Veniamin Kaverin: Two Captains

The house was still asleep when the judge returned. He gave such a fierce growl when Aunt Dasha made to wake us that we had to pretend being asleep for another half hour. Just like five years ago, we heard him snorting and grunting in the kitchen as he washed and splashed about.

Katya fell asleep again, but I dressed quietly and went into the kitchen, where he was drinking tea, sitting barefooted, in a clean shirt, his head and moustache still wet from washing.

"I woke you up after all," he said, stepping up to me and hugging me.

Whenever I turned to my hometown and my old home he always met me with that stern: "Well, let's hear all about it!" The old man wanted to know what I had been doing and whether I had been living right during the years since we last met. Regarding me sternly from' under his tufted eyebrows, he interrogated me like the real judge he was, and I knew that nowhere in the world would I receive a fairer sentence. But on this occasion, for the first time in my life, the judge demanded no account from me.

"Four, I see?" he said, eyeing my decorations with a pleased look.

"Yes."

"And a fifth for Captain Tatarinov," he went on gravely. "It's hard to word it, but you'll get it."

It really was hard to word it, but apparently the old man had decided to tackle that in earnest, because the same evening, when we again met round the table, he delivered a speech in which he attempted to sum up what I had done. "Life goes on," he said. "You have come back to your hometown as grown-up, mature people, and you say you have difficulty in recognising it, it has changed so much. It has not merely changed, it has matured, the way you have matured and discovered within yourselves the strength to fight and win. But other thoughts, too, come to my mind when I look at you, dear Sanya. You have found Captain Tatarinov's expedition. Dreams come true, very often truth is stranger than fiction. It is to you that his farewell letters are addressed-to the man who would carry on his great work. And it is you that I see standing by right at his side, because captains such as he and you advance mankind and science."

And he raised his glass and drained it to my health.

We sat round the table until late into the night. Then Aunt Dasha announced that it was time to go to bed, but we did not agree and went out instead for a walk by the river.

The fiery-black clouds were still chasing each other over the factory. We went down to the river and walked to the Gap, beside which a thin, dark boy in a baggy trousers had once caught blue crabs with meat bait. Time seemed to have stood still, waiting patiently for me on this bank, between the two ancient towers at the confluence of the Peshchinka and the Tikhaya-and here I was back again, and we looked into each other's face. What lay ahead for me? What new trials, new labours, new dreams, happiness or unhappiness? Who knows. But I did not lower my eyes under that incorruptible gaze.

It was time to go back. Katya felt cold. We walked along the quayside, which was cluttered with timber, and made our way home.

The town was quiet and somehow mysterious. We walked along in silence, our arms round each other. I recollected our flight from Ensk. The town had been just as dark and quiet, and we so small, unhappy and brave, facing the unknown, frightening life that lay ahead of us.

My eyes were wet, but I did not wipe away those tears of joy. I was not ashamed of them.

A lovely scene unfolds from this high cliff, at the foot of which wild Arctic poppies thrust up their slender stems between the rocks. By the shore one can still see the mirror-like water, and farther out, open lanes amid the lilac-tinted icefields running out into the mysterious distance. Here the Arctic air seems extraordinarily limpid. Silence and vast open spaces. Only a hawk sometimes comes flying over the solitary grave.

The ice-floes drift past it, jostling and circling, some slowly, others faster, assuming fantastic shapes.

There, sailing along, appears the head of a giant in a silver gleaming helmet. One can make out everything-the green shaggy beard trailing in the sea, the flattened nose and the narrowed eyes under grey, bushy brows.

And here comes a house of ice from which the water rolls off with a tinkle of innumerable little bells. And following it, great festive boards covered with clean tablecloths.

They keep coming and coming without end!

Ships putting in at the Yenisei Bay can see this grave from afar. They pass it with flags at half-mast and their guns fire a salute whose echo rolls on and on.

The grave-stone is white, and it gleams dazzlingly in the beams of the Arctic's midnight sun.

At the height of a man these words are carved upon it:

"Here rests the body of Captain I. L. Tatarinov, who made one of the most daring voyages and perished in June 1915 on his way back from Severnaya Zemlya, which he had discovered.

"To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield!"