"Barrels" and "Immelmanns". This time, though, you could say that the
machine had gone into a spin.
"It's all over, Katya," he said savagely when he had returned from V.
"The Arctic, expeditions, the St. Maria—\ don't want to hear anything
more about them. It's all fairy-tales for children, time we forgot them."
And I promised to be with him in forgetting those "fairy-tales",
though I was sure that he never would forget them.
I still had a slender hope that Sanya would succeed in Moscow in
getting the order revoked. But the telegram I got from him, sent not
from Moscow but from somewhere on the way to Saratov, killed that
hope. The very appointment which he had received put the seal, as it
were, to the cancellation of the expedition. He had been transferred to
the Agricultural Aviation Service, known as the S.P.A.— Special Purpose
Aviation—and his job now was to sow wheat and spray reservoirs. "Very
well, I'll be what they take me for," he wrote in his first letter from some
farm, where he had been spending over a week now "co-ordinating and
fixing" things with the local authorities. "To hell with illusions, for they
were illusions really! C. was right after all-if a thing's worth doing at all,
do it well. Don't imagine that I've thrown my hand in. The future is still
ours."
247
"Let's be grateful for that old story," he wrote in another letter, "if only
because it helped us to find and love each other. I am confident, though,
that very soon these old private reckonings will prove important not
only to us."
Nothing seemed to be working out the way I had thought and dreamt.
I had come to Leningrad for two or three weeks to meet Sanya and
follow him wherever he might go, and now he was far away from me
again. I now found myself with a family—Pyotr junior, Pyotr senior and
Nanny, who had to be taken care of, and it was I who had to do all the
thinking.
I continued my studies of Arctic geology, though I had promised
Sanya to think no more of the North. Being hard up for money, I took
up some dreary work at the Geological Institute.
Ordinarily, I would probably have taken it badly, cursed myself, and
thought about myself a thousand times more than need be. But a
curious inward composure had suddenly taken possession of me. It was
as though, together with the "fairy-tales", I had seen the last of my
vanity, my pride, my sense of personal grievance at things not having
turned out the way I so passionately wanted them to. "It can't be helped,
dearest!" I answered Sanya when he blamed himself in one of his letters
for having dragged me out to Leningrad and abandoned me there, and
with a whole family on my hands into the bargain. "As our old judge
says, you can't have things your own way in life."
I wrote to him often, long letters about our "learned" Nanny, about
how quick little Pyotr was changing, about how Pyotr senior all of a
sudden had thrown himself eagerly into his work and his design for a
Pushkin monument was going splendidly.
But not a word did I write about how, one day, while shopping at a
grocery store in October 25th Prospekt, I saw through the window a
familiar figure in a grey overcoat and soft hat, the very hat which had
been bought for my benefit and which sat so awkwardly on the big
square head.
It was getting dark, and I may have been mistaken. No, it was
Romashov all right. Aloof, pale, leaning slightly forward, he slowly
walked past the shop window and was lost in the crowd.
248
PART SEVEN
FROM THE DIARY OF KATYA TATARINOVA
SEPARATION
September 2, 1941. I once read some verses in which the years were
compared to lanterns hanging "on the slender thread of time drawn
through the mind". Some of these lanterns burn with a bright, beautiful
light, others flicker smokily in the darkness.
We live in the Crimea and in the Far East. I am the wife of an airman
and I have many new acquaintances, all airmen's wives, in the Crimea
and the Far East. Like them, I worry when new aircraft are received in
the detachment. Like them, I keep telephoning detachment
headquarters, to the annoyance of the duty-officer, whenever Sanya
goes aloft and doesn't come back in time. Like them, I am sure that I
shall never get used to my husband's job, and like them, end up by
getting used to it. Almost impossible though it is, I have not given up my
geology. My old professor, who still calls me "dear child", assures me
that had I not got married, and to an airman at that, I should long ago
have won my M. Sc. degree. She went back on these words when, in the
late autumn of 1937, I came back to Moscow from the Far East with a
new piece of research done together with Sanya. Aeromagnetic
prospecting, the subject was. Searching for iron-ore deposits from an
airplane.
We are in a sleeping-car compartment of the Vladivostok-Moscow
express. It is almost unbelievable-we have actually been together under
the same roof for ten whole days, without parting day or night. We have
breakfast, dinner and supper at the same table. We see each other in the
daytime-there are said to be women who do not find this strange.
"Sanya, now I know what you are."
"What am I?"
"You're a traveller."
249
"Yes, a sky chauffeur-Vladivostok-Irkutsk, take-off from Primorsky
Airport, seven forty-four."
"That doesn't mean anything. You don't get a chance. All the same
you're a traveller by vocation, it's your grand passion. You know, it has
always seemed to me that every person has a characteristic age of his
own. One person is born forty, while another remains a boy of nineteen
all his life. C. is like that, and so are you. Lots of airmen, in fact.
Especially those who go in for ocean hops."
"You think I'm one of them?"
"Yes. You won't throw me over when you're hopped across, will you?"
"No. But they'll call me back mid-way."
I said nothing. "They'll call me back"—now that was quite a different
story. A story of how my father's life, which Sanya had pieced together
from fragments scattered between Ensk and Taimyr, had fallen into
alien hands. The portraits of Captain Tatarinov hang in the
Geographical Society and the Arctic Institute. Poets dedicate verses to
him, most of them very poor ones. The Soviet Encyclopaedia has a big
article about him signed with the modest initials N.A.T. His voyage is
now history, the history of Russia's conquest of the Arctic, along with
names like Sedov, Rusanov and Toll.
And the higher this name rises, the more often does one hear it
uttered alongside that of his cousin, the distinguished Arctic scientist,
who gave his whole fortune to organise the expedition of the St. Maria
and devoted his whole life to the biography of that great man.
Nikolai Antonich's admirable work has received appreciative
recognition. His book Amid the Icy Wastes is reprinted every year in
editions designed both for children and adults. The newspapers carry
reports of various scientific councils which he chairs. At these councils