Omon Ra (13 page)

“What were your duties?”

“Operational officer. Then strategic officer.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing complicated. If you’re sitting in a tactical operations rocket, you’re an operational officer. If you’re in a strategic rocket, then you’re a strategic officer.”

“Is it tough?”

“It’s okay. Like working as a watchman back in the everyday world. Twenty-four hours’ duty in the rocket and three days off.”

“So that’s what turned your hair grey … I suppose all of you are grey.”

Dima didn’t answer that one either.

“It’s the responsibility, is it?”

“No. More likely the training flights.”

“What training flights? Ah—that’s when they write in fine print on the back page of
Izvestya
that it’s forbidden to sail into such and such a sector of the Pacific Ocean, is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“And do they have training flights often?”

“It depends, but you pull a straw every month.
Twelve times a year, the entire squadron. All twenty-four of you. That’s what turns the guys’ hair grey.”

“And what if you don’t want to pull a straw?”

“Pulling a straw is just an expression of speech. What actually happens before the training flight is the assistant political instructor goes round and gives everyone an envelope. Your straw’s already in it.”

“And if you get a short straw, can you refuse?”

“In the first place, it’s a long straw, not a short one. And in the second place, no. All you can do is write an application for a cosmonauts’ detachment. But you have to be really lucky.”

“Are many people lucky?”

“I’ve never counted them. I was lucky.”

Dima answered my questions reluctantly, with lots of rather impolite pauses. I couldn’t think of anything else to ask, so I put down the receiver.

I made my next attempt to talk to him when there were only a few minutes left to braking. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I was overcome by a callous curiosity—would Dima change before … ? I wanted to check whether he would be as taciturn as he was during our last conversation, or whether the approaching end of his flight would make him a bit more talkative. I picked up the receiver and called him.

“Dima! This is Omon. Pick up the phone.”

The answer I got was: “Listen, ring me back in two minutes! If your radio’s working, switch it on now!”

Dima hung up. His voice sounded excited, and I thought they must be talking about us on the radio. But Radio Beacon was broadcasting music—when I switched on, I caught just the fading tinkle of a synthesiser;
the programme was about to end, and after a few seconds there was a silent pause. Then came the time signal, and I learned that in a place called Moscow it was two in the afternoon. I waited a bit and then picked up the receiver.

“Did you hear it?” Dima asked excitedly.

“Yes,” I said, “but only the very end.”

“But did you recognise it?”

“No,” I said.

“It was Pink Floyd. ‘One of These Days’.”

“How come the workers requested that?” I asked in astonishment.

“They didn’t, of course,” said Dima. “It’s the theme tune for the programme
Life of Science.
From the album
Meddle.
Pure underground.”

“You mean you like Pink Floyd?”

“Me? I’m a fan. I had all their albums. What d’you think of them?”

It was the first time I had heard Dima speak with such enthusiasm.

“Not bad in general,” I said. “But not all their stuff. They have this album with a cow on the cover.”

“
Atom Heart Mother,”
said Dima.

“I like that one. And there’s another one I remember—a double album with them sitting in a yard, and on the wall is a picture of the same yard with them sitting in it…”

“
Ummagumma.”

“Maybe. I don’t think that’s music at all.”

“That’s right! It’s not music, it’s shit!” a bass voice roared in the receiver, and we said nothing for a few seconds.

“You’re wrong,” said Dima when he finally spoke. “At the end there’s a new version of ‘Saucerful of Secrets’. A different timbre from on
Nice Pair.
Different singer, too.”

I’d forgotten that.

“What do you like on
Atom Heart Mother!”
asked Dima.

“There are a couple of songs on side two. One’s quiet, just a guitar, and the other has an orchestra. The ending’s beautiful—tam ta-ta ta-ta ta-ta ta-ta tam-taram tra-ta-ta …”

“I know it,” said Dima. “ ‘Summer ’68. And the quiet song’s ‘If.”

“Maybe,” I said. “So what’s your favourite record?”

“I don’t have a favourite record,” Dima said haughtily. “It’s not records I like, it’s music. On
Meddle
, for instance, I like the first song. About the echo. It makes me cry every time I listen to it. I translated it with a dictionary. ‘Overhead the Albatross pa-ra-ram, pa-ram … And help me understand the best I can …’ “

Dima swallowed and fell silent.

“Your English is very good,” I said.

“Yes, that’s what they told me in the rocket division. The assistant political instructor said so. But that’s not the point. There was one record I didn’t manage to find. During my last leave I went to Moscow specially, took four hundred roubles with me. I asked around everywhere, no one had even heard of it.”

“What record was that?”

“You wouldn’t know it. Music from a film. It’s called
Zabriskie Point.”

“Ah,” I said, “I did have that one. Not the record, I
had it on tape. Nothing special really … Dima, why have you gone all quiet? Hey, Dima!”

The receiver crackled for a long time before Dima asked: “What’s it like?”

“How can I put it?” I said. “Have you heard ‘More’?”

“Sure.”

“It’s kind of like that. Only they don’t sing. An ordinary kind of soundtrack. If you’ve heard ‘More’, you can reckon you’ve heard it. Typical Pinky—saxophone, synthesiser. The second side …”

There was a beep in the phone, and my skull cavity was filled with Khalmuradov’s loud roar: “Ra, come in! What are you fucking chattering about up there? Haven’t you got anything to do? Prepare the automatic system for soft landing!”

“The automatic system’s ready!” Dima replied, reluctantly.

“Then commence orientation of the braking motor axis to the lunar vertical!”

“All right.”

I glanced out into space through the moonwalker’s spy holes and saw the moon right up close. The picture that met my eyes would have been just like the Ukrainian flag, if its top half were blue instead of black. The phone rang. I picked it up, but it was Khalmuradov again.

“Attention! At the count of three, activate the braking motor on the command of the radioaltimeter!”

“Read you,” replied Dima.

“One … two …”

I hung up quickly.

The motor fired. It worked intermittently, and about
twenty minutes later my shoulder was suddenly thrown against the wall, then my back was bounced against the ceiling, and then an intolerably loud crash shook everything; I realised that Dima had passed on to immortality without saying goodbye. But I wasn’t offended—apart from our final conversation he’d always been taciturn and unsociable, and I had a feeling that sitting for days at a time in the gondola of his intercontinental ballistic missile, he’d understood something which meant he never needed to say hello or goodbye again.

•

I didn’t notice the landing. The shuddering and rumbling suddenly stopped, and looking out through the spy holes, I saw the same pitch blackness I had seen before the start of the flight. At first I thought something had gone wrong, then I remembered that according to plan I was supposed to land during the lunar night.

I waited for a while, not knowing what I was waiting for. Suddenly the phone rang.

“Khalmuradov here,” said the voice. “Is everything in order?”

“Yes, sir, Comrade Colonel.”

“The telemetry will be activated in a moment, and the guiderails will be lowered,” he said. “You will proceed down onto the surface and report. But use the brakes, you understand?”

Then in a quieter voice, holding the receiver away from his face, he added: “Hun-der-ground. What a bastard.”

The moonwalker swayed and I heard a dull thud from outside.

“Proceed,” said Khalmuradov.

This was probably the most difficult part of my assignment—I had to drive down out of the descent module along two narrow guiderails lowered onto the lunar surface. The guiderails had special slots to accommodate the flanges on the moonwalker’s wheels, so it was impossible to slide off them, but there was still the danger that one of the guiderails might land on a boulder, and then the moonwalker might tilt and overturn on its way down to the ground. I turned the pedals a few times and felt the massive machine lean forward and begin to move under its own momentum. I pressed the brake, but the force of inertia was too strong, and the moonwalker was dragged downwards; suddenly there was a clanging sound, the brake went slack, and my feet turned the pedals backwards several times with terrifying speed. The moonwalker rolled forward irresistibly, swayed, and came to a halt, standing evenly on all eight wheels.

I was on the moon. But I had no feelings about the fact at all; I was wondering how to put back the chain that had slipped off the cog wheel. Just when I had finally managed it, the phone rang. It was the Flight Leader. His voice sounded solemn and official.

“Comrade Krivomazov! On behalf of the entire aviation officers’ corps present here at Central Flight Control, I congratulate you on the soft landing of the Soviet automated space station Luna-17B on the moon!”

I heard popping sounds, and I realised they were opening champagne. There was music too—some kind of march; I could hardly hear it, it was almost drowned out by the crackling in the receiver.

My youthful dreams of the future were born from the gentle sadness of those evenings, far removed from the rest of life, when you lie in the grass beside the remains of someone else’s campfire, with your bicycle beside you, watching the purple stripes left in the western sky by the sun that has just set, and you can see the first stars in the east.

I hadn’t seen or experienced very much, but I liked lots of things, and I thought that a flight to the moon would take in and make up for all the things I had passed by, in hopes of catching up with them later; how could I know that you only ever see the best things in life out of the corner of your eye? As a kid I often imagined the landscapes of other worlds—rocky plains flooded with dead light and pitted with craters; distant, sharp-pointed mountains; a black sky with the huge brand of a sun blazing on it amid the glittering stars. I imagined metre-thick layers of cosmic dust, I imagined boulders lying motionless on the surface of the moon for billions of years—for some reason I was really excited by the idea that a boulder could lie in the same place without moving for so long until one day I bent down and picked it up between the thick fingers of my spacesuit glove. I thought about how I would raise my
head to see the blue sphere of the earth, and this supreme moment of my life would link me with all the moments when I felt I was standing on the threshold of something wonderful beyond comprehension.

In fact, the moon proved to be a narrow, black, stuffy space where the faint electric light came on only rarely; it turned out to be constant darkness seen through the useless lenses of the spy holes, and restless, uncomfortable sleep in a cramped position with my head resting on my arms, which lay on the handlebars.

I travelled slowly, about five kilometres a day, and I hadn’t the slightest idea what the world around me looked like. But then, of course, this kingdom of eternal darkness probably didn’t look like anything—apart from me, there wasn’t anybody for whom it could look like anything, and I didn’t switch on the headlight, in order to save the battery. The surface of the ground beneath me was obviously even and the machine moved smoothly over it. I couldn’t turn the handlebars at all—they must have jammed on landing—so all I had to do was keep turning the pedals. But my journey into space had been so long that I refused to allow gloomy thoughts to get me down, and I even managed to feel happy.

Hours and days went by. When I halted, it was only to lower my head onto the handlebars and sleep. It was so horribly uncomfortable to use the toilet that I preferred to wait till the final moment, the way I used to during quiet hour in kindergarten. The corned beef was gradually running out, there was less and less water in the milk can; every evening I extended the red line on the map in front of me by another centimetre, and it
crept closer and closer to the small black circle where it was supposed to come to a stop. The circle was like the symbol for a metro station; it irritated me that it had no name, and I wrote one beside it—“Zabriskie Point”.

•

With my right hand squeezing the nickel-plated knob in the pocket of my padded jacket, I had been staring for an hour at the label of one of the cans, with its words “Great Wall”. I was having visions of warm winds over the fields of distant China, and I wasn’t really interested in the tedious ringing of the phone on the floor, but I picked it up after a while.