Omon Ra (11 page)

“And now, following established tradition for these occasions,” the Flight Leader said when the photo had been taken, “we’ll go up and spend a few minutes on Red Square.”

We walked across the hall and lingered for a moment by the small iron door—lingered for a final look at the rocket that was an exact replica of the one on which we would soon go soaring up into the sky. The Flight Leader took a key from the bunch he carried and opened a small iron door in the wall, and we set off along a corridor which led in a direction that was new to me.

We wove this way and that for quite a while between
stone walls festooned with wires of various colours: the corridor made several turns, and at times the ceiling was so low that we had to stoop. In one place I noticed faded flowers lying in a shallow niche, and on the wall beside it was a small memorial plaque with the words: “On this spot in 1932 Comrade Serob Nalbandian was villainously slain with a spade.” Then a red carpet runner appeared under our feet; the corridor began to widen out and finally ended at a staircase.

The staircase was very long, and it was flanked by a smooth incline a metre wide with narrow steps at its centre. I realised why it was built that way when I saw the Flight Leader pushing Colonel Urchagin’s wheelchair up it. When he tired, Urchagin put on the hand brake and they stood still for a while, so the others didn’t walk too fast, especially since long flights of steps were difficult for Ivan to cope with. Eventually we arrived at a pair of heavy oak doors covered with carved emblems; the Flight Leader unlocked the doors with another of his keys, but the doors were swollen from dampness and opened only when I put my shoulder against them and shoved with all my strength.

The daylight was dazzling; some of us put a hand over our eyes, others turned away, and only Colonel Urchagin sat there calmly, with the usual half-smile on his face. When we got used to the light, it turned out we were facing the grey headstones in front of the Kremlin wall, and I guessed we must have come out of the back entrance of the Lenin Mausoleum. It was so long since I’d seen the sky over my head that I felt dizzy.

“Every single one of our Soviet cosmonauts,” the Flight Leader said softly, “has come here before their
flight, to these stones that are sacred to every Soviet citizen, in order to take a little part of this place into space with them. Our country’s labours have been hard and long, it all began with nothing but gun carts and machine guns, and now you young lads work with highly complex automatic systems”—he paused and ran a cold, unblinking gaze round all our eyes—“which have been entrusted to you by the Motherland, and which Bamlag Ivanovich and I have explained to you in our lectures. I am sure that as you tread the surface of the Motherland for the final time you will each take with you a little part of Red Square, though just what that particle will be for each of you, I cannot say …”

We stood in silence on the surface of our native planet. It was daytime. The sky was slightly overcast, and the sweeping branches of the blue firs swayed gently in the wind. There was a scent of flowers. The bells began chiming five o’clock; the Flight Leader glanced at his watch, adjusted the hands, and said that we still had a few minutes.

We went out onto the steps in front of the main door of the mausoleum. There was no one at all on Red Square, unless you counted the two sentries who had just come on duty and gave no sign at all that they saw us, and three sentries’ backs receding in the direction of the Spasskaya Tower. I glanced around, drinking in everything I saw and felt: the grey walls of GUM, the hollow fruit and vegetable shapes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, the Lenin Mausoleum, the green dome topped by a red flag that I knew was behind the wall, the pediment of the Historical Museum, and the low grey sky, which looked as though it had turned its back on the earth and
was probably still unaware that soon it would be ripped open by the iron phallus of a Soviet rocket.

“It’s time,” said the Flight Leader.

The guys walked slowly back behind the mausoleum. A minute or so later only Colonel Urchagin and I were left under the word
LENIN
. The Flight Leader looked at his watch and coughed, but Urchagin said: “One moment, Comrade Lieutenant-General. I want to say a few words to Omon.”

The Flight Leader nodded and withdrew around the polished marble corner.

“Come here, my boy,” said the colonel. I went over to him. The first large, scattered raindrops were falling on the cobblestones of Red Square. Urchagin groped in the air, and I held out my hand to him. He caught it, squeezed it slightly, and tugged it towards him. I bent over, and he began to whisper in my ear. As I listened to him, I watched the steps in front of his wheelchair gradually turning darker in the rain.

Comrade Urchagin spoke to me for about two minutes, pausing at length between his words. When he stopped talking, he squeezed my hand again and let go of it.

“Now go and join the others,” he said.

I took a step in the direction of the mausoleum, then turned back and asked: “What about you?”

The raindrops were falling more and more thickly.

“No matter,” he said, extracting an umbrella from a holster-like case on the side of the wheelchair. “I’ll ride around here for a while.”

And that was what I carried away with me from Red Square that early evening: the darkened cobblestones
and a thin figure in an old military jacket, sitting in an invalid chair and struggling to open a black umbrella.

Dinner was pretty bad that evening: soup with macaroni stars, skinny chicken with rice, and boiled fruit; usually when I’d drunk the liquid, I ate all the boiled fruit, but this time after I’d eaten a single bitter wrinkled pear, I began to feel sick and I pushed my plate away.

It felt as if I were riding on a pedal boat through thick reeds with huge telegraph poles sticking up out of them. The pedal boat was strange somehow, unusual, the pedals not in front of the seat but improvised from an ordinary bicycle: set between the two thick, long floats was a bicycle frame with the word “Sport” on it. I hadn’t any idea where all these reeds and the pedal boat had come from, or what I was doing there. But I wasn’t really bothered about it. Everything around me was so beautiful I just wanted to ride on and on and keep looking, and probably I’d have been quite happy to go on like that for ages. The sky was particularly lovely—long, narrow, lilac-coloured clouds hung above the horizon, looking like a string of strategic bombers. It was warm; I could just hear the propeller splashing in the water, and there was an echo of distant thunder from the west.

Then I realised it wasn’t thunder. At regular intervals everything in me—or everything around me—was shaken, and my head began to buzz. With every successive blow all my surroundings—the river, the reeds, the sky over my head—seemed to fade a little more. The world was becoming as familiar in its finest details as the door of the bathroom at home seen from the inside,
and it was all happening very quickly, until I noticed that the bicycle was no longer on water or surrounded by reeds but inside a transparent sphere that separated me from everything around me. Every blow made the wall of the sphere thicker and more solid; it let through less and less light, until finally there was total darkness. Then the sky over my head was replaced by a ceiling, a feeble glow of electric light appeared, and the walls began to change their shape, closing in on me and bending out to form shelves stacked with glasses, cans, and other stuff. And then the rhythmical shuddering of the world became what it had been from the very start—a telephone ringing.

I was sitting on the saddle inside the moonwalker, clutching the handlebars and leaning right down over the frame; I was dressed in a padded jacket, a fur cap with earflaps, and fur boots; an oxygen mask hung round my neck like a scarf. The ringing came from the green box of the radio screwed to the floor. I picked up the receiver.

“Why, you fucking useless shithead!” a monstrous bass voice boomed in my ear in a tone of anguished suffering. “What’re you doing in there, wanking?”

“Who’s that?”

“Head of Central Flight Control Colonel Khalmuradov. Are you awake?”

“What?”

“Fuck you, that’s what. Make ready, one minute to launch!”

“Ready in one minute, sir!” I muttered in reply, biting my lip in horror and grasping for the wheel with my free hand.

“You asshole,” the receiver hissed indistinctly and began croaking—the man yelling at me was obviously holding the receiver away from his face while he talked to someone else. Then there was a ping in the phone, and I heard a different voice, mechanical and impersonal, but with a strong Ukrainian accent:

“Fifty-nine … fifty-ate …”

I was in that state of shame and shock that makes a man groan out loud or scream obscenities; the thought that I’d almost made an irrevocable mistake obscured everything else. As I followed the numbers exploding in my ears, I tried to remember what had happened and realised I probably hadn’t really done anything all that terrible. All I could remember was lowering the glass of boiled fruit from my mouth and getting up from the table after I suddenly lost my appetite. The next thing I knew, the phone was ringing and I had to answer it.

“Tirty-tree …”

I noticed the moonwalker was fully equipped. The shelves that had always been empty before were densely stacked—on the bottom shelf there were cans of Great Wall Chinese corned beef, covered in gleaming Vaseline; on the upper shelf there was a map case, a mug, a can opener, and a pistol in a holster, everything secured by wire. Resting against my left hip was an oxygen cylinder with the word “Inflammable” on it, and against my right hip an aluminium milk churn that reflected the light of the small electric lamp glowing on the wall. Under the lamp hung a map of the moon marked with two black circles: under the lower circle were written the words “Landing Site”. Hanging beside the map on a piece of string was a red marker pen.

“Sax-teen …”

Beyond the two spy holes there was total darkness—which was what I should have expected, I realised, since the moonwalker was covered by the rocket’s nose cone.

“Nine … Ate …”

I recalled Comrade Urchagin’s words: “Those final seconds of the countdown, what are they but the voice of history speaking through millions of television screens.”

“Tree … Two … Win … Blastoff.”

Somewhere far below me I heard a rumbling and roaring that grew louder with every second, until soon it was beyond all imagining, as though hundreds of sledgehammers were pounding on the rocket’s iron fuselage. Then the shuddering began, and I banged my head against the wall in front of me a few times—if not for the fur cap, I’d probably have beaten my brains out. A few cans of corned beef fell to the floor, then everything suddenly keeled over so sharply I thought for a second we were going to crash—and the next moment there was a distant voice in the telephone receiver that I was still pressing to my ear:

“Omon! You’re flying!”

“We’re off,” I remembered my instructions and yelled, just as Gagarin did when he was first catapulted out into space.

The roaring became a steady, powerful rumbling, while the shuddering became the kind of vibration you feel in a train when it’s already picked up speed. I put the receiver back on the hook, and the phone immediately rang again.

“Omon, are you all right?”

It was Sema Anikin’s voice, speaking over a monotonous recitation of information about the first section of the flight.

“I’m fine,” I said. “But why are we … Ah, I see …”

“We thought they’d have to postpone the launch, you were so sound asleep. The moment’s calculated to the split second. The entire trajectory depends on it. They even sent a soldier up the gantry and he kicked the nose cone to wake you up. They were trying to call you on the radio for ages.”

“Aha.”

We said nothing for a few seconds.

“Listen,” Sema began again, “I’ve only got four minutes left, not even that. Then I have to detach the first stage. We’ve all said goodbye to each other, except for you … This is our last chance to talk.”

I couldn’t think of the right words to say, and all I felt was embarrassment and weariness.

“Omon!” Sema called me again.

“Yes, Sema,” I said, “I hear you. We’re flying, d’you understand?”

“Yes,” he said.

“How are you feeling?” I asked, realising just how senseless and insulting the question was.

“I’m okay. How about you?”

“Me too. What can you see?”

“Nothing. There’s no way to see out. The noise is terrible. And the shaking.”

“Up here too,” I said, then stopped.

“Okay,” said Sema, “my time’s up. You know what? Think about me when you land on the moon, okay?”

“Of course,” I said.

“Just remember there was a guy called Sema. The first stage. Promise?”

“I promise.”

“You’ve got to get there and finish the job, you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Time’s up. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, Sema.”

There were several hollow knocks in the receiver, and then through the crackle of interference I heard Sema’s voice loud and clear as he sang his favourite song.