Omon Ra (6 page)

“And what happened to him?”

Landratov smacked the rubber hose down on the table beside him.

“What’s it matter?” he said. “The main thing is, I can understand them. All that time you keep hoping that eventually you’ll get around to flying, so when they finally tell you the truth … D’you think anyone needs you without legs? And the country’s hardly got any planes, they just fly up and down the borders so the Americans can photograph them. And even then …”

Landratov fell silent.

“Even then?”

“Never mind. What I wanted to say was, d’you think that after Zaraisk you’d be hurtling through the clouds in a fighter plane? If you were lucky, you might just find yourself in a song-and-dance ensemble in some air-force defence district. But most likely you’d end up dancing the ‘Kalinka’ in some restaurant. A third of us take to drink, and another third—the ones whose operation didn’t go right—end up committing suicide. How d’you feel about suicide, anyway?”

“I don’t really know,” I said. “I never thought about it.”

“Well, I used to think about it. Especially during the second year, when they were showing tennis on the TV and I was on duty in the club with my crutches. I was real miserable. And then it passed. Once you can come to terms with yourself, it gets easier. So you just remember, if you get any thoughts like that, not to give in. You should be thinking about all the interesting things you’ll see if you go to the moon. These buggers won’t let you go alive, anyway. Better play along with them, okay?”

“You don’t seem to like them much,” I said.

“What’s there to like them for? Every word they say is a lie. Which reminds me, when you’re with the Flight Leader, don’t you mention anything about dying, or even about you flying to the moon. Just talk about automatic systems, okay? Or we’ll be having another little talk in this room. I follow orders.”

Landratov swung his rubber hose through the air; then he took a pack of Flight cigarettes from his pocket and lit up.

“That friend of yours agreed straightaway,” he informed me.

•

When I went out into the air, my head was spinning slightly. The inner yard, separated from the city by the grey-brown blocks of the building, was very much like a part of a country village that had been cut out precisely to fit the yard and then transported here: there was a wooden summerhouse with cracked and peeling paint,
and a horizontal bar welded together out of iron pipes, with a strip of green hallway carpet hanging on it—someone must have been beating it and then forgotten it; there were allotments, a chicken coop, and a sports field, several table-tennis tables, and a circle of old painted tyres half buried in the ground that immediately reminded me of photographs of Stonehenge. Mitiok was sitting on a bench by the exit. I went over and sat beside him, stretched out my legs, and looked at the black uniform trousers tucked into my boots—after the conversation with Landratov I felt as though the legs in them weren’t really mine.

“Is it all true?” Mitiok asked in a quiet voice.

I shrugged. I didn’t know exactly what he meant.

“All right, I can believe the stuff about the aeroplanes,” he said. “But all that about the nuclear weapons … Maybe back in ’47 you could still make two million political prisoners all jump at once. But we don’t have them anymore, and there are nuclear tests every month …”

The door I had just come out of opened, and Colonel Urchagin’s wheelchair drove out; he braked and surveyed the yard several times with his ear. I realised he was looking for us in order to add something to what had already been said, but Mitiok stopped speaking, and Urchagin obviously decided not to bother us after all. The wheelchair’s electric motor hummed and it moved away to the opposite wing of the building. As he rode past us, Urchagin turned his smiling face in our direction and the sunken hollows of his eyesockets seemed to peer benevolently into our very souls.

I think most Muscovites know perfectly well what’s going on deep below their feet during those hours when they’re queuing at the Children’s World department store next to the KGB building or when they ride the metro through Lubyanka station, so I won’t go over it all again. Let me simply say that the model of our rocket was full-size and there was room for another one just as big beside it. The lift was an old prewar model that took so long getting down that you could read two or three pages of a book on the way.

The model rocket was a rather patchy construction, with parts of it just knocked together from planks, and only the crew members’ workplaces were precise recreations of the real thing. It was all intended for practical training, which Mitiok and I would not begin for some time yet. Even so, we were moved straight into a spacious box down below, with two pictures pretending to be windows presenting a panoramic view of Moscow under construction.

There were seven beds, so Mitiok and I knew our numbers would soon be increasing. The box was only three minutes’ walk along a corridor from the training hall where the model rocket stood. An interesting thing seemed to happen to the lift—whereas before it had
seemed to take a long time to go down, now it seemed to take even longer to go up.

We didn’t go up very often, since we spent most of our free time in the training hall. Colonel Khalmuradov gave us a brief series of lectures on the theory of rocket flight, using the model rocket to illustrate his points. When we were studying the technical equipment, the rocket was simply a study aid, but when evening came and the main lights were turned off, sometimes, for a few seconds, the dim wall lamps transformed it into something long forgotten and wonderful, a final greeting to Mitiok and me from our childhood.

•

He and I were the first to arrive. The other members of our crew appeared in the college over a period of time. The first was Sema Anikin, a short stocky village lad who had been a sailor. The black uniform really suited him—unlike Mitiok, who looked like a scarecrow in it. Sema was very calm and didn’t speak much and spent all his time on training, as all of us should have done, although his job was the simplest and the least romantic. He was responsible for the rocket’s first stage, and his young life, in the words of Urchagin, who loved pompous and convoluted phrases, was destined to be broken off a mere three minutes after takeoff. The success of the entire expedition depended on the precision with which he performed his task, and if he made the slightest mistake, we would all face an early and senseless death. Sema obviously laboured under the burden of this responsibility, and he even trained in the empty barracks, honing his movements till they were completely
automatic. He squatted down, closed his eyes, and began moving his lips as he counted up to 240, and then he began turning anticlockwise, performing complicated hand movements every forty-five degrees. Even though I knew he was mentally opening the catches that attached the first stage to the second, his movements reminded me every time of something out of a Hong Kong martial-arts movie; having gone through this complex manual procedure eight times, he immediately fell on his back and kicked upwards powerfully with both legs, thrusting against the invisible second stage.

Our second stage was Ivan Grechka, who arrived about two months after Sema. He was a Ukrainian with light hair and blue eyes, who was transferred to us from the third year at Zaraisk, so he still walked with some difficulty. He had a certain kind of warm simplicity, as though he was always smiling at the world, and everyone he met loved him for this smile. Ivan became particularly close friends with Sema. They teased each other all the time and were constantly competing to see who was quicker and better at running through the operations to detach his stage. Sema was nimbler, but Ivan had to open only four catches, so sometimes he was quicker.

Our third stage, Otto Plucis, was a ruddy-faced meditative Balt. As far as I can recall, he never once joined Ivan and Sema when they were practising in the barracks—he always seemed to be lying on his bunk doing the crosswords in
Red Warrior
, his legs in their painstakingly polished boots crossed on the gleaming nickel-plated bar of the bedstead. But you only had to see how he dealt with his share of the catches on the
model to realise that if there was one reliable section in our rocket, then it was the separation system for the third stage. Otto was a funny guy. After the all-clear, he enjoyed telling stupid stories like the ones children tell to frighten each other at summer camp.

“Once, this expedition flies off to the moon,” he would say in the darkness. “They’ve been flying for ages, and they’re just getting close. Then suddenly the hatch opens and in come some people in white coats. The cosmonauts say: ‘We’re flying to the moon!’ The people in white coats say: ‘Fine, fine. No need to get excited. We’ll just give you this little injection …’ ”

•

Mitiok and I still hadn’t begun technical equipment training when the training for the ballistics group was made more complicated. It hardly affected Sema Anikin—his feat of heroism took place at a height of four kilometres, and all he had to do was put on a padded work jacket over his uniform. It was harder for Ivan: at forty-five kilometres, where his moment for immortality arrived, it was cold, and the air was already rarefied, so he trained in a sheepskin coat, tall fur boots, and an oxygen mask, which made it difficult for him to climb in through the narrow hatch on the model. Otto had things easier—a special spacesuit was made for him, complete with electrical heating. It was sewn by the seamstresses at the Red Mountain clothing factory from several American high-altitude suits captured in Vietnam, but it wasn’t quite ready yet—they were still finishing off the heating system. In order not to lose time, Otto practised in a deep-sea diver’s suit; I can still see his red, sweaty,
pockmarked face behind the glass of the helmet as it rose out of the hatch; when he said hello, the friendly words came out as strangely jumbled sounds.

•

The lectures on the general theory of automated cosmic systems were read to us in turn by the Flight Leader and Colonel Urchagin.

The Flight Leader was called Pkhadzer Vladlenovich Pidorenko. He got his name from the small Ukrainian village where he was born. His father had been in the Cheka too, and following the fashion of those days, he’d taken his son’s first name from the first letters of the Russian words for “Party and Economic Activists of the Dzerzhinsky District”, while his second was an abbreviation of “Vladimir Lenin”: what’s more, if you added up the letters in the two names Pkhadzer and Vladlen, there were fifteen, the same as the number of Soviet republics. But he couldn’t stand being called by his own name, and subordinates who served with him called him either Comrade Lieutenant-General or, like myself and Mitiok, Comrade Flight Leader. He pronounced the phrase “automated systems” with such pure, visionary intonation that for a second his office in the Lubyanka, which we went up to for his lectures, was transformed into the sounding board of some immense grand piano—but even though the phrase turned up in his speech quite often, he gave us absolutely no technical information, and spent most of the time telling us run-of-the-mill stories or reminiscing about his wartime days with the partisans in Belorussia.

Urchagin didn’t deal with any technical topics, either.
He usually nibbled on sunflower seeds, laughing as he spat out the shells, or told us jokes.

“How do you divide a fart into five parts?” he asked once.

When we said we didn’t know, he answered himself: “Fart into a glove.”

And he would burst into thin laughter. I was amazed at the positive optimism of this man, blind, paralysed, chained to a wheelchair, but nonetheless carrying out his duty and never tiring of life. There were two political instructors in the space school who were very like each other—Urchagin and Burchagin, both colonels. It was Urchagin who usually taught our crew. There was only one Japanese wheelchair with an electric motor for the two of them, so when one of them was busy with educational work, the other would lie silent and motionless, propped up on his elbow on the bed in a tiny room on the fifth floor, wearing his uniform jacket and covered up to the waist with a blanket that hid the bedpan from probing eyes. The poor furnishings of the room—a map case for writing on, with narrow slits in the sheet of cardboard laid over it, a glass of strong tea permanently on the table, the white curtain and the rubber plant—all touched me so profoundly I almost wept, and at those moments I stopped thinking that all Communists were cunning, mean, and self-serving.

•

The last member of the crew to arrive was Dima Matiushevich, who was responsible for the lunar module. He was very withdrawn and, despite his young years, quite grey. He kept himself to himself, and all I knew
about him was that he’d served in the army. When he saw the reproduction of a painting by Kuindzhi that Mitiok had cut out of a magazine and hung over his bed, he hung a sheet of paper over his own bed, with a small drawing of a bird and three words in big block capitals:
OVERHEAD THE ALBATROSS.

Dima’s arrival coincided with the introduction of a new discipline into the timetable, known as “Strong in Spirit”. It wasn’t really a study subject in the normal sense of the word, although it was given pride of place on the timetable. We began to get visits from people who were professional heroes—all of them told us about their lives without a trace of sentimentality; their words were the same simple ones you heard in the kitchen at home, so the very essence of their heroism seemed to spring from the ordinary, from the petty details of everyday life, from the grey, cold air around us.