caused the death of her mother.
Ah, well, the future was still ours! The memory of that scene made me
groan inwardly.
What could I do in Leningrad, working at the factory from eight till
five and then at the flying school from five till midnight?
In the winter, before flight training began, we studied in the reading-
room of the Aviation Museum. One day I asked the Custodian whether
he knew anything about Captain Tatarinov and whether there were any
books in the library about him or perhaps his own book Causes of the
Failure of the Greely Expedition.
I don't know why, but the Custodian showed a great interest in the
question.
'Captain Tatarinov?' he queried in surprise. 'Oho! Why does that
interest you?'
To answer that question I should have had to tell him everything you
have read in this book. So I answered briefly:
'Oh, I just like reading about voyages of exploration.' 'Very little, if
anything, is known about this voyage,' said the Custodian. 'Come along,
let's go into the library.'
Without him, of course, I would never have found anything, as it was
all in the form of newspaper articles. There was only one book, or rather
a booklet of some twenty-five pages entitled Woman at Sea. The
Captain, I discovered, had not only written about the Greely Expedition,
The booklet went out to prove that a woman could become a sailor
and quoted instances from the life of the fisher folk on the shores of the
Sea of Azov, when women in dangerous situations had behaved as well
as men and even shown themselves braver. The Captain wrote that he
visualised a time when ships would carry 'women engineers, women
navigators and women captains'.
As I read this booklet I recollected the Captain's notes on Nansen's
voyage and his report concerning the 1911 expedition to the North Pole,
and it struck me for the first time that he was not only a brave sailor, but
a broadminded man of extraordinarily keen intellect.
The writers of some of the articles evidently thought otherwise. In the
Peterburgskaya Gazeta, for instance, one journalist came out against
the expedition on the grounds that the Council of Ministers had 'turned
down Captain Tatarinov's request for the necessary funds'. Another
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newspaper carried an interesting photograph—a beautiful white ship
which reminded me of the caravels in The Century of Discovery. It was
the schooner St. Maria. She looked slim and graceful, too slim and
graceful to make the voyage from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok along
the shores of Siberia.
The next issue of the same newspaper carried a still more interesting
photograph—the crew of the schooner. True, it was very difficult to
make anything out on this photograph, but the arrangement of the
group with the Captain seated in the middle, arms folded over his chest,
struck me as very familiar. Where had I seen that photograph? Of
course-at the Tatarinovs, among a lot of other photos, which Katya had
once shown me. I continued thinking back. No, it was not at the
Tatarinovs! It was at Doctor Ivan Ivanovich's -that's where I had seen it!
And suddenly a very simple idea occurred to me. At the same time,
however, it was an extraordinary one, which only Doctor Ivan Ivanovich
could confirm. There and then I decided to write to him. It was about
seven years since he had left Moscow, but I was quite certain that he was
alive and well.
CHAPTER FOUR
I RECEIVE A REPLY
A month passed, then a second and a third. We had finished our
theoretical studies and moved out to the Corps Airfield.
It was a Big Day at the airfield-September 25th, 1930. We still
remember it by that name. It began as usual: 7 a.m. found us sitting by
our 'crates'. At nine o'clock the instructor arrived and things began to
happen. For one thing, he had brought with him an imposing-looking
man in a Russian blouse and gold-rimmed spectacles. This we soon
discovered to be the secretary of the District Party Committee.
Secondly... But this 'secondly' needs going into greater
detail.
We made several flights that day with the instructor, and he kept
studying me all the time, and, contrary to custom, he did not swear at
me.
'Well,' he said at last. 'Now fly solo.'
I must have looked excited, because he regarded me for a moment
with a searching, kindly look. He checked the instruments to see
whether they were working properly, and fastened the straps in the first,
now empty, cockpit.
'A routine round flight. Take off, start climbing. Don't turn until
you're a hundred and fifty metres off the ground. Bank, then come in to
land.'
With a feeling as though it were not I but someone else doing it, I
taxied to the end of the runway and raised my hand for permission to
take off. The flight-controller waved his white flag for me to go. I opened
the throttle and sent the machine down the airfield.
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I had long forgotten that childish sense of disappointment I had
experienced when, on the first taking to the air, I realised what flying
meant. In those days I had always imagined that I would fly like a bird,
whereas here I was sitting in an armchair just as if I were on the ground.
I sat in the armchair and I had no time to think either of the earth or the
sky. It was not until my tenth or eleventh solo flight that I noticed that
the earth below me was patterned like a map and that we lived in a very
precise geometrical world. I liked the shadows of the clouds scattered
here and there on the ground, and altogether it dawned on me that the
world was very beautiful.
