that Katya frowned. Her lips stirred as if she was about to say
something, but she checked herself.
We walked round the foyer, Maria Vasilievna talking all the time
about Nikolai Antonich. It was unbearable. It was also astonishing,
because I had not forgotten what her former attitude to him had been.
Nothing of the sort! The man was kindness and nobility itself. All his
life he had helped his cousin (it was the first time I had heard Maria
Vasilievna refer to her late husband as Ivan) even when he himself was
having a bad time. He had given his whole fortune to fit out his last
hapless expedition.
'Nikolai Antonich believed in him,' she said earnestly.
All this I had heard from Nikolai Antonich himself, almost in the
same phrases. Maria Vasilievna never used to repeat his words before.
There was something behind this. For all the eagerness and earnest-ness
with which she spoke I sensed that she was trying to persuade herself
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that Nikolai Antonich really was a remarkable person and that her late
husband owed everything to him.
This was on my mind all through the third act. I decided that I would
ask Katya about her father point blank. The portrait of the naval officer
with the broad brow, the set jaw and light dancing eyes suddenly rose
before me. What was this expedition from which he had never returned?
After the show we lingered in the auditorium until the cloakroom
crowds had thinned out.
'I say, Sanya, why don't you ever drop in?' Maria Vasilievna said.
I mumbled something.
'I'm sure Nikolai Antonich has long forgotten that silly affair,' she
went on. 'If you like, I'll talk to him about it.'
The last thing I wanted was for her to get permission from Nikolai
Antonich for me to call on them. I was on the point of saying, 'Thanks,
I'd rather you didn't,' when Katya interposed, saying that it was nothing
whatever to do with Nikolai Antonich, as I would be coming to see her
and not him.
'Oh, no!' Maria Vasilievna said, startled. 'Why only you? He'll be
coming to see me, too, and Mother.'
CHAPTER FIVE
KATYA'S FATHER
Now that expedition. What kind of man was Katya's father? All I knew
was that he had been a naval officer and was dead. But was he? Katya
never spoke of him as dead. Except for Nikolai Antonich, who
constantly referred to him as 'my late cousin', the Tatarinovs did not
talk about him very often. His portraits hung in all the rooms, but they
seldom spoke about him.
In the end I got tired of speculating, all the more as one could simply
ask Katya where her father was and whether he was alive or dead. That's
what I did.
And this is what she told me.
She was only three, but she clearly remembered the day her father
went away. He was a tall man in naval blues and had big hands. Early in
the morning, while she was still asleep, he had come into her room and
bent over her cot. He patted her head and said something. It sounded
like: 'Look, Maria, how pale she is. Promise me she'll be out in the fresh
air as much as possible.' And Katya had opened her eyes just a wee bit
and seen her mother's tear-stained face. But she gave no sign she was
awake-it was such fun pretending to be asleep. Afterwards they were
sitting in a big brightly lit hall at a long table on which stood white little
hillocks. These were table-napkins. Katya was so fascinated by these
table-napkins that she did not notice that her mother had left her and in
her place now sat Grandma, who kept sighing and saying: 'My
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goodness!' And Mother, in a strange unfamiliar dress with puffed
sleeves, sat next to Father and winked to Katya from afar.
It was very jolly at table, there were lots of people, all laughing and
talking together loudly. Then Father got up, a glass of wine in his hand,
and everyone fell silent. Katya did not understand what he was saying,
but she remembered everyone clapping and cheering when he had
finished, and again Grandma muttered 'My goodness!' and sighed.
Then everyone said goodbye to Father and to some other sailors, and at
parting he had tossed Katya high up in the air with his kind, big hands.
'Well, Maria darling,' he had said to Mother. And they had kissed
each other on both cheeks.
This had been a farewell dinner and send-off of Captain Tatarinov at
the Ensk railway station. He had come to Ensk in May 1912 to say
goodbye to his family, and in the middle of June he had set sail from St.
Petersburg in the schooner St. Maria bound for Vladivostok.
At first everything went on as before, except that something quite new
had appeared in life—letters from Daddy. 'There will soon be a letter
from Daddy.' And a letter there would be. Sometimes it took a week or
two coming, but it always came. And then came the last letter, sent from
Yugorsky Shar in the Arctic. It really was the last, but Mother was not
particularly worried; she even said that this was as it should be: the St.
Maria was sailing in places where there was no post, nothing but ice
and snow.
It was as it should be. Daddy himself had written that there would be
no more letters. Still, it was very sad, and Mother became more and
more silent and sad every day.
'A letter from Daddy' was a splendid thing. Grandma, for instance,
always baked a pie when a letter came from Daddy. And now, instead of
that splendid thing which cheered everyone up, there appeared in life
that long and dreary phrase: 'It is as it should be,' or 'There can't be
anything yet.'
These words were repeated every day, especially in the evenings,
when Katya went to bed and Mother and Grandma kept talking and
talking. And Katya listened. She had long been wanting to say:
