The Town By The Sea tof-3

by Владимир Павлович Беляев Неизвестный Автор

  We walked along the honeysuckle-covered fortress wall to the place where Yuzik had climbed into the fortress for the last time.

  A yellowish biplane appeared over Dolzhetsky Forest and' flew over our heads, deafening us with the roar of its engine. "That must be the professor flying here from Lvov in answer to Elena Lukyanovna's call," I thought.

  The sight of the aeroplane in the sky brought Maremukha's thoughts to something he had told me before we met Lazarev.

  "There'll come a time," Petka said dreamily, "when you, Valerian Dmitrievich, will make a place of honour in your museum for yet another of our old school-friends."

  "Who?"' Lazarev asked with interest.

  "Alexander Bobir."

  "I don't remember anyone of that name."

  "How could you remember Bobir, if you could hardly remember us!" said Maremukha. "Bobir used to study at your school, then went on to the factory-training school. After that he went to the Azov Sea with us. While he was there, he got interested in flying. An airman came to their flying club and helped them put a damaged training plane in order, then up they went! Before we knew what was happening, Sasha was waving to us from the sky..."

  "But that's hardly enough to gain him a place of honour in the museum," Lazarev said cautiously. "Hundreds of thousands of young people go in for flying nowadays."

  "We don't mean that he ought to be remembered just for that first risky flight," Petka replied. "Sasha distinguished himself apart from that. In 1936 he volunteered to fight in Republican Spain. He flew in the 'snub-noses,' shot down two Savoias and three Junkers, I think, and was killed in an air battle over Teruel. There was an obituary about him in the Mundo Obrero. Some time afterwards I met a Spanish airman. A chap called Fernandez. Sasha had taught him to fly. Fernandez even showed me his photograph. There was our Sasha with his arm round that dark Spanish chap. Both of them in flying kit on the airfield. They were laughing. And there were mountains in the distance. What a pity I never asked Fernandez for that photograph! I could have given it to you."

  "Don't frown, Petka," I said. "People meet each other in all kinds of places nowadays. Your Fernandez may be commanding a guerilla detachment somewhere right under Franco's nose. Perhaps he's still got that photograph with him. And perhaps there'll come a day when Fernandez and his guerillas will be able to show us Sasha's grave without fear of Franco's gendarmes..."

  "If you do see his grave one day," Lazarev said, "be sure to bring me a handful of soil from it. I shall exhibit in the museum and write: 'Soil of Spain for whose freedom Alexander Bobir of Podolia shed his blood."

  "Valerian Dmitrievich," Maremukha said after a pause, "get in touch with the Lvov historians. They'll tell you how the defenders of the Old Fortress liberated Lvov from the Nazis. The Urals tank men were the first to break through into the city. A tank man from the Urals, Alexander Marchenko, hoisted the red flag over the city hall of Lvov. All those facts would be very interesting for your museum. Make a special exhibition: 'Liberators of Podolia!' "

  "Yes, that's quite a good idea," Lazarev agreed. "But as a matter of fact there were very few defenders of the Old Fortress left. Most of the garrison that Senior Lieutenant Stetsuk commanded were either killed or wounded. Those who were still fighting up to the last moment, when the First and Second Ukrainian fronts joined each other, were so tired that they had to go to the rear for a rest. Stetsuk, for example, as soon as he heard that the main forces of the Soviet Army had reached Podolia land the Nazis were shouting kaput, said to his comrades: 'Well, that'll do for now. We've done our job.' Then he

  just dropped down on the wet earth under Karmeluk Tower and slept for fifteen hours without stirring. People tried to wake him, but it was no good. The brigade commander arrived, glanced at the sleeping man and said: 'Don't bother him, let him sleep. Even an eagle must rest sometimes.' "

  "And what happened to Dima, Valerian Dmitrievich?" I asked.

  "Dima was very unlucky," Lazarev replied. "On the last day of the defence a shell from a Tiger tank smashed the Archbishop Tower. Dima fell into the yard with the rest of the rubble, badly shell-shocked. He still can't say a word..."

  "So it's for him the professor has been called in from Lvov?" I exclaimed. "Why didn't I think of it before!"

  "Has he been called already? Oh, I am glad to hear that!" Lazarev said gladly.

  "It may have been him who flew over just now," I said.

  "Let's go and see Dima, what about it, Vasil?" Maremukha suggested suddenly.

  "Yes, let's," I agreed. "If you're going to stay in town overnight, we've got plenty of time. Besides I know Elena Lukyanovna. She's in charge of his case, so I think she'll let us see him."

  Lieutenant-Colonel Maremukha's truck whisked us down to the market, where we bought Dima some good things to eat—home-made pork sausage with a delicious smell of garlic and wood-smoke about it, eggs, a loaf of caraway bread, several fresh prickly cucumbers, butter wrapped in a damp pumpkin leaf, a bar of chocolate, and a bunch of fragrant dewy jasmine.

  When Elena Lukyanovna saw us with all this she looked worried.

  "What am I to do with you, I really don't know!" she exclaimed, spreading her arms. "The professor started examining Dima half an hour ago. Now he's gone out to telephone. He wants to get in touch with Leningrad. I can let you see the patient, but only for a minute."

  We had expected to find a tough young dare-devil when we went to see Dima. That was how we had pictured the youngster from Siberia from the way Lazarev had described him. But before us, propped on his pillows, lay a very quiet, round-faced Russian lad smiling at us shyly.

  The young hero looked at us with surprise and hope. Perhaps he thought we were professors from Leningrad, who had arrived so quickly on some specially fast plane.

  To clear up the lad's bewilderment, Maremukha started telling him in an impressive bass voice who we were and why we had come to see him.

  Dima's round face glowed with pleasure when he heard that Petka was lieutenant-colonel from the same tank corps in which Dima had fought his way into Podolia. He struggled into a sitting position and offered first Maremukha then me an unnaturally pale but still boyish hand with blue veins showing through the skin. To make us understand that he could not speak, Dima waved his hand in front of his mouth.

  "Everything'll be all right, Dima, don't get downhearted!" I comforted him. "Scientists nowadays can restore the sight of people who have been blind for years, they'll find a way of curing you."

  "Well, will you mistake a stuffed model in a museum for a live goat next time?" Maremukha asked smiling.

  The lad wrinkled his smooth forehead in an effort to remember. A stubborn line appeared over the bridge of his nose... And suddenly Dima remembered the funny incident and laughed.

  Steps sounded in the corridor. A tall man in a white gown entered the ward with the manner of one who feels himself at home in any hospital atmosphere, lit was the professor from Lvov. We moved away from the bed.

  The professor glanced sideways at us and started examining an X-ray photograph. Elena Lukyanovna, who had followed him into the ward, stood respectfully at the head of the bed, holding cotton wool and test tubes.

  "Now we shall test his responses," said the professor in a voice that sounded very familiar to me.

  "Where have I seen that man before?" I thought, wracking my brains.

  Paying no attention to Maremukha and me, the professor made a long and careful examination of the patient.

  Elena Lukyanovna closed the windows looking out on to Hospital Square. The glass muffled the sounds coming from the Motor Factory that had just got going again after the war. I suddenly remembered how I had once lain in this hospital after being wounded by bandits. '

  How trivial my old wound now seemed in comparison with what this lad had experienced. What courage it must have needed to crouch over a captured machine-gun at that loop-hole in the Archbishop Tower, watching the road and firing until a heavy shell struck the tower and threw him down among du
st and rubble at the foot of the ruined tower!

  "Well, old chap," the professor said when he had finished his examination. "We're going to operate on you. There are some pieces of bone and some small shell splinters pressing on your brain. That is what's depriving you of speech. I've called up the best surgeon in Leningrad. He'll be coming to Lvov on the first plane. So I'm going to take you with me to our clinic there. When we've removed those splinters, you'll be singing songs. Agree?"

  We could not see Dima, he was concealed behind the tall figure of the professor. But apparently Dima nodded to him, for the professor gave a sigh of relief.

  "Splendid! I knew you were a good lad."

  When we called in at the office to see Elena Lukyanovna we found the professor pacing the polished parquet floor. He had removed his gown and I noticed two rows of medal ribbons on his grey suit.

  The professor swept his hand down sharply, interrupting the conversation he had started before we came in. The gesture told me where I had first met him.

  "I should like to introduce you, Professor," said Elena Lukyanovna. "This comrade is an engineer from Leningrad. . ." she motioned towards me.

  "But we know each other already," I said smiling. "The professor's brief case brought me a lot of luck on one occasion. . ."..'.

  "Do we know each other?..." the professor asked in a puzzled voice. "What brief case are you talking about?"

  "Twenty years ago, in this very town, the pupils of the factory-training school elected a delegate to go to Kharkov. The delegate had to go there and save the school from being closed down by the Ukrainian Nationalist Zenon Pecheritsa. But the trouble was that the delegate had ho brief case to keep all his papers in. So a request was made to the head of the instructors' department Panchenko, and he gave the delegate to the Central Committee his brief case... You're Panchenko, aren't you?"

  "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 husba
nd 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.

  I looked down and remembered my childhood years in this town. How many times after the spring floods had we searched the muddy banks of the river hoping to find the crown of some Turkish vizir, or at least a few gold ducats!

  We had found no gold, but we had found great happiness, the happiness of having a country to live in that is the envy of honest working people throughout the world.

  "Yes, time and environment change people. Those are true words of yours, Petka!" I said after a thoughtful pause. "And I'm sincerely glad that not only people like us who were brought up by the Komsomol and the Party, but even those like Angelika, who in the twenties were still wavering over what path to take, have found the experience of the past twenty-five years so beneficial."