And so this was my first solo flight. The instructor's cockpit is empty.
The first turn. The cockpit is empty and the machine becomes airborne.
A second turn. I am flying quite alone, with a wonderful sensation of
complete freedom. A third turn. Time to land now. Fourth turn.
Attention! I cut off the engine. The ground gets closer and closer. There
it is, right under the machine. The landing run. The touch-down. It must
have been a decent performance, seeing that even our grumpy
instructor nodded approval, while Misha Golomb, behind his back, gave
me the thumbs-up sign.
'Sanya, you're a topnotcher,' he said, when we sat down on a grassy
bank to have a smoke. 'Honest, you are. By the way, there's a letter for
you. I was at the Aviation Museum today and the doorman said: 'One
for Grigoriev. Maybe you'll give it to him?''
And he held out a letter to me. It was from Doctor Ivan Ivanovich.
'Dear Sanya, I am very glad to hear you are well. I am looking forward
to welcoming you with your plane, as we have to use dogs here all the
time for travelling. Now about the photograph. It was given to me by the
navigating officer of the St. Maria, Ivan Klimov. He was brought to
Archangel in 1914 with frostbitten feet and died in the hospital from
blood-poisoning. He left a couple of notebooks and some letters-quite a
lot of them, round about twenty, I believe. This, of course, was the mail,
which he had brought with him from the ship, though he may have
written some of the letters himself during his journey-he was picked up
somewhere by Lieutenant Sedov's expedition. When he died the hospital
posted these letters to their respective addresses, but the notebooks and
photographs remained with me. As you are acquainted with Captain
Tatarinov's family and are determined 'to present a correct picture of his
life and death', you will naturally be interested to know about these
notebooks. They are ordinary school copybooks and the writing in them,
done in pencil, is unfortunately quite illegible. I tried several times to
read them, but had to give it up. This is about all I know. This happened
at the end of 1914 when the war had just started and nobody was
interested in Captain Tatarinov's expedition. These notebooks and
photographs are still in my possession and you can read them if you
have the patience when you come, or rather fly out here. My address is:
24 Kirov Street, Zapolarie, Arctic Circle.
'I expect more letters from my interesting patient. Your doctor, I.
Pavlov.'
Just as I had thought! That photo had been left by the navigating
officer. The doctor has seen the man with his own eyes. The very same
man who had written: 'I remain your obedient servant, I. Klimov,
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Navigating Officer.' The very same man who had fascinated me for life
with the glamorous words 'latitude', 'schooner', 'expedition', 'the
From' and the extraordinary politeness of his 'I hasten to inform you'
and 'I hope to see you soon'.
I decided that as soon as I left school I would go to Zapolarie and read
his notebooks. The doctor had given it up, but he wouldn't have done so
if he had had the hope of finding in them as much as a single word to
prove that he had been right, if somebody had spat in his face, if Katya
had thought that he had killed her mother...
CHAPTER FIVE
THREE YEARS
Youth does not end in a single day; you do not mark that day off in the
calendar: 'Today my youth has ended.' It passes imperceptibly, and it is
gone before you know it.
From Leningrad they sent me to Balashov. After graduating from the
flying school I started studying at another-this time under a real
instructor and on a real machine.
I do not recall any period in my life when I worked so diligently.
'Do you know how you fly?' our School Superintendent had said to
me back in Leningrad. 'Like an old tub. For the North you have to be
first rate.'
I learnt night-flying, when you get into the dark the moment you take
off, and while you are climbing you feel all the time as if you are making
your way gropingly through a dark corridor. I learnt to fly blind, when
everything around you is wrapped in a white mist and you seem to be
flying through millions of years into a different geological epoch; as if
you are being borne on and on in a Time-Machine instead of an
aeroplane.
I learnt that an airman has to know the properties of the air, all its
ways and whims, just as a good sailor knows the ways of the sea.
Those were the years when the Arctic, until then regarded as a remote
and useless icy wilderness, had drawn closer to us and when the first
great air jumps were attracting the whole country's attention. Every day
articles about Polar expeditions by sea and air appeared in the
newspapers and I read them with a thrill. I was longing for the North
with all my heart.
Then, one day, when I was about to take one of the most difficult
examination flights and was already seated in the cockpit, I saw a
newspaper in the hands of my instructor. It had something in it which
made me take off my helmet and goggles and climb out of the plane.
'Warm greetings and congratulations to the members of the
expedition which has successfully solved the problem of navigating the
Arctic Ocean' was printed in big letters right across the front page.
Paying no heed to what the astonished instructor was saying to me, I
looked at the page again, trying to take it all in at a glance. 'Great
Northern Sea Route Opened', one article was headed. 'The Sibiryakov
in the Bering Strait' ran another. 'Salute to the Victors' said a third.
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This was the news of the historic expedition of the Sibiryakov, which for
the first time in history had navigated the Northern Sea Route in a
single season-the route which Captain Tatarinov had attempted in the
schooner St. Maria.
