"ßõòà 'Ëîïå äå Âåãà'" - The Yacht | "Ëèíãâà Ôðàíêà" - Translations
Victor Pelevin

Omon Ra.

Translated from Russian by Yuri Machkasov.

Russian original copyright © 1993 Victor Pelevin, "Text" Publishers, Moscow, Russia.

This translation copyright © 2001, Yuri Machkasov. All rights reserved. The translator may be contacted by means of electronic mail at machkasov@yahoo.com. All rights to the Russian original are not intended to be usurped or infringed upon by this translation and remain property of the corresponding copyright holders, or in public domain as the case may be. All endnotes are by the translator.

Lunokhod-1. Photo by Lavochkin Assn.

Dedicated to heroes of the Soviet Space.

1.

Omon[1] is not a particularly common name, and it maybe isn't the best there is. My father gave it to me. He worked in police all of his life, and he wanted me to become a policeman too.

- You see, Ommie, - he would tell me often after having a couple of drinks, - with this name, if you decide on police... And especially if you join the Party[2]...

Even though father's job included shooting people from time to time, he had a kind heart, and he was cheerful and agreeable by nature. He loved me very much, and he hoped I would achieve that which he wasn't able to achieve himself. And what he wished for was a plot of land in the suburbs so that he could grow cucumbers and beets on it - not for eating, or selling at the farmer's market. That too, of course, but mainly for just being able to hack at the earth with a spade after stripping naked from the waist up, to see the purplish earthworms writhe and all the assorted underground life go about its business, to haul the wheelbarrow full of manure across the entire subdivision, stopping at strangers' fences to have a couple of jokes. When he realized he was not going to get any of that, he began to hope that at least one of the Krivomazov[3] brothers was going to live a happier life (my older brother Ovir[4] whom my father wanted to become a diplomat died from meningitis when he was in fourth grade; all I remember about him is that he had a big oblong mole on his forehead).

Father's plans concerning my future never quite inspired much confidence in me; he himself was a Party member, and he had a good name, Matvei, but all he managed to scrape together at the end was a meager retirement pension and a lonely alcoholic old age.

I don't remember mom all too well. One single memory is all that's left - how dad, drunk and in uniform, tries to pull the gun from his holster, and she, crying, with messed-up hair, grabs at his hands, screaming: "Matvei, stop it!"

She died when I was very little, and I was brought up by my aunt, only visiting my father on the weekends. He would be puffy and red-faced, with his medal that he was so proud of hanging askew on his worn out pajama top. His room always smelled badly, and on the wall there was a copy of Michelangelo's "Creation", where the bearded God is floating over Adam who is lying on his back, God's arm outstretched to meet the man's delicate hand. This picture seemed to have a rather odd effect on my father's nature, apparently reminding him of something from his past. When in his room, I usually played with the toy railroad set sitting on the floor, and he would snore on the converted sofa. Sometimes he would wake up, squint at me for a while, and then hang down halfway from the sofa steadying himself against the floor and reach towards me with his big hand, all covered in bluish veins, which I was supposed to shake.

- What's your name now? - he'd ask.

- Krivomazov, - I'd answer, faking the innocent smile on my face, and then he would pat me on the head and give me candy. All of this he did in such a mechanical fashion that I almost was not disgusted.

There's nothing much I can say about the aunt - she was pretty indifferent towards me, and tried to arrange it so that I spent most of my time in various camps and "extended day care groups". By the way, it is only now that I can see the extraordinary beauty of that last expression.

From my childhood I only managed to remember that which was related, so to say, to my dreams of the sky. Of course, this wasn't how the life started. Before that, there was a long, brightly lit room full of other children and large plastic blocks, and there were the stairs of a wooden slide glazed over with ice that I was scaling up hurriedly, and some cracked young drummer boys in the yard made from painted stucco, and lots of other stuff. But it can hardly be said that it was I who saw those things; for in the early childhood (just like, ostensibly, after death) a person is going in many directions at once, and therefore it is safe to assume that he is not there yet, his full personality to arrive only later, along with attachment to one fixed, specific direction.

Our apartment was not far from the "Cosmos" movie theatre. An enormous rocket made of shiny metal always reigned supreme over our neighborhood, standing as it were on a narrowing plume of titanium smoke, resembling a huge curved blade piercing the ground[5]. Surprisingly, it was not the rocket that started me as a person, but a wooden airplane installed on the playground on our block. It was not quite an airplane, rather a small wooden house with two windows which acquired wings and tail made from pickets when the fence was taken down, and then they covered it with green paint and decorated with several large orange stars. Two, maybe three of us could fit inside, and there also was a small loft above with a triangular window overlooking the wall of the army draft office. By an unspoken agreement honored throughout the block, this loft was always assigned to be the pilot's cockpit, and every time the plane was shot down the people in the main body were to bail out first, and only then, when the earth was already imminently gaining on the windows with a deafening howl, only then was the pilot allowed to join the others - if he managed to do it in time, of course. I always tried to get to be the pilot, and I even mastered the art of seeing the sky with clouds and the Earth floating beneath in place where the draft office was standing, fuzzy violets and dusty cacti looking dejectedly down on us from its windowsills.

I always liked movies about pilots; it was one of these movies that was linked with the strongest experience of my childhood. One time, on an outer-space-black December night, I switched on the aunt's TV set and saw on the screen an airplane swinging its wings gently, with an ace of spades and a cross stenciled on its body. I shifted closer to the screen, and right away the canopy over the cockpit came looming large into view; behind the thick glass an almost inhuman face could be seen smiling, in a soft helmet with shiny black Bakelite earphones, behind goggles resembling ones that skiers put on. The pilot lifted the gloved hand and waved at me. Then the body of another plane appeared on screen, shot from inside; behind two identical sets of controls two pilots were sitting in mutton overcoats, watching intently over the evolutions of the enemy fighter, flying right nearby, through thick translucent plastic braced by steel frame.

- Spot nine, - said one of the pilots to the other. - They're going to bring us down.

The other one, with the handsome face of a habitual drunkard, just nodded.

- I'm not holding it against you, - he said, apparently continuing the conversation that was just interrupted. - But remember this: you better make sure that with you and Barb - it's for the rest of your life... To the grave.

This was when I stopped acknowledging the happenings on the screen - I was struck by the thought, not even the thought, but its barely recognizable shadow (as if the thought itself floated by somewhere in the vicinity, only touching my head with one of its edges) - about how, if I by glancing at the screen could see the world from the inside of the cockpit where the two pilots in overcoats were sitting - how in fact there's nothing that can stop me from getting into that or any other cockpit without the aid of any television, because the experience of flight is reduced to just a set of perceptions, and the principal ones of them I had already learned to simulate long ago, while sitting in the loft of the winged hut with red stars, looking at the draft office wall that impersonated the sky and making faint humming noises with my mouth.

This indistinct realization had so shaken me that the remainder of the movie I observed with half of my mind, only tuning into the television reality when smoky trails appeared on the screen, or a line of enemy planes on the ground swept by across it. "This means", I thought, "that you can look from inside yourself as if from inside the plane, and it does not even matter at all where you look - the only important thing is what you see...". Ever since, when I trundled along some snowy street, I would imagine that I am in fact flying an airplane over snow-bound fields, making wide turns, and I tilted my head so that the world would tilt obediently - to the left, or to the right.

And still, that person that I am now able to confidently name "I" have in fact formed later, gradually over time. I consider the first glimpse of my real soul to be the exact moment when I realized that one can aspire not to the thin blue film of the sky, but beyond it to the bottomless black pit of space. It happened the same winter, one evening, when I was wandering around the Industry Achievements Expo[6]. I was walking down a dark, deserted alley covered with snow, and then I heard a buzzing sound from the left, like a huge phone ringing. I turned and I saw him.

Reclining, sitting on emptiness as if it were an easy chair, he was moving forward slowly, and just as slowly the lines and tubes were straightening out behind him. The glass of his helmet was pitch black, and only a small triangular reflection was burning bright on its surface, but I knew he could see me. He was quite possibly dead for some centuries now. His arms were confidently outstretched towards the stars, and his feet did not require any kind of support to such an extent that I realized once and for all that true freedom can only be attained through weightlessness, and this is why, by the way, all my life I found all those Western radio "voices"[7] and writings of assorted solzhenitsyns so incredibly boring, because while in my heart of hearts I, of course, could not help but be sickened by the Soviet state, the demands of which, vague but powerfully threatening nonetheless, were forcing any group of people, no matter how small, no matter how fleetingly assembled, to endeavor to imitate painstakingly the tawdriest of its members, but upon gaining the understanding that no peace or freedom can exist here on Earth my spirit soared skywards, and anything that my chosen path ever demanded from me from that moment on could never become contrary to my conscience, because the conscience called me to space and paid little attention to what was going on below.

It was just a stained glass mosaic on the wall of the pavilion in front of me, depicting a cosmonaut in open space, but in one instant it conveyed to me more than the dozens of books that I had read to date. I was looking at it for a long, long time, and then I suddenly felt someone looking at me.

I turned around and saw a boy standing behind me, about my age, looking rather strange - he was wearing a leather helmet with shiny black Bakelite earphones, and there were swimming goggles hanging around his neck. He was half a foot taller and probably a little older; as he entered the zone that was illuminated by the floodlights he raised his black-gloved hand, his lips grimaced in a cold smile, and for a second the pilot of the fighter with the black ace flashed before my eyes.

They called him Mityok[8].  It turned out that we lived very close to each other, even though we went to different schools. Mityok was unsure about many things, but there was one thing he knew for certain. He knew that he would become a pilot first, and then he would fly to the Moon.

2.

There seems to be some sort of strange connection between the general outline of life and the small episodes that one constantly finds himself in without assigning any significance to them. I can see clearly now that my destiny was quite accurately determined at the time when I had not even started to pay any earnest consideration to the way I'd like to see it unfold, moreover - it was already demonstrated to me then, albeit in a slightly simplified way. Maybe that was just a future echo. And maybe that which we assume to be a future echo is in fact the seed of that future, taking to root at the very moment that later, from afar, we come to regard as an echo that flew back from the future.

Anyway, the summer after the seventh grade was hot and dusty. The first half of it I remember only for the long bicycle rides on one of the suburban parkways. I would attach a special rattler onto the rear wheel of my semi-racing "Sport" bike, made from a piece of cardboard folded over several times and fastened to the frame with a clothespin - when I was moving, the paper would strike against the spokes producing rapid gentle clattering, reminiscent of the roar of an airplane engine. Storming down the paved hill I would again and again become a fighter acquiring the target. The fighter was not usually a Soviet one, but that wasn't my fault, it was just that in the beginning of that summer I've heard an inane song somewhere, and there were lines in it about "Fast as bullet is my "Phantom", In the sky all blue and clear It is quickly gaining altitude." I have to say that the stupidity of this song, while quite apparent to me, never interfered with the warm sensation that it aroused deep in my soul. What other lines I remember from it? "'Cross the sky a smoky trail... My dear Texas left behind...". And there were a mother and a father in it, and some Mary, made very real by the mention of her last name later in the song.

By mid-July I was back in the city again, and then Mityok's parents got vouchers for us to go to the summer camp named "Rocket". This was your regular camp in the South, in some ways maybe even better than a lot of others. I only remember well the first few days of it, but everything that would become so significant later on happened in those few days. While in the train on the way there, Mityok and I ran back and forth about the cars and dropped any bottles we  could find into the toilets - they would fall down onto the railway tracks rushing by under the small round porthole and explode noiselessly, with the song that was following me around imparting the sweet flavor of the struggle for the freedom of Vietnam to this uncomplicated activity.

Next day our entire group that was traveling together by the same train disembarked at the damp terminal of a Southern town and was loaded onto trucks after a headcount. We were driving on a road winding its way between mountains for a long time, and then the sea showed itself to our right and brightly colored barns were approaching us. We got off onto a paved square, they assembled us in formation and led to the flat-roofed glass building on top of a hill. That was the mess, where we were greeted by a cold dinner, even though it was already supper time[9], since we arrived several hours later than expected. The dinner was not particularly tasty - soup with small star-shaped noodles, boiled chicken with rice and stewed dried fruits for desert.

Hanging on the threads from the ceiling of the mess, covered with something that appeared to be sticky when you looked at it, there were spaceships made from craft paper. I was observing one of them for some time. The unknown artisan expended a lot of shiny foil to decorate it, splattering it all over with the words "CCCP"[10].The ship was hanging right in front of our table, glowing orange from the sunset, suddenly reminding me of a subway train headlamp lighting up in the black void of a tunnel. I became sad for some reason.

Mityok, on the contrary, was chatty and joyful.

- They had one kind of spaceships in the twenties, - he said, jabbing the air with his fork, - and then it was different in the thirties, and different again in the fifties, and so on.

- What are you talking about - spaceships in the twenties? - I asked feebly.

Mityok considered it for a second.

- Alexey Tolstoy had those huge metal eggs where explosions would occur at minute intervals, giving energy for the propulsion[11], - he said. - At least that was the main principle. There can be a lot of variations, of course.

- But they never actually flew, did they? - I said.

- These don't either, - he countered and pointed at the subjects of our discussion, swaying lightly in the draft.

Finally I understood what he meant to say, even though I would hardly have been able to put it precisely in words. The only space where the starships of the Communist future were flying - incidentally, when I encountered the word "starship" in science fiction books, I always though for some reason that it had something to do with the red stars on the bodies of the Soviet space technology - in short, the only place where they did indeed fly was the Soviet citizens' collective consciousness, just as the mess hall around us was the space into which the group who lived in the camp before us launched their starships, so that they would still be traversing the space-time continuum over the dinner tables even when the creators of the cardboard fleet are no longer around. This thought superimposed onto that special unspeakable longing that always took hold of me when I was eating the camp's dried fruit compote to produce a peculiar idea in my head.

- You know, I always liked to assemble plastic airplanes, - I said, - those kits that you glue together. Especially the military ones.

- So did I, - replied Mityok, - but that was long time ago.

- The ones from GDR[12] were good. And ours often did not have the pilot included. That really sucked. When the cockpit is empty, I mean.

- Exactly, - Mityok said. - Why are you talking about it?

- Know what, I wonder, - I said, pointing with my fork at the starship hanging right over our table, - is there anyone inside there or not?

- No idea, - said Mityok. - But you're right, it is interesting.

The camp was situated on a gentle mountain slope, and the lower section of it formed something like a little park. Mityok disappeared somewhere, so I walked there alone; a couple of minutes later I found myself in a long, empty alley lined with cypresses, casting deep shadows in an advanced warning of the approaching darkness. Enormous plywood boards with drawings on them hung off the chain link fence bordering the asphalt walk path. The first depicted a young pioneer[13] with a plain Russian face, looking far ahead and clutching the brass horn adorned with a red flag against his thigh. The same pioneer was on the second one, with a drum slung around his shoulders and sticks in his hand. On the third one - him again, continuing to look ahead from under the hand raised in salute[14]. The next board was twice as wide as the other ones, and it was very long - about ten feet, I guess. It was painted in two colors; the side from which I was approaching slowly was red, and then it became white, with a jagged wave that separated the colors overcoming the white field, leaving a trail of red behind it. I did not realize at first what that was, and only when I came closer I recognized in the intertwining red and white splotches Lenin's face. Apart from the protuberance of the beard resembling the battering ram, the face was left open. There was no back to Lenin's head - it only had the face, and the entire red surface behind it was in itself Lenin; he looked like an incorporeal god, his manifestation only a ripple on the surface of the world he had created.

I stubbed my toe on the crack in the asphalt and transferred my gaze onto the next board - it was the pioneer, now in a spacesuit, red helmet under his arm, with a sharp pointy antenna and letters "CCCP" written on it. The next pioneer was already sticking halfway out of the flying rocket, saluting with his heavily gloved hand. And the last pioneer, still in spacesuit, was standing on the merrily yellow Moon next to his ship, which looked very much like the cardboard rocket in the mess hall. Only his eyes were visible, they were exactly the same eyes as the ones he had on the other boards, but now that the rest of his face was obscured by the helmet they seemed to contain an expression of unspeakable agony.

I heard steps coming fast behind me; when I turned around, there was Mityok.

- You were right, - he said, coming closer.

- About what?

- Look, - he stretched out his hand holding something dark. I managed to discern a small Play-Doh figurine, its head wrapped in foil.

- There was this little paper chair inside, and he was sitting on it, - said Mityok.

- You didn't take apart that rocket from the mess, did you? - I asked.

He nodded.

- When?

- Just now. Ten minutes ago. It's the strangest thing, everything in there... - he crossed his hands, making a lattice with his fingers.

- In the mess?

- No, in the rocket. When they were making it, they started with this guy. They made him, stuck him to the chair and totally papered him over.

Mityok handed me a piece of cardboard. I took it and was able to make out tiny, very elaborately drawn gauges, controls, buttons and even some kind of painting on the wall.

- But the most interesting thing is, - Mityok continued dolefully and a little despondently, - there was no door there. The hatch is painted on the outside, but on the inside it's solid wall, with gauges and stuff.

I looked at the paper scrap once again and noticed a little window in which the small distant Earth was shining bright blue.

- If I could get my hands on the guy that put this rocket together, - said Mityok, - I'd definitely break his face.

- Why?

Mityok did not answer. Instead he wound up his arm to chuck the little figurine over the fence, but I caught his hand and asked him to give it to me. He did not object, and I spent the next half hour looking for an empty cigarette box to put it in.

The echoes of this bizarre discovery caught up with us the next day, during the siesta hour. The door opened, they called Mityok's name, and he stepped out into the corridor. I've heard snippets of conversations, "mess" was mentioned a couple of times, and it was only too clear. I also got up and went out into the corridor. A pair of camp instructors, he - lanky and mustachioed, she - short and red-haired, were handling Mityok in the corner.

- I was there too, - I said.

The male instructor stared me down approvingly.

- You want to crawl together or separately? - he asked. I noticed he was holding a gas mask in a green canvas bag.

- How could they possibly crawl together, Kolya, - said the other one bashfully, - when you only have one gas mask. Has to be one after the other.

Mityok took a step forward, glancing slightly back at me.

- Put it on, - the instructor said.

Mityok put the gas mask on.

- Get down.

He got down on the floor.

- Go, - said Kolya, clicking his stopwatch.

The dorm was at least fifty yards long, and the corridor spanned the entire length of it. The surface of the floor was shrouded in linoleum, and when Mityok started forward it squeaked - softly but disgustingly. Of course, Mityok did not make it in the three minutes that the instructor gave him - he did not even make it one way in that time, but when he crawled back to us, Kolya did not choose to have him do it all over, because there were only a couple of minutes left in the siesta. Mityok took the gas mask off. His face was red, with drops of sweat and tears all over it, and his feet were already covered with blisters where they rubbed against the linoleum.

- Now you, - the instructor said, passing the wet gas mask on to me. - Get set...

It is a mysterious and wondrous sight, the corridor when you look at its linoleum-clad infinity through the fogged lenses of a gas mask. The floor you are lying on is cooling your breast and stomach, the far end of it barely visible, with the pale stream of the ceiling almost coming to a point together with the walls. The gas mask is cinching your face, pressing at the cheeks, making your lips draw forward in a kind of half-kiss, directed apparently at everything around you. Before you are nudged slightly, giving you the go-ahead, at least a couple dozen seconds pass; they drift by agonizingly slow, and you are able to notice a lot of things. There's some lint, and translucent sand grains in the notch where two linoleum panels meet, and a knot in the wood paneling at the very bottom of the wall that was painted over, and this is an ant that became just two dried-out thin drops but left a reminder of itself in the future, in a form of a small wet spot a couple of feet further, where the foot of a person walking down the corridor stepped a second after the catastrophe.

- Go, - I heard over my head, and I was on my way, merrily and earnestly. The punishment looked like a joke to me, and I couldn't understand why Mityok suddenly came apart. First ten yards flashed by in an instant, but then it became harder. When you crawl, at some point you have to push against the floor with the upper part of your foot, where the skin is thin and tender, so if you haven't anything on you get blisters right away. Linoleum was clinging to my body, it seemed like hundreds of insects were drilling into my feet, or like I was crawling on the freshly paved asphalt. I was surprised how slowly the time was dragging on - there was a large amateur watercolor painting on the wall, depicting the "Aurora" cruiser[15] in the Black Sea, and I noticed that I have been crawling past it for quite some time, while it hasn't moved an inch.

And then suddenly everything changed. I mean, everything continued as it was - I was still crawling down the corridor, just as before, but the pain and the tiredness, after having reached the point of being unbearable, switched something off inside me. Or switched on, I don't know. I noticed all of a sudden that everything is very quiet around me, only the linoleum is squeaking under my feet, like something being dragged on rusty little wheels, and somewhere far below the windows the sea is rumbling, and farther still, as if from beyond the sea, the loudspeaker is singing with the voice of many children.

The life was a gentle green miracle, the sky was still and cloudless, the sun was shining - and in the middle of this world there was the two-storied dorm building, and inside it was a long corridor, and I was crawling along it in a gas mask. And this fact was, on one hand, so obvious and natural, and on the other hand - so hurtful and grotesque, that I started crying under my rubber second face, taking comfort in my real face being hidden from the instructors and especially the door frames, from where dozens of eyes were peering at my glory and my shame through the cracks.

My tears dried up in another few yards, and I began to feverishly scramble for at least one thought that would have given me the strength to go on, because the terror before the instructor was no longer sufficient. I closed my eyes, and it was night, its velvet darkness disturbed from time to time by the stars lighting before my eyes. The distant song became audible again, and very, very softly, probably even silently, I began to sing along.

The tinny sound of the trumpet spread over the camp - it was the wake-up signal. I stopped and opened my eyes. I still had about three yards to go before the end of the corridor. There was a shelf on the slate gray wall in front of me, with a yellow Lunar globe standing on top of it; through the glass that was sprayed with tears and fogged over it seemed fuzzy and washed out, as though it was not standing on the shelf but instead floating in the grayish void.

3.

The first time in my life that I drank wine was in winter, when I turned fourteen. It happened in an industrial garage; Mityok would bring me there because his brother, a morose hippie who conned his way out of the draft[16], worked there as a night guard. The garage occupied a large fenced-off plot strewn with cement blocks, which Mityok and I have taken to climbing for hours on end, sometimes finding ourselves in wondrous places, isolated completely from the rest of the real world and looking like sections of a long-abandoned spaceship, with its empty hull (strangely resembling a pile of cement blocks) the only thing left standing. The streetlights over the crooked picket fence also contributed to the illusion with their mysterious, otherworldly glow, and the clear, empty sky displayed only a smattering of small stars - in other words, if you didn't count the empty wine bottles and iced-over urine flows, it was the outer space that surrounded us.

Mityok suggested that we go inside, where it's warm, and we directed our steps to the corrugated aluminium half-sphere of the garage, its shape also vaguely related to something from space. It was dark inside, and the outlines of the trucks that smelled of gasoline were hulking indistinctly. There was a small wooden cubicle with a glass window tucked against the wall in the corner; the light was shining inside. Mityok and I squeezed in, sitting ourselves on the narrow and uncomfortable bench, and silently drank some tea from an old peeling tin pan. Mityok's brother was smoking long papirosy[17], thumbing through an old issue of "Technology Review for the Youth", and did not acknowledge our presence in the slightest. Mityok produced a bottle from under the bench, placed it on the table with  a thump and asked:

- Want some?

I nodded, even though I had a bad feeling about this inside. Mityok filled the glass from which I was just drinking tea to the brim with the dark-red liquid and handed it to me; clicking into the rhythm of the process, I grabbed the glass, put it to my lips and drank, amazed at how little effort one has to expend to do something for the first time. While Mityok and his brother were busy drinking the rest, I was listening to the experiences inside me, but nothing was really happening. I took the magazine, opened it randomly and stared at a two-page spread filled with tiny pictures of various flying contraptions that you had to guess the names of. I liked one of them better than the others - it was an American plane that could use its wings as a propeller for vertical take-off. There was also a small rocket there with a cockpit for the pilot, but I didn't get a good look at it because Mityok's brother, without as much as a single word or even a glance at me, pulled the magazine back from my hands. That hurt me, and in order to hide it I shifted to the other table where the can with plug-in boiler stood, surrounded by dried-out sausage scraps. Suddenly I was overcame with disgust over the thought that I was sitting here in this rat hole which smelled of garbage, over the fact that I have just drunk cheap port from a grubby glass, and that the entire vastness of the country where I live was just a multitude of similar rat holes, also smelling of garbage, where people also just finished drinking cheap port, and most importantly it was painful to think that all the wonderful multi-colored lights that take my breath away every time I pass by a window situated far enough over the night capital - they all were lights of exactly those stinky shacks. It hurt most of all when compared with the beautiful American flyer from the magazine spread. I lowered my eyes and saw the newspaper on the table, serving as a tablecloth; it was covered in greasy stains, round marks from glasses and bottles and cigarette burns. The headlines were scaring me with their icy inhuman briskness and might - nothing was standing in their way now, not for a long time, but they continued to strike into the emptiness, blow after monstrous blow, and in that emptiness, especially when drunk (I noticed I was already drunk, but did not pay much attention to that), one was liable to get his lumbering soul in the way of a "principal task of our time" or "greetings from cotton pickers'". The room around the table became completely unrecognizable, and Mityok was staring at me intently. Catching my glance, he winked and asked me, his tongue slightly unwieldy:

- So, are we going to the Moon or what?

I nodded, and my gaze transfixed on the small column titled "NEWS FROM ORBIT". The lower part of the text was torn off, and the column now consisted of only "The twenty eighth day started..." in a bold type. This was quite enough - I understood everything and closed my eyes. Yes, it really was like that - the holes in which we spent our lives were indeed dark and soiled, and we ourselves were, probably, a good match for the holes, but in the deep blue sky overhead between sparsely sown feeble stars a special kind of bright points existed, artificial, crawling slowly through the constellations, made right here, on the Soviet soil, in the midst of puke, empty bottles and noxious tobacco smoke, fashioned out of steel, semiconductors and electricity, and flying now through space. And every one of us, even the blue-faced drunk cowering toad-like in the snowdrift whom we passed on our way here, even Mityok's brother and, naturally, Mityok and I - we all had in that cold clear blue ether our own small embassy.

I ran out into the yard and stared for a long, long time, choking on tears, at the yellowish-blue, unbelievably close disk of the Moon in the translucent winter sky.

4.

I don't really remember the exact moment I decided to apply to Air Force academy. I guess I don't remember it because this decision had ripened within my soul (and Mityok's as well) long before we graduated from high school. For a brief time we were faced with the problem of choice - there were many academies scattered throughout the country, but we have decided very quickly, upon seeing in the "Soviet Aviation" magazine afull-color fold-out describing the life in Lunar City of the Maresyev[18] Red Banner[19] Flight Academy in Zaraisk. Right away we could almost feel being in the throng of first-year cadets, among the plywood mountains and craters painted yellow, we recognized our future selves in the buzz-cut guys doing flips on the bars and throwing bath water, frozen in time by the camera, from huge enameled pans of such a tender shade of peach that it immediately evoked childhood memories, and this color for some reason was more compelling, aroused more trust and desire to go study in Zaraisk than all of the adjoining photos of flight simulators, which resembled nothing so much as half-decomposed airplane corpses teeming with crawling people.

Once the decision was made, the rest was pretty uncomplicated. Mityok's parents, frightened by the murky fate of his older brother, were glad that their youngest son would be attached to such a sure and stable business, and my father has finally drunk himself into stupor by that time, and spent most of his days just lying on the sofa facing the wall with the bulge-eyed moose woven on the rug hanging on it; I wouldn't be surprised if he did not even understand that I was going to become a pilot, and to my aunt it was all the same.

I remember the town of Zaraisk. More precisely, I can neither say that I remember it nor that I forgot - so few things were there that one can remember or forget. In the very center a whitestone belfry was standing tall, famous for some duchess having jumped off of it in times immemorial, and even though it has been many centuries since, her feat was still remembered in the town. The town history museum was right next to it, with post office and police station nearby.

When we got off the bus, an unpleasant driving rain was falling, it was cool and damp. We cowered under the canopy of some basement with "Elections Office" banner on top, and waited for half an hour until the rain abated. Behind the basement door there seemed to be drinking going on, we could feel the thick onion stench and hear voices, someone was insistently proposing that they sing a song from a popular movie; finally, tired male and female voices started singing.

The rain ended, we ventured out in search of the next bus and found the exact same one that brought us here. It turned out that we did not have to get out of it at all; we could have waited out the rain inside the bus, while the driver was having lunch. We drove past small wooden houses, then they disappeared and we entered the forest. It was in this forest, outside of the town, that the Zaraisk Flight Academy was located. We had to go on foot about three miles from the final stop of the bus, which was called "Vegetable Market"; there was no trace of any market in the vicinity, and someone explained to us that the name carried over from before the war. We got off the bus and started along the road sprinkled with soggy pine needles, it led us further and further into the forest, and just when we started thinking that we were going the wrong way it abruptly terminated at the gate welded from steel pipes, bearing huge tin stars; all around it the forest was pressing against the unpainted gray wooden fence, with rusty barbed wire snaking its way on top of it. We showed our letters of recommendation from the draft office and newly-minted passports to the sleepy guard at the checkpoint, and he let us in, directing us to the clubhouse where the meeting was about to begin.

A paved road was leading into the small camp, and the Lunar City that I saw in the magazine revealed itself immediately to the right of it, consisting of several long, one-storied yellow barrack buildings, a dozen or so tires dug halfway into the ground and the lot imitating the lunar landscape. We went past it to the clubhouse, where the boys who came for the entrance exams[20] were swarming around the supporting columns. Soon we were visited by an officer who appointed someone to be "in charge" and ordered us to register with the entrance commission and then go receive the "inventoried items".

On account of warm weather the entrance commission was sitting in a Chinese-looking open-air gazebo. It was actually three officers who were drinking beer to the eastern music that played quietly on the radio and distributing pieces of paper with numbers in exchange for the documents we gave them. Then they led us to the edge of the stadium which had been overrun with waist-high weeds (it was obvious nobody had been playing anything on it for ten years at the least) and presented us with two military tents - we were going to live in them during the exam session. The tents were tightly packed sheets of multi-layer rubber, and we had to pitch them on the wooden poles stuck in the ground. We all got acquainted while lugging the cots into the tents; we made bunk beds out of them, the cots were ancient, very heavy, with nickel-plated balls that you could screw on top of the posts when they weren't connected to the upper bunk. These balls they gave us separately, in special bags, and when the exams were over I sneakily removed one of them and hid it in the same cigarette pack that housed the Play-Doh pilot with a foil head, the only living witness of that unforgettable Southern evening.

It seemed like we spent a very short time in those tents, but when we took them off we discovered that under them a thick, vigorous and disgustingly white pillow of weeds managed to grow out. I don't recall much about the exams themselves, only that they turned out to be quite uncomplicated, and it even upset me not to be able to fit on the exam sheet all the graphs and formulas into which the long spring and summer days spent poring over the textbooks have been distilled. Mityok and I got the points required for admission effortlessly, and then there was the interview which we dreaded most. It was conducted by a major, a colonel and some old-timer with a jagged scar across the forehead, dressed in a well-worn technical forces uniform. I said I wanted to be in the cosmonaut detachment, and the colonel asked me what is the Soviet cosmonaut. I was scrambling for the right answer for so long that finally the faces of my interviewers began to reflect deep grief, from which I concluded that I was about to be shown the door.

- All right, - said the old timer, who was silent until then, - do you remember how you first thought of becoming a cosmonaut?

I panicked, because I had absolutely no idea what the correct answer to that question might be. Motivated, apparently, by utter despair, I began to relate the story of the red Play-Doh figurine and the cardboard rocket with no exit. The old timer perked up instantly, his eyes began to glow, and when I came to the place where Mityok and I had to crawl along the corridor in the gas mask, he grabbed my hand and burst into laughter, which made the scar on his forehead turn purple. Then he suddenly became somber.

- Do you know, - he said, - that this is not your average daily chore - flying in space? What if your Motherland asks you to give your life for it? Then what, eh?

- Well, I'm as good for it as the next guy, - I said, furrowing my brow.

Then he stared straight into my eyes, and looked at me for what seemed like three minutes.

- I believe you, - he said finally, - you can do it.

When he heard that Mityok, who wanted to go to the Moon since he was a kid, was also applying, he scribbled his name on a piece of paper. Mityok told me later that the old man was grilling him on why it had to be necessarily the Moon.

The next day, after breakfast, they pinned the lists with the names of those accepted to the columns of the clubhouse, Mityok and I were there next to each other, out of the alphabetical order. Somebody dragged himself to the appeals committee, the others were jumping for joy on the asphalt criss-crossed with white lines, or running to the phone booth, and above all of that I remember a white swath left by a jet in the faded sky.

Everyone accepted was invited to the meeting with the instructor-teaching staff, the professors were already waiting for us in the clubhouse. I remember the heavy velour drapes, a table across the entire stage and the officially-austere officers sitting behind it. Leading the meeting was a youngish lieutenant-colonel with a pointed gangly nose, and all the time while he spoke I was imagining him in the flight suit and helmet, sitting in the cockpit of a MiG, camo-striped like an expensive pair of jeans.

- Guys, I don't wish to frighten you, I don't want to start our talk here with scary words, right? But you all know - we don't choose the times we live in, it's the times that choose us. It might be inappropriate on my part to give you this information, but I am going to tell you anyway...

The lieutenant-colonel interrupted himself for a second, leaned over to the major sitting next to him and whispered something in his ear. Major furrowed his brow, tapped the end of his pencil against the table, apparently deciding something, and then nodded[21].

- All right, - the lieutenant-colonel started again softly, - recently at a closed meeting of morale officers[22] the times in which we live were defined as pre-war period!

Lieutenant-colonel  became silent, expecting some kind of reaction - but the audience apparently did not get it. At any rate, Mityok and I definitely did not get it.

- I'll explain, - he said even more softly, - the meeting was held on June 15, right? So, until June 15 we were living in the post-war period, and since then - a full month - we live in the pre-war period. Clear now?

For several seconds there was complete silence.

- I am not telling you this to scare you, - the lieutenant-colonel continued, now in his normal voice, - it's just that you have to understand the kind of responsibility put on our shoulders, right? You made the right choice when you came to our Academy. I would like to tell you now that our primary goal here is not to simply make you into pilots, but to make you into real men, right? And when you receive your diplomas and military ranks, you can be sure that by that time you are going to become Real Men, with the capital M, as capital as it only can be in the Soviet country.

The lieutenant-colonel sat down, adjusted his tie and caught the edge of the glass with his lips - his hands were shaking, and I could swear I heard his teeth clanking almost inaudibly against glass. The major rose.

- Guys, - he said in a sonorous voice, - though it would be more correct to call you cadets now, but I still would like to address you in this manner - guys! Recall the famous story of the legendary character glorified by Boris Polevoy! The one whose name our academy proudly bears! He, who after losing both of his legs in battle, did not surrender but instead soared as Icarus into the sky to continue pounding the Nazi beast! Many have told him it was impossible, but he always remembered that he was a Soviet man! Don't you forget that either, never forget that! And we, the instructor-teaching staff, and I personally, the flying morale officer of the Academy, we promise you - we will make real men out of you in the shortest possible time!

Then we were shown our bunks in the first-year dorm, where we were being moved from the tents, and led to the mess. Hanging on threads from its ceiling were dusty MiG's and Il's, resembling giant islands suspended in the air among the fast squadrons of houseflies. The dinner was not particularly tasty - soup with small star-shaped noodles, boiled chicken with rice and stewed dried fruits for desert. After the meal we immediately felt like sleeping, Mityok and I barely dragged ourselves to our cots and I fell asleep at once.

5.

Next morning I was awakened by a moan right over my ear, a moan filled with deep pain and disbelief. In fact, I must have been hearing noises through my sleep for some time, but I was jolted into the full consciousness by only this, particularly loud and tormented cry. I opened my eyes and looked around. On the cots everywhere there was some kind of slow groaning motion, I tried to prop myself on my elbow but couldn't, because I was apparently locked in place with several wide straps, like ones used to keep together overstuffed luggage; the only thing I could do is turn my head slightly from side to side. From the nearby cot a boy named Slava from the Siberian town of Tynda, whom I met yesterday, was looking at me, his eyes full of intense suffering, the lower part of his face hidden under some kind of tightly stretched cloth. I wanted to open my mouth to ask him what was going on, but found out that I couldn't move my tongue, and moreover I did not feel the lower half of my face at all, as if it fell asleep. I figured that my mouth was gagged and bound as well, but did not have time to get surprised over it, because I felt sudden horror: in the place where Slava's feet were supposed to be, his blanket stepped sharply down instead, and the freshly starched sheet there was bearing fuzzy reddish blots, the kind you see watermelon juice leave on white kitchen towels. The most frightening thing was that I couldn't feel my own feet and couldn't raise my head to look at them.

- Fifth deta-ach-mint! - the deep booming voice of the sergeant at the doors was unusually full of subtle intonations and replete with innuendo, - bandage time!

Right away about a dozen of second- and third-year students (or to be more precise, cadets of the second and third year of duty, I figured that by looking at the patches on their sleeves) entered the room. I never saw them before; officers told us they were "on potatoes"[23]. They were wearing strangely rigid high boots and moving about awkwardly, steadying themselves now and again against the walls and bedframes. I noticed unhealthy pastiness in their faces, also bearing the marks of prolonged suffering which have molded into some kind of unspeakable readiness, out of place here as it seemed, and in that moment I recalled the words of the pioneer salutation that Mityok and I repeated along with everybody else in the pioneer camp, on that faraway plot of asphalt - I recalled it and finally understood what it was that we actually meant when shouting "Always ready!"[24], deceiving ourselves, our comrades at the rally and the clear July morning.

One after another they rolled the cots out into the corridor, with moaning and thrashing first-years strapped to them, and then there were only two cots left - mine and the one by the window on which Mityok was lying. The straps did not allow me to look at him, but out of the corner of my eye I could make out that he was awake and lying quietly.

They came for us in about ten minutes, turned me around feet first and started rolling along the corridor. One of the cadets was pushing the cot while the other was pulling it backing up, it appeared as if he was trying to contain the cot that was gaining on him. We maneuvered into a narrow long elevator and went up, then the second-year backed away from me again through another corridor and we stopped before the door covered with black imitation leather, with a large brown sign on it which I could not read because of my uncomfortable position. The door opened and I was wheeled into the room, under the enormous crystal chandelier in form of a bomb; the top of the walls had a figured ornament of alternating hammers, sickles[25] and vases wrapped in vines.

The straps were taken off and I propped myself on the elbows trying hard not to look at my feet; ahead of me in the room's depths was a massive desk with the a green lamp on it, illuminated by the grayish light filtering sideways through the tall narrow window. The man sitting behind the desk was obscured from sight by an issue of "Pravda"[26], a kind wrinkled face with glowing eyes looking straight at me from its front page. The linoleum squeaked and Mityok's cot came to a halt right beside mine.

The pages being turned rustled several more times, and then the paper came to rest on the table.

We were facing the same old man with the scar across the forehead who was grabbing my hand at the interview. He was now decked in a lieutenant-general uniform, complete with golden brooms on the shoulders[27], his hair carefully combed and his gaze sober and clear. I also noticed that his face seemed to copy the one from the front page of "Pravda" which had been looking at me the previous moment, so that it was almost like in that movie[28] where they show you one icon at first and then it is slowly replaced by another one - the images similar but not exactly the same, and because the actual moment of the transition was glossed over the icon appeared to be morphing in front of your eyes.

- Since we are going to be working with you guys for a long time now, you may call me "comrade mission chief", - said the old man. - I would like to congratulate you - based on the results of the exams and especially the interview (he winked as he was saying that) you have been enrolled directly in the first year program of the secret cosmonaut academy under auspices of First Department of the KGB[29]. So you will have to become Real Men some other time, and right now get your stuff - you're going to Moscow. We'll meet you there.

I got the full meaning of those words only when we were back in the empty dorm room, wheeled there again through the same long corridors, linoleum singing something soft and full of nostalgia under the tiny steel wheels of the cot, prompting me to recall all of a sudden a long-forgotten July afternoon by the sea.

Mityok and I slept through the rest of the day - I guess they spiked our yesterday's dinner with some kind of drugs (we were really sleepy the next day, too), and in the evening we were visited by a merry straw-haired lieutenant in shoes that were squeaking as he walked. He wheeled our cots, one after another, with jokes and laughs along the way, to the asphalt platz in front of the cement shell of an open-air stage, where several top generals with kind intelligent faces were sitting behind the table, our comrade mission chief among them. We could, of course, get there on our own, but lieutenant told us that this is the standing order for the first-years and asked us to lie still so as not to confuse others.

Because of the multitude of cots standing side by side the square resembled the yard of a car factory or farm equipment show, and above it, following a convoluted trajectory, a stifled moan was fluttering; disappearing from one place, it reappeared in the other, then the next one, like a giant mosquito darting over the cots. On the way there the lieutenant said that the graduation ceremony was now going to take place, combined with the final exam.

Soon he, first among several dozen lieutenants just like him, pale and anguished but still with inimitable grace, was dancing the "Kalinka"[30] to the deliberately sparse accompaniment of the flying morale officer's concertina. Lieutenant's last name was Landratov, I heard it when he was presented with a small red booklet and congratulated on his diploma. Then all the others were performing the same dance, and finally I got bored looking at them. I turned my head towards the stadium field that started right at the edge of the platz and suddenly came to realize why it was so overwhelmed with weeds.

I was looking at them swaying in the wind for a long time, and imagined that the cracked, peeling gray fence with barbed wire on top, running behind the decrepit goalposts, was in fact the Great Wall, and despite all the pickets that were either hanging loose or missing altogether it still stretches as it did for millennia from the rice fields of the faraway China right down here to the town of Zaraisk, imparting the ancient Chinese spirit to everything around it - the lacy gazebos where the entrance commission sits in hot weather, decommissioned rusted-through fighter, and antique military tents I am staring at from my cot, holding fast under the covers to the small nickel-plated ball I screwed off the bedpost.

The next day a truck was carrying Mityok and me through the summer forest and the fields, we were sitting on our backpacks against the cool metal truck bed. I remember the swaying canvas awning above us, the tree trunks and withered grayish poles of an abandoned telegraph line rushing past. From time to time the trees would give way and allow the triangles of pale gloomy sky to peek through. Then we had a short stopover and five minutes of blissful silence, interrupted only by heavy faraway thuds, which the driver (who had to go into the bushes) explained to us were large-caliber machine guns coming in short bursts at the firing range of the nearby Matrosov[31] Infantry Academy. Then the incessant jolts resumed and I dozed off, waking for just a few seconds when we already reached Moscow, in time to catch a glimpse of "Child's World"[32] arches, as if a reminder of some long-forgotten summer school vacation.

6.

When I was a kid I would often imagine the newspaper spread, still smelling of fresh ink, with a large portrait of myself in the middle (with the helmet on, smiling), titled:

"Cosmonaut Omon Krivomazov reported in excellent spirits!"

Hard to understand why I wanted that so much. I guess I always wanted to live part of my life through the eyes of other people - those who would look at that photograph and think of me, imagine my thoughts, feelings, the delicate fabric of my soul. And most importantly, of course, I wanted to turn into one of those other people myself, stare into my own face composed of the typographic dots, think about what kind of movies this man likes, who his girlfriend might be, and then suddenly realize that this Omon Krivomazov is in fact me. Since those times I have changed, in a subtle and unhurried way. I stopped caring about opinions of others, because I realized - the others would never care about me, and they are going to be thinking about my photograph, not even me personally, with the same indifference as I think about photographs of other people. So the news that my heroism was to remain hidden and unknown was not a big blow for me; the big blow was that I was going to be a hero.

Mityok and I took turns visiting the mission chief the next day after our arrival, right after we were outfitted with black uniforms like the ones in other military academies - only the shoulder patches were bright yellow, with mysterious letters "BKY"[33] on them. Mityok went first, and about an hour and a half later they sent for me.

When the tall oak doors swung open before me I was a little stunned by the degree to which the view unfolding before me copied a set of some war movie. There was a big table in the middle of the room, covered with a yellowish map and surrounded by several people in military uniform - the mission chief, three other generals who looked nothing like each other but at the same time all very much like a popular author and playwright Borovik, and two colonels, one short and stout, his face a shade of purple, the other - lean and thin-haired, resembling an aged sickly boy, wearing dark glasses and sitting in a wheelchair.

- The chief of Flight Control Center, colonel Halmuradov, - said the mission chief pointing at the fatso with the purple face.

He nodded.

- Morale officer for the special cosmonaut squadron colonel Urchagin[34].

The colonel in the wheelchair turned his face towards me, leaned forward a bit and took off his glasses, as if to study me closer. I shuddered involuntarily - he was blind, eyelids of one of his eyes fused together, between the lashes of the other one I could make out the glistening whitish mucus.

- You may call me Bamlag[35] Ivanovich, Omon, - he said in a high-pitched tenor. - I hope we're going to be good friends.

For some reason the mission chief did not introduce the generals, and they did not by their manner demonstrate that they even saw me. On the other hand, I thought I saw one of them at the final exam in the Zaraisk Academy.

- Cadet Krivomazov, - the mission chief introduced me. - Shall we begin now?

He turned to me, resting his hands on his stomach, and started talking.

- Omon, you probably read the newspapers, see movies and so on, and you know that Americans have landed several of their cosmonauts on the Moon, and even drove around there in a motorized conveyance. This would seem like an entirely peaceful endeavor, but that depends on how you look at it. Imagine if you will a common hard-working man from a small country, let's say in Central Africa...

The mission chief scrunched his face and imitated rolling his sleeves and wiping sweat off his brow.

- Then he sees that Americans landed on the Moon, while we... You get the picture?

- Yes sir, comrade lieutenant-general! - I answered.

- The principal goal of the space experiment for which you, Omon, are now beginning to be prepared is to demonstrate that in technology terms we roughly match the capabilities of the Western countries, and that we are also capable of sending missions to the Moon. To send there a piloted, returnable craft is beyond our means at this point. But there is another possibility - to launch an automated vehicle that we won't have to bring back.

The mission chief was bending over the relief map with protruding mountain ranges and minuscule crater holes. Right through the middle of it there was a bright-red line, like a fresh scratch from a nail.

- This is a section of the Lunar surface, - said the mission chief. - As you well know, Omon, our space science is mostly concerned with the dark side of the Moon, in contrast to the Americans, who prefer to land on the visible side. This long line is the Lenin Fault, discovered several years ago by our domestic satellite. It is a unique geological formation, and in that region we have recently dispatched a automated expedition to obtain samples of the Lunar soil. According to results of the preliminary analysis, there formed an opinion concerning the need for further exploration of the fault. You are probably aware that our space program is oriented chiefly towards the use of automatic devices. Let the Americans risk their own human lives; we only endanger mechanisms. And so there is now an idea of sending a special self-propelled vehicle, so called lunokhod[36], that will drive along the bottom of the fault and transmit valuable scientific data back to Earth.

Mission chief opened a drawer in the desk and began grasping inside while keeping his eyes on the table.

- The combined length of the fault is a hundred miles, but its width and depth are insignificant, measuring mere yards. We assume that the lunokhod will be able to travel along it for fifty miles - this is how long the batteries should last - and then place in its center a pennant with a radio beacon, which would transmit into space the words "PEACE", "LENIN" and "USSR", encoded in electromagnetic impulses.

His hand appeared  from under the table clutching a little red-colored car. He wound it up with a key and placed it at the beginning of the red line on the map. The car began crawling forward with a whir. It was just a child's toy: a body very much resembling a tin can, sitting on top of eight small black wheels, with "CCCP" painted on its side and two bulges in front that looked like eyes. Everyone stiffly followed its progress, even colonel Urchagin was turning his head in sync with the others. The car reached the end of the table and fell over.

- Something like that, - the mission chief said contemplatively and shot me a glance.

- Permission to address the senior officer! - I heard myself saying.

- Fire away.

- But the lunokhod is automated, comrade lieutenant-general!

- Absolutely.

- So what do you need me for?

The mission chief lowered his head and sighed.

- Bamlag, - he said, - your turn.

The electric motor of the wheelchair whirred softly, and colonel Urchagin drove out from beside the table.

- Let's go for a walk, - he said, approaching me and grabbing my sleeve.

I turned quizzically to mission chief. He nodded. I followed Urchagin into the corridor and we started along it - I was walking and he was driving beside me, controlling the speed with a lever crowned with a homemade little pink plastic ball, containing a figured red rose inside. Several times Urchagin would open his mouth, attempting to say something, but he shut it again every time, I started thinking that he probably does not know where to start, and then he grabbed my wrist in a very precise movement with his slightly damp narrow hand.

- Listen to me closely, Omon, and don't interrupt, - he said intimately, as if we had just finished singing a song together by a campfire. - I am going to begin from a distance. You see, the fate of mankind consists to a very large extent of things that are convoluted, seemingly absurd or unnecessarily bitter. You have to be able to see very clearly, very distinctly, to keep yourself from making mistakes. History is never the way they write in the textbooks. There is dialectics in the fact that Marx's teachings, directed towards a prosperous country, took hold in the most backward one instead. We communists just did not have time to formally prove the validity of our ideas - too much effort spent on the war, too long turned out to be the struggle with the remnants of the past and the internal enemies of the state. We could not defeat the West technologically. But the struggle of ideas is the field where you cannot take a rest for even a split second. It is a paradox, and it is again dialectics, that we are aiding truth with deception, because Marxism is bringing the all-conquering truth with it, while that for which you are going to give your life - formally represents a deception. But the more deliberately...

I felt cold in the pit of my stomach and reflectively tried to snatch my wrist away, but colonel Urchagin's hand seemed to have transformed into a small steel cuff.

- ... more deliberately you are going to accomplish your heroic feat, the greater degree of truth it will actually attain, the greater justification your short but beautiful life will acquire!

- Give my life? What feat? - I asked in a croaking voice.

- The very same, - replied the colonel very-very softly, almost as if he was frightened, - that more than a hundred of boys just like you and your friend have already accomplished.

He fell silent, and after a while continued in the normal tone.

- Have you heard that our space program relies on the use of automatic devices?

- I have.

- Well, right now we're going to go to Room 329, so you can find out what our automatic space devices look like.

7.

- Comrade colonel...

- Comrade co-olonel! - he shot back mockingly. - They asked you in the Zaraisk Academy quite clearly if you were ready to give your life, didn't they? You remember what you answered, huh?

I was sitting on a metal chair that was fastened to the floor in the center of the room, my arms were strapped to the armrests, my feet - to the chair's legs. The heavy drapes on the windows were drawn shut; there was a telephone without a dial standing on a small desk in the corner. Colonel Urchagin was sitting across from me in his wheelchair, smiling and joking as he talked, but I could sense that he was dead serious.

- Comrade colonel, please understand, I am just a regular guy... You seem to be mistaking me for someone else... And I am absolutely not the one who...

Urchagin's wheelchair whirred, he moved from his place, drove up to me very closely and stopped.

- Now wait, Omon, - he said. - Wait just a moment. This is where you go wrong. You think our soil is drenched in what kind of blood? Non-regular? Some special blood? From some uncommon people?

He stretched his hand towards me, felt my face and then struck with his dried-out fist against my lips - not hard, but enough for me to get a taste of blood in my mouth.

- It is drenched in this exact blood. From normal, regular guys, like you are.

He patted me on my neck.

- Don't get angry, - he said, - I am now like a second father to you. If need be, I can even punish you with a belt.

- Bamlag Ivanovich, I don't feel I'm ready to be a hero, - I said,  licking the blood off. - I mean, I feel I am not ready... I think I'm better off returning to Zaraisk than this...

Urchagin bent over towards me and started talking softly and gently, stroking my neck:

- You silly boy, Ommie. Just understand, my dear, that this is precisely the essence of heroism, that the hero is always someone who is not ready for it, because heroism is a thing which is impossible to prepare for. You can, of course, be trained to run to the firing slot very quickly, you can get accustomed to throwing yourself onto it, we are teaching all that stuff, but the spiritual act of heroism cannot be learned, you can only accomplish it. And the more you wanted to live before it, the better for heroism. Heroism, even invisible, is essential for the nation - it nourishes that principal force which...

Suddenly a loud screech reached our ears. A black shadow of a large bird flying very close to the window darted by the drapes, and the colonel fell silent. He contemplated something for a minute in his wheelchair, then switched on the motor and rolled out into the corridor. The door slammed shut behind him, then opened again after a minute or two, and a straw-haired Air Force lieutenant with a length of a rubber hose in his hands entered the room. His faced looked familiar, but I couldn't quite place it.

- Remember me? - he asked.

I shook my head. He approached the table and sat on top of it, his feet in shiny black boots hanging down; one look at them was enough for me to recall where I have seen him - it was that lieutenant from Zaraisk Academy who wheeled our cots onto the square. I even thought of his last name.

- Lan... Lan...

- Landratov, - he said, flexing the hose. - They sent me here to have a talk with you. Urchagin did. What are you, nuts? Do you really want to go back to the Maresyev's?

- It's not that I particularly want to go back, - I said, - but I sure don't want to go to the Moon. To be a hero.

Landratov chuckled and slapped his hands against his stomach and thighs[37].

- That's rich. Listen to him - he doesn't want to. And you think maybe they're going to leave you alone now? Let you go? Or return you to the Academy? And even if they did return you - do you have any idea how it feels to get up from the bed and take your first steps on crutches? Or the way you feel when there's a rain coming?

- No, I don't, - I said.

- Or maybe you expect that when you legs heal it's going to be peaches and cream? Last year we court-marshaled two guys for treason. Starting with the fourth year, we have the simulator training - know what that is?

- No.

- Well, in short it is very much like the real thing, you sit as if in the cockpit, got all your controls, pedals, but you look at a monitor screen. So these two are conducting the exercise, and instead of practicing immelman turns they just fucking take off to the west at extreme low altitude. And no response to the hails. So then we pull them out of there and ask: what's with you, guys? What the hell were you thinking? And they just stand there. One did answer, though. Later. He said: "Just wanted, you know, to find out how it feels, you know. For just a moment..."

- So what happened to them afterwards?

Landratov slapped the hose hard against the table he was sitting on.

- What's the difference, - he said. - Main thing is - you can kinda really feel for them. You always hope that you will eventually start flying. So when they tell you the whole truth... Think about it: who needs you with your prosthetics? Besides, we only have a handful of planes in the country anyway, they fly along the border so Americans can snap pictures of them, and even those...

Landratov fell silent.

- "Even those" what?

- Never mind. Here's what I'm saying - you don't really believe that you are going to traverse the skies in a fighter jet after the Zaraisk Academy, do you? Best case - you'll end up in the dance ensemble at some Air Defense regional command center. But most likely you'll just dance your "Kalinka" in restaurants. A third of our guys drink themselves to death, another third, the ones for whom the operation goes badly, simply commit suicide. How do you feel about suicide, by the way?

- I don't, - I said. - Never thought about it.

- I did. Especially in the second year. Especially one time when they were showing Wimbledon on the TV, and I was on guard duty at the clubhouse, with the crutches and all. That got me really depressed. And then I got better, you know. You see, you have to decide something here for yourself, then it all becomes easier. So be careful, when you get those thoughts you just don't give in to them. Think instead about all the cool stuff you'll see if you really haul your butt to the Moon. These motherfuckers aren't letting you out alive anyway. Get with the program, OK?

- You don't like them very much, do you?

- What's there to like? They won't say a word of truth ever. Which reminds me: when you talk to the mission chief, never mention anything about death or even that you're going to the Moon. You are to talk exclusively about automatics, understood? Otherwise we'll be having another talk in this room. I have my orders, you know.

Landratov waved the hose in the air, took a pack of "Polyot"[38] from his pocket and lit up.

- That friend of yours, he agreed right away, - he said.

When I finally got out into the open air my head was spinning slightly. The inner patio, isolated from the city by the enormous brownish-gray square hulk of the building, resembled very much a piece of a suburban subdivision, cut out in the exact form of the yard and transferred here intact: it had the crooked wooden gazebo with peeling paint, a gymnastics bar welded from steel pipes that now supported a green rug, apparently someone was beating the dust out of it, left it hanging and forgot about it; there were rows of vegetables in the ground, a chicken coop, a training circuit, a couple of ping-pong tables and several tires dug in halfway and arranged in a circle, evoking images of Stonehenge in my head. Mityok was sitting on the bench near the exit, I came closer, sat beside him, stretched my legs and looked down at the black britches of my uniform - after my meeting with Landratov I couldn't chase away the feeling that those weren't my legs inside them.

- It cannot all be true, can it? - asked Mityok quietly.

I shrugged. I did not know what exactly he was talking about.

- OK, about the aviation I can believe, - he said. - But nuclear weapons... I suppose you could make two million political prisoners jump at the same time in '47. But we don't have them anymore, and nuclear tests - they're like every month...

The door that I just came out of opened and colonel Urchagin's wheelchair rolled out into the yard, he braked and traced the yard several times over with his ear. I understood that he was looking for us, to add something to the things he already said, but Mityok fell silent, and Urchagin apparently decided not to bother us. The electric motor started whirring again and the wheelchair took off towards the far section of the building; passing in front of us, Urchagin turned his head with a smile and seemed to look into our souls with the kind hollows of his eyes.

8.

I assume most of the inhabitants of Moscow know full well what is beneath their feet during the time they spend in endless lines of the "Child's World" or pass through the "Dzerzhinskaya"[39] station, so I'm not going to waste my time here[40]. Suffice it to say that the mock-up of our rocket was made to scale, and there was enough space left to put another one next to it. Interestingly enough, the elevator was really ancient, pre-war, and was descending so slowly that one had time to read a couple of pages from a book.

The mock-up was thrown together quite roughly, in places the lumber showed through, but the workstations for the crew were exact replicas of the real ones. All of that was designed for practical exercises, which Mityok and I weren't supposed to begin for some time. In spite of that, we were transferred and assigned quarters deep below, in an expansive room with two pictures on the wall depicting windows opening to the panorama of Moscow being built. There were seven cots inside, so we figured we were going to get company soon. The dorm was separated from the training facility where the model of the rocket was located by a three minute walk through a corridor, and a weird thing happened to the elevator: where it was very slowly descending just recently, it now turned out to have been ascending, just as slowly.

But we weren't going up very often, and the best part of our free time was spent inside the training hall. Colonel Halmuradov was teaching the course in basic theory of rocket flight, using the mock-up for clarifications. While we were studying the hardware the rocket was just a learning aid, but come evening the floodlights were turned off, and by the dim glow of the wall fixtures the mock-up would turn into something wondrous and long-forgotten for a few moments, sending to Mityok and me the last salute from the childhood.

We were first. Other guys who formed our crew gradually appeared later on. Syoma Anikin was the first to arrive, a short sturdy fellow from Ryazan region; he was enlisted in the Navy before. He looked great in the black cadet uniform which made Mityok look like a clothes hanger. Syoma was very quiet and composed and spent all his time practicing, a habit we all would be better off picking up, even though his task was the simplest and least romantic. He was our first stage, and the young life of his (as Urchagin would say with his penchant for transposing words in a sentence to underscore the gravity of the moment) was designed to be cut short after four minutes of flight. The success of the entire mission depended on the preciseness of his actions, and were he to make even a slightest mistake we would all meet a swift and pointless demise. He seemed to take it very close to heart, so he was practicing even when left alone in the dorm, trying to make his movements completely automatic. He would squat, close his eyes and start moving his lips - counting to two hundred and forty, - then turn counterclockwise, pausing every forty five degrees of the arc and performing elaborate manipulations with both his hands. Even though I knew that in his mind he was undoing the latches which fastened the first stage to the second, every time it looked like a fight scene from a Hong Kong blockbuster to me. After completing this complex job eight times, he would fall on his back and kick up hard with both legs, pushing the invisible second stage away.

Ivan Grechka was our second stage, he came a couple of months after Syoma. He was a blond blue-eyed Ukrainian, taken here from the third year of the Zaraisk Academy, so he still was not too sure on his feet. But he possessed a certain inner clarity, a perpetual smile directed to the outside world, which endeared him to everyone he met. He and Syoma became very close friends. They would needle each other jokingly and compete for the fastest time and cleanest separation of their respective stages. Syoma was, of course, much quicker, but then Ivan only needed to undo four latches, so from time to time he did come ahead.

Our third stage - Otto Pluzis - was a rose-cheeked introspective Baltic[41] who, as far as I can remember, never joined Syoma and Ivan in their practice sessions in the dorm; it seemed that the only thing he ever did was crossword puzzles in the "Red Warrior" magazine while lying on his cot (he would always cross his legs in shiny boots on the gleaming nickel-plated bedframe). But seeing the way he disposed with his portion of latches on the mock-up it became crystal clear that if any of the systems in our rocket were reliable at all, the third stage separation was it. Otto was a little on the weird side - he loved to tell stupid stories after "lights out", like those kids scare each other with in camps and on sleepovers[42].

- So this one time this mission is going to the Moon, - he would say in the darkness. - They fly like really long time. So they're almost there. And then the hatch opens and all these people in white scrubs come in. So these cosmonauts are, like, "We're flying to the Moon!". And  the scrubs go: "Sure, sure you are. Just don't get so excited. We'll have a shot of this really nice medicine now..."

Or something like this:

- So these people are going to Mars. And they're almost there, so they look out the window. Then they turn around and see this man, short and dressed all in red, and he's got this huge switchblade in his hand. "So, guys, - he asks, - you want to go to Mars, don't you?"

Mityok and I finally were granted access to our hardware when the training of the guys from ballistics turned up a notch. Syoma Anikin was almost unaffected by the change - the altitude of his heroism was only three miles, so he would just put a cotton-filled overcoat on top of his uniform. It was harder for Ivan, since the moment for his march into eternity came up at thirty miles, it was cold up there and the air was pretty thinned out, so he had to train in a fur coat, fur boots and oxygen mask which made his entry into the narrow porthole on the mock-up really tight. Otto, surprisingly, got it easier - they were supposed to outfit him with a special spacesuit with electric heating system fashioned by the "Red Hill" factory seamstresses from several American high-altitude flight suits we took in Vietnam, but the suit was not ready yet, so he was training in scuba gear; I still have before my eyes an image of his reddened, sweaty poke-marked face behind the glass mask rising over the edge of the porthole. Upon emerging he would say something that sounded like "Zweigs!" or "Tsveiks!"[43].

The general theory of the space automation was taught in turns by mission chief and colonel Urchagin.

Mission chief's name was Pcadzer Vladilenovich Pidorenko. He was born in a small Ukrainian village of Pidorenka, and so the name was inflected on the first "o". His father worked in CheKa as well, and gave his son a name constructed from the first letters of "Party Committee for Agriculture of Dzerzhinsky region"; besides, the names "Pcadzer" and "Vladilen"[44] combined to give exactly fifteen letters - corresponding to the number of Soviet republics. But he couldn't stand being addressed by name anyway, so his subordinates linked to him through varied work-based relations either called him "comrade lieutenant-general" or, like Mityok and I, "comrade mission chief". He pronounced the word "automation" with such dreamy and pure intonation that the Lubyanka office to which we ascended to listen to the lectures resonated like a soundboard of a giant piano for a moment; however, even though the word itself popped in his speech quite often, he never conveyed any technical knowledge to us, relating instead stories from his life or reminiscing about the times he was conducting guerilla operations in Belarus during the war.

Urchagin never touched any technical subjects either; he would chuckle and shell sunflower seeds into his mouth[45], or tell us something humorous. He asked us, for example:

- How do you break farts in five parts?

When we told him we didn't know, he gave the answer himself:

- You got to fart into a glove.

And broke out in high-pitched giggles. I was astonished by the constant optimism of this man: blind, paraplegic, bound to a wheelchair - but still carrying out his duty while never failing to take enjoyment in his life. We had two morale officers in the Space Academy, who we called political instructors sometimes behind their backs - Urchagin and Burchagin, both alumni of the Korchagin Military-Political Academy, both looking very much like each other. They had only one electric-powered Japanese-made wheelchair among them, so while one of them was busy conducting the morale-boosting activities, the other one would lie quiet and motionless on a bed in a tiny room on the fifth floor - in uniform, with the blanket drawn up to the waist to obscure the bedpan from prying eyes. Sparse furnishings of the room, a special cardboard pattern for writing with narrow slits for lines, the invariable glass of strong tea on the desk, white blinds on the windows and a potted plant - all that moved me almost to tears, in those minutes I even stopped thinking that all communists are cunning, double-crossing calculating bastards.

Dima Matyushevich was the last to come on board, assigned to be in charge of the lunar module. He was extremely introverted and his hair was completely gray despite his young age. He always carried himself very independently; the only thing about him that I knew was that he served in ground forces. Upon seeing the posters with nighttime landscapes above Mityok's cot which he ripped out of the "Working Woman" magazine, Dima pinned up a piece of paper over his cot, with a picture of a tiny bird and large printed letters:

OVERHEAD

THE ALBATROSS

Dima's arrival coincided with introduction of a new learning subject. It was titled like that movie - "Strong In Spirit". This wasn't a subject in the normal sense of the word, even though it featured prominently in the curriculum. We got visited by people for whom heroism was in their job description - they told us about their lives simply, without any pathos, their words were plain as talk around the kitchen, and because of that the essence of heroism appeared to grow out of the mundane, from the little everyday things, from that gray cold air of ours.

Among all the strong in spirit I remembered one retired major best, Ivan Trofimovich Popadya[46]. Funny name. He was tall, a regular Russian warrior (his forefathers fought in the battle of Kalka River[47]), his face and neck all red, covered in whitish beads of scars, and with a patch over his left eye. He had a very unusual life story: he started out as a simple ranger in a state wildlife preserve, where Party and government bosses used to hunt, and his responsibility was to drive the animals - bears and wild boars - onto the shooters behind the trees. Then the disaster stroke. A mature male boar jumped the pennant line and mortally wounded with his tusks a member of government, who was hiding behind a birch. He died en route to the city, and the conference of the government officials decided to prohibit the top brass from hunting wild prey. But such necessity, of course, continued to arise - and so one time Popadya was called to the Party meeting at the preserve headquarters, they explained everything to him and said:

- Ivan! We cannot order you - and even if we could, we wouldn't, such is the nature of the offer. But you see, we really need this. Think about it. No one is going to force you.

Popadya thought long and hard, all through the night, and the next morning went back to the Party committee and told them he agreed.

- I never expected anything less from you, - said the local secretary.

Ivan Trofimovich was issued a bulletproof vest, metal helmet and a boar's skin, and thus began his new line of work - which could be justly called daily heroism. He was a little apprehensive the first couple of times, especially fearing for his exposed legs, but then he kind of got used to it; also the government members (who of course knew what the deal was) tried to aim for his sides, protected by the vest, under which Ivan Trofimovich always placed a little pillow for softness. Naturally, from time to time some enfeebled Central Committee veteran would miss, sending Ivan Trofimovich onto disability pay; he used the time to read a lot of books, including one that became his favorite - memoirs by Pokryshkin[48]. To give you an idea just how dangerous his job really was, comparable as it was to armed combat, his Party membership card that he carried in the internal sewn-in pocket had to be replaced every week because it would be riddled with bullet holes. In those days when he was seriously wounded other rangers would step in, his own son Marat among them, but Ivan Trofimovich was still considered to be the most experienced worker, so the most important cases would fall on him, and they even held him back if some insignificant regional committee was coming for a routine hunt (each time that happened Ivan Trofimovich took offense, just like Pokryshkin when denied a sortie with his own squadron). Ivan Trofimovich was cherished. In the meantime, he and his son studied the behavior and vocalizations of the wild inhabitants of the forest - bears, wolves, boars - and thus improved their skills.

It was already some time ago that the capital of our Motherland was visited by an American politician Kissinger. He was participating in a crucial round of negotiations on a nuclear arms reduction treaty - made all the more important by the fact that we never had any, but our adversaries were to never find out. Because of all that Kissinger was cared for at the highest state level, all branches of service were involved - for example, when it became known that the sort of women he likes most were voluptuous short brunettes, four of such exact swans floated in formation over the Swan Lake of the Bolshoi in front of his turtleshell-rimmed eyeglasses gleaming in the darkness of the government luxury box.

Negotiations are easier to conduct amidst a hunt, so they asked Kissinger what kind of prey he prefers. Apparently attempting a fine political joke he said that he'd like to bag a bear, and was quite surprised and frightened when the next morning he was indeed taken hunting. On their way there he was told that the round was closed on two bruins for him.

These were Ivan and Marat Popadya, communists, the best special rangers of the entire preserve. The guest felled Ivan Trofimovich with one well-aimed shot, as soon as he and Marat emerged from the forest on their hind legs growling; his carcass was hoisted by specially designed loops attached in the fur and dragged to the truck. But the American couldn't quite get at Marat, even though he was firing almost point-blank while Marat was deliberately moving as slow as he possibly could, squaring those broad shoulders of his against American's bullets. And suddenly the unexpected happened - the rifle of our guest from over the ocean misfired and he, even before anyone was able to understand what was going on, threw it into the snow bank and charged at Marat with just a knife. A real bear would have disposed of such a hunter in no time, but Marat remembered the grave responsibility he was entrusted with. He lifted his paws and roared, hoping to scare the American away, but instead Kissinger - whether he was drunk or very brave, who knows - ran closer and struck Marat in the stomach with the knife, the thin blade penetrated between the strips of the vest. Marat fell. All of this happened in full view of his father, lying just a few yards away, Marat was dragged to him and Ivan Trofimovich realized that his son was still alive - he was moaning softly. The blood trail he was leaving behind on the snow was not a special fluid from a hidden container - it was real.

- Hold on, son! - Ivan Trofimovich whispered, choking on tears, - hold on!

Kissinger was beyond himself with excitement. He suggested to the officials accompanying him that they should share a bottle there on the "mishki"[49], as he said, and then sign the agreement right away. They put the Employee Of The Month board taken off a nearby rangers' hut on top of Marat and Ivan Trofimovich, forming a makeshift table, with their own photographs among others right there on the board. All Ivan Trofimovich could see over the next hour was the multitude of feet shuffling about, all he could hear was drunken foreign talk and quick babbling of the translator; the Americans dancing on the table almost crushed him. When the darkness fell and the horde has left, the agreement was signed and Marat was dead. A thin thread of blood was dripping from his muzzle onto the bluish evening snow, and on his fur a golden Hero's star[50] glistened in the moonlight, put there by the chief ranger. All through the night the father lied across his dead son crying, not ashamed of his tears.

Suddenly the words "There is always a place for heroism in our lives" that looked at me every morning from the wall of the training facility, after having lost their meaning and becoming stale long ago, filled with fresh significance for me. It was not some romantic gibberish anymore, but instead a precise and sober statement of the fact that our Soviet life is not the instance of reality but instead a kind of a forechamber to it. I don't know if that was clear or not. Take America, for example. Nowhere between the sparkling shop window and a Plymouth parked at the curb is there a place for heroism, and there never was, if you don't count the moments when a Soviet intelligence agent passed by, of course. And here, you can found yourself standing by an exact same window, on exact same curb - but the times around you are going to be either post-war or pre-war, and right there the door leading to heroism is going to crack open for you, even though it is actually going to happen on the inside.

- You've got it, - said Urchagin when I confided my thought in him, - but be careful. The door to heroism does open from the inside, but you accomplish the actual feat on the outside. Don't let yourself slide into subjective idealism. Otherwise right away, in a blink of an eye, your path upward, so high and proud, shall have lost its meaning.

9.

It was May already, some of the peat bogs around Moscow were on fire and the sun, pale but hot nonetheless, was looking down from the smoggy sky. Urchagin gave me this book by a Japanese writer who was a kamikaze pilot in WWII, and I was amazed to no end by the similarities of the state of being he described to my own. Just like he did, I never took time to think about that which was waiting for me, lived only in the here and now, lost myself in books, forgot about everything when looking at the movie screen flashing with explosions (every Saturday night they showed military-historic films to us), was really upset about my not-too-high marks for training. The word "death" was always present in my life in a way of a reminder note stuck to the wall - I knew it was there in place, but I never looked at it long enough. I never discussed this topic with Mityok either, but when they told us that our equipment training is finally about to start we looked at each other and seemed to have felt the first breeze of the icy storm imminently gaining on us.

At the first sight the lunokhod looked like a large metal clothes hamper put on eight heavy wheels resembling those you find on streetcars. Its body featured loads of assorted protuberances, differently shaped antennae, robotic arms and other stuff - none of it functional; it was there just for the sake of TV cameras, but made a profound impression all the same. The roof was sporting diagonal serrated notches - this wasn't done on purpose, it's just that they used the sheetmetal for the subway station floor where it meets the escalators, and it's always like that there. Nevertheless, it made the machine appear even more mysterious.

Strange are the depth of the human psychology! First thing it needs is detail. I remember when I was young, I would often draw tanks and airplanes and show them to my friends. They always liked those pictures where there were lots of superfluous lines, so that I would even put more of them all over. So was the lunokhod - a convincingly complex and clever piece of machinery.

The lid swung away - it was hermetically sealed, with rubber gaskets and several layers of thermal isolation material. There was some space inside - approximately like in the turret of a tank, and fastened to the floor was a slightly modified frame from the "Sport" bicycle, complete with pedals and two gears, one of them welded carefully to the rearmost axle. The handlebars were your regular semi-racing "horns"; by means of a special transfer case they could be used to wiggle the front wheels slightly, but as they told us there should not be any need for that. The walls were equipped with shelves, but those were empty for now; the space between handlebars was occupied by a compass, and on the floor there was a tin box painted green - a transceiver with a phone. In front of the handlebars in the wall there were two tiny lenses, like the fisheyes they put into the doors; if one looked through them, he could see the edges of the front wheels and the pretend manipulator. A radio receiver hung in the back - just a common mass-market brick of red plastic, with a black volume control handle (the mission chief explained to us that in order to prevent the psychological separation from our country every Soviet spacecraft is designed to receive "Mayak"[51] programming). The large convex outside lenses were covered on top and sides by metal shielding, giving the front of the lunokhod an appearance of a face - or rather a muzzle, quite agreeable in fact, like the ones they draw on watermelons or appliances in children's comics.

When I installed myself inside for the first time and the lid clicked shut over me I thought that I would never be able to endure such cramped and uncomfortable surroundings. I had to dangle over the frame, distributing my weight between the hands clutching the bars, feet pushed against the pedals and the saddle which did not so much accept its share of weight as determine the posture my body was forced to assume. The cyclist leans in this fashion when developing higher speed - but then he has an opportunity to flex back which I did not have, since my head was already pressing against the lid as it was. However, truth be told, a couple of weeks after the training started I did get used to this and it turned out that there was quite enough space inside for one to forget for hours on end how little space there actually was.

The round "eyes" were located right in front of my face, but the lenses distorted the view to such an extent that it was utterly impossible to make sense of anything beyond the thin steel of the machine. On the other hand, the spot just in front of the wheels was enlarged and in sharp focus, as was the edge of one of the toothed antennae; everything else disappeared in zigzags and patches, as if you were staring into a long dark corridor through the glass of a gas mask.

The machine was really heavy, and it was hard to cause it to move - so that I even started doubting that I would be able to conquer the entire fifty miles of the lunar surface in it. After just one spin around the yard I got winded, my back was aching, the shoulders hurt too.

Now every other day, taking turns with Mityok, I took the elevator to the surface, stripped down to my underwear, climbed into the lunokhod and started my regimen of turning circles in the yard to strengthen my leg muscles, frightening the chickens and even squashing them from time to time - I was not doing it intentionally, of course, but I found it absolutely unrealistic to distinguish a wayward chicken from a piece of an old newspaper or, for example, some laundry stripped from the line by a wind gust, and in addition I could never put on the brakes in time to avoid them. At first colonel Urchagin would drive in his wheelchair in front of me, showing me the way - he looked like a greenish-gray blob through the lenses, - but then I got the knack for it and could go around the entire yard with my eyes closed - one only had to dial an exact turn into the handlebars and machine described a sweeping circle all by itself, returning to the starting point of the journey. I didn't even have to peer through the "eyes" most of the time; I just worked my muscles and mulled my own thoughts. Sometimes I would remember my childhood, sometimes - imagine how the rapidly approaching moment of my departure into eternity was going to feel like. From time to time I also tried to wrap up some of the older conundrums which started surfacing again in my consciousness. For example, I would start thinking - who exactly am I?

It has to be said that this question bothered me since I was a kid, usually early in the morning when I woke up and found myself staring at the ceiling. Afterwards, when I grew up a little, I began asking it at school, but all I got in response was that consciousness is a property of highly organized matter consistent with Lenin's theory of reflection. I couldn't quite catch the meaning of those words, so I kept wondering - how come I could see? And who is that "I" that is seeing? And what does it actually mean - to see? Am I seeing something on the outside or just looking within myself? And what is "outside" or "within"? I often felt right on the threshold of solution, but when I tried to make the last step towards it I would suddenly lose the "I" which was just now standing on that threshold.

When my aunt went to work she often asked our neighbor to look after me, an old woman whom I also pestered with all those questions, taking delight in seeing her struggle with the answers.

- You, Ommie boy, have a soul inside you, - she'd say, - it peers out from you through your eyes, and it lives in your body, like your hamster lives in the pot. This soul is a part of God, who created us all. So you are this soul.

- Why would God have me sit in this pot? - I asked.

- I don't know, - said the old woman.

- Where does he sit himself?

- Everywhere, - the old woman answered, showing with her hands.

- So I am also God?

- No, - she'd say. - A man is not God. But he is divinely inspired.

- Is the Soviet Man also divinely inspired? - I asked, having trouble with the unfamiliar words.

- Of course, - said the old woman.

- Are there many gods? - I asked.

- No. He is one.

- Then why does the dictionary say there are many? - I asked pointing at the Atheist's Encyclopedia on the aunt's bookshelf.

- I don't know.

- Which one is better?

But the woman answered again:

- I don't know.

And then I asked:

- Can I choose for myself?

- Go ahead, Ommie boy, - the old woman laughed, and so I buried myself in the dictionary, where they had stacks of different gods. I particularly liked Ra, the god in whom ancient Egyptians put their trust many millennia ago - I liked him because he had a hawk's head, and pilots, cosmonauts and other heroes in general were often called "Motherland's hawks" on the radio. So I decided that if I am indeed inspired by a god, let this be the one. I remember I took a large notebook and scribbled this note in it, taken from the dictionary:

"During the day Ra traverses the Celestial Nile in the Manjet-boat, the Barque of Millions of Years, shining light on the world, in the evening he transfers to the Mesektet-boat, the Barque of Night, and descends to the underworld where he travels the Nether Nile fighting off forces of darkness, and in the morning he appears on the horizon again."

The ancient people couldn't have known that the Earth was in fact rotating around the Sun, it said in the dictionary, and this is why they created this romantic myth.

Right under the article's text in the dictionary there was an ancient Egyptian picture showing Ra's transfer from one barque to the other; it depicted two identical boats side-by-side in which two girls were standing, one of them passing to the other a hoop with a hawk sitting inside - that was Ra. Most of all I liked that the boats, in addition to a lot of other stuff in them, contained what unmistakably was four Khrushchev-era six-story housing projects.

Since then, even though I continued to respond to the name "Omon", I would always call myself "Ra", and that was the name of the main character in my private adventures that I experienced before falling asleep, with my face turned to the wall and eyes closed - until the time, that is, when my dreams have undergone the usual age-related transformation.

I wonder if anyone seeing the photo of the lunokhod in the paper would be visited by a thought that inside the steel box, whose existence is justified by its task to crawl fifty miles on the Moon and fall forever motionless, there is actually a person peering out through its two glass lenses? On the other hand, what's the difference. Even if someone does get an inkling, they still would never guess that this person was in fact I, Omon Ra, the true hawk of our Motherland, as the mission chief said once embracing me by the shoulders at the window and pointing with his finger to the glowing thundercloud in the sky.

10.

Another subject that appeared in our curriculum - "General Theory of the Moon" - was considered optional for everyone except Mityok and me. The lectures were conducted by the doctor of philosophy (Ret.) Ivan Evseyevich Kondratiev. For some reason I did not hit it off with him, even though there was no clear rationale for my dislike; his lectures were, as a matter of fact, quite interesting. I remember that the first meeting with us he started in a very unusual fashion - he read poems about the Moon to us from scraps of paper for at least half an hour, becoming so touched himself at the end that he had to wipe his glasses. I was still keeping notes at the time, and this lecture left behind a nonsensical pile of quotational debris: "And like a golden drop of honey The Moon is twinkling sweet and high... Not long did moon's vain hopes delude us, Its dreams of love and prideful fame... The Moon! how full of sense and beauty Is that one sound for Russian heart!.. But in this world the other regions, By moon tormentedly beset... And in the sky, resigned to everything,The disk of moon in shallow grin... The flow of thought he was directing, and subjugated thus the Moon... This uneasy and watery moonn