Omon Ra (3 page)

The first time in my life I drank wine was during the winter when I was fourteen. It was in a garage that Mitiok took me to—his brother, a pensive long-haired type who had tricked his way out of army service, worked there as a watchman. The garage was on a large fenced-off lot stacked with concrete slabs, and Mitiok and I spent quite a long time clambering over them, sometimes ending up in astonishing places entirely screened off from the rest of reality which were like the compartments of a long-abandoned spaceship of which only the carcass was left, strangely resembling a heap of concrete slabs. What’s more, the streetlamps beyond the crooked wooden fence burned with a mysterious and unearthly light, and a few small stars hung in the pure empty sky—in short, if not for the empty bottles of cheap booze and the frozen streams of urine, we would have been surrounded by cosmic space.

Mitiok suggested going in to warm ourselves up, and we set off towards the ribbed aluminium hemisphere of the garage, which also had something cosmic about it. Inside, it was dark: we could make out the dim forms of cars that smelt of petrol. In the corner was a planking hut with a glazed window, built up against the wall: there was a light on inside it. Mitiok and I squeezed our
way inside, sat down on a narrow, uncomfortable bench, and silently drank our fill of tea from a battered tin saucepan. Mitiok’s brother was smoking long hand-rolled cigarettes with cardboard roaches, and looking through an old issue of
Young Technology
magazine, and he didn’t acknowledge our presence at all. Mitiok pulled a bottle out from under the bench, smacked it down onto the cement floor, and asked, “Want some?”

I nodded, although I felt uneasy about it. Mitiok filled the glass I’d just been drinking tea from right up to the brim with a dark-red liquid and held it out to me. As though I was trying to get the hang of some new procedure, I grasped the glass, raised it to my mouth, and drank, amazed at how little effort was required to do something for the first time. While Mitiok and his brother finished off the rest, I paid close attention to my own sensations, but there was nothing happening to me. I picked up the magazine that had been put down, opened it at random, and was faced with a double spread of drawings of flying machines whose names you were supposed to guess. I liked one better than the others—it was an American aeroplane with wings that could function as a rotor during takeoff—and there was a small rocket with a cabin for the pilot, but I didn’t get a proper look at that, because without saying a word or even raising his eyes, Mitiok’s brother grabbed the magazine out of my hands. In order not to show I was offended, I moved over and sat at the table, on which a glass jar with a water-heating element protruding from it stood among shrivelling pieces of cheap salami.

I suddenly felt disgusted to think that I was sitting in this lousy little closet that smelt like a garbage dump,
disgusted by the fact that I’d just drunk cheap port from a dirty glass, that the entire immense country in which I lived was made up of lots and lots of these lousy little closets where there was a smell of garbage and people had just been drinking cheap port, and most important of all—it was painful to think that these very same stinking little closets were the settings for those multicoloured arrays of lights that made me catch my breath in the evenings when I happened to look out of some window set high above the twilit capital. And it all seemed particularly painful in comparison with the beautiful American flying machine in the magazine.

I lowered my eyes to the newspaper which was spread over the table—it was a mass of grease spots, holes burned by cigarette butts, and ring marks left by glasses and saucers. The headlines were strangely frightening, with an inhuman cheerfulness and power: it had been a long time since anyone had stood in their way, but still they went on beating at the empty air, and if you were drunk (and I noticed that I already was, but I didn’t attach any importance to it), you could easily just happen to be in the wrong place and get your loitering soul crushed under some
MAJOR OBJECTIVE OF THE CURRENT PLAN
or some
GREETING FROM THE COTTON HARVESTERS
. The room around me was suddenly totally strange; Mitiok was watching me carefully. He caught my eye, winked, and, with a tongue that moved thickly, he asked: “What about it, we gonna fly to the moon?”

I nodded, and my eyes came to rest on a small column titled
NEWS FROM ORBIT
! The bottom of the text had been torn off, and all that was left of the column
were the words “Twenty-eight days …” in bold type. But this was still enough—I understood immediately and closed my eyes: yes, it was true, perhaps the burrows in which our lives were spent really were dark and dirty, and perhaps we ourselves were well suited to these burrows, but in the blue sky above our heads, up among the thinly scattered stars, there were special, artificial points of gleaming light, creeping unhurriedly through the constellations, points created here in the land of Soviets, among the vomit, empty bottles, and stench of tobacco smoke, points built here out of steel, semiconductors, and electricity, and now flying through space. And every one of us, even the blue-faced alcoholic we had passed on the way here, huddling like a toad in a snowdrift, even Mitiok’s brother, and of course Mitiok and I—we all had our own little embassy up there in the cold pure blueness.

I ran outside and stood there for ages, swallowing my tears as I stared up at the bluish-yellow, improbably near orb of the moon in the transparent winter sky.

I don’t remember the exact moment when I decided to enroll in military college, probably because this decision had ripened in my soul, and in Mitiok’s, long before we graduated from high school. For a little while we faced the problem of choice—there were a lot of flying schools around the country—but we made our minds up very quickly once we saw a coloured double-page insert in the magazine
Soviet Aviation
, all about life in the Lunar Village at the Maresiev Red Banner Flying School in Zaraisk. We immediately felt as though we were there in the crowd of students, among the yellow-painted plywood mountains and craters; we could see our future selves in the close-cropped young men turning somersaults on the gymnastic turnstile and dousing themselves with the water captured and frozen by the camera as it fell from a large enamelled basin that was such a tender peach colour you immediately remembered your childhood, and somehow the colour made you trust the picture more and did more to make you want to go to Zaraisk to study than all the other photographs of aviation trainers that looked like the half-decayed corpses of aeroplanes teeming with tiny people.

Once the decision was made, the rest proved to be
quite easy: Mitiok’s parents, puzzled and scared by the way his brother had turned out, were glad that their younger son would have such a secure and reliable job. By this time my father was an inveterate drunkard who spent most of the time lying on the divan facing the wall, under a rug embroidered with a goggle-eyed deer: I don’t think he even understood that I intended to be a flier, while my aunt couldn’t have cared less.

•

I remember the town of Zaraisk. Or rather, I can’t really say either I remember it or I’ve forgotten it—there’s so little in the place either to forget or to remember. Right in the centre was a tall bell tower of white stone, from which long ago some princess had leapt onto the stones below, and despite all the centuries that had passed, this incident was vaguely remembered by the townspeople. Next to the tower was the history museum, and not far from that were the post office and the police station.

When we got out of the bus, a nasty slanting rain was falling, and it was cold. We huddled under a basement awning bearing the sign
POLLING STATION
and waited half an hour for the rain to pass over. Apparently they were drinking inside; a strong smell of onions and the sound of voices came from behind the door. Someone kept suggesting they should sing, and eventually elderly male and female voices were raised in song: “Let us rejoice while we’re alive …”

The rain stopped; we went to look for the bus and found the same one in which we’d arrived. It turned out we need not have got out, we could have waited in
the bus while the driver was having his lunch. Small wooden houses began drifting past the windows, one after the other; then they stopped and the forest began. The Zaraisk flying school was in the forest, well away from the town. It had to be reached by walking about five kilometres from the final bus stop, which was called Vegetable Shop (there was no shop anywhere near, but we were told the name was left over from before the war). Mitiok and I got off the bus and set off along a road scattered with sodden ash-tree keys; it led us deeper and deeper into the forest, and just when we were beginning to think we were going the wrong way, we suddenly came up against gates made of welded metal pipes, decorated with large tin stars. On both sides the forest ran up to a tall fence of grey, unpainted planks with rusty barbed wire coiling along its top. We showed the sleepy soldier on gate duty our warrants from the district military enlistment office and the passports we had received only recently; we were admitted and told to go to the club, where a meeting was about to begin.

Immediately to the right of an asphalted roadway leading into the centre of a small settlement was the beginning of the Lunar Village I had seen in the magazine—it consisted of several long, single-storey barracks buildings painted yellow, surrounded by a dozen or so tyres dug into the ground, and a special plot designed to look like a panoramic view of the surface of the moon. We walked past it and came to the garrison club, where the boys who had come to enrol were crowded around the columns. Soon an officer came out, appointed
someone sergeant, ordered us to register with the examination committee and then go and collect our kit.

The examination committee was sitting in a Chinese-looking latticework pavilion in the yard of the club—three officers drinking beer and listening to quiet Eastern music on the radio as they gave out numbered squares of cardboard in exchange for our papers. Then they led us over to the edge of a sports field overgrown with grass that was waist-high (it was obvious no one had played any kind of sport on it for many years) and issued us with two army tents, which we were to live in during the exams. These were rolls of multilayered rubber sheets that we had to stretch out over wooden poles set into the ground. We got to know each other as we dragged the beds into the tents and then set them up in two tiers—the bedsteads were old and heavy, with nickel-plated knobs that could be screwed onto their uprights if they weren’t connected with another bed above them. They gave us these knobs separately, in a special bag, and when the exams were over, I secretly unscrewed one and put it away in the cigarette pack where I kept the plasticine pilot with the metal-foil head, the only witness to that distant and unforgettable evening in the south.

We hardly seemed to spend any time at all in the tents, but when they were taken down, there was a dense growth of grass under the rubber groundsheets, colourless and repulsive, with thick stems.

I can hardly remember the actual exams. All I do remember is that they weren’t difficult at all, and there was no chance to fill up the answer paper with all the
formulae and graphs that had absorbed the long spring and summer days we spent poring over the pages of textbooks. It was no problem for Mitiok and me to get passing marks, and then came the interview, which scared everyone more than anything else. We were interviewed by a major, a colonel, and a little old man with a jagged scar on his forehead, dressed in worn overalls. I said I wanted to join the cosmonaut class, and the colonel asked me to define a Soviet cosmonaut. I thought for a long time, but I couldn’t think of the right answer, and finally I realised from the examiners’ bored expressions that they were about to send me out into the corridor.

“All right,” said the old man, who hadn’t spoken a word before this, “do you remember how you first got the idea of becoming a cosmonaut?”

I was in despair, because I had no idea how to answer the question. It must have been despair that drove me to tell him about the red plasticine figure and the cardboard rocket that had no exit. The old man livened up straightaway at this, and his eyes began gleaming. When I got to the part about Mitiok and me having to crawl along the corridor in gas masks, he even grabbed hold of my arm and laughed, which made the scar on his forehead turn bright crimson. Then he suddenly became serious.

“Do you realise how difficult it is to fly into space?” he asked. “And what if your Motherland requires you to lay down your life? What then, eh?”

“If it comes to it …” I said with a frown.

He stared me right in the eyes for maybe three minutes.

“I believe you,” he said. “You can do it.”

When he heard that Mitiok, who had wanted to fly to the moon since he was a baby, was joining too, he noted down his name on a piece of paper. Mitiok told me afterwards that the old man spent a long time asking him why he particularly wanted to go to the moon.