Veniamin Kaverin - Two Captains

"Very strange," he said, looking at me closely with his stern grey eyes. "Lieutenant Sedov's expedition? Very strange."

We were not waifs, though. Like Captain Hatteras (Pyotr told me about him with a wealth of detail which Jules Verne himself had never suspected), we were going forward, forever forward. Not only because in Turkestan there was bread, while here there were none. We were going out to discover a new land of sunny cities and rich orchards. We had sworn an oath to each other.

What a help that oath was to us!

Once at Staraya Russa we strayed from the road and lost our way in the forest. I lay down in the snow and closed my eyes. Pyotr tried to scare me with talk about wolves, he swore and even hit me, but all in vain. I couldn't take another step. So then he took off his cap and flung it down in the snow.

"You swore an oath, Sanya," he said, "to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield. D'you mean to say you've sworn falsely? Didn't you say yourself-no mercy for whoever breaks the oath?"

I started to cry, but I got up. Late that night we arrived at a village. It was a village of Old Believers, but one old woman nevertheless took us in, fed us and even washed us in the bathhouse.

And so, passing from village to village, from station to station, we at last reached Moscow.

On the way we had sold or bartered for food nearly everything that we had brought with us. Even Pyotr's knife and its sheath, I remember, was sold for two pieces of meat-jelly.

The only things that remained unsold were the papers with the oath written on them in blood "P.S." and "A.G." and the address of Pyotr's uncle.

That uncle! How often we had talked about him! In the end I -came to see him as a sort of Grand Patriarch of Steam Engines-beard streaming in the wind, funnel belching smoke, boiler ejecting steam…

And then, at last, Moscow! One frosty February night we clambered out through the window of the lavatory in which we had been travelling during the last stage of our journey, and jumped down on to the track. We couldn't see Moscow, it was hidden in the dark, and besides, we weren't interested in it. This was just Moscow, whereas that Uncle lived at Moscow Freight Yard, Depot 7, Repair Shop. For two hours we blundered amidst the maze of diverging tracks. Day began to break by the time we reached Depot 7, a bleak building with dark oval windows and a tall oval door on which hung a padlock. The uncle wasn't there. And there wasn't anybody you could ask about him. Later in the morning we learned at the Depot Committee that Uncle had gone off to the front.

So that was that! We went out and sat down on the platform.. It was goodbye to the streets where oranges grew, goodbye to the nights under the open sky, goodbye to the knife under the girdle and the curved sword ornamented in silver!

Just to make sure, Pyotr went back to the committee to ask whether his uncle was married. No, Uncle was a single man. He lived, it transpired, in a railway truck and had gone off to the front in the same truck.

It was quite light by this time and we could now see Moscow-houses upon houses (they all looked like railway stations to me), great heaps of snow, an occasional tramcar, then again houses and houses.

What was to be done! The weeks that followed were about the toughest we had known. The things we did for a living! We took up queues for people. We did jobs for ex-bourgeois, shovelling snow off the pavements in front of the houses when "compulsory labour service" was introduced. We cleaned the stables at the circus. We slept on landings, in cemeteries and in attics.

Then, suddenly, everything changed.

We were walking, I remember, down Bozhedomka Street, yearning only for one thing-to come across a bonfire somewhere; in those days bonfires were sometimes lighted in the centre of the city. But there was nothing doing. Snow, darkness, silence! It was a cold night. All house entrances were locked. We walked along in silence, shivering. It looked as if Pyotr would have to fling his cap down again, but at that very moment, tipsy voices reached us from one of the gateways we had just passed. Pyotr went into the yard. I sat on a curb stone, my teeth chattering with cold and my freezing fingers thrust into my mouth. Pyotr came back.

"Come on!" he said joyfully. "They'll let us in!"

It's good to sleep when you have a roof over your head! It's good, in a bitter frost, to sit around an iron stove, chopping and feeding bits of wood into it, until the tin smoke pipes begin to roar! But better still, while weighing out salt and flour, is it to think that Turkestan itself had been promised us in return for our work. We had stumbled upon a den of black-marketeering war cripples. Their boss, a lame Pole with a scalded face, promised to take us with him to Turkestan. We learned that it was not a city, but a country, whose capital was Tashkent, that same Tashkent to which our cripples used to go every two or three weeks.

Those crooks employed us to pack food products. We got no wages, only board and lodging. But we were glad to have that.

But for the boss's wife, life wouldn't have been at all bad. But the woman got on our nerves.

Fat, with bulging eyes, her belly shaking, she would come running into the shed where we were packaging the food to see whether everything was safe.

"Pfef A pfef Jak smiesz tak rоbiс?” "How dare you work like this?"

I don't know about robic, but it was a sore temptation while weighing out salted pork fat not to nip off at least a tiny bit for yourself. Lump sugar just got itself stuck into your sleeve or pocket. But we put up with her. Had we known that we should no more see Turkestan than our own ears, that old hag might have really found herself short of quite a few things.

One day, when we had been working for over two months with this gang, she came rushing into the shed clad only in a dressing gown. In her hand was the padlock with which she locked up the shed at night. Eyes popping, she stopped in the doorway, looked over the shoulder and went very pale.

"No knocking, no banging," she whispered, clutching her head. "No shouting! Keep quiet!"

Before we knew where we were, she shot home to bolt, breathing heavily, then hung up the padlock and went away.

It was so unexpected that for a minute or so we really kept quiet. Then Pyotr swore and lay down on the floor. I followed suit, and we both put an eye to the crack under the door to see what was going on.

At first all was quiet-the empty yard, the thawing snow with yellow footprints filled with water. Then there appeared strange legs in a pair of black high boots: after that another pair of legs, then a third. The legs were making for the annex across the yard. Two pairs disappeared, the third remaining on the doorstep. The butt of a rifle came to rest beside them.

"A round-up," Pyotr whispered and sprang to his feet.

In the dark he bumped his head against mine and I bit my tongue. But this was no time to think of bitten tongues.

"We must run for it!"

Who knows-my life might have taken quite a different turn if we had taken some rope with us. There was plenty of rope in the shed. But we didn't think of it until we were up in the loft. The shed was brick-built, with a loft, a lean-to roof, and a round opening in the rear wall which gave on to the yard next door.

Pyotr poked his head through this opening and took a look round. He had scratched a cheek when we had removed a plank from the ceiling in the darkness, and now he kept wiping the blood away with his fist every minute.

"Let's jump, eh?"

But it was no easy thing, jumping through a small opening in a sheer wall from a height of fifteen or eighteen feet, unless you took a dive, head foremost. You had to crawl through this opening feet foremost, sitting bent up almost double, then push free from the wall and drop to the ground. That's what Pyotr did. I had half a mind to go back for some rope, when he was already sitting in the hole. He couldn't turn round. He just said, "Come on, Sanya. Don't be afraid." And he was gone. I looked out, my heart in my mouth. He was all right. He had dropped on to a heap of wet snow on the other side of the fence, which at this point came close up to our shed.