Omon Ra (8 page)

•

It was a question I often used to ask myself as a child, when I woke early in the morning and stared up at the ceiling. Later on, when I was a bit older, I began to ask it in school, but the only answer I got was that consciousness is a property of highly organised matter, according to Lenin’s theory of reflection. I didn’t understand what these words meant, and I remained as astonished as ever. How was it that I could see? Who was this “I” who saw? And what did it mean, to see? Did I see anything outside me, or was I simply looking at myself? And what did that mean—outside myself and inside myself? I often felt as if I were on the very threshold of the answer, but when I tried to take the final step, I suddenly lost sight of the “I” that was about to cross the threshold.

When my aunt went out to work, she often asked an old neighbour to look after me, and I used to ask her the same questions, taking real pleasure in seeing how hard it was for her to answer them.

“Inside you, Ommy, you’ve got a soul,” she said, “and it looks out through your eyes, but it lives in your body like your hamster lives in that saucepan. And this soul is a part of God, who created all of us. And you are that soul.”

“But then why did God stick me in this saucepan?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said the old woman.

“And where is he?”

“Everywhere,” said the old woman, gesturing with her arms.

“Then that means I’m God too?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Man isn’t God. But he’s made in God’s image.”

“And is Soviet man made in God’s image too?” I asked, stumbling over the unfamiliar phrase.

“Of course,” said the old woman.

“Are there many gods?” I asked.

“No. There is only one.”

“Then why does it say in the handbook that there are lots of them?” I asked, nodding towards the atheist’s handbook standing on my aunt’s bookshelf.

“I don’t know.”

“Which god is best?”

The old woman gave the same answer again: “I don’t know.”

Then I asked: “Can I choose for myself, then?”

“You choose, Ommy.” The old woman laughed, and I began riffling through the handbook, which had heaps of different gods in it. I especially liked Ra, the god the ancient Egyptians believed in thousands of years ago. Probably I liked him because he had a falcon’s head, and pilots and cosmonauts and all sorts of heroes were often called falcons. I decided that if I really was made in a god’s image, then it should be this one. I remember taking a large exercise book and copying the following extract into it:

In the morning Ra, illuminating the earth, sails along the heavenly Nile on the barque
Manjet;
in the evening
he transfers to the barque
Mesektet
and descends into the underworld, where he does battle with the forces of darkness as he sails along the nether Nile; and in the morning he reappears on the horizon.

In ancient times, people could not know that the earth really circles the sun, said the dictionary, and so they invented this poetic myth.

Under the article in the dictionary was an old Egyptian picture showing Ra transferring from one barque to the other: two identical boats were drawn up side by side, and a girl in one was handing a girl in the other a hoop with a falcon sitting in it—that was Ra. What I liked most of all was that in among all the weird and wonderful items in the boats there were four grim five-storey houses which looked just like the ones built in the Moscow suburbs in Khrushchev’s time.

From then on, although I responded to the name Omon, I always thought of myself as Ra: that was the name of the hero of the imaginary adventures I had before I fell asleep, when I closed my eyes and turned to face the wall—until the time when my dreams were affected by the usual developmental changes.

•

I wonder if anyone who sees a photograph of the moonwalker in the newspapers will imagine that inside this steel saucepan, which exists for the sole purpose of crawling seventy kilometres across the moon and then halting for eternity, there is a human being gazing out through two glass lenses? But what does it matter? Even
if someone guesses the truth, he’ll never know that this human being was me, Omon Ra, the faithful falcon of the Motherland, as the Flight Leader once called me, putting his arm round my shoulder and pointing through the window at a brightly glowing cloud.

Another subject that appeared in our study timetable—“The General Theory of the Moon”—was classed as optional for everyone except Mitiok and me. The classes were given by a retired Lieutenant-Colonel of Philosophy, Ivan Evseievich Kondratiev. Somehow I didn’t take to him, although I had no real reason for disliking him and his lectures were quite interesting. I remember the unusual way he began his first class with us—he spent half an hour reciting various poems about the moon from pieces of paper; eventually he became so moved that he had to stop and wipe off his glasses. I still used to take notes then, and what I was left with from this class was a senseless accumulation of fragmentary quotations: “Like a golden drop of honey sweetly gleams the moon … Of the moon and hope and quiet glory … The moon, how rich the meaning of this word for every Russian ear … But the world has other regions, oppressed by the tormenting moon, to highest strength and supreme courage forever out of reach … But in the sky, schooled to endure all things, a senselessly distorted disc … He did control the flow of thought, but only by the moon … The cheerless liquid moonness …” And so on for another page and a half. Then Lieutenant-
Colonel Kondratiev grew more serious and began speaking in an official singsong voice:

“Dear friends! Let us recall the historic words of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, written in 1918 in a letter to Inessa Armand. ‘Of all the planets and heavenly bodies,’ Lenin wrote, ‘the most important for us is the moon.’ Many years have passed since then, and the world has changed in many ways, but Lenin’s assessment has lost none of its acuteness and fundamental relevance: time has confirmed its correctness, and the fire of these words of Lenin’s still illuminates today’s page in the calendar. Indeed, the moon plays an immense role in the life of humanity. The famous Russian scientist Georgy Ivanovich Gurdjieff developed the Marxist theory of the moon during the early illegal period of his activity. According to this theory, the earth had five moons in all—this is, in fact, why the star which is the symbol of our state has five points. The fall of each of the moons has been accompanied by social upheavals and catastrophes—thus, the fourth moon, which fell to earth in 1904, and is known as the Tungus Meteorite, provoked the first Russian revolution, which was soon followed by the second. Previous moon falls led to changes in sociopolitical formations—of course, the cosmic catastrophes did not affect the level of development of the forces of production, which is determined independently of human will and consciousness, or the emanations of the planets, but they did facilitate the development of the subjective preconditions for revolution. The fall of our present moon—the fifth and final one—will usher in the absolute victory of Communism throughout the solar system. In this course we shall
study Lenin’s two major works on the moon—‘The Moon and Rebellion’ and ‘Advice from an Outsider’. We’ll begin today with a review of bourgeois falsifications of the question—those views which assert that organic life on earth serves merely as nourishment for the moon, as the source of emanations which it absorbs. This is incorrect, for the goal of the existence of organic life on earth is not to feed the moon but, as Lenin demonstrated, to build a new society, free from the exploitation of men numbers one, two, and three by men numbers four, five, six, and seven …”

And so on. He said a lot of other complicated things, but what I remember most vividly is an image that struck me as amazingly poetical: a weight hanging on a chain makes a clock work. The moon is such a weight, the earth is the clock, and life is the ticking of the gears and the singing of the mechanical cuckoo.

•

We had fairly frequent medical checkups—they studied every one of us inside and out, which was understandable. So when I heard that Mitiok and I had to have what they called a “reincarnation check”, I thought they would just be testing our reflexes or measuring our blood pressure. I didn’t know what the first word meant.

But when I was summoned downstairs and I saw the specialist who was going to examine me, I felt an uncontrollable childish fear, which was quite out of place in view of what the immediate future held in store for me.

The person facing me was not a doctor with a stethoscope
sticking out of the pocket of his white coat; he was an officer, a colonel—only he wasn’t wearing a uniform jacket, he was dressed in a strange black robe with epaulettes. He was large and fat, with a red face that looked as though it had been scalded with hot soup. Hanging on a string round his neck were a whistle and a stopwatch, and if not for his eyes, which were like the observation slit of a heavy tank, he would have looked like a football referee. But anyway, he was pleasant enough and laughed a lot, and by the end of the conversation I felt relaxed. He spoke with me in a small office where there was nothing but a table, two chairs, a couch covered with imitation leather, and a door leading into another room. He filled up several yellowish forms, gave me a measuring glass of some bitter liquid to drink, and set a small hourglass on the table. Then he went out through the second door, telling me to follow him when all the sand had fallen through the hourglass.

I remember watching the hourglass and being amazed at how slowly the grains of sand tumbled down through the narrow glass neck, until I realised that it was because each grain had its own will, and none of them wanted to fall, because for them that was the same as dying. And at the same time they had no choice, it was inevitable. The next world and this one are just like this hourglass, I thought: when everyone alive has died in one direction, reality is inverted and they come to life again; that is, they begin to die in the opposite direction.

This made me feel sad for a while, and then I noticed that the grains of sand had stopped falling a long time
ago, and I ought to go and join the colonel. I felt agitated, and at the same time strangely light and airy; I remember taking ages to walk to the door behind which he was waiting for me, although in fact it was only two or three steps away. I reached for the handle and pushed, but the door didn’t open. Then I tried pulling it towards me, and suddenly noticed that I was pulling not at a door but at a blanket. I was lying in my bed, and Mitiok was sitting on the edge. I felt dizzy.

“Well? What was it like in there?” asked Mitiok. He looked oddly excited.

“What? Where?” I asked, raising myself up on one elbow and trying to think what had happened.

“At the reincarnation check,” said Mitiok.

“Hang on,” I said, remembering how I’d just been pulling on a door handle, “hang on … No. I don’t remember a thing.”

I felt strangely empty and lonely, as though I’d been walking through fields in autumn for a long time. This was such an unusual feeling that I forgot everything else, including even the sense of approaching death that had been constantly with me during the last few months: it was no longer so sharp now, it was simply there as the background for all my other thoughts.

“Did you sign a promise not to tell?” Mitiok asked scornfully.

“Leave me alone,” I said, turning to face the wall.

“These two fat-faced warrant officers in black robes just dragged you in here,” he went on, “and they said to me, ‘Here, take back your Egyptian’. And your blouse is covered in puke. Can’t you remember anything at all?”

“Not a thing,” I answered.

“Well, wish me luck,” he said. “I have to go now.”

“Break a leg,” I said. All I wanted to do was sleep, because it seemed to me that if I fell asleep quickly enough, I’d wake up as myself again.

I heard Mitiok close the squeaky door behind him, and then it was morning.

“Krivomazov! The Flight Leader wants you!” one of our group yelled in my ear. I didn’t really wake up until after I was already dressed. Mitiok’s bed was empty and undisturbed: the other guys were sitting on their beds in just their vests. I could feel the tension in the air as they glanced awkwardly at each other, and Ivan wasn’t even cracking any of those stupid but very funny morning jokes of his. Something had happened, and all the way up to the Flight Leader’s office on the third floor above ground I tried to figure out what it was. As I walked along with my eyes screwed up against the sunlight that pierced through the curtains—I was so unused to it—I noticed my reflection in a huge dusty mirror standing in a bend in the corridor, and I was amazed at how deathly pale my face was. I realised that my feat of heroism had really begun a long time ago.

The Flight Leader stood up to greet me and shook my hand.

“How’s the training going?” he asked.

“Fine, Comrade Flight Leader,” I said.

He looked into my eyes, checking me out.

“Yes, I can see it is. The reason I sent for you, Omon, is that I want you to help me. Take this tape recorder,” he said, pointing to a small Japanese cassette player on the table in front of him, “and these forms and a pen,
and go to room number 329. It’s free just at the moment. Have you ever transcribed a tape recording?”