"Quite an ordinary profession, Nikolai Antonich," I said "Just like any other."
"Any other? What about self-control? And courage in dangerous situations? And discipline? Not only service discipline, but moral discipline, too-self-discipline, so to speak."
It made me feel sick, as of old, to hear these bombastic, well-turned phrases of his, but I listened to him with courteous attention. He looked much older than he had at the anniversary party and his face was careworn.
As we passed into the dining-room he put an arm round Katya's shoulders, and she drew away with a barely perceptible movement.
In the dining-room sat one of the Bubenchikov aunts, which one exactly I couldn't make out. My last encounter with the two of them had been a rather stormy one. Anyway, this aunt now greeted me quite nicely.
"Well, we're waiting," said Nikolai Antonich, when Nina Kapi-tonovna, fussing timidly around me, had poured me out some tea and moved up to me everything that lay on the table. "We're waiting to hear some tales of the Arctic. Flying blind, permafrost, drifting , icefields, snowy wastes!"
. "Nothing to write home about, Nikolai Antonich," I answered
•[)] cheerily. "Just icefields as icefields go."
Nikolai Antonich laughed.
"I once met an old friend who is now working in our trade delegation in Rome," he said. "I asked him: 'Well, what's Rome like?' And he answered:
'Nothing much. Just Rome.' "
His tone was condescending. Katya was listening to us with down--A cast eyes. To keep the ball JroLlmg Istarted talking about the Nentsi, about the Arctic scenery, and even my flight to Vanokan with the doctor. Nina Kapitonovna wanted to know whether I flew very high, and this reminded me of Aunt Dasha's letter which I had received when still at school at Balashov:
"Since it's not your lot to walk on the ground like other people, then I beg you, Sanya dear, to fly low."
I told them how Misha Golomb had got hold of that letter and how, ever since then, whenever I put on my flying-helmet, the boys at the airfield used to shout from all sides: "Sanya, don't fly Ugh!"
Misha started a comic journal at the school entitled Fly Low. It ran a special section called: "Flying Techniques in Pictures" with verses like this:
It's good to glide when you get height,
Don't try daisy-clipping, though,
Don't risk your life on any flight,
Take Auntie's advice and fly low.
I must have made it a good story, because everyone laughed, loudest of all Nikolai Antonich. He held his sides with laughter. His face turned pale
- it always did when he laughed.
Katya hardly sat at the table. She kept getting up and disappearing for long periods in the kitchen, and I had an idea that she went out in order to be alone and think things out. She had that sort of look when she came back into the room. On one such occasion she went up to the sideboard with a biscuit barrel and evidently forgot what she had gone there for. I looked her straight in the eye and she answered with an anxious puzzled look.
Nikolai Antonich must have noticed our exchange of glances. His face clouded and he began to speak still more slowly and smoothly.
Then Romashka arrived. Nina Kapitonovna answered the doorbell and I heard her say to him in the hall in a tone of timid malice:
"We have a visitor!"
He lingered in the hall for quite a time, preening himself, no doubt.
When he came in he did not show the slightest surprise at seeing me.
"Ah, so that's who your visitor is," he said with a sour smile. "Very glad. Very glad to see you, very glad." His face belied his words. If anybody was glad it was me. From the moment he came in I watched his every movement. I did not take my eyes off him. What kind of man was he? How had he turned out? What was his attitude to Nikolai Antonich, to Katya? He went up to her and started chatting, and every movement, every word of his was a sort of riddle which I had to guess there and then, while my eyes kept drilling his face and I kept thinking about him.
Now that I saw them together, him and Katya, I could have laughed-so insignificant did he look beside her, so ugly and meanly. He sounded very sure of himself when he talked to her, "too sure" I made a mental note. He passed some humorous remark to Nina Kapitonovna, but nobody smiled. "Not even Nikolai Antonich," I made another mental note.
The two started talking shop, something to do with a student's thesis, which Nikolai Antonich considered poor, and Romashka considered good.
This was done, of course, to stress the fact that my presence meant nothing to them. I preferred it that way, if anything, because I was now able to sit and watch them, listening and thinking.
"No," I said to myself, "this is not the old Romashka, who was even proud of being at the complete beck and call of Nikolai Antonich. He talks to him in a slighting tone, almost offensive, and Nikolai Antonich answers wearily, wincing. Theirs is a difficult relationship, and Nikolai Antonich finds it irksome. I was right. Romashka had not been acting on his behalf.
He had not taken those papers from Vyshimirsky in order to destroy them. He had done it so that he could sell them to Nikolai Antonich-that was more like him. And must have demanded a pretty stiff price too. That is, if he had sold them and was not still haggling."
Katya asked me something and I answered her. Romashka, who was listening to Nikolai Antonich, glanced at us uneasily, and suddenly an idea passed slowly through my mind and seemed to step a little to one side of the others as if waiting for me to come up closer. It was a very weird idea, but quite a valid one for anybody who had known Romashov since childhood. At the moment, however, I could not dwell on it because the thought was chilling and would not bear thinking of. I merely glanced at it, as it were, from the side.
Then Nikolai Antonich went into his study with Romashka and we were left with the old ladies, one of whom was deaf while the other pretended to be deaf.
"Katya," I said quietly, "Korablev asked you to call on him tomorrow at seven. Will you come?"
She nodded.
"Was it all right, my coming here? I wanted to see you ever so badly."
She nodded again.
"And please forget that evening when we last met. It was all wrong.
Consider that we haven't met yet."
She looked at me in silence with a puzzled expression.
What was that idea? I thought about it the whole evening until I fell asleep. The next morning I awoke with a feeling that I had not slept at all for thinking.
The whole day was like that. With this thought in my mind I went to the Northern Sea Route Administration, to the Geographica Society and to the office of a journal devoted to Arctic affairs. At times I forgot about it, but only as though I had simply left it outside the door and then come out and run into it again like an old acquaintance.
Towards the evening, tired and irritable, I arrived at Korablev's. He was working when I came, marking exercise books. Two high stacks of them lay on the table and he sat there in his spectacles reading them, his poised pen coming down from time to time to pitilessly underline mistakes. I couldn't imagine where this work had sprung from, this being holiday-time and the school closed. But even at holiday-time he found something to do.
"You go on with your work, Ivan Pavlovich, and I'll sit here a bit. You don't mind? I'm tired."
For a while we sat in complete silence, broken only by the scratching of Korablev's pen and his angry growls. I had never noticed him growling so angrily while he worked.
"Well, Sanya, how goes it?"
"I'd like to ask you one question, Ivan Pavlovich."
"Go ahead."
"Do you know that Romashov has been visiting Vyshimirsky?"
"I do."
"And do you know what he went there for?"
"I do."
"Ivan Pavlovich," I said reproachfully. "I can't make you out, honestly, I can't! Knowing such a thing and never telling me a word!"
Korablev regarded me gravely. He was very serious that evening-probably a bit nervous, waiting for Katya, and not wanting me to see that he was.
"There are many things I haven't told you, Sanya," he retorted.
"Because although you're a pilot now you're still capable of kicking somebody in the face."
"That was ages ago! An idea has come to me, Ivan Pavlovich. Of course, I may be wrong. So much the better."
"There you are, getting excited again," said Korablev.
"No I'm not. Don't you think that Romaska might have demanded of him
... might have said he would keep his mouth shut if Nikolai Antonich helped him to marry Katya?"
Korablev did not answer.
"Ivan Pavlovich!" I yelled.
"Getting excited?"
"I'm not. What I can't understand is how Katya could let him even entertain such an idea. Katya of all people!"
Korablev took a turn about the room with a thoughtful air. He removed his spectacles and his face looked sad. I caught him glancing several times at Maria Vasilievna's portrait, the one in which she was wearing the coral necklace. It stood in its old place on the desk.
"Yes, Katya," he said slowly. "Katya, whom you do not know at all."
That was something new. I did not know Katya?
"You don't know how she has been living all these years. But I do, because I've ... because I've taken an interest in her," Korablev said quickly. "All the more because nobody else seemed to have been taking much interest in her."
That was a dig at me.
"She was very miserable after her mother died," he went on. "And there was another person at her side who was just as miserable, if not more so.
You know whom I mean."
He meant Nikolai Antonich.
"A very experienced and complex person," he continued. "A terrible man.
But he did really love her mother all his life. And that's saying a lot. Her death brought the two closer together. That's a fact."
He lit a cigarette and his fingers shook slightly as he struck a match and then gently laid it in the ashtray.
"Then Romashov came on the scene," he went on. "Let me tell you that you don't know him either. He's another Nikolai Antonich, but cast in a different mould. For one thing, he's energetic. Secondly, he's entirely without morals, good or bad. Thirdly, he's capable of taking a decisive step, that's to say he's a man of action. And this man of action, who knows what he's after, comes one fine day to his teacher and friend and says to him: 'Nikolai Antonich, would you believe it-that Grigoriev fellow turned out to be quite right. You did swindle Captain Tatarinov's expedition.
What's more, there are quite a number of shady things you're reticent about when answering personnel questionnaires...' Nina Kapitonovna overheard this conversation. She did not know what to make of it, so she came running to me. I got it right, though."
"That's interesting," I said.
There was a pause.
"As to what happened next," Korablev continued, "you can judge by results. You know Nikolai Antonich-he doesn't do things in a huny. Probably this was first put to him half in a joke, casually. Then more and more seriously and repeatedly."
"But, Ivan Pavlovich, he cannot have persuaded her, can he?"
"Sanya, Sanya, what a funny chap you are! Would I be telling you all this if he had? But who knows? He would have got his way in the end, perhaps, the way he got-"
I understood what he was going to say: "The way he got Maria Vasilievna to marry him."
I did not know whether to stay or leave-it was already seven o'clock and Katya might ring the bell at any moment. I found it physically hard to tear myself away from him. I watched him sitting there smoking, his grey head bowed and his long legs stretched out, and thought how deeply he had loved Maria Vasilievna and how unlucky he had been and yet how true to her memory he had remained-for that was why he had watched over Katya so carefully all those years.
Then he suddenly said that I had better go.
"It will be easier for me to talk to her."
He saw me to the door and we took leave of each other till the following day.
It was still quite light when I went out into the street. The sun was setting and its rays were reflected in the windows on the opposite side of Sadovaya.
I stood at the entrance looking down the street in the direction from which Katya should be coming. I must have been waiting a long time, for the windows darkened one after another from left to right. Then I saw her, but not where I had been looking. She had come out of a side street and was standing on the pavement, waiting for the cars to pass. A sudden fear assailed me as I watched her crossing the road, wearing the same dress she had worn when we met outside the Bolshoi Theatre and looking very sad. She was quite near me now, but she walked with her head down and did not see me.
As a matter of fact I did not want her to see me. I wished her mentally good cheer and all the best I could wish her at that moment, and I followed her with my eyes all the way to the door. She disappeared inside, but mentally I followed her. I could see Korablev coming forward to meet her, trying hard to appear calm, and taking a long time fitting a cigarette into his long holder before starting to talk.
Now the windows were darkening quickly and the glow of sunset lingered only in the two end windows of the block facing me.
It was only eight o'clock and I did not feel like going back to my hotel yet. For a long time I sat in a little public garden facing the entrance to our school. I went into the courtyard several times to see whether the light had gone on in Korablev's flat. But they were talking in the twilight, Korablev speaking while Katya listened in silence.