jumped stiffly down on the damp sandy earth, and when Volodya introduced us to his aunt, a thin old lady in a long skirt, she turned out to be quite simple and homely-looking.
She was called Maria Trofimovna. Her grey hair peeped out from under a simple, black-spotted cotton kerchief. She came out to us with a gleaming spade in her hands—the old lady had been digging her garden herself.
'I've brought some lodgers for you, aunt. Make them welcome!' Volodya said gaily, cracking his long whip.
NO MORE WORRIES
The 'two-storey house of her own' turned out in fact to be a little yellow-tiled cottage standing in a small yard planted with flowers. Farther back, behind the cottage, we noticed the trees of the park and a blue-painted bandstand.
A small dark kitchen and a clean, whitewashed bedroom, the 'door of which led straight into the front passage, made up the whole of the 'mansion's' first floor.
From the front passage, which was cluttered with baskets, wooden tubs, and kitchen things, a rather steep and creaky ladder without any rail led up into what appeared to be an attic.
As we climbed up the ladder after the mistress of the house, I expected the two sloping beams that held the rungs to collapse at any moment and send the five of us tumbling down amid the lumber in the passage.
The one and only room upstairs took our fancy at once. Some time ago, by the look of it, it had been converted from an ordinary loft. The ceiling was sloping and the window led straight out on to the roof.
Volodya stood his whip in the corner and, as if he were the owner of the place, flicked back the catch on the window. The dusty little window opened with a creak.
'If you climb out here,' said Volodya, 'you'll see the screen as well as in the front row, even better. I saw Beast of the Forests last week. No queuing, no charge, and a nice breeze to keep you cool! What more do you want?'
And indeed, even without climbing out of the window, we had a very good view of the white cinema screen in the town park. I leaned farther out of the window and saw the roof sloping away below me, the neighbour's garden on the other side of the fence, and farther away still, beyond the railway line—the sea.
The driver had not mislead us; the Azov Sea, large as life, and pretty dirty near the shore because of the storm, pounded the beach not more than a hundred paces from Maria Trofimovna's cottage. From the window I could see the white caps on the waves. A fishing smack with bare mast was tossing in the bay.
The old lady watched us anxiously as we examined her room. She seemed very willing to let it and Sasha Bobir accordingly acted like an experienced lodger. Where he learnt his tricks, I don't know.
He swaggered about the room, stamping on the cracked floor-boards and poking his nose into every nook and cranny. For some reason he even opened the door in the chimney of the little stove. Noticing a cross outlined with candle smoke above the door, he ran his finger over it with an air of stern disapproval. Finally he examined the ladder; from above, it looked even more steep and dangerous.
'Why no hand-rail?' Sasha asked severely. 'If you have to get out of bed in the night, you might break your neck going down there.'
'I keep an icon-lamp burning all night in the passage,' the old lady answered obligingly.
'What?. . . An icon-lamp? They cause fires!' Sasha said impressively.
'Oh, surdy not, dear! Heaven forbid!' The old lady looked worried.
'What about fuel in winter?' Sasha went on relentlessly.
'Well, if you'll be working at the factory,' the old lady said, 'you'll have enough fuel. The factory workers always get a ration of coal. Volodya will bring it here for you and we'll store it in the shed where I keep the goat.'
'But suppose we aren't working at the factory,' I thought. 'Suppose they don't take us on and we have to go away altogether?'
'This little attic suits me down to the ground, chaps!' said Sasha emphatically, as if his opinion clinched matters. 'Pity it's rather bare, of course.'
'But I told you, lads,' the driver put in hastily, 'buy yourselves tropical furniture for the time being, and later on, when winter's getting near and you've made some money, you'll be able to have all the luxury you want.'
'But what are we going to sleep on?' Sasha objected. 'You can't get much sleep on an orange box.'
'You can buy 'put-you-ups'—camp-beds—but they're a bit dearer, of course,' Volodya suggested not quite so confidently.
'But can't we just sleep on the floor?' Petka broke in suddenly. 'I like sleeping on the floor in summer. It's good for you. Haven't you got any straw, Gran?'
'I can let you have some hay. There's some left over from what I bought for the goat last winter.'
'Hay breeds flees,' Sasha said, wrinkling his nose. 'Hay and sawdust. Let General Denikin sleep on hay. We'll buy ourselves 'put-you-ups.' Now...'
'Hold on, Sasha,' I cut in. 'You've done enough talking.' And turning to Maria Trofimovna, I said: 'If you're willing, I think we'll be staying here. But what about the deposit—do you want us to pay now or later?'
'I don't know, I'm sure. . .' The old lady said helplessly. 'Perhaps Volodya could say.'
'Listen to me, lads!' said Volodya, thumping the floor with the handle of his whip. 'We're all friends together, aren't we? No one wants to diddle you. I've introduced you to my aunt, now you stick to her. She'll be a mother to you. A bit of washing, a bit of cooking when you need it—she'll do it for you. You'll be your own masters entirely, and Auntie, here, will get her keep out of it, won't she? You can discuss the cash later. Now, listen to me, I'm a man of experience. You pop off now to the works, show them those passes you've got from Comrade Dzerzhinsky and find out how you stand. Otherwise you're all in the dark, so to speak. Do you know what grade they'll give you, how much they'll pay you? You don't know anything, do you? But when you've been to the works, you'll be a lot wiser. And in the meantime, Auntie, here, will put her thinking cap on and work out how much to charge you, so that she won't feel the pinch and her nephew, Volodya, will have something to wet the bargain with. Well, shall we be getting a move on?. . .'
Of course, we shouldn't have wasted a minute on this first day of our arrival in the new town. We ought to have taken Volodya's advice and rushed off at once to the works. But we were very keen to discover what the sea looked like at close quarters. We had never seen it before, except in pictures.
The biggest river we had ever seen back home was the Dniester, and that was a good fifteen versts away, along country roads. And in the Dniester, you could only bathe near the bank—if you swam out to the middle, you might get potted at by a Rumanian gendarme.
Leaving the cottage, we turned down a lane leading to the sea, crossed the harbour railway lines, and stopped at the sea wall.
This strange sea that we had never seen before was hurling itself furiously at the shore. Foaming waves thundered against the foot of the wall, then rolled back defeated carrying away pebbles, shells and dead seaweed and making room for fresh waves to repeat the assault. The sea was all hills and dales, and not a calm patch anywhere.
A cloud of cold spray swept over us. With a grimace of distaste, Sasha wiped his freckled face and stepped back.
I must say I had not imagined the sea was like this. What I had expected to see was a great calm expanse of clear blue water.
Once I had given Galya a photograph of myself with the inscription: 'My love, boundless as the sea, the shores of life o'erflows.'
I had heard these words at the theatre, in a play about seven prisoners who were hung by the tsarist police. I had learnt them by heart and often thought of them. Galya asked me once, I remember, if I had composed them myself. It was a bit too much to tell a lie and say 'yes' straight out. So I had to put her off by replying: 'What, don't you like them?'
