Another scene rises before me when I recall my first year in
Leningrad. C. comes to the Corps Airfield every day. He has a modest
job-flying passengers in an old war-scarred machine. But we know what
kind of man he is, we know and love him long before he became known
to and loved by the whole country. We know whom the airmen talk
about when they gather at the Aviation Museum, which was a sort of
club of ours in those days. We know whom our Chief is imitating when
he says in a calm bass voice: 'Well, how goes it? Can you manage the
sharp bank? But no fibbing, mind?'
We run to this man as fast as our legs can carry us when he returns to
the airfield after his amazing aerobatics, and the lovers of stunt flying,
green as the grass, crawl away almost on all fours, while he looks at us
from the cockpit, his goggles off, a flyer of amazing flair, a wizard of sky
flying.
Together with the stethoscope which Doctor Ivan Ivanovich left me as a
keepsake I carry a photo of this airman about with me wherever I go. He
gave this photo to me not in Leningrad where I was an air cadet, but
much later, several years afterwards, in Moscow. He wrote on it: 'If it's
worth doing at all, do it well.' Those were his words. So this year passed,
a hard but splendid year in Leningrad.
CHAPTER TWO
SANYA 'S WEDDING
I saw Sanya every Sunday and I must say—strange though it may sound
coming from a brother—that I came to like her more and more.
She had just entered the Academy of Arts and had found a job with a
children's publishing house. She knew all about our doings, Pyotr's and
mine, and kept the old folks informed about us. She worked a lot at the
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Academy too, and although she lacked Pyotr's vivid talent she painted
extremely well. She was fond of doing miniatures, an art that is
nowadays almost completely neglected by our painters, and the
fastidious care with which she executed all the minute details of faces
and dress was simply remarkable. As in childhood, she liked to talk, and
when provoked or carried away she would talk so fast and end up in
such a rush that her listeners would be dazed. In short, she was a
wonderful sister, and now she was getting married.
Of course, it is not hard to guess whom she was marrying, though of
all the young men who gathered that evening at the studio of the
photographer—artist Berenstein where she rented a room, Pyotr looked
the least like a bridegroom. He sat unperturbed and silent beside a
sharp-nosed boy, who was talking at him earnestly.
Altogether, it was an odd wedding. All the evening the guests argued
about a cow—whether it was right for the artist Filippov to be painting a
cow for the last two and a half years. He was said to have divided it into
little squares and was painting each square separately. No one took any
notice of the newlyweds. Sanya was kept very busy. There were not
enough plates to go round and the guests had to be fed in two shifts. She
sat down only for a moment, flushed and tired, in her new dress
trimmed with lace, which somehow reminded me of Ensk and Aunt
Dasha.
'Someone sends you regards,' she said to me. 'Guess who.'
I guessed at once, but answered calmly:
'I don't know.'
'Katya.'
'Really? Thanks.'
Sanya looked at me critically. Her face even paled slightly with
annoyance. She realised, of course, that I was pretending.
'You like to fancy yourself a Childe Harold! Now don't you dare tell
me a lie on my wedding-day. I'll write to her and say you kept asking me
for this letter all day and I wouldn't give it to you.'
'I'm not asking you for anything.'
'In your heart you are,' Sanya said with conviction. 'Outwardly you're
pretending you don't care. I can let you have it if you like, only you
mustn't read the last page. You won't, will you?'
She thrust the letter into my hand and ran away. I read the letter, of
course, the last page three times, seeing that it was about me. Katya did
not send her regards to me at all, she just inquired how I was getting on
and when I was graduating. To look at, it was just an ordinary letter, but
really a very sad one. It had this passage in it, for instance: 'It is now
four o'clock and already dark here, and suddenly I fell asleep and when I
woke up I couldn't make out what had happened to make me feel so
good. It was because I had dreamt of Ensk and of my aunts getting me
dressed for the journey.'
I reread this passage several times, and recalled that memorable day,
the day of our departure from Ensk. I remembered the old ladies, her
aunts, shouting their last-minute admonitions as the train moved out,
and how later I had moved into Katya's carriage and we had started to
go through our baskets to see what the old folks had put in them. The
little unshaven man who shared our compartment was trying to guess
what we were, and Katya stood beside me in the corridor and I had
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looked at her, standing there, and talked to her. How hard it was to
believe, now that she was so far away, that all this really happened...
CHAPTER THREE
I WRITE TO DOCTOR IVAN IVANOVICH
I was angry with Katya, because I had wanted to say goodbye to her
before leaving Moscow and had written to her, but she had not
answered and had not come to meet me, though she knew I was going
away for a long time and that perhaps we should never see each other
again. I did not write to her any more, of course. No doubt Nikolai
Antonich had succeeded in convincing her that I had slandered him
'with the most dreadful slander which the human imagination is
capable of, and that I was 'a guttersnipe of impure blood' who had
