Victor Pelevin. Omon Ra
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© Copyright 1991 Victor Pelevin.
© Translated from Russian by Yuri Machkasov (machkasov@yahoo.com)
Date: 17 May 2001
Russian original copyright © 1991 Victor Pelevin, "Text"
Publishers, Moscow, Russia.
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Dedicated to the heroes of the Soviet Space.
This translation copyright © 2001, Yuri Machkasov. Permission to
distribute this work in its entirety or any of its parts by any and all
electronic means (including, but not limited to creating local electronic
copies, hosting on public servers and transmitting over networks and
protocols) is hereby granted on condition that the work itself as well as
this notice appear unchanged in any such distribution. All other rights
reserved. The author may be contacted by means of electronic mail at
machkasov@yahoo.com. All rights to the Russian original are not intended to
be usurped or infringed upon by this translation and remain property of the
corresponding copyright holders, or in public domain as the case may be. All
endnotes are by the translator.
1.
Omon(1) is not a particularly common name, and it maybe isn't the best
there is. My father gave it to me. He worked in police all of his life, and
he wanted me to become a policeman too.
- You see, Ommie, - he would tell me often after having a couple of
drinks, - with this name, if you decide on police... And especially if you
join the Party(2)...
Even though father's job included shooting people from time to time, he
had a kind heart, and he was cheerful and agreeable by nature. He loved me
very much, and he hoped I would achieve that which he wasn't able to achieve
himself. And what he wished for was a plot of land in the suburbs so that he
could grow cucumbers and beets on it - not for eating, or selling at the
farmer's market. That too, of course, but mainly for just being able to hack
at the earth with a spade after stripping naked from the waist up, to see
the purplish earthworms writhe and all the assorted underground life go
about its business, to haul the wheelbarrow full of manure across the entire
subdivision, stopping at strangers' fences to have a couple of jokes. When
he realized he was not going to get any of that, he began to hope that at
least one of the Krivomazov(3) brothers was going to live a happier life (my
older brother Ovir(4) whom my father wanted to become a diplomat died form
meningitis when he was in fourth grade; all I remember about him is that he
had a big oblong mole on his forehead).
Father's plans concerning my future never quite inspired much
confidence in me; he himself was a Party member, and he had a good name,
Matvei, but all he managed to scrape together at the end was a meager
retirement pension and a lonely alcoholic old age.
I don't remember mom all too well. One single memory is all that's left
-- how dad, drunk and in uniform, tries to pull the gun from his holster,
and she, crying, with messed-up hair, grabs at his hands, screaming:
"Matvei, stop it!"
She died when I was very little, and I was brought up by my aunt, only
visiting my father on the weekends. He would be puffy and red-faced, with
his medal that he was so proud of hanging askew on his worn out pajama top.
His room always smelled badly, and on the wall there was a copy of
Michelangelo's "Creation", where the bearded God is floating over Adam who
is lying on his back, God's arm outstretched to meet the man's delicate
hand. This picture seemed to have a rather odd effect on my father's nature,
apparently reminding him of something from his past. When in his room, I
usually played with the toy railroad set sitting on the floor, and he would
snore on the converted sofa. Sometimes he would wake up, squint at me for a
while, and then hang down halfway from the sofa steadying himself against
the floor and reach towards me with his big hand, all covered in bluish
veins, which I was supposed to shake.
- What's your name now? -- he'd ask.
- Krivomazov, -- I'd answer, faking the innocent smile on my face, and
then he would pat me on the head and give me candy. All of this he did in
such a mechanical fashion that I almost was not disgusted.
There's nothing much I can say about the aunt -- she was pretty
indifferent towards me, and tried to arrange it so that I spent most of my
time in various camps and "extended day care groups". By the way, it is only
now that I can see the extraordinary beauty of that last expression.
From my childhood I only managed to remember that which was related, so
to say, to my dreams of the sky. Of course, this wasn't how the life
started. Before that, there was a long, brightly lit room full of other
children and large plastic blocks, and there were the stairs of a wooden
slide glazed over with ice that I was scaling up hurriedly, and some cracked
young drummer boys in the yard made from painted stucco, and lots of other
stuff. But it can hardly be said that it was I who saw those things; for in
the early childhood (just like, ostensibly, after death) a person is going
in many directions at once, and therefore it is safe to assume that he is
not there yet, his full personality to arrive only later, along with
attachment to one fixed, specific direction.
Our apartment was not far from the "Cosmos" movie theatre. An enormous
rocket made of shiny metal always reigned supreme over our neighborhood,
standing as it were on a narrowing plume of titanium smoke, resembling a
huge curved blade piercing the ground(5). Surprisingly, it was not the
rocket that started me as a person, but a wooden airplane installed on the
playground on our block. It was not quite an airplane, rather a small wooden
house with two windows which acquired wings and tail made from pickets when
the fence was taken down, and then they covered it with green paint and
decorated with several large orange stars. Two, maybe three of us could fit
inside, and there also was a small loft above with a triangular window
overlooking the wall of the army draft office. By an unspoken agreement
honored throughout the block, this loft was always assigned to be the
pilot's cockpit, and every time the plane was shot down the people in the
main body were to bail out first, and only then, when the earth was already
imminently gaining on the windows with a deafening howl, only then was the
pilot allowed to join the others -- if he managed to do it in time, of
course. I always tried to get to be the pilot, and I even mastered the art
of seeing the sky with clouds and the Earth floating beneath in place where
the draft office was standing, fuzzy violets and dusty cacti looking
dejectedly down on us from its windowsills.
I always liked movies about pilots; it was one of these movies that was
linked with the strongest experience of my childhood. One time, on an
outer-space-black December night, I switched on the aunt's TV set and saw on
the screen an airplane swinging its wings gently, with an ace of spades and
a cross stenciled on its body. I shifted closer to the screen, and right
away the canopy over the cockpit came looming large into view; behind the
thick glass an almost inhuman face could be seen smiling, in a soft helmet
with shiny black Bakelite earphones, behind goggles resembling ones that
skiers put on. The pilot lifted the gloved hand and waved at me. Then the
body of another plane appeared on screen, shot from inside; behind two
identical sets of controls two pilots were sitting in mutton overcoats,
watching intently over the evolutions of the enemy fighter, flying right
nearby, through thick translucent plastic braced by steel frame.
- Spot nine, -- said one of the pilots to the other. -- They're going
to bring us down.
The other one, with the handsome face of a habitual drunkard, just
nodded.
- I'm not holding it against you, - he said, apparently continuing the
conversation that was just interrupted. -- But remember this: you better
make sure that with you and Barb -- it's for the rest of your life... To the
grave.
This was when I stopped acknowledging the happenings on the screen -- I
was struck by the thought, not even the thought, but its barely recognizable
shadow (as if the thought itself floated by somewhere in the vicinity, only
touching my head with one of its edges) -- about how, if I by glancing at
the screen could see the world from the inside of the cockpit where the two
pilots in overcoats were sitting -- how in fact there's nothing that can
stop me from getting into that or any other cockpit without the aid of any
television, because the experience of flight is reduced to just a set of
perceptions, and the principal ones of them I had already learned to
simulate long ago, while sitting in the loft of the winged hut with red
stars, looking at the draft office wall that impersonated the sky and making
faint humming noises with my mouth.
This indistinct realization had so shaken me that the remainder of the
movie I observed with half of my mind, only tuning into the television
reality when smoky trails appeared on the screen, or a line of enemy planes
on the ground swept by across it. "This means", I thought, "that you can
look from inside yourself as if from inside the plane, and it does not even
matter at all where you look -- the only important thing is what you
see...". Ever since, when I trundled along some snowy street, I would
imagine that I am in fact flying an airplane over snow-bound fields, making
wide turns, and I tilted my head so that the world would tilt obediently --
to the left, or to the right.
And still, that person that I am now able to confidently name "I" have
in fact formed later, gradually over time. I consider the first glimpse of
my real soul to be the exact moment when I realized that one can aspire not
to the thin blue film of the sky, but beyond it to the bottomless black pit
of space. It happened the same winter, one evening, when I was wandering
around the Industry Achievements Expo(6). I was walking down a dark,
deserted alley covered with snow, and then I heard a buzzing sound from the
left, like a huge phone ringing. I turned and I saw him.
Reclining, sitting on emptiness as if it were an easy chair, he was
moving forward slowly, and just as slowly the lines and tubes were
straightening out behind him. The glass of his helmet was pitch black, and
only a small triangular reflection was burning bright on its surface, but I
knew he could see me. He was quite possibly dead for some centuries now. His
arms were confidently outstretched towards the stars, and his feet did not
require any kind of support to such an extent that I realized once and for
all that true freedom can only be attained through weightlessness, and this
is why, by the way, all my life I found all those Western radio "voices"(7)
and writings of assorted solzhenitsyns so incredibly boring, because while
in my heart of hearts I, of course, could not help but be sickened by the
Soviet state, the demands of which, vague but powerfully threatening
nonetheless, were forcing any group of people, no matter how small, no
matter how fleetingly assembled, to endeavor to imitate painstakingly the
tawdriest of its members, but upon gaining the understanding that no peace
or freedom can exist here on Earth my spirit soared skywards, and anything
that my chosen path ever demanded from me from that moment on could never
become contrary to my conscience, because the conscience called me to space
and paid little attention to what was going on below.
It was just a stained glass mosaic on the wall of the pavilion in front
of me, depicting a cosmonaut in open space, but in one instant it conveyed
to me more than the dozens of books that I had read to date. I was looking
at it for a long, long time, and then I suddenly felt someone looking at me.
I turned around and saw a boy standing behind me, about my age, looking
rather strange -- he was wearing a leather helmet with shiny black Bakelite
earphones, and there were swimming goggles hanging around his neck. He was
half a foot taller and probably a little older; as he entered the zone that
was illuminated by the floodlights he raised his black-gloved hand, his lips
grimaced in a cold smile, and for a second the pilot of the fighter with the
black ace flashed before my eyes.
They called him Mityok(8). It turned out that we lived very close to
each other, even though we went to different schools. Mityok was unsure
about many things, but there was one thing he knew for certain. He knew that
he would become a pilot first, and then he would fly to the Moon.
2
There seems to be some sort of strange connection between the general
outline of life and the small episodes that one constantly finds himself in
without assigning any significance to them. I can see clearly now that my
destiny was quite accurately determined at the time when I had not even
started to pay any earnest consideration to the way I'd like to see it
unfold, moreover -- it was already demonstrated to me then, albeit in a
slightly simplified way. Maybe that was just a future echo. And maybe that
which we assume to be a future echo is in fact the seed of that future,
taking to root at the very moment that later, from afar, we come to regard
as an echo that flew back from the future.
Anyway, the summer after the seventh grade was hot and dusty. The first
half of it I remember only for the long bicycle rides on one of the suburban
parkways. I would attach a special rattler onto the rear wheel of my
semi-racing "Sport" bike, made from a piece of cardboard folded over several
times and fastened to the frame with a clothespin -- when I was moving, the
paper would strike against the spokes producing rapid gentle clattering,
reminiscent of the roar of an airplane engine. Storming down the paved hill
I would again and again become a fighter acquiring the target. The fighter
was not usually a Soviet one, but that wasn't my fault, it was just that in
the beginning of that summer I've heard an inane song somewhere, and there
were lines in it about "Fast as bullet is my "Phantom", In the sky all blue
and clear It is quickly gaining altitude." I have to say that the stupidity
of this song, while quite apparent to me, never interfered with the warm
sensation that it aroused deep in my soul. What other lines I remember from
it? "'Cross the sky a smoky trail... My dear Texas left behind...". And
there were a mother and a father in it, and some Mary, made very real by the
mention of her last name later in the song.
By mid-July I was back in the city again, and then Mityok's parents got
vouchers for us to go to the summer camp named "Rocket". This was your
regular camp in the South, in some ways maybe even better than a lot of
others. I only remember well the first few days of it, but everything that
would become so significant later on happened in those few days. While in
the train on the way there, Mityok and I ran back and forth about the cars
and dropped any bottles we could find into the toilets -- they would fall
down onto the railway tracks rushing by under the small round porthole and
explode noiselessly, with the song that was following me around imparting
the sweet flavor of the struggle for the freedom of Vietnam to this
uncomplicated activity.
Next day our entire group that was traveling together by the same train
disembarked at the damp terminal of a Southern town and was loaded onto
trucks after a headcount. We were driving on a road winding its way between
mountains for a long time, and then the sea showed itself to our right and
brightly colored barns were approaching us. We got off onto a paved square,
they assembled us in formation and led to the flat-roofed glass building on
top of a hill. That was the mess, where we were greeted by a cold dinner,
even though it was already supper time(9), since we arrived several hours
later than expected. The dinner was not particularly tasty -- soup with
small star-shaped noodles, boiled chicken with rice and stewed dried fruits
for desert.
Hanging on the threads from the ceiling of the mess, covered with
something that appeared to be sticky when you looked at it, there were
spaceships made from craft paper. I was observing one of them for some time.
The unknown artisan expended a lot of shiny foil to decorate it, splattering
it all over with the words "CCCP"(10).The ship was hanging right in front of
our table, glowing orange from the sunset, suddenly reminding me of a subway
train headlamp lighting up in the black void of a tunnel. I became sad for
some reason.
Mityok, on the contrary, was chatty and joyful.
- They had one kind of spaceships in the twenties, - he said, jabbing
the air with his fork, - and then it was different in the thirties, and
different again in the fifties, and so on.
- What are you talking about -- spaceships in the twenties? -- I asked
feebly.
Mityok considered it for a second.
- Alexey Tolstoy had those huge metal eggs where explosions would occur
at minute intervals, giving energy for the propulsion(11), - he said. -- At
least that was the main principle. There can be a lot of variations, of
course.
- But they never actually flew, did they? -- I said.
- These don't either, - he countered and pointed at the subjects of our
discussion, swaying lightly in the draft.
Finally I understood what he meant to say, even though I would hardly
have been able to put it precisely in words. The only space where the
starships of the Communist future were flying -- incidentally, when I
encountered the word "starship" in science fiction books, I always though
for some reason that it had something to do with the red stars on the bodies
of the Soviet space technology -- in short, the only place where they did
indeed fly was the Soviet citizens' collective consciousness, just as the
mess hall around us was the space into which the group who lived in the camp
before us launched their starships, so that they would still be traversing
the space-time continuum over the dinner tables even when the creators of
the cardboard fleet are no longer around. This thought superimposed onto
that special unspeakable longing that always took hold of me when I was
eating the camp's dried fruit compote to produce a peculiar idea in my head.
- You know, I always liked to assemble plastic airplanes, - I said, -
those kits that you glue together. Especially the military ones.
- So did I, -- replied Mityok, - but that was long time ago.
- The ones from GDR(12) were good. And ours often did not have the
pilot included. That really sucked. When the cockpit is empty, I mean.
- Exactly, - Mityok said. -- Why are you talking about it?
- Know what, I wonder, - I said, pointing with my fork at the starship
hanging right over our table, - is there anyone inside there or not?
- No idea, - said Mityok. -- But you're right, it is interesting.
The camp was situated on a gentle mountain slope, and the lower section
of it formed something like a little park. Mityok disappeared somewhere, so
I walked there alone; a couple of minutes later I found myself in a long,
empty alley lined with cypresses, casting deep shadows in an advanced
warning of the approaching darkness. Enormous plywood boards with drawings
on them hung off the chain link fence bordering the asphalt walk path. The
first depicted a young pioneer(13) with a plain Russian face, looking far
ahead and clutching the brass horn adorned with a red flag against his
thigh. The same pioneer was on the second one, with a drum slung around his
shoulders and sticks in his hand. On the third one -- him again, continuing
to look ahead from under the hand raised in salute(14). The next board was
twice as wide as the other ones, and it was very long -- about ten feet, I
guess. It was painted in two colors; the side from which I was approaching
slowly was red, and then it became white, with a jagged wave that separated
the colors overcoming the white field, leaving a trail of red behind it. I
did not realize at first what that was, and only when I came closer I
recognized in the intertwining red and white splotches Lenin's face, with
the protuberance of the beard resembling the battering ram, his face left
open. There was no back to Lenin's head -- it only had the face, and the
entire red surface behind it was in itself Lenin; he looked like an
incorporeal god, his manifestation only a ripple on the surface of the world
he had created.
I stubbed my toe on the crack in the asphalt and transferred my gaze
onto the next board -- it was the pioneer, now in a spacesuit, red helmet
under his arm, with a sharp pointy antenna and letters "CCCP" written on it.
The next pioneer was already sticking halfway out of the flying rocket,
saluting with his heavily gloved hand. And the last pioneer, still in
spacesuit, was standing on the merrily yellow Moon next to his ship, which
looked very much like the cardboard rocket in the mess hall. Only his eyes
were visible, they were exactly the same eyes as the ones he had on the
other boards, but now that the rest of his face was obscured by the helmet
they seemed to contain an expression of unspeakable agony.
I heard steps coming fast behind me; when I turned around, there was
Mityok.
- You were right, - he said, coming closer.
- About what?
- Look, - he stretched out his hand holding something dark. I managed
to discern a small Play-Doh figurine, its head wrapped in foil.
- There was this little paper chair inside, and he was sitting on it, -
said Mityok.
- You didn't take apart that rocket from the mess, did you? -- I asked.
He nodded.
- When?
- Just now. Ten minutes ago. It's the strangest thing, everything in
there... - he crossed his hands, making a lattice with his fingers.
- In the mess?
- No, in the rocket. When they were making it, they started with this
guy. They made him, stuck him to the chair and totally papered him over.
Mityok handed me a piece of cardboard. I took it and was able to make
out tiny, very elaborately drawn gauges, controls, buttons and even some
kind of painting on the wall.
- But the most interesting thing is, - Mityok continued dolefully and a
little despondently, -- there was no door there. The hatch is painted on the
outside, but on the inside it's solid wall, with gauges and stuff.
I looked at the paper scrap once again and noticed a little window in
which the small distant Earth was shining bright blue.
- If I could get my hands on the guy that put this rocket together, -
said Mityok, - I'd definitely break his face.
- Why?
Mityok did not answer. Instead he wound up his arm to chuck the little
figurine over the fence, but I caught his hand and asked him to give it to
me. He did not object, and I spent the next half hour looking for an empty
cigarette box to put it in.
The echoes of this bizarre discovery caught up with us the next day,
during the siesta hour. The door opened, they called Mityok's name, and he
stepped out into the corridor. I've heard snippets of conversations, "mess"
was mentioned a couple of times, and it was only too clear. I also got up
and went out into the corridor. A pair of camp instructors, he - lanky and
mustachioed, she - short and red-haired, were handling Mityok in the corner.
- I was there too, - I said.
The male instructor stared me down approvingly.
- You want to crawl together or separately? -- he asked. I noticed he
was holding a gas mask in a green canvas bag.
- How could they possibly crawl together, Kolya, - said the other one
bashfully, - when you only have one gas mask. Has to be one after the other.
Mityok took a step forward, glancing slightly back at me.
- Put it on, - the instructor said.
Mityok put the gas mask on.
- Get down.
He got down on the floor.
- Go, - said Kolya, clicking his stopwatch.
The dorm was at least fifty yards long, and the corridor spanned the
entire length of it. The surface of the floor was shrouded in linoleum, and
when Mityok started forward it squeaked -- softly but disgustingly. Of
course, Mityok did not make it in the three minutes that the instructor gave
him -- he did not even make it one way in that time, but when he crawled
back to us, Kolya did not choose to have him do it all over, because there
were only a couple of minutes left in the siesta. Mityok took the gas mask
off. His face was red, with drops of sweat and tears all over it, and his
feet were already covered with blisters where they rubbed against the
linoleum.
- Now you, - the instructor said, passing the wet gas mask on to me. --
Get set...
It is a mysterious and wondrous sight, the corridor when you look at
its linoleum-clad infinity through the fogged lenses of a gas mask. The
floor you are lying on is cooling your breast and stomach, the far end of it
barely visible, with the pale stream of the ceiling almost coming to a point
together with the walls. The gas mask is cinching your face, pressing at the
cheeks, making your lips draw forward in a kind of half-kiss, directed
apparently at everything around you. Before you are nudged slightly, giving
you the go-ahead, at least a couple dozen seconds pass; they drift by
agonizingly slow, and you are able to notice a lot of things. There's some
lint, and translucent sand grains in the notch where two linoleum panels
meet, and a knot in the wood paneling at the very bottom of the wall that
was painted over, and this is an ant that became just two dried-out thin
drops but left a reminder of itself in the future, in a form of a small wet
spot a couple of feet further, where the foot of a person walking down the
corridor stepped a second after the catastrophe.
- Go, - I heard over my head, and I was on my way, merrily and
earnestly. The punishment looked like a joke to me, and I couldn't
understand why Mityok suddenly came apart. First ten yards flashed by in an
instant, but then it became harder. When you crawl, at some point you have
to push against the floor with the upper part of your foot, where the skin
is thin and tender, so if you haven't anything on you get blisters right
away. Linoleum was clinging to my body, it seemed like hundreds of insects
were drilling into my feet, or like I was crawling on the freshly paved
asphalt. I was surprised how slowly the time was dragging on -- there was a
large amateur watercolor painting on the wall, depicting the "Aurora"
cruiser(15) in the Black Sea, and I noticed that I have been crawling past
it for quite some time, while it hasn't moved an inch.
And then suddenly everything changed. I mean, everything continued as
it was -- I was still crawling down the corridor, just as before, but the
pain and the tiredness, after having reached the point of being unbearable,
switched something off inside me. Or switched on, I don't know. I noticed
all of a sudden that everything is very quiet around me, only the linoleum
is squeaking under my feet, like something being dragged on rusty little
wheels, and somewhere far below the windows the sea is rumbling, and farther
still, as if from beyond the sea, the loudspeaker is singing with the voice
of many children.
The life was a gentle green miracle, the sky was still and cloudless,
the sun was shining -- and in the middle of this world there was the
two-storied dorm building, and inside it was a long corridor, and I was
crawling along it in a gas mask. And this fact was, on one hand, so obvious
and natural, and on the other hand -- so hurtful and grotesque, that I
started crying under my rubber second face, taking comfort in my real face
being hidden from the instructors and especially the door frames, from where
dozens of eyes were peering at my glory and my shame through the cracks.
My tears dried up in another few yards, and I began to feverishly
scramble for at least one thought that would have given me the strength to
go on, because the terror before the instructor was no longer sufficient. I
closed my eyes, and it was night, its velvet darkness disturbed from time to
time by the stars lighting before my eyes. The distant song became audible
again, and very, very softly, probably even silently, I began to sing along.
The tinny sound of the trumpet spread over the camp -- it was the
wake-up signal. I stopped and opened my eyes. I still had about three yards
to go before the end of the corridor. There was a shelf on the slate gray
wall in front of me, with a yellow Lunar globe standing on top of it;
through the glass that was sprayed with tears and fogged over it seemed
fuzzy and washed out, as though it was not standing on the shelf but instead
floating in the grayish void.
3
The first time in my life that I drank wine was in winter, when I
turned fourteen. It happened in an industrial garage; Mityok would bring me
there because his brother, a morose hippie who conned his way out of the
draft(16), worked there as a night guard. The garage occupied a large
fenced-off plot strewn with cement blocks, which Mityok and I have taken to
climbing for hours on end, sometimes finding ourselves in wondrous places,
isolated completely from the rest of the real world and looking like
sections of a long-abandoned spaceship, with its empty hull (strangely
resembling a pile of cement blocks) the only thing left standing. The
streetlights over the crooked picket fence also contributed to the illusion
with their mysterious, otherworldly glow, and the clear, empty sky displayed
only a smattering of small stars -- in other words, if you didn't count the
empty wine bottles and iced-over urine flows, it was the outer space that
surrounded us.
Mityok suggested that we go inside, where it's warm, and we directed
our steps to the corrugated aluminium half-sphere of the garage, its shape
also vaguely related to something from space. It was dark inside, and the
outlines of the trucks that smelled of gasoline were hulking indistinctly.
There was a small wooden cubicle with a glass window tucked against the wall
in the corner; the light was shining inside. Mityok and I squeezed in,
sitting ourselves on the narrow and uncomfortable bench, and silently drank
some tea from an old peeling tin pan. Mityok's brother was smoking long
papirosy(17), thumbing through an old issue of "Technology Review for the
Youth", and did not acknowledge our presence in the slightest. Mityok
produced a bottle from under the bench, placed it on the table with a thump
and asked:
- Want some?
I nodded, even though I had a bad feeling about this inside. Mityok
filled the glass from which I was just drinking tea to the brim with the
dark-red liquid and handed it to me; clicking into the rhythm of the
process, I grabbed the glass, put it to my lips and drank, amazed at how
little effort one has to expend to do something for the first time. While
Mityok and his brother were busy drinking the rest, I was listening to the
experiences inside me, but nothing was really happening. I took the
magazine, opened it randomly and stared at a two-page spread filled with
tiny pictures of various flying contraptions that you had to guess the names
of. I liked one of them better than the others -- it was an American plane
that could use its wings as a propeller for vertical take-off. There was
also a small rocket there with a cockpit for the pilot, but I didn't get a
good look at it because Mityok's brother, without as much as a single word
or even a glance at me, pulled the magazine back from my hands. That hurt
me, and in order to hide it I shifted to the other table where the can with
plug-in boiler stood, surrounded by dried-out sausage scraps. Suddenly I was
overcame with disgust over the thought that I was sitting here in this rat
hole which smelled of garbage, over the fact that I have just drunk cheap
port from a grubby glass, and that the entire vastness of the country where
I live was just a multitude of similar rat holes, also smelling of garbage,
where people also just finished drinking cheap port, and most importantly it
was painful to think that all the wonderful multi-colored lights that take
my breath away every time I pass by a window situated far enough over the
night capital -- they all were lights of exactly those stinky shacks. It
hurt most of all when compared with the beautiful American flyer from the
magazine spread. I lowered my eyes and saw the newspaper on the table,
serving as a tablecloth; it was covered in greasy stains, round marks from
glasses and bottles and cigarette burns. The headlines were scaring me with
their icy inhuman briskness and might -- nothing was standing in their way
now, not for a long time, but they continued to strike into the emptiness,
blow after monstrous blow, and in that emptiness, especially when drunk (I
noticed I was already drunk, but did not pay much attention to that), one
was liable to get his lumbering soul in the way of a "principal task of our
time" or "greetings from cotton pickers'". The room around the table became
completely unrecognizable, and Mityok was staring at me intently. Catching
my glance, he winked and asked me, his tongue slightly unwieldy:
- So, are we going to the Moon or what?
I nodded, and my gaze transfixed on the small column titled "NEWS FROM
ORBIT". The lower part of the text was torn off, and the column now
consisted of only "The twenty eighth day started..." in a bold type. This
was quite enough -- I understood everything and closed my eyes. Yes, it
really was like that -- the holes in which we spent our lives were indeed
dark and soiled, and we ourselves were, probably, a good match for the
holes, but in the deep blue sky overhead between sparsely sown feeble stars
a special kind of bright points existed, artificial, crawling slowly through
the constellations, made right here, on the Soviet soil, in the midst of
puke, empty bottles and noxious tobacco smoke, fashioned out of steel,
semiconductors and electricity, and flying now through space. And every one
of us, even the blue-faced drunk cowering toad-like in the snowdrift whom we
passed on our way here, even Mityok's brother and, naturally, Mityok and I
-- we all had in that cold clear blue ether our own small embassy.
I ran out into the yard and stared for a long, long time, choking on
tears, at the yellowish-blue, unbelievably close disk of the Moon in the
translucent winter sky.
4.
I don't really remember the exact moment I decided to apply to Air
Force academy. I guess I don't remember it because this decision had ripened
within my soul (and Mityok's as well) long before we graduated from high
school. For a brief time we were faced with the problem of choice -- there
were many academies scattered throughout the country, but we have decided
very quickly, upon seeing in the "Soviet Aviation" magazine a full-color
fold-out describing the life in Lunar City of the Maresyev(18) Red
Banner(19) Flight Academy in Zaraisk. Right away we could almost feel being
in the throng of first-year cadets, among the plywood mountains and craters
painted yellow, we recognized our future selves in the buzz-cut guys doing
flips on the bars and throwing bath water, frozen in time by the camera,
from huge enameled pans of such a tender shade of peach that it immediately
evoked childhood memories, and this color for some reason was more
compelling, aroused more trust and desire to go study in Zaraisk than all of
the adjoining photos of flight simulators, which resembled nothing so much
as half-decomposed airplane corpses teeming with crawling people.
Once the decision was made, the rest was pretty uncomplicated. Mityok's
parents, frightened by the murky fate of his older brother, were glad that
their youngest son would be attached to such a sure and stable business, and
my father has finally drunk himself into stupor by that time, and spent most
of his days just lying on the sofa facing the wall with the bulge-eyed moose
woven on the rug hanging on it; I wouldn't be surprised if he did not even
understand that I was going to become a pilot, and to my aunt it was all the
same.
I remember the town of Zaraisk. More precisely, I can neither say that
I remember it nor that I forgot -- so few things were there that one can
remember or forget. In the very center a whitestone belfry was standing
tall, famous for some duchess having jumped off of it in times immemorial,
and even though it has been many centuries since, her feat was still
remembered in the town. The town history museum was right next to it, with
post office and police station nearby.
When we got off the bus, an unpleasant driving rain was falling, it was
cool and damp. We cowered under the canopy of some basement with "Elections
Office" banner on top, and waited for half an hour until the rain abated.
Behind the basement door there seemed to be drinking going on, we could feel
the thick onion stench and hear voices, someone was insistently proposing
that they sing a song from a popular movie; finally, tired male and female
voices started singing.
The rain ended, we ventured out in search of the next bus and found the
exact same one that brought us here. It turned out that we did not have to
get out of it at all; we could have waited out the rain inside the bus,
while the driver was having lunch. We drove past small wooden houses, then
they disappeared and we entered the forest. It was in this forest, outside
of the town, that the Zaraisk Flight Academy was located. We had to go on
foot about three miles from the final stop of the bus, which was called
"Vegetable Market"; there was no trace of any market in the vicinity, and
someone explained to us that the name carried over from before the war. We
got off the bus and started along the road sprinkled with soggy pine
needles, it led us further and further into the forest, and just when we
started thinking that we were going the wrong way it abruptly terminated at
the gate welded from steel pipes, bearing huge tin stars; all around it the
forest was pressing against the unpainted gray wooden fence, with rusty
barbed wire snaking its way on top of it. We showed our letters of
recommendation from the draft office and newly-minted passports to the
sleepy guard at the checkpoint, and he let us in, directing us to the
clubhouse where the meeting was about to begin.
A paved road was leading into the small camp, and the Lunar City that I
saw in the magazine revealed itself immediately to the right of it,
consisting of several long, one-storied yellow barrack buildings, a dozen or
so tires dug halfway into the ground and the lot imitating the lunar
landscape. We went past it to the clubhouse, where the boys who came for the
entrance exams(20) were swarming around the supporting columns. Soon we were
visited by an officer who appointed someone to be "in charge" and ordered us
to regi