Omon Ra (15 page)

I didn’t answer.

“What’s this, are you angry with me? Omon? Just because I
called you a wanker that time? Forget it, will
you? You had all
Central Flight Control shitting bricks, we almost had to cancel the flight,” said
Khalmuradov. He paused, then went on. “You act just like a stupid woman …
Are you a man or not? Today’s a special day. Just you remember that.”

“I remember,” I said.

“Button yourself up as tight as you can,” Khalmuradov advised
me anxiously, “especially the neck of your jacket. Your face …”

“I know what to do as well as you,” I interrupted.

“First you put on the goggles, then you wrap the scarf round your
head, and then you put on your cap. Be sure to fasten it under your chin. Then the
gloves. Tie your sleeves and your boots with string—you can’t mess around
with a vacuum. Then you’ll be able to last three minutes. Understood?”

“Understood.”

“Not ‘understood’, you bastard—‘yes,
sir’. Report back when you’re ready.”

They say that during the last minutes of his life a man sees it all again
in fast rewind. I don’t know about that. Nothing of the sort happened to me, no
matter how hard I tried. What I saw instead was a vivid, strangely detailed picture of
Landratov in Japan—walking along the street in the morning sunshine wearing
brand-new expensive training shoes and smiling—probably not even remembering what
kind of feet he was wearing them on. And I imagined the others—the Flight Leader
transformed into an elderly intellectual in a three-piece suit, and Comrade Kondratiev
giving a thoughtful interview to a correspondent from the television current-affairs
programme. But not a single thought
about myself entered my head.
To calm myself down, I switched on the radio and listened to a quiet song about lights
burning in the distance beyond the river, a head lowered in sorrow, a heart pierced by
grief, and White Guards who had nothing to lose but their golden watch chains.

Suddenly the radio was switched off and the phone rang.

“Well,” asked Khalmuradov, “are you ready?”

“Not yet,” I answered, “what’s the
hurry?”

“You little jerk, you,” said Khalmuradov, “I saw what it
said in your personal file about you not having any childhood friends except for that
bastard we shot. Don’t you ever think about other people? I could miss my tennis
again.”

Somehow I found it incredibly offensive to think that in a short while
Khalmuradov would be standing on the courts at Luzhniki with white shorts on his fat
thighs, knocking a tennis ball around the asphalt, while I wouldn’t be around
anymore. I didn’t feel this because I envied him but because I suddenly recalled
with startling clarity a certain sunny September day in that same Luzhniki, when I was
still at school. But then I realised that when I was gone, Khalmuradov and Luzhniki
itself would be gone too, and the thought dispelled the melancholy my dream had left
with me.

“Other people? What other people?” I asked quietly.
“Anyway, it’s no big deal. You go. I’ll manage on my own.”

“Stop that.”

“It’s all right, you go.”

“Stop it, stop it,” Khalmuradov said in a serious
voice. “I have to finalise the report, register the signal
from the moon, note the time in Moscow. Just you get on with it.”

“Is Landratov in Japan too?” I suddenly asked.

“What’s that you asked?” Khalmuradov said
suspiciously.

“I just remembered something.”

“So, what was it you remembered? Tell me.”

“I just remembered him dancing the ‘Kalinka’ at the
graduation exams.”

“I get you. Hey, Landratov, are you in Japan? Someone here’s
asking for you.”

There was a sound of laughter and the slippery squeak of fingers on the
receiver.

“He’s here,” Khalmuradov said at last. “He sends
his regards.”

“Give him mine too. All right, I suppose it’s time.”

“Push open the hatch,” Khalmuradov said quickly, repeating the
instructions I knew by heart, “and immediately grab the handlebars so the air
pressure won’t throw you out. Then take a breath from the oxygen mask through the
scarf and climb out. Walk fifteen steps along the line of motion, take out the radio
buoy, set it down, and turn it on. Make sure you carry it a good distance, or the
moonwalker will screen the signal… And then … We’ve given you a pistol
with a single bullet, and we’ve never had any cowards in the cosmonauts’
detachment yet.”

I hung up. The telephone rang again, but I took no notice. For a second I
toyed with the idea of not switching on the radio buoy so that bastard Khalmuradov would
have to hang around in Central Flight Control till
the end of the
day, and then collect some kind of Party reprimand, but I remembered Sema Anikin and how
he said I had to get there and finish the job. I couldn’t betray the guys from the
first and second stages, not even unsociable Dima; they’d died so I could be here
now, and in the face of their exalted destiny my spiteful feelings for Khalmuradov
seemed petty and shameful. And when I finally knew that in a few seconds I would gather
my courage and do what had to be done, the phone stopped ringing.

I began making preparations, and in half an hour I was ready. I sealed my
ears and nostrils tightly with the special hydrocompensatory tampons made of greased
cotton wool and then checked my outfit—everything was buttoned up tight, tucked in
and tied down; the . rubber strap of the motorcycle goggles was a little too tight, and
they bit into my face, but I didn’t try fiddling with them: I wouldn’t have
to put up with it for very long anyway. I picked up the holster from the shelf, drew out
the pistol, cocked it, and shoved it into the pocket of my padded jacket. I threw the
sack with the radio buoy over my left shoulder, and was just about to pick up the phone
when I remembered I’d already sealed my ears with cotton wool; and anyway, I
didn’t really want to waste my final moments of life on conversation with
Khalmuradov. I remembered the last time I talked to Dima and I was sure I had done the
right thing by lying to him about
Zabriskie Point
. It’s a miserable thing
to leave behind a world which still holds secrets.

I breathed out, as though I were about to jump into deep water, and set to
work.

After all those hours of training, my body knew what
it had to do so well that I didn’t stop once, even though I had to work in almost
total darkness, because the battery was so weak the lamp had stopped giving out
light—I could just make out the little crimson worm of the filament. First I had
to remove five bolts around the edge of the hatch. When the final bolt clanged against
the floor, I felt along the wall for the little window over the emergency opening switch
and hit the glass hard with my last can of corned beef. The glass shattered. I stuck my
hand in through the opening, hooked my finger into the ring of the explosive cartridge,
and tugged. The cartridge was made with explosives from an F-1 grenade, and it had a
three-second delay, so there was just enough time for me to grab the handlebars and get
my head down as low as possible. There was a thunderous bang above my head and I was
shaken so hard I was almost thrown out of the saddle, but I managed to hold on. I waited
half a second and raised my head.

There above me was the black bottomless abyss of open space. The only
thing between me and it was the thin Plexiglas of my motorcycle goggles. I was
surrounded by total darkness. I bent down, took a deep breath from the oxygen mask,
scrambled clumsily out of the moonwalker, stood up, and began walking—every step
cost an immense effort to overcome the pain in my back, which I hadn’t
straightened up for a month. I didn’t feel like walking the full fifteen steps, so
I went down on one knee, loosened the string around the sack with the radio buoy, and
started pulling it out, but the lever got jammed and I couldn’t shift it. It was
getting
harder and harder to hold the air in my lungs, and I had a
brief moment of panic—I thought I would die there and then, without finishing the
job I had come to do. But the next moment the sack slipped off; I set the radio buoy on
the invisible surface of the moon and turned the lever. Out into the ether flew the
encoded words “Lenin”, “
USSR
”, and
“Peace”, repeated every three seconds, and a tiny red lamp sprang to life on
the side of the buoy, lighting up an image of the earth floating across ears of
barley—and for the first time in my life I noticed that my Motherland’s
national emblem showed the view from the moon.

The air was bursting out of my lungs, and I knew in a few seconds I would
let it go and my scorched mouth would choke on emptiness. I swung back my arm and threw
the nickel-plated bed knob as far as I could. It was time to die. I took the pistol out
of my pocket, raised it to my temple, and tried to remember the most important event of
my brief existence, but the only thing that came into my head was the story of Marat
Popadya as his father had told it to me. I was offended by the absurdity of dying with a
thought that had nothing to do with me, and I tried to think of something else, but I
couldn’t; I could see the clearing in the winter forest, the huntsmen sitting in
the bushes, the two bears roaring as they rushed at the hunters—and as I pressed
the trigger, I suddenly realised beyond a shadow of a doubt that Kissinger had very well
known what he was stabbing at.

The pistol misfired, but it wasn’t needed anyway; there were
bright-coloured lifebelts drifting in front of
my eyes; I tried to
grab one of them, missed, and collapsed onto the black, ice-cold lunar basalt.

•

I felt a sharp stone sticking into my cheek—it wasn’t all
that painful through the scarf, but it was unpleasant enough. I propped myself up on my
elbows and looked around. I could not see a thing. My nose began to itch; I sneezed, and
one of the tampons flew out of my nostril. Then I pulled off the scarf, the goggles, and
the cap and dragged the swollen cotton-wool tampons out of my ears and nose. I
couldn’t hear anything, but there was a distinct musty smell. It was damp and
cold—despite the padded jacket.

I stood up and fumbled round about me, then stretched out my arms and
started walking forward. Almost immediately I stumbled over something, but I kept my
balance. A few steps later my fingers came up against a wall; I moved my hands along it
and felt a thick festoon of wires covered in sticky fluff. I turned and walked in the
opposite direction, walking more carefully this time, lifting my feet high in the air,
but
after
a few steps I stumbled over something again. Again my hands felt a
wall with cables hanging on it. Then I noticed a tiny red lamp lighting up a five-sided
metal object about five metres away from me—and I remembered everything.

But before I could come to terms with what I remembered or think clearly
about anything, there was a flash of light far off to my right; I turned my head,
instinctively shielding my face with my hands, and through the gaps between my fingers I
saw a tunnel running off
into the distance—the bright light
was at the far end of it, and it lit up the thick bunches of cables covering the walls
and the rails that ran together in a distant point.

Turning away from the light, I saw the moonwalker standing on the rails,
painted all over in stars and emblazoned with the letters
USSR
, and my
own long black shadow falling across it. I stumbled towards it, shielding my face from
the blinding light drifting towards me above the rails—somehow it suddenly
reminded me of the setting sun. Something ricocheted off the fuselage of the moonwalker
at the very same instant as I heard a loud crack; I realised I was being shot at and
made a dash for shelter behind the moonwalker. Another bullet clanged against the
fuselage, and it went on ringing for several seconds, like a funeral bell. I heard the
clatter of wheels, then there was another shot, and the clattering of wheels
stopped.

“Hey, Krivomazov!” thundered an inhumanly loud voice.
“Come out with your hands up, you bastard! They’ve given you a
medal!”

I peeped out from behind the moonwalker: standing on the rails about fifty
metres away was a small hand trolley with a blinding searchlight, and swaying to and fro
in front of it on wide-straddled legs was a man with a megaphone in one hand and a
pistol in the other. He raised the gun: a shot rang out like thunder and the bullet
ricocheted several times before it whistled past just below the roof. I hid my head.

“Come on out, you skunk!”

His voice was familiar, but I couldn’t quite tell who it was.

“Two!”

He fired again, and hit the fuselage of the
moonwalker.

“Three!”

I peeped out again and saw him put the megaphone on his trolley, stretch
out his arms to the sides, and begin to jog slowly over the sleepers towards the
moonwalker. When he got a bit closer, I could hear him making buzzing noises with his
mouth, imitating the roar of aeroplane engines, and I recognised him
straightaway—it was Landratov. I would have backed away down the tunnel, but I
realised that as soon as he reached the moonwalker, I would be absolutely defenceless. I
hesitated for a second, then bent down and dived under the low hull.

All I could see now were his legs coming closer and closer, stepping
deftly but somehow sloppily over the sleepers. He didn’t seem to have noticed
anything. When he got close to the moonwalker, he began buzzing differently, with a more
intense sound, and I realised he was banking steeply as he rounded the machine. His boot
appeared between the rusty wheels, and without having planned it, I grabbed his legs.
When my fingers closed around his ankles, the sensation of almost total emptiness in his
boots was so nauseating I nearly let go of them again. He shouted and fell. I
didn’t loosen my grip, and the artificial limbs twisted unnaturally in the soft
leather. I gave them one more twist and crawled out from under the moonwalker; by the
time I was free of it, he was already crawling towards his pistol, which had fallen
between the sleepers. I had only a second left; I grabbed the heavy five-sided radio
buoy and
smashed it down on the back of Landratov’s
yellow-haired head.