Владимир Беляев - The Town By The Sea

"Yes, I am," said the professor. "And you... Just a minute. . . You must be Vasily Mandzhura!"

And although a friend of mine had once advised me that if I wanted to keep healthy I should always avoid all contact with doctors, I threw myselfjoyfully on the broad chest of the professor...

It was some time since the yellow aeroplane had roared away over the town and turned in the direction of Lvov, taking with it the professor and his new patient, but I still could not get over my unexpected encounter. Who would have thought that our favourite speaker and perhaps the most active of all the Komsomol members, Dmitry Panchenko, would twenty years later become a professor of medicine!

In the short time we had spent together in the office, the professor had managed to tell me quite a lot about himself. At the end of the twenties he had left his post as Regional Komsomol Secretary in a town on the Volga and with a Komsomol authority in his pocket gone to Leningrad to study at the Army Medical Academy. It had been his good fortune to see Academician Pavlov. From Pavlov personally, after a lecture, he had heard the famous words that the great physiologist afterwards included in his behest-letter to the youth of the country: "Consistency, consistency, and still more consistency!"

... As Maremukha and I walked round Zarechye, I recalled yet another incident in my life—the argument I had had long ago with engineer Andrykhevich.

From my far-off youth, on that sunny post-war day, crowded with so many chance encounters, the angry, bitter face of the old engineer floated into my mind. Even then he had been connected with spies and counter-revolutionaries of the industrial party who were waiting for the collapse of the Revolution and hoping to trick Soviet rule. And again I seemed to hear his cunning question: "Where will you get your educated people from? Going to teach yourselves, are you? 'One, two—see how she goes!' I doubt it... I doubt it very much!..."

Petka and I walked to the Old Estate where he had spent his childhood. But there, too, we found only ruins. The little house where Petka's father and mother had lived before the war was a heap of reddish rubble. Goose-foot and thistles watched over the ruins. Evidently the house had been destroyed by artillery fire in the first year of the war, when Hitler's armies, after capturing Ternopol, had advanced through our town towards Proskurov.

And the tall gates outside Yuzik's cottage had gone too. How many times had we stood by those gates yelling: "Yuzik! Yuzik! Weasel!"

At last he would appear, our stern quick-footed ataman, tapping a long stick as he walked, and we would set out for a raid on the orchards of Podzamche or to bathe near Paradise Gate. Never again would he respond to our call, our dear Yuzik...

Where their cottage had once stood a grey enemy blockhouse, quite recently built, rose from a deep clay pit. Twisted wire protruded from the concrete. The narrow horizontal embrasure of the blockhouse looked out to the East.

Evidently it had been one of the strong points built by the enemy on the Volyno-Podelian plateau.

Neither this blockhouse, nor hundreds of others like it had been able to save the Nazis!

Maremukha climbed on to the roof of the blockhouse, glanced down the ventilator that stuck out of the top like a railway engine's whistle, spat down it, and tapping his heel on the concrete, said: "Our guns have blasted out bigger things than this. Ever seen tree stumps being stubbed in the woods? That's just about what they did with these blockhouses."

Depressed by the sight of the ruins that surrounded us, we wandered in silence back to the Old Fortress through the suburb of Tatariski. It was guarded by a tall watch-tower rising on the bank of the Smotrich.

In the purple light of the sunset the Old Fortress looked particularly impressive silhouetted against the evening sky. Half way across the bridge we stopped. Resting his elbows on the oak rail, Maremukha gazed down at Zarechye. From this high point the grey blockhouse looked quite small, like the turret of a tank buried in the earth.

"I say, Vasya," Petka said suddenly. "Do you remember our neighbour, the daughter of the chief engineer at the works? You were rather interested in her at one time... She went away to Leningrad, didn't she? You didn't see anything of her there, I suppose?"

"Of course I did, Petka!" I replied, " I don't mind admitting to you frankly that after I had got to know Angelika I did everything I could to help her become a new person. In the days when she broke with her family and went away to Leningrad against their will, I helped her. When H went into the army, we wrote to each other. In her letters she suggested I should come to Leningrad when my service was over. And that's what I did. I took a job at a plant there and' settled down. We met as friends. I remember it as if it were yesterday; we went to the Philharmonic Hall together and heard Chaikovsky's Sixth Symphony.

Angelika had nearly finished at the conservatoire at that time. She married just before the war."

"Is her father still alive?"

"You know he was transferred from our place to the Agricultural Machinery Works in Rostov. She told me he had been arrested in Rostov for having contact with the industrial party, but he was released soon afterwards. He atoned for his guilt towards the country by good work. When war broke out, he was evacuated with his plant to the Urals. All through the war he worked as an engineer in the mortar shop. He's a very old man now."

"Perhaps he had Polevoi as his director?" Petka said. "You know Polevoi went to the Urals to manage a very big works after graduating from the Industrial Academy."

"I saw his name in the papers once or twice. I meant to write to him, but couldn't find out his exact address."

"Did Lika survive the starvation in Leningrad, do you know?" Maremukha asked.

"Of course she did!" I exclaimed. "Do you know where I met her during that winter of the siege? It makes me shudder to remember it. In the Wiedeman Hospital, on Vasilevsky Island! I was being treated there for starvation. One day 'I heard someone in the corridor say quietly: 'Vasya!' I looked round—and there was Angelika! She was terribly thin. There were black circles under her eyes. Her hands were so thin you could nearly see through them... 'Lika, dear, haven't you left?' I shouted. And she said, quietly: 'How can I leave my own city? My husband is still here, fighting on the Pulkovo Heights.' And she told me how she had refused to be evacuated with the Philharmonia... I remember how she looked at me and whispered: 'Heavens, Vasil, how you've changed! You must be having a bad time too, dear?' I was ashamed to say yes, because II was a man. So I passed it off with a joke: 'You'll be telling me next I haven't got the same look in my eye as Lieutenant Glan?' I said. 'What's Lieutenant Glan got to do with it!' she exclaimed. 'Don't you remember,' I said, 'one evening you compared me with a chap called Glan? And because I didn't know much about literature I asked you whether this Lieutenant Glan was a Whiteguard, by any chance. I wasn't far wrong, you know. At any rate, the man who wrote about him has become an out-and-out fascist...' We had a long talk. It was there, Petka, that 'I realized Angelika had changed right through and become a new person. And do you remember at one time we used to think her a useless creature?"

"Yes, time and environment change people," Maremukha said and glanced down over the bridge rail.

Below us, harnessed to the turbines of a power station, roared the fortress waterfall. It was calmer now that it gave most of its force to the machines housed in the white power house under the fortress cliffs. Soon—so we had learnt from one of the local people—some of the station's power would be used to supply a new trade school for metal workers. The new school was being built on the spot where our factory-training school had stood until it was blown up by the Germans.