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Authors: Victor Pelevin

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #sci-fi, #Dystopian

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BOOK: Omon Ra
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I was back in Moscow for the middle of July, and then Mitiok’s
parents got us places in the Rocket camp. It was a typical summer camp for children in
the south, maybe even a little better than most. I really only remember the first few
days we spent there—but that was when everything that became so important later
happened. In the train Mitiok and I ran through the carriages, throwing all the bottles
we could find down the toilets—they fell on the railway tracks rushing by beyond
the tiny hatch and burst soundlessly; the stupid song that was stuck in my head gave
this simple game the flavour of the struggle for the liberation of Vietnam. The next day
the entire contingent for the camp, who had all travelled in the same train, was
unloaded at a wet railroad station in a provincial town to be counted and loaded into
trucks. We drove for a long time along a road which looped between mountains; then on
our right the sea appeared and little houses of various colours came drifting towards
us. We piled out onto an asphalted parade square and were led up steps flanked by
cypress trees to a low glass-walled building on the top of the hill. This was the dining
hall, where a cold lunch
was waiting for us, although it was already
suppertime—we had arrived several hours later than expected. The food was pretty
bad—thin soup with macaroni stars, tough chicken with rice, and tasteless stewed
fruit.


Hanging down from the ceiling of the dining hall on threads covered
with tacky-looking kitchen glue were cardboard models of spaceships. I stared at one of
them in admiration—the anonymous artist had gone to a great deal of effort and
covered it all over with the letters
USSR
. The setting sun looking in on
it through the window suddenly seemed to me like the headlight of a train in the metro
as it emerges from the darkness of the tunnel. Somehow I felt sad.

But Mitiok was in a happy mood and felt like talking.

“In the twenties they had one kind of spaceship,” he said,
jerking his fork up into the air, “in the thirties they were different, in the
fifties they were different again, and so on …”

“What kind of spaceships were there in the twenties?” I asked
listlessly.

Mitiok thought for a moment.

“Alexei Tolstoy had these huge metal eggs powered by explosions at
minuscule time intervals,” he said. “That was the basic principle, but there
could be lots of variations.”

“But they never really flew,” I said.

“Neither do these,” he answered, pointing to the model we were
discussing as it swayed gently in the draught.

I finally got his point, although I couldn’t really have
put it into words. The only space in which the starships of the
Communist future had flown (incidentally, when I first came across the word
“starship” in the science fiction books I used to like so much, I thought it
came from the red stars on the sides of Soviet spacecraft) was the Soviet psyche, just
as the dining hall we were sitting in was the cosmic space in which the ships launched
by the previous camp contingent would go on ploughing their furrows through time up
there above the dining tables, even when the creators of the cardboard fleet were long
gone. This thought filtered through the peculiar indescribable ennui I always suffered
after the boiled fruit at the camp, and then I suddenly had a strange idea.

“I used to like making plastic aeroplane models,” I said,
“from the kits. Especially military planes.”

“So did I,” said Mitiok, “but that was a long time
ago.”

“I liked the East German kits. But there were no pilots in ours.
They looked stupid, because the cockpits were always empty.”

“That’s right,” said Mitiok. “What made you think
of that?”

“I was just thinking,” I said, pointing my fork at the
starship hanging just in front of our table, “whether there’s anyone inside
there or not.”

“I don’t know,” said Mitiok. “It’s an
interesting question, all right.”


The camp was set on the gentle slope of a hill, and its lower section
formed a kind of park. Mitiok had disappeared,
and I went off that
way on my own; in a few minutes I was in a long, deserted avenue of cypress trees, where
it was already half dark.

Wire netting stretched alongside the asphalt footpath, and on the netting
there hung large sheets of plywood with hand-drawn posters on them. On the first there
was a Young Pioneer with a simple Russian face, staring ahead of him as he pressed a
brass bugle with a small flag to his thigh. On the second the same Pioneer had a drum
hanging on a strap and was holding the drumsticks. He was there again on the third
panel, gazing into the distance in the same way from under a hand raised in salute. The
next sheet of plywood was about twice as wide as the rest and very tall—probably
about three metres. It was in two colours: on the right, the side from which I was
slowly approaching, it was red, and farther away from me it was white, and these two
colours were separated by the ragged edge of a wave invading the white surface and
leaving a red trail in its wake. At first I couldn’t understand what it was, and
it was only when I came closer that I recognised the interspersed red and white blobs as
the face of Lenin, with a jutting beard that looked like a battering ram, and an open
mouth; Lenin had no back to his head—there was just his profile, and all the red
surface behind it was Lenin. He was like some incorporeal god rippling across the
surface of the world which he had created.

I stumbled over a pothole in the road and shifted my gaze to the next
board—it was the Pioneer again, but this time wearing a spacesuit, with a red
helmet in his hand; the helmet bore the inscription
USSR
and a pointed
antenna. The next Pioneer was leaning out of a
rocket in flight and
saluting with a hand in a heavy-duty glove. The final picture was the Pioneer in a
space-suit, standing on the cheerful yellow surface of the moon beside a spaceship like
the cardboard rocket in the dining hall; all that could be seen of him were his eyes,
the same eyes as on the other boards, but because the rest of his face was concealed by
the helmet, they seemed filled with some inexpressible anguish.

There was the sound of swift steps behind me, and I turned round and saw
Mitiok.

“There
was,”
he said, as he came up to me.

“There was what?”

“Look.” He held out his hand with something dark lying on the
palm. I made out a little plasticine figure with its head wrapped in foil.

“There was a little cardboard chair inside, and he was sitting on
it,” said Mitiok.

“What, did you take the rocket in the dining hall to pieces?”
I asked him.

He nodded.

“When?”

“Just now. Ten minutes ago. The strangest thing of all is that
everything in there was …” He crossed the fingers of both hands over each
other to form a grid.

“In the dining hall?”

“No, in the rocket. When they made it, they started with this little
man. They made him and sat him on the chair and glued the cardboard shut all around
him.”

Mitiok held out a scrap of cardboard. I took it and saw painstakingly
detailed drawings of instruments, handles, buttons, and even a picture on the wall.

“But the most interesting thing,” Mitiok said in a
thoughtful and depressed sort of voice, “is that there was no
door. There was a hatch drawn on the outside, but in the same place on the
inside—just some dials on the wall.”

I glanced again at the scrap of cardboard and noticed a porthole through
which the earth was visible, small and blue.

“I’d like to find the man who stuck this rocket
together,” said Mitiok. “I’d punch his ugly face for him.”

“What for?” I asked.

Mitiok didn’t answer. Instead, he swung back his arm in order to
chuck the figure over the wire netting, but I caught his hand and asked him to give the
figure to me. He didn’t object, and I spent the next half hour looking for an
empty cigarette pack to use as a case.


The echo of this strange discovery came back to us the next day, during
the camp’s quiet hour. The door opened and Mitiok’s name was called; he went
out into the corridor. I could hear snatches of conversation, the words “dining
hall” were repeated several times, and everything was clear. I stood up and went
out into the corridor. Mitiok was there, pressed into the corner by two camp
leaders—a skinny young man with a moustache and a squat ginger-haired woman.

“I was there too,” I said.

The male leader looked me up and down approvingly.

“Do you want to crawl together or take turns?”

I saw he had a green bag with a gas mask in his hand.

“How can they crawl together, Kolya, when you’ve
only got one gas mask?” the female leader asked timidly.
“They have to take turns.”

Mitiok gave me a swift glance and took a step forward.

“Put it on,” said the camp leader.

Mitiok put on the gas mask.

“Get down.”

He lay on the floor.

“Move,” said Kolya, clicking on his stopwatch. The floor of
the corridor, which ran the full length of the building, was covered with linoleum, and
when Mitiok began to crawl forward, the linoleum gave out a soft but unpleasant squeak.
Of course, Mitiok took longer than the three minutes allowed by the camp leader—it
wasn’t even long enough for him to crawl along the corridor in one
direction—but when he had come crawling back towards us, Kolya didn’t force
him to cover the distance again, because there were only a few minutes left to the end
of quiet hour. Mitiok took off the gas mask. His face was red and dripping with tears
and sweat. Blisters had swelled up on his feet where they rubbed against the
linoleum.

“Now you,” said the camp leader, handing me the wet gas mask.
“Get ready …”

There is something weird and mysterious in the way a corridor looks when
you’re gazing at its linoleum-spread expanses through the steamed-up lenses of a
gas mask. The floor you’re lying on chills your belly and chest; you can’t
even see its far end; the pale ribbon of ceiling and the walls are fused together almost
into a point. The gas mask gently squeezes your face, pressing on your cheeks and
forcing your lips to stretch into a
kind of kiss, apparently
addressed to everything around you. Before someone prods you with their foot and orders
you to crawl, about twenty seconds pass: a long period of slow torment, time enough to
notice all sorts of things. Take the dust—there are several transparent specks
there in the crack between two sheets of linoleum; take that painted-over knot in the
wood of the skirting board; take that ant that death has transformed into two incredibly
thin little petals, which has left behind it a small moist spot in the future half a
metre away where the foot of a person walking down the corridor stepped just a second
after the disaster.

“Go!” The command rang out above my head and I began
cheerfully and earnestly crawling forward. The punishment seemed more like a joke to me,
and I didn’t understand why Mitiok had turned so weepy. I covered the first ten
metres quick as a flash; then it got harder.

When you crawl, there’s a moment at which you push off from the
floor with the upper part of your foot, and the skin there is thin and delicate; if
you’ve nothing on your feet, you immediately get a blister from the friction. The
linoleum stuck to my body, and it felt like hundreds of tiny insects were boring into my
legs or like I was crawling over freshly laid asphalt. I was astonished at how slowly
time was passing—at one spot on the wall there was a large watercolour of the
cruiser
Aurora
in the Black Sea, and I noticed I’d been crawling past it
for quite a long time, but it was still hanging there in the same place …

Then suddenly everything changed. That is, everything was just the same as
before—I was crawling along the corridor in just the same way—but the pain
and fatigue,
passing beyond the level of endurance, seemed to switch
something off inside me. Or else just the opposite—they switched something on. I
noticed that all around me it was very quiet, there was only the squeaking of the
linoleum under my feet, as though something were trundling along the corridor on rusty
castors; outside the windows, way below me, the sea was murmuring, and somewhere even
farther away, maybe beyond the sea, a loudspeaker was singing with children’s
voices.

Beautiful yonder, do not hurt me so,
Do not be cruel

Life was a tender green miracle; the sky was clear and still, the sun was
shining—and in the very centre of this world stood the two-storey dormitory
building, and inside it was the long corridor, along which I was crawling in a gas mask.
It was all so natural, and at the same time so painful and absurd, that I began to cry
inside my rubber snout, feeling glad that my real face was hidden from the camp leaders,
and especially from the chinks round the doors, through which dozens of eyes were gazing
at my glory and my shame.

After a few more metres my tears dried up and I joined in the song, very
quietly, maybe without actually making any sound at all:

From the pure source into the beautiful yonder,
Into the
beautiful yonder I chart my path.

The bright brassy note of a trumpet drifted over the
camp—that was reveille. I stopped and opened my eyes. There were three metres left
to the end of the corridor. On the dark grey wall in front of me hung a shelf, with a
yellow globe of the moon standing on it; through the steamy glass smeared with tears it
appeared blurred and indistinct, as though it weren’t standing on a shelf but
hanging in a grey void.

BOOK: Omon Ra
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