, and even washed up. I found it
interesting there. The flat was a sort of Ali Baba's cave to me, what with
its treasures, perils and riddles. The old lady was the treasure, and
Maria Vasilievna the riddle, while Nikolai Antonich stood for things
perilous and disagreeable.
Maria Vasilievna was a widow—or maybe she wasn't, because one day
I heard Nina Kapitonovna say of her with a sigh: 'Neither widowed nor
married.' The odd thing about it was that she grieved so much for her
husband. She always went about in a black dress, like a nun. She was
studying at a medical institute. I thought it rather strange at the time
that a mother should be studying. All of a sudden she would stop talking
and going anywhere, either to her institute or to work (she was also
working), but would sit with her feet up on the couch and smoke. Katya
would then say: 'Mummy's pining,' and everybody would be short-
tempered and gloomy.
Nikolai Antonich, as I soon learnt, was not her husband at all, and
was unmarried for all that he was forty-five. 'What is he to you?' I once
asked Katya. 'Nothing.'
She was fibbing, of course, for she and her mother bore the same
surname as Nikolai Antonich. He was Katya's uncle, or rather a cousin
once removed. He was a relative, yet they weren't very nice to him. That,
too, struck me as odd, especially since he, on the contrary, was very
obliging to everybody, too much so in fact.
The old lady was fond of the movies and did not miss a single picture,
and Nikolai Antonich used to go with her, even booking the tickets in
advance. Over the supper she would start telling enthusiastically what
the film was about (at such times, by the way, she strongly resembled
Katya), while Nikolai Antonich patiently listened, though he had just
returned from the cinema with her.
63
Yet she seemed to feel sorry for him. I saw him once playing patience,
his head bent low, lingers drumming on the table, and caught her
looking at him with compassion.
