Omon Ra (4 page)
Next day after breakfast, lists of the successful applicants appeared on the columns of the garrison club: my name and Mitiok’s were beside each other in the list, out of alphabetical order. Some of the boys trudged off to appeal, some of them jumped up and down for joy on the criss-crossed white lines of the asphalt, some ran to call home, and I recall, high above it all, the white streak of a vapour trail in the colourless August sky.
Those of us who were enrolled as first-year cadets were summoned to a meeting with the flight-training staff—the teachers were already waiting for us in the club. I remember heavy velvet drapes and a table across the full width of the stage, with officers sitting at it looking strict and official. The meeting was chaired by a youthful-looking lieutenant-colonel with a skinny pointed nose: while he was talking, I imagined him in flying suit and pressurised helmet, sitting in the cabin of a MiG fighter covered in blotches, like expensive jeans.
“Okay, boys, we don’t want to begin by talking about scary stuff, do we? But you know well enough we don’t get to choose the times we live in—the times choose us. Maybe I shouldn’t be giving you this kind of information, but I’m going to tell you anyway …”
The lieutenant-colonel paused for a second, bent down to the major sitting beside him, and whispered
something in his ear. The major grimaced, rapped thoughtfully on the table with his pencil, and then nodded.
“Right,” said the lieutenant-colonel in a quiet voice. “At a recent closed session of the political instructors of the armed forces, the times we are living in were defined as a Pre-War Period!”
The colonel paused, waiting for a response, but clearly the audience hadn’t understood a thing—at least Mitiok and I hadn’t.
“Let me explain,” he went on, even more quietly. “The meeting was on July 15, right? So up until July 15 we were living in a Post-War Period, but since then—a whole month already—we’ve been living in a Pre-War Period. Is that clear or not?”
For a few seconds there was silence in the hall.
“I’m not saying this to scare you,” the lieutenant-colonel went on, in a normal voice now, “but we have to remember the responsibility we bear on our shoulders, don’t we? And make no mistake about it, by the time you get your diplomas and your ranks, you’ll be Real Men with a great big capital M, the kind that exist only in the land of Soviets.”
The lieutenant-colonel sat down, straightened his tie, and touched the edge of a glass to his lips—his hands were shaking and I thought I could hear the faintest echo of his teeth rattling against the glass. The major stood up.
“Boys,” he said in a melodious voice, “although it would be more correct now to call you cadets, but I’m just going to call you boys anyway. Boys! Remember the story of the legendary hero Alexei Maresiev, immortalised
by Boris Polevoi in his book
The Story of a Real Man!
The hero our college is named after! He lost both legs in combat. But after losing his legs, he didn’t lose heart, he rose up again on artificial legs and soared into the sky like Icarus to strike at the Nazi scum! Many people told him it was impossible, but he never forgot what was most important—that he was a Soviet man! A Real Man! And you must never forget this, never, wherever you are! All the flight-training staff and I personally, as assistant flight political instructor, promise that we will make Real Men of you in the shortest possible time!”
Then they showed us our places in the first-year cadets’ barracks, into which we were being moved from the tents, and took us to the mess hall, where the dusty MiGs and ILs dangling on strings from the ceiling seemed like immense flying islands beside the squadrons of swift black flies.
The dinner was pretty bad: watery soup with macaroni stars, tough chicken with rice, and boiled fruit. After we’d eaten we felt really sleepy; Mitiok and I barely made it to our beds, and I fell asleep straightaway.
The next morning I was awakened by loud groans of pain and confusion right in my ear. In fact, I’d been hearing the same sounds in my sleep for a long time, but I was jerked into full wakefulness only by a particularly loud and piteous wail. I opened my eyes and looked around. The surrounding beds were alive with a strange squirming and muffled bellowing—I tried to prop myself up on my elbow, but I couldn’t, because I was bound to the bed with broad straps like the ones used to tie up suitcases that are stuffed too full: the most I could do was turn my head slightly from side to side. From the next bed I met the pain-filled eyes of Slava, a young village boy I had got to know the day before; the lower part of his face was hidden by a tightly tied piece of cloth. I tried to open my mouth to ask him what was wrong, but discovered that I couldn’t move my tongue, and I had no feeling at all in the lower part of my face, as though it had gone numb. I guessed that my mouth must be bound and gagged too, but before I could feel surprised, I was struck by horror: where Slava’s legs should have been, the blanket fell straight down in an abrupt step, and the freshly starched blanket cover was stained with red blotches like the marks left on cotton towels by watermelon juice. What was
even more terrifying—I couldn’t feel my own legs and I couldn’t lift my head to look at them!
“Platoon 5!” The words thundered out in a sergeant’s fruity bass, replete with an infinitude of allusions. “To the dressing station!”
About ten men immediately came into the ward—they were second- and third-year students (or more correctly, cadets in their second or third year of service, as I could tell from the stripes on their sleeves). I hadn’t seen them before—the officers had said they were out helping with the potato harvest. They were wearing strange boots with tops that didn’t bend, and they walked unsteadily, holding on to the walls or the ends of the beds. I noticed how pale and unhealthy their faces were; they seemed to bear the imprint of long days of interminable torment, to have been recast in a fixed expression of readiness. Inappropriately enough, at that moment I recalled the words of the Young Pioneers’ greeting Mitiok and I had repeated with all the others on the distant parade square at summer camp—and I realised just what frauds we’d been, loudly assuring ourselves, our comrades in the lineup, and the transparent July morning that we were “always prepared”.
The cadets wheeled the beds out into the corridor one after another, with the first-years bound down on them moaning and squirming, until only two were left in the room—mine and one by the window, on which Mitiok was lying. I couldn’t get a proper look at him because of the straps, but I could see out of the corner of my eye that he was quiet and seemed to be asleep.
They came for us about ten minutes later, turned us
round, feet first, and wheeled us along the corridor. One cadet pushed the bed while another walked backwards and pulled it towards him; it looked as if he were backing down the corridor and warding off the bed as it pursued him. We trundled into a long, narrow lift with doors at both sides and went up, the second-year student backed away from me down another corridor, and we stopped beside a door upholstered in black with a large brown plaque that I couldn’t read because of my uncomfortable position. The door opened, and I was rolled into a room with an immense crystal chandelier in the shape of an aircraft bomb hanging from the ceiling; the upper section of the walls was decorated with a band of bas-relief ornamentation made up of sickles, hammers, and urns entwined with grapevines.
They took my straps off, and I propped myself up on my elbows, trying not to look at my legs: straight ahead of me at the back of the room a green lamp stood on a massive desk that was illuminated by the slanting grey light from a tall narrow window. The person sitting at the desk was hidden from me by the open pages of a copy of
Pravda
, from the front of which a wrinkly face with radiantly kind eyes stared straight at me. The lino on the floor squeaked, and Mitiok’s bed came to a halt beside mine.
The newspaper rustled a few times as its pages were turned, and then sank down onto the table.
There in front of us was the little old man with the scar on his forehead, the one who had grabbed me by the arm during the interview. Now he was wearing the uniform of a lieutenant-general with brocade at the buttonholes, his hair was neatly brushed down, and his
gaze was clear and sober. I noticed that his face seemed like a copy of the one that had been looking at me from the front page of
Pravda
just a minute before: it was just like in a film I saw, where they showed one icon for a long time, and then another one gradually appeared in its place—the images were similar, but not quite the same, and because the transition was blurred, it seemed as if the icon were changing in front of your eyes.
“Now, boys, since you and I will be seeing quite a lot of each other for quite a long time, you can call me Comrade Flight Leader. Allow me to congratulate you on the results of your exams—and the interview in particular,” said the old man, winking. “You have been registered immediately for the first-year course at the KGB secret space-training school—so you’ll just have to wait a bit before you become Real Men. Meanwhile, get ready to go to Moscow. I’ll see you there.”
I didn’t realise what he’d said till we’d been taken back to the empty ward along those long corridors, where the lino sang a quiet song of nostalgia beneath the tiny casters of the bed, reminding me somehow of a day in July by the sea.
Mitiok and I slept the whole day (it seems they’d drugged our supper the previous evening—I was still sleepy the next day), and that evening a jolly yellow-haired lieutenant in squeaky boots came for us, and laughed and cracked jokes as he wheeled our beds out onto the asphalt parade ground in front of the platform with the concrete shell-shaped canopy, where several senior generals with kind intelligent faces, including Comrade Flight Leader, were sitting at a table. Of course, Mitiok and I could have walked there on our
own, but the lieutenant said that this was standing orders for first-year cadets, and he ordered us to lie still so as not to upset the others.
All those beds stacked up against one another made the parade ground look like the yard of an automobile factory or a tractor plant: a subdued groaning traced a complex flight path above it—dying away in one place, it sprang up in another, and then in a third, as though some huge invisible mosquito were darting about above the beds. On the way out, the yellow-haired lieutenant told us that a combined graduation party and final state exam was about to begin.
Soon we were watching our lieutenant, the first of about fifty like him, as he danced the “Kalinka” for the exam committee. He was pale and nervous, but he performed with incomparable mastery, to the sparse accompaniment of the assistant political instructor’s accordion. The lieutenant was called Landratov—I heard his name when the Flight Leader handed him a red diploma and congratulated him on receiving it. Then the same dance was performed by all the others, and by the end I was bored stiff watching them. I turned to look at the sports field immediately beside the parade ground—and suddenly realised why it lay under such a thick covering of wild grass.
I lay there and watched the stems swaying in the wind. The grey, rain-cracked fence topped with barbed wire just beyond the ruined soccer goalposts seemed to me like the Great Wall, still stretching, despite all the warped and missing planks, all the way from the fields of distant China to the town of Zaraisk, making everything that appeared against its background look ancient
and Chinese—the latticework pavilion where the exam committee worked, the obsolete fighter plane, and the ancient army tents I could see from where I lay on my bed, clutching in my fist the nickel-plated knob I’d unscrewed for a souvenir.
The next day a truck carried Mitiok and me off through the summery woods and fields: we sat on our rucksacks, leaning against the cool steel of the side of the truck. I remember the edge of the tarpaulin swaying, and beyond it glimpses of tree trunks and grey, dried-out telegraph poles from which the wires had long since been torn down. From time to time the trees parted and I glimpsed a pale, pensive triangle of sky. Then there was a halt and five minutes’ silence, punctuated only by a dull, distant rattling; the driver, who had got out to relieve himself, explained that they were firing short bursts on the one or two machine guns they had at the shooting range close by. Then it was back to the truck’s interminable jolting: I fell asleep, and woke up again for a few seconds only when we were already in Moscow, as the chink in the tarpaulin revealed a glimpse of a sight from some long-ago summer of my schooldays—the archways of the shop Children’s World by the Lubyanka.
