Omon Ra (14 page)

“Ra, come in! Why don’t you answer? Why aren’t we moving? I can see everything here with the telemetry.”

“I’m having a rest, Comrade Flight Leader.”

“Report the reading on the gauge!”

I glanced at the figures in the opening in the small steel cylinder.

“Thirty-two kilometres, seven hundred metres.”

“Now put out the light and listen. Looking at the map here, we can see you’re very close.”

I felt my heart sink, although I knew there was still a long way to go to that small black circle that gazed at me from the map like the barrel of a gun.

“To what?”

“The landing module of Luna-17B.”

“But I’m Luna-17B,” I said.

“Never mind, so were they.”

It seemed he was drunk again. But I understood what he was talking about. It was the expedition to obtain samples of the lunar soil: that time two cosmonauts had
landed on the moon, Pasiuk Drach and Zurab Pratsvania. They had a small rocket with them which they used to send five hundred grammes of soil back to earth; after that they lived on the lunar surface for one and a half minutes, and then shot themselves.

“Careful, Omon!” said the Flight Leader. “Be cautious now. Reduce speed and switch on the headlights.”

I flicked a switch and pressed my eyes to the black lenses of the spy holes. The optical distortion drew the blackness around the moonwalker into an arch that stretched out ahead of me in an endless tunnel. All I could make out clearly was a small section of the rough, uneven rocky surface—it was evidently ancient basalt; every one and a half metres or so there were long, low outcrops perpendicular to my line of movement; they reminded me of sandhills in the desert. The strange thing was, I didn’t feel them at all as I moved along.

“Well?” asked the voice in the receiver.

“I don’t see anything,” I said.

“Turn off the headlights and proceed. Don’t hurry.”

I went on for another forty minutes. Then the moonwalker collided with something. I picked up the phone.

“Earth, come in. There’s something here.”

“Switch on the headlights.”

Right in the centre of my field of vision lay two hands in black leather gloves. The extended fingers of the right hand lay over the handle of a small shovel which still held a little sand mixed with small stones, and the left hand gripped a Makarov pistol that gleamed dully. There was something dark between the hands. Looking closer, I could make out the raised collar of an
officer’s padded jacket with the top of a fur cap protruding above it; the man’s shoulder and part of his head were concealed by the wheel of the moonwalker.

“What is it, Omon?” the receiver breathed in my ear.

I described briefly what I could see.

“What about the epaulettes, can you see them?”

“No, I can’t.”

“Move back half a metre.”

“The moonwalker doesn’t travel backwards,” I said. “It has pedal braking.”

“Damn … I told the chief designer,” mumbled the Flight Leader. “I wonder who it is, Zura or Pasha. Zura was a captain, and Pasha was a major. Okay, switch off the headlights, you’ll flatten the batteries.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, but before I carried out the order, I took another look at the motionless hand and the fabric top of the fur cap. I couldn’t get moving for a while, but then I gritted my teeth and put all my weight on the pedal. The moonwalker jerked upwards and then, a second later, back down again.

“Proceed,” said Khalmuradov, who had replaced the Flight Leader on the phone. “You’re falling behind schedule.”

•

I saved energy by spending almost all the time in total darkness, frenziedly turning the pedals and switching on the light for only a few seconds at a time in order to check the compass, although this was quite pointless, since the handlebars were useless anyway. But they ordered me to do it. It’s hard to describe the sensation: darkness, a hot, cramped space, sweat dripping from
your brow, a gentle swaying—perhaps an embryo experiences something of the sort in its mother’s womb.

I was aware that I was on the moon, but the immense distance separating me from the earth was a pure abstraction for me. I felt as though the people I spoke with on the phone were somewhere close by—not because I could hear their voices clearly in the receiver, but because I couldn’t imagine how the entirely immaterial official relationships and personal feelings that linked us together could be stretched so far. But the strangest thing was that the memories connecting me with childhood could extend over such an incomprehensible distance too.

•

When I was in school, I used to spend the summers in a village outside Moscow. It stood on the edge of a main highway, and I spent most of my time on the saddle of my bike, sometimes riding up to thirty or forty kilometres a day. The bicycle wasn’t very well adjusted—the handlebars were too low, and I really had to bend down to them—like in the moonwalker. And now, probably because my body had been set in that pose for such a long time, I began having light hallucinations. I seemed to drift off into a waking sleep—in the darkness it was particularly easy—and I dreamed I could see my shadow on the asphalt rushing past below me, and the white dotted line in the middle of the highway, and I was breathing air smelling of diesel fumes. I began to think I could hear the roar of lorries rushing past and the hissing of tyres on asphalt, and only the next radio contact brought me back to my senses. But afterwards I
dropped out of lunar reality and again was transported back to the Moscow highway, and I realised how much the hours I spent there had meant to me.

On one occasion Comrade Kondratiev came on the radio to talk to me and began declaiming poetry about the moon. I was wondering how to ask him to stop without being offensive, when he began reading a poem that I recognised from the very first lines as a photographic image of my soul:

Life’s vital bonds we took for lasting truth
,

But as I turn my head to glance at you
,

How strangely changed you are, my early youth
,

Your colours are not mine, and not one line is true.

And in my mind, moonglow is what I see

Between us two, the drowning man and shallow place;

Your semi-racer bears you off from me

Along the miles towards the moon’s bright face
,

How long now since …

I gave a quiet sob, and Comrade Kondratiev immediately stopped.

“What comes next?” I asked.

“I’ve forgotten,” said Comrade Kondratiev. “It’s gone clean out of my head.”

I didn’t believe him, but I knew it was pointless to argue or plead.

“What are you thinking about now?” he asked.

“Nothing really,” I said.

“Nobody thinks of nothing,” he said. “There’s always some thought or other running round your head. Tell me, I’d like to know.”

“Well, I often remember my childhood,” I said reluctantly. “How I used to go riding on my bike. It was a lot like this. And to this day I don’t understand it—there I was, riding along on my bike, with the handlebars way down low, and it was really bright up ahead, and the wind was so fresh …”

I stopped speaking.

“Well? What is it you don’t understand?”

“I thought I was riding towards the canal … So how can it be that I…”

Comrade Kondratiev said nothing for a minute or two and then quietly put down the receiver.

I switched on Radio Beacon—I didn’t believe it was really Beacon, even though every two minutes they assured me it was.

“Maria Ivanovna Plakhuta from the village of Nukino has given the Motherland seven sons,” said a woman’s voice, soaring out over the factory lunchtime in distant Russia. “Two of them, Ivan Plakhuta and Vassily Plakhuta, are now serving in the army, in the tank forces of the KGB. ‘They have asked us to broadcast the comic song The Samovar’ for their mother. We’re doing just as you asked, lads. Maria Ivanovna, here singing for you is People’s Jester of the USSR, Artem Plakhuta, who was just as delighted to accept our invitation as he was to be demobilised from the army with the rank of senior sergeant eight years before his brothers.”

Then the balalaikas began to jangle, the cymbals clashed a couple of times, and a voice filled with feeling, leaning hard on the letter
r
as if it were the person crushed next to him in a crowded bus, began to sing: “O-oh,
the wa-terr’s on the boil!”

I switched it off. The words sent a shiver through me. I remembered Dima’s grey head and the cow on the cover of
Atom Heart Mother
, and a cold shudder ran slowly down my spine. I waited a minute or two until I was sure the song must have finished, and turned the black knob. For a second there was silence, and then the baritone leapt out of hiding straight into my face with:

We gave the skunks our tea to drink,
Fed them water fiery hot!

This time I waited longer, and when I finally switched the radio on, the announcer was speaking.

“Let us remember our cosmonauts, and all those whose earthly labours make possible their shift-work in the heavens. For them today …”

I withdrew into my own thoughts, or rather, I suddenly found myself immersed in one of them, as though I had fallen through thin ice, and I only began to hear anything again a few minutes later, as a ponderous choir of distant basses was laying the final bricks in the monumental edifice of a new song. But even though I was completely unaware of the real world, I carried on mechanically pressing the pedals, with my right knee turned out as far as possible—that way I felt less pain from the blister my boot had given me.

I was struck by a sudden idea.

If now, when I closed my eyes, I was—as far as a person can actually be anywhere—on a phantom highway outside Moscow, and the nonexistent asphalt, trees, and sunshine became as real to me as though I actually was
dashing down a slope in my favourite second gear; if—forgetting about Zabriskie Point, which was not very far off now—I was sometimes happy for a few seconds, didn’t that mean that already back then in my childhood, when I was simply a part of a world submerged in summer happiness, when I really was dashing along the asphalt strip on my bicycle, riding against the wind into the sun, without the slightest interest in what the future had in store for me—didn’t that mean that even then I was really already trundling across the black, lifeless surface of the moon, seeing nothing but what penetrated into consciousness through the crooked spy holes as the moonwalker slowly solidified around me?

We’re spaceward bound tomorrow
But there’s no grief or sorrow
Alone in the sky.
The moon’s riding high.
You ripe ears of barley, goodbye.

I saw a board on the wall bearing a pointy-bearded golden profile and
the word “Lenin”, written in a semicircle and framed by two metal-foil olive
branches. Although I’d walked past the spot plenty of times before, there had
always been people around, and I hadn’t dared go right up close.

I scanned the entire structure with a new interest: the board was quite
large—about a metre high—and covered with crimson velvet. It hung from two
hinges, and a small hook on the back held it right up against the wall. I glanced
around. Quiet hour wasn’t over yet, and there was no one in the corridor. I went
over to the window—the avenue leading to the dining hall was empty, except for two
moonwalkers at the far end, slowly creeping towards me. I recognised the camp leaders,
Kolya and Lena. It was quiet, the only sound was the tapping of a table-tennis ball
downstairs: I was filled with melancholy at the idea that someone had the right to play
table tennis during the quiet hour. Then I unlatched the hook and pulled the board
towards me, revealing a square section of the wall. Right in the centre of it I saw a
switch, painted with gold paint. The hollow churning in the pit of my stomach grew even
worse as I reached out and flicked the switch upwards.

There was a low buzzing sound. Without even knowing
what it was, I felt like I’d done something terrible to the world around me, and
to myself as well. The buzzer sounded again, louder this time, and suddenly I realised
that the switch, the small crimson door I’d opened, and the corridor I was
standing in—none of it was real, because I wasn’t really standing by a
switch on a wall but sitting uncomfortably hunched over in some terribly cramped space.
There was another buzz, and a few seconds later the moonwalker materialised around me.
One more buzz, and the thought flitted through my mind that yesterday, before I lowered
my head onto the handlebars, I had extended the red line on the map to the centre of the
black circle beside the words “Zabriskie Point”.

The phone was ringing.

“Sleep well, you asshole?” Colonel Khalmuradov’s voice
thundered in the receiver.

“Asshole yourself,” I said, suddenly angry.

Khalmuradov gave a rumbling, infectious laugh—I realised he
wasn’t offended at all.

“I’m all alone again here in Central Flight Control. The lads
have gone off to Japan to set up a joint flight mission. Pkhadzer Vladlenovich sends you
his regards, says he was sorry he didn’t get to say goodbye—it was all
decided at the last moment. And I had to stay here all because of you. Well, are you
setting up the radio buoy today? Probably had enough, have you? Glad it’s
over?”