Free Two Captains by Veniamin Kaverin

day she was to take Sanya and me down to the orphanage, and she spent the day baking cookies "for the road". She was baking them all day and kept taking off her glasses and blowing her nose.
    She made me give a solemn promise not to steal, not to smoke, not to be rude, not to be lazy, not to get drunk, not to swear or fight-more taboos than there were in the Ten Commandments. To my little sister, who was very sad, she gave a magnificent ribbon of pre-war manufacture.
    Of course, we could have simply slipped out of the house and disappeared. But Pyotr decided that this was too tame, and he drew up a rather intricate plan which had an air of fascinating mystery about it.
    In the first place, we were to swear to each other a "blood-oath of friendship". It ran like this:
    "Whoever breaks this oath shall receive no mercy until he has counted all the sand grains in the sea, all the leaves in the forest, all the raindrops falling from the sky. When he tries to go forward, he will go back, when he wants to go left he will go right. The moment I fling my cap to the ground thunderbolts shall strike him who breaks this oath. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
    We had to utter this oath in turn, then shake hands and fling our caps down together. This was performed in Cathedral Gardens on the eve of our departure. I recited the oath by heart, while Pyotr read it "off the cuff.
    After that he pricked his finger with a pin and wrote "P.S." on the paper in blood, the letters standing for Pyotr Skovorodnikov. I scrawled with some difficulty the initials "A.G.", standing for Alexander Grigoriev.
    Secondly, I was to go to bed at ten and pretend to be asleep, though nobody was curious to know whether I was asleep or only pretending. At three in the morning Pyotr was to give three whistles outside the window-the prearranged signal that all was in order, the coast was clear and we could decamp.
    This was far more dangerous than it would have been in the daytime, when things really were in order, the coast clear, and nobody would have noticed that we had run away. In the night we risked being grabbed by the patrols-the town was under martial law-and the dogs were let loose at night all along the river bank. But Pyotr commanded and I obeyed. And then came the crucial night, my last night in the paternal home.
    Aunt Dasha was sitting at the table, mending my shirt. Though they provided you with linen at the orphanage, here was one shirt more, to be on the safe side. In front of her was the lamp with the blue shade which had been Aunt Dasha's wedding presence Mother. It looked sort of abashed now, as though it felt ill at ease in our deserted house. It was dark in the corners. The kettle hung over the stove, but its shadow looked more like a huge upturned nose than a kettle. From a crack under the window came whiffs of cool air and the tang of the river. Aunt Dasha was sewing and talking.
    She took something from the table and the circle of light on the ceiling began to quiver. It was ten o'clock. I pretended to be asleep.
    "Now mind, Sanya, you must always do as your brother tells you," Aunt Dasha was telling my sister. "Being a girl, you must lean on him. We womenfolk always lean on the men. He'll stand up for you."
    My heart was wrung, but I tried not think of Sanya. "And you, too, Sanya," Aunt Dasha said to me, and I could see a tear creep down from under her glasses and fall on my shirt, "take care of your sister. You'll be in different sections, but I'll ask them to allow you to visit her every day."
    "All right, Aunt Dasha."
    "Ah, my God, if only Aksinya were alive..."
    She turned up the wick, threaded her needle and took up her work again with a sigh.
    I am not asleep, I am pretending to be asleep. Half past eleven.
    Twelve. Aunt Dasha gets up. For the last, the very last time I see her kind face above the lamp, lit up from below. She places her hand over the rim of the glass and blows. Darkness. She makes the sign of the cross