"What are you doing? Are you crazy!"
"Go along, I'll soon be back," he repeated gruffly.
A few minutes later he did come back-collarless, red-eyed— bringing
four ordinary blue scrap-books.
"There they are," he said. "I have no other papers. Take them."
This may have been another lie for all I knew, because, on opening
one of the books at random, I found that it contained some sort of
printed matter, like a page torn out of a book, but you couldn't talk to
him any more, and so I merely thanked him very politely.
"Thanks, Misha."
And went home.
July 12. Night. There they lie in front of me, four thick, blue scrap-
books, old ones, that is, from before the revolution because they all have
on them the trademark "Friedrich Kahn". The first page of the first book
bears the inscription in ornamental lettering with shading to each letter:
"Whereof I have been witness in real life" and the date-"1916. Memoirs."
Further on there are simply cuttings from old newspapers, some of
which I have never heard of, such as: The Stock Exchange Gazette,
Zemshchina, Gazeta-Kopeika. The cuttings were pasted in lengthways
in columns, but in some places also crosswise, for instance this one:
"Tatarinov's expedition. Buy postcards: (1) Prayer before sailing; (2) The
St. Maria in the roadsteads."
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When I came home I quickly looked through each book from cover to
cover. There were no "papers" here, as far as I understood this word
from my conversation with Korablev, only articles and news items
concerning the expedition from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok along the
coast of Siberia.
What sort of articles were they? I started to read them and could not
tear myself away. The whole of life in the old days was unfolded before
me and I read on with a bitter sense of irreparable doom and
resentment. Irreparable because the schooner St. Maria was doomed
before she set sail-that is what I gathered from these articles. And
resentment because I now learnt how treacherously my father had been
deceived, and how badly his trustful and guileless nature had let him
down.
This was how one "eye-witness" described the sailing of the St. Maria:
"The masts of the schooner, bound on her distant voyage are poorly
flagged. The hour for setting sail draws near. The last 'prayer for seamen
and seafarers', the last farewell speeches. Slowly the St. Maria gets
under way. The shore recedes farther and farther until houses and
people merge in a single colourful strip. A solemn moment! The last link
with land and home is severed. But we feel sad and ashamed at this poor
send-off, at these indifferent faces which register merely curiosity.
Evening draws in. The St. Maria stops in the mouth of the Dvina. The
people who are seeing her off drink a glass of champagne to the success
of the expedition. A last handshake, a last embrace, then back to town
aboard the waiting Lebedin, the women standing by the rail of the little
steamboat, waving and waving, brushing the tears away to wave again.
We can still hear the nervous barking of the dogs aboard the receding
schooner. She grows smaller and smaller until nothing but a dot can be
seen on the darkening horizon. What lies in store for you, brave men?"
Now the schooner was off on her long voyage and the lighthouse at
Archangel sent her its farewell signaclass="underline" "Happy sailing and success!"-but
ashore, what was happening ashore, my God! What sordid squabbling
among the ship chandlers who had serviced the schooner, what lawsuits
and auctions-some of the supplies and victuals had had to be left behind
and were all sold by auction. And the accusations-what didn't they
accuse my father of! Within a week of the schooner setting sail he was
accused of having failed to insure either himself or his men; of having
sailed three weeks later than the conditions of Arctic navigation
allowed; of having gone off without a wireless man. He was accused of
thoughtlessness in selecting his crew, among whom "there was not a
single man who could handle a sail". They made sneering remarks about
"this preposterous adventure, which reflected, as in a drop of water, this
present-day, pretentious, muddled life of ours."
Within a few days of the St. Maria's sailing a violent storm broke out
in the Kara Sea and immediately rumours spread that the expedition
had been shipwrecked off the coast of Novaya Zemlya. "Who is to
blame?" "The Fate of the St. Maria", "Where is Tatarinov?"- the first
chilling impressions of my childhood came back to me as I read these
articles. Mother came quickly into my little room at Ensk with a
newspaper in her hand. She was wearing that lovely black rustling dress.
She did not see me, though I spoke to her, and I jumped out of bed and
ran up to her in my bare feet and nightgown. The floor was cold, but she
did not tell me to go back to bed nor did she pick me up from the floor.
She just stood by the window with the newspaper in her hand. I tried to
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reach up to the window, too, but all I could see was our garden strewn
with wet maple leaves, and wet paths and puddles in which the
raindrops were still falling. "Mummy, what are you looking at?" She was
silent. I asked again. I wanted her to take me in her arms, because her
continued silence was frightening me. "Mummy!" I began to cry, and
that made her turn round and bend down to pick me up, but something
was the matter with her-she sat down on the floor, then lay down and
kept quite still, stretched out on the floor in her lovely black, rustling
dress. And all of a sudden wild, unreasoning terror seized me and I
started to scream. I screamed madly and banged at something with
hands and feet. Then I heard Mother's frightened voice, but I went on
screaming, unable to stop myself. Afterwards, back in bed I heard
Grandma talking to Mother, and Mother saying: "I frightened her."
I pretended to be asleep and did not say anything, because after all
she was Mummy and because she was talking and crying in her usual
voice.
Only now, on reading these articles, did I realise what made her act
that way.
The rumours proved to be false, however, and from Yugorsky Shar
Captain Tatarinov telegraphed a message of "hearty greetings and best
wishes to all who had made donations to the expedition and to all its
well-wishers".
This message was printed in facsimile under an unfamiliar portrait of
Father in naval uniform-regulation jacket with white shoulder-straps-an
elegant officer with an old-fashioned moustache turned up at the ends.
In sending "best wishes to those who had made donations" he was
hoping that their contributions would enable the Committee for the
Exploration of Russia's Arctic Territories to support the families of the
crew. He wrote about this in his dispatch sent through the Yugorsky
Shar Dispatch Service, which was published in the newspaper Novoye
Vremya:
"I am confident that the Committee will not leave to the mercy of fate
the families of those who have dedicated their lives to the common
national interests."
Vain hopes! In the issue of the same newspaper for June 27, I read a
report of the Committee's meeting: "According to N. A. Tatarinov, the