"Who?" he asked quickly.
"A man by the name of Grigoriev," the old man said.
He did not jump out, though he could have done-I bided my time. He stood in the dark corner between the wardrobe and the wall and he gave a scream when he saw me. Then he raised doubled fists and pressed them to his face, childlike. There was a key in the door. I turned it, took it out and slipped it into my pocket. Vyshimirsky was standing between us. I picked him up and set him aside like a dummy. Then, for some reason, I pushed him and he toppled mechanically into an armchair.
"Well, let's go and have a chat," I said to Romashov.
He was silent. He had a cap in his hand, and he stuffed it into his mouth and clamped his teeth down on it.
"Well!" I said again.
He shook his head violently.
"You're not going?"
"No!" he screamed.
The stark terror of despair that had seized him at the sight of me suddenly fell away from him. I wrenched his arm and he straightened up. When we entered the room only one eye of his still had a slight squint to it, but a complete change had come over his face, which was now composed and blank of expression.
"I'm alive as you see," I said quietly.
"So I see."
I could now have a good look at him. He was wearing a light grey suit with a yellow ribbon on the lapel-the insignia of a seriously wounded man, whereas he was only slightly shell-shocked. He had put on weight, and but for Ms protruding red ears, he had never looked such a presentable gentleman.
"The pistol."
I thought he would start lying about having handed it in when he was demobbed. But the pistol, with my name engraved on it, was a gift from my regimental commander for bombing the bridge over the Narova. If Romashov had handed it in he would have given himself away. That was why, without saying a word, he now pulled open a drawer of his desk and got it out. The gun was not loaded.
"The papers!"
He was silent.
"Well!"
"They got soaked and were ruined," he said hastily. "A bombshelter in Leningrad was flooded. I was unconscious. Only C.'s photograph was intact. I gave it to Katya. I saved her."
"Really?"
"Yes, I saved her. That's why I'm not afraid. You won't kill me."
"Won't I? Tell me everything, you skunk," I said seizing him by the collar, then letting him go at once when I felt the yielding softness of his throat.
"I gave her everything when she was starving. Ah, you don't believe me!" he cried in despair, sidling up to me to peer into my eyes. "But you will when you've heard me out. You don't know anything. I hate you."
"Is that so?"
"You've taken from me everything that was good in life. I could have made a go of it, yes I could," he said arrogantly. "I was always in luck, because the world's full of fools. I could have made a career. But I didn't give a damn for that!"
"I didn't give a damn for a career" was putting it pretty strong. From what I knew of him, Romashov had always been an unprincipled climber. He had succeeded admirably, considering that he had always been such a frightful dullard at school.
"So listen," Romashov said, growing still paler, if that were possible.
"You'll believe me because I'm going to tell you everything. The Tatarinov search expedition-it was me who got it cancelled! At first I helped Katya because I was sure you were going alone. But she decided to .go with you, so I got the expedition cancelled. I sent in a letter, making a rather risky statement-it would have been all up with me if I hadn't been able to prove it. But I pulled it
off."
Some sheets of writing paper lay in a grey leather case bearing the initials "M.R." in gold. I drew out one sheet, and Romashov froze, Ms staring eyes directed to some spot above my head. It looked as if he was trying to peer ahead into his own future, to see what threat to himself that simple action of mine contained.
"Yes, write it down," he said, "this man who had the expedition stopped was eventually exiled and is dead. But write it down if it still matters to you."
"It doesn't mean anything to me," I answered coolly.
"I wrote that the idea of finding Captain Tatarinov, who had disappeared twenty years ago, was a mania with you, and that you always were unbalanced ever since your schooldays. But behind it all was an ulterior motive. You had married Captain Tatarinov's daughter and were raising all this fuss around his name in order to further your own career. I did not write this by myself."
"Trust you!"
"D'you remember that article 'In Defence of a Scientist'? Nikolai Antonich wrote that, and we referred to it in the letter."
"You mean in the denunciation."
I was now taking all this down as fast as I could.
"Yes, in the denunciation. And we had it all corroborated. I tricked Nina Kapitonovna into signing one paper, and my God, what a job it was to prevent them calling her out! You have no idea what harm this caused you! In the Civil Air Fleet, and I suppose also afterwards, when you were already in the army."
How can I convey the feeling with which I heard out this confession? I couldn't make out why he was coming clean. The simple calculation was soon to become clear to me though. It was like a light thrown in retrospect upon all the inexplicable things that had been happening to me and that I couldn't help thinking of wherever I was.
"It all began a long time ago, when I was still at school," Romashov went on. "I had to sit up all night to be able to answer my lesson as well as you did. I tried not to think about money because I saw that money didn't mean anything to you. It was my ambition to become like you, to become you, and I fretted because you were always and in everything the better man."
With trembling fingers he drew a cigarette out of a glass box lying on the desk and looked round for a light. I struck my lighter. He lit up, inhaled and threw the cigarette away.
"Sometimes I used to meet you in the street, and I'd hide myself in doorways and then follow you like a shadow. I sat behind you in the theatre, and used to think, my God, in what way am I different from him? But I knew that what I saw on the stage was different, because I looked at everything with different eyes than yours. No, Katya was not the only bone of contention between us. Everything that I ever felt was always at war with what you felt. That's why I know everything about you. I know that you were working in agricultural aviation on the Volga, then in the Far East. You asked to be sent to the North again, but they refused you. So then you went to Spain-my God, it was as though everything I had striven for all those years was suddenly working out of itself. But you came back," Romashov shouted with loathing, "and from then on everything went well with you. You went to Ensk with Katya-you see, I know everything, even things you have long forgotten. You could forget because you were happy, but I couldn't, because I was unhappy." He drew a shuddering breath and closed his eyes.
Then he opened them again, and something very keen and sober, a world away from these passionate confessions, flickered in his quick glance. I listened to him in silence.
"Yes, I wanted to part you, because this love had given you such marvellous happiness all your life. I was sick with envy, thinking that you loved simply out of love, whereas my love had the extra spur in that I wanted to take her away from you. You may think it funny, my talking to you about love. But the contest is over, I have lost, and what is this humiliation to me now compared with the fact that you are alive and that fate had played a trick on me again?"
The telephone rang in the hall. Vyshimirsky answered it. "Yes, he's in.
Who's that speaking?"
He did not call Romashov, however.
"Then the war broke out. I joined up. I didn't have to, I was reserved.
If I was killed, all the better! But secretly I was hoping that you'd be killed. Near Vinnitsa I was lying in a barn when an airman came in and stopped in the doorway, reading a newspaper. 'What a fine bunch o' lads!' he said. 'A pity, they've gone up in smoke.' 'Who?' 'Captain Grigoriev and his crew.' I read that paragraph a thousand times. I learnt it by heart. A few days later I met you in the hospital train."
It was very odd, the way he was seeking my sympathy, as it were, for the fact that, contrary to his hopes, I was still alive. He was so carried away, however, that he did not see the absurdity of his attitude.
"You know the rest. Even in the train I was struck by the fact that you somehow didn't seem to be thinking about Katya. I saw that you were tormented by all the filth and confusion, but there again you were yourself, you would have given your life to prevent that retreat. For me it merely meant that you had shown yourself again to be the better man."
He fell silent. There might never have been that aspen wood, the heaps of wet leaves and the woodstack which prevented me from swinging my arm back, or myself lying on the ground, propped up on my hands, trying not to shout to him: "Come back, Romashov!"- as he sat there before me, a dignified gentleman in a light grey suit. The desire to strike him with my pistol was so great that my arms even began to ache.
"Yes, a profound thought," I said. "Incidentally, will you please sign this paper."
While he was confessing I had been writing a "deposition", that is, a brief history of how the search-party had been torpedoed. It was torture for me, as I am a poor hand at composing official papers. But I think I made a good showing with the "Deposition ofM.V. Romashov", perhaps because it contained such phrases as: "Having basely deceived the leadership of the Northern Sea Route Administration" etc.
Romashov quickly glanced through the paper.
"All right," he muttered, "but first I must explain to you-"
"First, sign, you'll do your explaining afterwards."
"But you don't know-"
"Sign, you rat!" I said in such a voice that he recoiled in terror, and his teeth began to chatter in a sort of slow, reluctant manner.
He signed and flung the pen down with a savage gesture.
"You ought to be grateful to me, but instead you intend to take advantage of my frankness. Ah well!"
"Yes, I do!"
He looked at me. How deeply at that moment he must have regretted that he had not finished me off in the aspen wood!
"I returned to Moscow," he continued, "and immediately set about getting a transfer to Leningrad. I travelled by way of Lake Ladoga. The Germans were sinking our ships, but I made it, and just in time, thank God,"
he added hastily. "In another day, at most two days, I would have had to arrange her funeral."
This may have been the truth. When Vyshimirsky was telling me about Romashov having been in Leningrad, I recollected the story of the ginger major which the yardkeeper and her children had told me. "She dig out ginger man, he have bread. Big sack, carry himself, not let me." It was not this that worried me. Romashov might have talked Katya into believing that I had been killed-in battle, of course, and not in the aspen wood.
"And there I was in Leningrad. You can't imagine what it was. I got a bread ration of three hundred grams, and brought half of it to Katya. At the end of December I managed to get some glucose, and I bit all my fingers while I was taking it to Katya. I dropped beside her bed, and she said:
'Misha!' But I didn't have the strength to get up. I saved her," he repeated gloomily, as though the fearful thought that I might not believe him had struck him again. "And if I didn't die myself it was only because I knew that she and you needed me." "I too?" "Yes, you too. Skovorodnikov had written to her that you'd been killed. She was half-dead with grief when I arrived. You should have seen what happened to her when I told her I had seen you! I realised at that moment how pitifuF'-Romashov brought this out in such a full, loud voice that there even came a thud from the hallway, as if Vyshimirsky had fallen off his chair-"how pitiful I was in the face of this love. At that moment I bitterly regretted having wanted to kill you. It was a false step. Your death would not have brought me happiness."
"Is that all?"
"Yes, that's all. In January they sent me to Khvoinaya. I was away a fortnight. I brought meat, but the flat was already empty. Varya Trofimova-I expect you know her-had sent Katya away by plane."
"Where to?"
"To Vologda-I found that out definitely. And from there to Yaroslavl."
"Who did you make inquiries of at Yaroslavl?" "The evacuation centre. I know the man in charge." "Did you get a reply?"
"Yes. But it was only to say that she had passed through theevacuation centre and had been sent to a hospital for Leningraders."
"Show me."
He found the letter in his desk and handed it to me. "Vspolye Station,"
I read. "In reply to your inquiry..." "Why Vspolye?"
"The evacuation centre is there. It's two kilometres outside Yaroslavl."
"Is that all now?" "Yes."
"Now listen to me, then," I said, fighting for self-control. "I can't forgive, or not forgive you, whatever you may have done for Katya. After what you did for me this is no longer a personal quarrel between us. You weren't quarrelling with me when you wanted to finish me off and left me, a badly wounded man, in the wood to die. You were committing a military offence, a dastardly crime for which you will be tried as a scoundrel who violated his oath."
I looked him squarely in the eye and was amazed. He was not listening to me. Somebody was coming up the stairs, two or three people judging by the footfalls which echoed hollowly on the staircase. Romashov looked about him uneasily and stood up. There came a knock at the door, then a ring.
"Shall I open?" Vyshimirsky asked from behind the partition.