It required an effort to keep from asking her: 'I hear that you see
quite a lot of Romashov?' I made the effort and did not ask.
'And how is Sanya?' she suddenly asked, meaning my sister. 'We
used to correspond, then we stopped.'
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We began talking about Sanya, and Katya said that a Leningrad
theatre had recently come to Moscow and was presenting Gorky's
Mother, and the programme had said that the decor was by 'Artist P.
Skovorodnikov'.
'You don't say?'
'Very good scenery too. Daring, yet simple.' We went on talking
and talking about this and that in ordinary voices, until a feeling of horror
came upon me at the thought that it would all end like this— with our
talking ourselves out in ordinary voices, then parting and my not having
any excuse to phone her again.
'Katya, I want to see you. When can you meet me?'
'As it happens, I'm free this evening.'
'Nine o'clock, say?'
I waited for her to invite me home, but she did not, and we arranged
to meet-but where?
'What about the public garden at Triumfalnaya?'
'That garden doesn't exist any more,' Katya said coldly.
We arranged to meet in the colonnade of the Bolshoi Theatre. That was
all we spoke about on the telephone, and there was no sense in my going
over each word the way I did all that long day in Moscow.
I went to the offices of the Civil Aviation Board, then went to see
Valya at the Zoological Institute. I must have been wool-gathering,
because Valya had to repeat to me several times that tomorrow was the
twenty-fifth anniversary of Korablev's teaching career and there was to
be a meeting to mark the occasion at the school.
Nine o'clock found me outside the Bolshoi Theatre.
It was the same Katya with those plaits coiled round her head and the
curls on her forehead, which I always remembered when I thought of
her. She was paler and more grown-up, no longer that girl who had
kissed me once in a public garden in Triumfalnaya Square. She had
acquired a certain restraint in manner and speech. Yet it was Katya all
the same, and she had not grown to resemble Maria Vasilievna as
strongly as I had feared. On the contrary, her original traits of character
had become more pronounced, if anything, she was even more herself
than before. She was wearing a short-sleeved white silk blouse with a
blue polka-dot bow pinned at the neck, and she put on a severe
expression when I tried, during our conversation, to peer into her face.
Wandering about Moscow that cheerless day, we might have been
conversing through a wall in different rooms, with the door being
opened a little now and again and Katya peeping out to see whether it
was me or not. I talked and talked—I don't remember when I ever talked
so much. But all this was not what I had wanted to tell her. I told her
how I had made up my 'Klimov alphabet' and what a job it had been to
read his diaries. I told her how we had found the old boat-hook with the
inscription 'Schooner St. Maria' on it.
But not a word was said about why I had done all this. Not a word. As
though the whole thing were long since dead and buried, and there had
never been the pain and love, the death of Maria Vasilievna, my jealousy
of Romashka, and all the living blood that throbbed in me and Katya.
They were building the Metro in Moscow and the most familiar places
were fenced off, and we had to walk the length of these fences over
sagging board-walks and then turn back, because the fence ended in a
184
pit which had not been there yesterday and from which voices could
now be heard and the noise of underground work.
Our conversation was like that too-all roundabout, hedged, with the
most familiar places, known to us from childhood and school years,
fenced off. We kept running into these fences, especially when we
approached such dangerous ground as the subject of Nikolai Antonich.
I asked Katya whether she had received my letters—one from
Leningrad and another from Balashov, and when she said she hadn't, I
hinted at the possibility of their having fallen into strange hands.
'There are no strange hands in our house,' Katya said sharply.
We returned to Theatre Square. It was already late in the evening, but
flowers were still being sold from the stalls, and after Zapolarie it was
strange to see so much of everything—people, cars, houses and electric
lamps swinging this way and that.
We sat on a bench, and Katya listened to me with her chin propped up
in her hand. I remembered how she had always liked to take her time
settling herself comfortably the better to be able to listen. It struck me
now what the change in her was. It was her eyes. They had grown sad.
It was our one good moment. Then I asked whether she remembered
our last conversation in the garden in Triumfalnaya Square, but she did
not answer. It was the most terrible of answers for me. It meant that the
old answer: 'Let's not talk about it any more', still stood.
Perhaps, if I had been able to have a good look into her eyes, I might
have read more in them. But she averted them and I gave it up.
All I felt was that she was growing colder towards me with every
passing minute. She nodded when I said: 'I'll keep you informed.' After
a pause, she said:
'I wanted to tell you, Sanya, that I appreciate what you are doing. I
was sure you had long forgotten the whole thing.'
'As you see, I haven't.'
'Do you mind if I tell Nikolai Antonich about our conversation?'
'Not at all. He'd be interested to learn about my discoveries. They
concern him very closely, you know, more closely than he imagines.'
They did not concern him as closely as all that and I had no grounds
whatever for making such an insinuation. But I was very sore.
Katya regarded me with a thoughtful air. She seemed to be on the
point of asking me something, but could not make up her mind. We said
