Katya had once had a dress like that-white polka dots on a blue ground. What could a woman be doing in Valya's bachelor flat? Kiren and the children had gone away at the beginning of the war-I learnt that from Katya's first letters. "I wonder who's hooked you, old chap?" I recalled a letter of Katya's in which she poked fun at Kiren for being jealous of her husband, engrossed though he was in the study of cross-bred silver foxes. The cause of her jealousy was a "Zhenka Kolpakchi, who has eyes of different colour".
It looked as if that Zhenka hadn't lost much time! Anyhow, I had not found Valya in.
"Dear old Valya," I wrote, "on my way to Yaroslavl, where I hope to find Katya or at least find out where she is, I dropped in on you but unfortunately did not find you in. I've had no news of Katya for the last six months. She corresponded with Kiren when she was in Leningrad, so maybe Kiren or you know something about her? I was wounded and was in hospital at M-v. I wrote to you but got no reply. I've been through a lot, but how much easier it would have been if Katya and I had met, or at least if each of us knew that the other was alive. Write to me, care of Rear-Admital R., Northern Fleet, Political Department, Polarnoye. This is a tentative address as I have no other yet. Keep well, dear friend. The door was open. You'll have to break it down now-at least that's better than leaving the flat open.
I'll drop in again before I leave, if I can manage it."
I put this note on the kitchen table. Then I placed the door-hook in position so that it would drop into the eye when I shut the door, and I slammed the door. The hook fell straight into the eye.
I had one more important errand in that neighbourhood. Not far from Valya there lived a man whom I had to see, whether he relished the prospect of such a visit or not. This visit of mine was long overdue!
During my sleepless nights in hospital, tossing about in delirium, I had thought about this encounter. I needed it so much that I felt I had to keep alive until I had seen him!
I had often pictured to myself this meeting. I wanted to appear before him at some relaxed moment in his life, at the theatre, say, when the thought of me would be farthest from his mind. Or somewhere in a hotel, say, when I would lock the door and eye him with a smile. Sometimes, in the gloom of pre-dawn, I would see him on the bed next to mine, sitting his legs tucked under him and a look of strange indifference in his flat, half-closed eyes.
KATYA'S PORTRAIT
One day, as we were passing through Dogs' Place, Katya had remarked:
"Romashov lives here." She had pointed to a grey-green building, which looked no different from its neighbours on either side. Yet both then and now I thought there was something indefinably mean about those peeling walls.
There was no list of tenants at the entrance, as before the war, and I had to go to the house-manager's office to find out the number of the flat.
And this is what took place in the office: the registration clerk, a dour, prim lady in pince-nez, started and looked at me with round eyes when I asked for Romashov. In a cubbyhole partitioned off with boards, men wearing aprons-evidently yardkeepers-sat and stood about. There was a slight stir among them too.
"Why don't you phone him," the clerk suggested. "His phone was connected yesterday."
"No, I'd rather call without phoning," I said, smiling. "A sort of surprise. You see, I'm an old friend of his whom he thinks dead."
Though this was a quite ordinary conversation, the clerk reacted with an oddly forced smile, and from the adjoining room there slowly emerged a very cool and deliberate young man in a smart cap, who gave me a close look.
I had to go back into the street to get to the entrance, and at the street door I hesitated for a moment. I had no gun, and was thinking whether I ought not have a word with the militiaman standing on the corner. I dismissed the idea, however. "He won't get away," I thought.
I never for a moment doubted that he was in Moscow, probably not in the army. Even if he was in the army he would still be living in his flat. Or in a summer cottage. In the mornings he would walk about in his pyjamas. I could see him as large as life in Ms pyjamas, after a bath, with the yellow tufts of wet hair sticking up on his head. It was a vision that set purple circles spinning before my eyes. I had to compose myself, which meant thinking of something else. I recalled that at five o'clock R. would be waiting for me at the Hydrographi-cal Department.
"Who's there?"
"May I speak to Romashov?"
"Call back in an hour."
"Couldn't I wait for him inside," I said very politely. "I shan't be able to call again, unfortunately. I'm afraid he'll be disappointed at not seeing me."
The door-chain clinked. It was not slipped off, though. On the contrary, it was being fastened, so that the person inside could have a peep at me through the slit. Then with another clink it was taken off. An old man in an unbuttoned shirt and baggy trousers held up by braces let me into the hallway. He stared at me suspiciously. There was something aristocratically haughty and at the same time pitiful about that weazened, hook-nosed face. A yellow-grey tuft of hair stuck up from his bald forehead. The skin hung over his Adam's .apple in long folds, like stalactites.
"Von Vyshimirsky?" I said, wonderingly. He started. "I mean Vyshimirsky without the 'von'-you're Nikolai Ivanovich Vyshimirsky, aren't you?"
"What?"
"My dear Nikolai Ivanovich, don't you remember me?" I proceeded cheerfully. "I came to see you once."
He started breathing hard.
"I've had lots of people coming to see me, thousands," he answered sullenly. "As many as forty used to sit down at my table."
"You were working at the Moscow Drama Theatre and used to wear a jacket with brass buttons. My friend Grisha Faber played the red-haired doctor, and Korablev introduced us in Grisha's dressing-room."
I wonder why I felt so light-hearted? Here I was standing in Roma-shov's flat as though I were the master there. He would be here within an hour. I took a deep breath with half-open mouth. What would I do to him?
"I don't know! What name did you say?"
"Captain Grigoriev at your service. So you are living here now? In Romashov's Hat?"
Vyshimirsky glanced at me suspiciously.
"I live where I'm registered," he said. "Not here. And the house-manager knows I live there, and not here."
"I see."
I took out my cigarette-case, flipped open the lid and offered him a cigarette. He took one. The door leading into the next room was open. The place was clean and tidy, all light-grey and dark-grey-walls and furniture.
A round table stood before a divan. And over the divan somebody's portrait, a large one in a smooth light-grey frame. "Everything to match," I thought.
"You mean Ivan Pavlovich, the teacher?" Vyshimirsky suddenly asked.
"Yes."
"Yes, of course, Korablev. A fine man. Valya was a pupil of his. Nyuta wasn't, she graduated from the Brzhozovskaya Girls' School. But Valya was a pupil of his. To be sure! He was a help, yes, he was..." And the glimmerings of a kindly feeling flitted across his bewhiskered old face.
Then, pretending to recollect himself, the old man invited me into the rooms-we had been standing all this time in the hallway-and even asked me whether I had just arrived in town.
"If you have," he said, "there's an army canteen where you can get quite a decent meal with bread for next to nothing on your travel warrant."
But I wasn't listening to his chatter. I had stopped in the doorway, astounded. That portrait over the divan in the light-grey frame was of Katya-a splendid portrait, which I had never seen before. It was a full-length photograph of Katya in the squirrel coat, which looked so nice on her and which she had made just before the war. I remember how hard she had been trying to get it done by some famous furrier named Manet, and was cross with me because I couldn't understand that the cap and the muff had to be made of fur too. What could this mean, my God?
At least a dozen thoughts jostled in my mind, one of them so absurd that the memory of it today makes me feel ashamed. I imagined almost everything except the truth, a truth which proved to be even more absurd than that absurd idea!
"I must say I never expected to meet you here, Nikolai Ivanovich," I said when the old man had told me how, after leaving the theatre, he had been employed at a mental hospital as a cloak-room attendant, and had been dismissed because the inmates had "unlawfully notified the matron that I stole soup and ate it at night".
"Are you working for Romashov? Or just keeping up the acquaintance?"
"Yes, keeping up the acquaintance. He suggested that I help him out in his business, and I agreed. I was employed as secretary to the Metropolitan Isidore, and I don't conceal the fact; on the contrary, I state the fact in my personnel questionnaires. It was a big job, an enormous task. Our daily mail alone was over fifteen hundred letters. The same here. But here I work as a favour. I get a worker's ration, because Romashov has fixed me up at his institution. And the institution knows I am working here."
"Isn't Romashov in the army now? When we last met he was in army uniform."
"No, he's not in the army. Reserved for the duration. Indispensable or something."
"What sort of mail are you getting?"
"Oh, business letters, very important," Vyshimirsky said. "Extremely important. We have an assignment. At the present moment we are under instructions to find a certain woman, a lady. But I suspect it's not an assignment, but a private affair. A love affair, so to speak."
"What woman is it?"
"The daughter of an historic personage, a man I knew very well,"
Vyshimirsky said proudly. "You may have heard of him perhaps- Tatarinov? We are searching for his daughter. We'd have found her long ago, but it's such a frightful muddle. She's married and has a double name."
It was as though life had suddenly pulled up sharply, jolting my head foremost into an imaginary wall. That was how I felt as I stared at the old man, just an ordinary old man, standing before me in an ordinary room and telling me that Romashov was looking for Katya, that is, doing the same thing I was doing.
Our conversation, however, proceeded as though nothing had happened.
From Katya the old man switched over to some member of T.U. committee who had had no right to call him "a hangover from the old regime", because he, Vyshimirsky, had a work record ~of fifty years, then he wandered off into reminiscences, relating how in the old days, back in 1908, when he came out of the theatre the commissionaire would cry out: "Vyshimirsky's carriage!
"-and the carriage would roll up. He wore a top hat and cloak in those days, but now people did not wear such things, which was "a great pity, because it was elegant".
"When did he die?" he suddenly asked.
"Who?"
"Korablev."
"Who said he died? He's alive and well," I said in a jocular tone, though I was quivering in all my being, thinking: "You'll know everything in a minute, but tread carefully."
"So it's a private affair you say? Concerning a lady?"
"Yes, private. But very serious, very. Captain Tatarinov is an historical personage. Mr Romashov was in Leningrad. He was there during the siege and starved so bad that he ate paste off the wallpaper. He tore down old wallpaper, and boiled and ate it. Afterwards he went on a meat foraging assignment, and when he came back she was no longer there. She'd been moved out."
"Where to?"
"That's just the question," Vyshimirsky said. "You know what that evacuation was like? Go and find anybody! It's not as if she'd been moved out by special train. You could trace it then. Take the Gold Storage Plant, for instance. Where did its train go? To Siberia? Then she'd be in Siberia.
But she was evacuated by aeroplane."
"By aeroplane?"
"Yes, exactly. As a privileged person, I suppose. And now, who knows where she is? All we know is that the plane flew via Khvoinaya that is, the very place where Mr Romashov was getting meat."
I must have sensed instinctively when it was necessary to hold my tongue and when to put in two or three words. Everything was as it should be. Here was an army man, seemingly just out of hospital, thin and peaky, who had called on a friend with whom he had parted at the front, asking how his friend was getting on, what he was doing. "You'll know everything in a minute, step warily."
"Well? And did you find her?"
"Not yet. But we will," said Vyshimirsky, "following my plan. I wrote to Buguruslan and to the Central Inquiry Bureau, but that was useless. They sent us a dozen Tatarinovs and a hundred Grigo-rievs, and we don't know what name we have to give as her first. So then I wrote personally to the chairmen of the executive committees of all the regional cities. It was a big job, a big assignment. But Captain Tatarinov was a friend of mine and for his daughter's sake I spent three months writing and sending out a stereotype inquiry-will you please give necessary instructions-evacuation point-historical personality-awaiting your reply. And we received it."
There was a sharp ring at the door. "That's him," Vyshimirsky said.
A cowed look came into his face. The grey tuft of hair on top of his head started shaking and his moustache drooped. He went out into the hallway, while I took up a position against the wall beside the door, so that Romashov should not catch sight of me at once on coming in. He might jump out onto the landing, because Vyshimirsky said to him in the hallway:
"Somebody to see you."