Omon Ra (7 page)

The person I remember best of all from “Strong in Spirit” is retired Major Ivan Trofimovich Popadya—a funny kind of name. He was tall, a real Russian Hercules, and his jacket was festooned with medals. His face and neck were red, and dotted all over with small white scars. He wore a patch over his left eye. His life was very unusual: He began as a simple huntsman in a hunting reserve used by Party leaders and members of the government, and his duties were to drive the animals—wild boar and bears—towards the marksmen hiding behind the trees. One day there was a terrible accident. A big male boar broke across the line of flags and fatally injured a Party leader who was firing from behind a birch tree. He died on the way to the nearby town, and a session of the supreme organs of power
adopted a resolution forbidding the leadership to hunt wild animals. But, of course, the need remained, and one day Popadya was summoned to the Party Committee of the hunting reserve, where they explained the whole business to him and then said: “Ivan! We can’t order you to do it—and even if we could, we wouldn’t, not this. But it’s something that needs to be done. Think about it. We won’t force you.”

Popadya thought hard about it all night long, and next morning he went to the Party Committee and said he agreed.

“We didn’t expect any other answer,” said the Party Secretary.

They gave Ivan a bulletproof waistcoat, a helmet, and a boar skin, and he went to work at his new job—a job which it would be no exaggeration to describe as daily heroism. For the first few days he felt a little afraid, especially for his exposed legs, but then he got used to it, and the members of the government, who all knew what was going on, tried to aim at his side, at the bulletproof waistcoat, which Ivan padded with a small pillow to soften the impact. Occasionally, of course, some old codger from the Central Committee would miss his aim, and then Ivan would go on extended sick leave and read a lot of books, including his favourite, the memoirs of the famous flier Pokryshkin. Just how dangerous this work was—every bit as bad as active military service—can be judged from the fact that every week they had to replace Ivan’s bullet-riddled Party card, which he carried in the inside pocket of the boar skin. When he was wounded, his shift was worked by other huntsmen, including his own son Marat, but Ivan
was always regarded as the most experienced, the one to be trusted with the most responsible jobs. They tried to take care of Ivan Popadya. Meanwhile, he and his son studied the habits and the calls of the wild inhabitants of the forest—the bears, wolves, and boars—and improved their professional skills.

The accident happened a long time ago, when the American politician Kissinger visited our country. He was conducting important negotiations, and a lot depended on whether we could sign a provisional nuclear arms limitation treaty (this was especially important, because our enemies must not be allowed to know that we never had any nuclear arms). So Kissinger was entertained at the very highest state level, and all the various state services were involved—for instance, when it was discovered that he liked short, plump brunettes, a quartet of plump brunette swans was found to drift across Swan Lake on the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre, under the glinting gaze of Kissinger’s horn-rimmed spectacles up in the government box.

It was thought easier to negotiate while hunting, and Kissinger was asked what he liked to hunt. Probably in an attempt at subtle political witticism, he said he preferred bears, and was surprised and rather alarmed when next morning he was actually taken hunting. On the way he was told that two bruins had been lined up for him.

These two were none other than the Communists Ivan and Marat Popadya, father and son, the finest special-service huntsmen in the reserve. The guest of honour laid out Ivan straightaway with a well-aimed shot, just as soon as he and Marat reared up on their hind legs
and came out of the forest, roaring; they attached the hooks to the special loops on his body and dragged it over to the car. But the American just couldn’t hit Marat, even at almost point-blank range, when Marat was deliberately moving as slowly as he could, exposing the full expanse of his chest to the American’s bullets. Suddenly something quite unpredictable happened—the foreign guest’s gun jammed, and before anyone realised what was happening, he had thrown it down in the snow and flung himself at Marat with a knife. Of course, a real bear would have dealt very quickly with any huntsman who behaved like that, but Marat remembered the responsibility he bore. He lifted up his paws and growled, hoping to frighten the American away, but the hunter was out for blood now, and he ran up and stuck the knife into Marat’s belly; the slim blade slipped between the plates of the bulletproof vest. Marat fell. And all this happened as his father looked on from where he lay a few metres away; they dragged Marat over to him, and Ivan realised that his son was still alive—he was groaning almost inaudibly. The blood he left on the snow wasn’t the special liquid from his little rubber bladder—it was the real thing!

“Hold on, son!” Ivan whispered, swallowing his tears. “Hold on!”

Kissinger was beside himself with delight. He suggested to the officials accompanying him that they should all drink a toast right there, standing on top of the “teddy bears”, as he called them, and they should sign the treaty on the spot. They covered Marat and Ivan with the board of honour from the wall of the forester’s hut—it had their photographs on it—and made
an improvised table. For the next hour, Ivan saw nothing but fleeting glimpses of feet, and he heard nothing but drunken speech in a foreign language and the swift muttering of the interpreter; he was almost crushed when the Americans danced on the table. When it grew dark and everybody left, the treaty was signed and Marat was dead. A thin trickle of blood flowed from his open jaws onto the blue evening snow, and a golden Hero of the Soviet Union star glittered on his fur, where the manager of the reserve had hung it. All night the father lay opposite his dead son, crying—and feeling no shame for his tears.

•

I suddenly understood anew the long-lost meaning of the words I was so fed up with seeing staring at me every morning from the wall of the training hall: “Life always has room for heroism.” It was not just romantic nonsense but a precise and sober statement of the fact that our Soviet life is not the ultimate instance of reality but only, as it were, its anteroom. I imagined it this way: that there is no space anywhere in America, between the glaring shop window and the parked Cadillac, for heroism, and there can be no space for it—apart, of course, from that rare moment when a Soviet spy passes by. But here in Russia, you can only be on an apparently identical pavement outside an identical shop window in a Post-War or Pre-War Period, and this is what opens the door leading to heroism, not in the external world, but within, in the very depths of the soul.

“Well done,” said Urchagin, when I shared my
thoughts with him, “only, be careful. The door leading to heroism certainly does open up within us, but it is in the external world that the act of heroism takes place. Don’t fall into subjective idealism, or your proud flight aloft will be robbed in a single short second of all its meaning.”

It was May, the peat bogs around Moscow were on fire, and a pale sultry sun hung in the smoke-veiled sky. Urchagin gave me a book to read, by a Japanese author who had been a kamikaze pilot during the Second World War, and I was astounded by the similarity between my state and the feelings he described. Just like him, I didn’t think about what lay ahead of me but lived for the present day—engrossing myself in books and leaving the world completely behind as I gazed at the fiery explosions on the cinema screen (on Saturday evenings they showed us war films), even worrying seriously about my marks, which weren’t too good. The word “death” existed in my life like a note reminding me of something I had to do that had been hanging on my wall for ages—I knew it was still there, but I never paused to look at it. Mitiok and I never discussed the subject, but when we were finally told it was time for us to begin practising on the actual space equipment, we glanced at each other and seemed to feel the first breath of an icy wind.

From the outside the moonwalker looked like a large laundry tank set on eight heavy tram wheels. Numerous different items protruded from its fuselage—various-shaped antennae, mechanical arms, and so forth. None
of these worked, and they were really there only for television, but they were very impressive all the same. The lid of the moonwalker was covered with small oblique incisions: this was not deliberate, it was simply that the metal sheeting it was made from was the same as they used on the floor in the metro, but then again, it made the machine appear more mysterious.

The human psyche works in peculiar ways: it needs details first of all. I remember when I was small I often used to draw tanks and aeroplanes and show them to my friends, and they always liked the drawings with lots of lines that didn’t really mean anything, so I actually began adding them on purpose. In just the same way, the moonwalker managed to look like a very complicated and ingenious piece of equipment.

The lid hinged up to one side—it was hermetically sealed with rubber padding and had several layers of thermal insulation. Inside, in a space about the same size as the turret of a tank, there was a slightly modified sports-bike frame, with the pedals and just two gearwheels, one of which was neatly welded to the axle of the rear pair of wheels. The handlebars were ordinary semi-racers—they could turn the front wheels just slightly via a special transmission system, but I was told the necessity shouldn’t arise. Shelves, empty for the time being, protruded from the walls; attached to the centre of the handlebars was a compass, and attached to the floor was the green tin box of a radio transmitter with a telephone receiver. Set in the wall in front of the handlebars were the black spots of two tiny round lenses, like the spy holes in apartment doors; through them I could see the edges of the front wheels and a
decorative mechanical arm. On the opposite wall hung the radio speaker, a perfectly ordinary square block of red plastic with a black volume control: the Flight Leader explained that in order to counter the sense of psychological isolation from the native land, all Soviet space vehicles received programmes broadcast from Moscow’s Beacon radio station. The large, convex external lenses were covered by blinkers above and at the sides, so that the moonwalker had something like a face, a crude and likeable face, like the ones they draw on melons and robots in children’s magazines.

When I first climbed inside and the lid clicked shut over my head, I thought I would never be able to stand being cooped up and cramped like that. I had to hang over the bicycle frame, distributing my weight between my hands on the handlebars, my legs braced against the pedals, and the saddle, which didn’t really support part of my weight so much as determine the position my body had to adopt. A cyclist bends over like that when he’s trying to get moving really fast—but at least he can straighten up if he wants to, whereas I couldn’t, because my back and my head were practically jammed against the lid. But then, after about two weeks of practice, when I began to get used to it, it turned out there was quite enough space in there to forget about feeling cramped for hours at a time.

The round spy-hole lenses were immediately in front of my face, but the lenses distorted everything so badly there was no way I could tell what was outside the thin steel wall of the hull. A small spot of the ground just in front of the wheels and a ribbed antenna were powerfully magnified in clear focus, but everything else was
dissolved into zigzags and blobs, as though I were gazing down a long, dark corridor through tears on the glass lenses of a gas mask.

The machine was fairly heavy, and it was hard to get it moving—I even began to doubt whether I would be able to power it across seventy kilometres of lunar desert. Just one turn round the yard was enough to make me really tired; my back ached and my shoulders hurt.

Every other day now, taking turns with Mitiok, I went up in the lift, then out into the yard, stripped down to my vest and underpants, climbed into the moonwalker, and strengthened the muscles in my legs by riding round and round the yard, scattering the chickens and occasionally running over one of them—not deliberately, of course; it was just that through the lenses there was no way to tell a huddled chicken from a newspaper, for instance, or a leg wrapping the wind had blown off the clothesline, and I couldn’t brake fast enough, anyway. At first Urchagin drove in front of me in his wheelchair to show me the way—through the lenses he was a blurred grey-green blob—but gradually I got the hang of it, so I could drive round the entire yard with my eyes closed. All I had to do was set the handlebars at a certain angle, and the machine went round in a smooth circle, coming back to its starting point. Sometimes I even stopped looking through the spy holes and just let my muscles work away, putting my head down and thinking my own thoughts. Sometimes I remembered my childhood, sometimes I used to imagine what the rapid approach of the final moment before eternity would feel like. And sometimes I tried to finish off really
old thoughts that resurfaced into consciousness. For instance, I thought about the question “Who am I?”