MiG Pilot

by John Barron

  A letter in the autumn saddened both his aunt and his grandmother. His father was coming to take him to Siberia. The grandmother sewed a kind of knapsack for him, and they packed it with food, including some smoked meat, to which they never treated themselves. Through a thick December snowfall the women walked with him and his father to the rail station and held each other, then waved as the train pulled away. He never saw either again.

  Authorities in the Siberian city of Rubtsovsk had assured his father that the room in the communal apartment for which he had waited forty-two months would be available by December. It was not, and Viktor was sent to stay on a collective farm, or kolkhoz, to the south with relatives of his father’s friend, the factory manager. The family — father, mother, and four children — were crowded into one room, and his first evening Viktor stared in wide-eyed wonderment as a cow was led into the hut for the night so she would not freeze to death.

  Despite the scarcity of space, the family welcomed him as one of their own and, as had his aunt and grandmother, shared with him unstintingly. He soon recognized, however, that the kolkhozniks were far poorer than the miners of the Donbas. The collective allocated each family grain for bread on the basis of the number of workdays credited to the household, rather than according to the number of members. The ration for families with very young children or elderly relatives unable to work was thus short. The small salary paid the kolkhozniks barely enabled them to buy essential salt, soap, and kerosene. For purchase of shoes, clothing, and other necessities, they depended on proceeds from the sale of milk and produce grown on their tiny private plots, which they tended fervently and carefully. Throughout the winter their diet consisted of bread and milk for breakfast, boiled potatoes, sauerkraut, and bread for dinner and bread and milk for supper. After the cow stopped giving milk, they drank water.

  The winter of 1954 was especially severe in Siberia, so cold that frozen birds littered the ground, and in February the cow could not be allowed outside very long even in daytime. The children amused themselves around the wood-burning stove with games of their own design, and Viktor devised the most popular. The hut was inhabited by big reddish-brown cockroaches, which were accepted as legal residents of all peasant homes and hence not necessarily considered repellent. The intricacy of their bodily composition and functioning fascinated Viktor, and he studied them long and curiously. How did such complicates creatures come to be? Why are they here? What gives them life? Watching how quickly they skittered about, he conceived the idea of harnessing the cockroaches by attaching threads between them and toy carts carved from wood. After many failed attempts and mangled insects, he succeeded and began to stage races. The competition became such a source of mirth for all that sometimes after supper the father would say, “Well, Viktor, let us have a race.”

  The spring thaws awakened and changed the kolkhoz. The pure air turned pungent with the omnipresent stench of ordure, but radishes, cucumbers, and tomatoes appeared in the garden, and they tasted delicious. Viktor worked in the fields eleven to twelve hours a day alongside other children, women, and older men, in their fifties or sixties, who constituted most of the labor force. The few teenagers among them malingered and caviled, cursing their barren life in general and the paucity of meat in particular. Once Viktor heard an old woman snap at them: “During the war, we were glad to eat grass and acorns and mice and grasshoppers. You should be grateful that things are much better now.” It never occurred to him that the toil was onerous. He liked the outdoors, the physical exertion, and the discoveries of how soil, moisture, sun, and time transform seed into wheat. For a boy of seven it was a pleasant summer.

  His father retrieved him in September and in effect appointed him housekeeper of their room on the second floor of a frame apartment building housing employees of the Altai truck factory in Rubtsovsk. His duties included some shopping, preparing a cold supper, cleaning the room, keeping the coke fire burning, and hauling water twice daily from a well about 150 yards down the street. Straining with the pails of water, he remembered the kolkhoz and in a few days built a yoke that enabled him to carry two buckets simultaneously. After slipping on winter ice, he constructed a crude, yet serviceable sled to transport water and other cargo. He did not object to the chores any more than he had minded the work on the farm. Rather, from them he gained a sense of partnership and worth, and he prided himself in their accomplishment.

  His father went out often in the evening and on Sundays to visit women, and they talked mostly during supper or while playing chess (which, by unspoken agreement they quit after Viktor started winning easily). Only once did his father ever discuss his future with him. “You will find your own way in life. I have no friends or relatives in the Party who can help you. I cannot give you money to buy your way out of Rubtsovsk. If you wish a life different from mine, you can find the way only through education. The war took away my opportunity for an education. You still have a chance.”

  Viktor needed no encouragement. Schooling excited him from the outset and offered, so he thought, the opportunity to learn the answers to all questions about life. And it was through school that he sought an answer to the first question about Soviet life that ever seriously troubled him.

  In wartime desperation, the Russians had quickly transfigured Rubtsovsk from a placid market town into a raw, roaring industrial city by transferring factories threatened by the Germans in the west. The forced industrialization was effected mainly by prison labor, and a web of concentration camps developed around the city. Although many camps were closed after Stalin died, those around Rubtsovsk remained, and their inmates were utilized in industrial construction with something akin to wartime urgency. Barbed-wire fences, watchtowers, and lights were erected around construction sites, and shifts of prisoners, or zeks, as the Russians called them, were trucked in to keep the work going twenty-four hours a day.

  Viktor first sighted some zeks while leaning into a stinging wind on the way to school. They were shivering and huddled against one another for warmth inside wire cages on the back of trucks, guarded by Central Asians clad in heavy sheepskin coats and armed with submachine guns. The thin cloth coats, painted with white numerals; the canvas boots; the cloth caps partially covering their shaved heads — all were ragged.

  He had seen people in dirty, tattered clothes before. Never had he seen eyes so vacant. There was no expression; it was as if he were looking at men whose minds and souls had died while their bodies continued to breathe. The concept of political prisoners was unknown to him. Criminals were criminals, and he was sure that each of the gaunt trembling, hollow figures he saw must have done something terrible. Yet he cried out to himself, Kill them! Kill them or set them free! I would not treat a rat like that. I would rather die than be in a cage.

  His recurrent vision of the zeks subsequently caused him to wonder: Why are they so rejected? What made them that way? In tune, as schools taught him the verities of Marxism-Leninism, he felt he understood. Man, political instructors emphasized, is but the product of his social and economic environment. Capitalism, although a necessary stage in human evolution, created an inherently defective socioeconomic environment based on selfishness, greed, and exploitation of the many by the few. Given such a defective environment, defective human behavior was inevitable. The criminality, alcoholism, acquisitiveness, indolence, careerism, and other aberrant behavior that admittedly persisted in the Soviet Union to some limited extent were merely the malignant remnants of capitalism.

  Viktor still pitied the zeks but now understood them for what they were — unfortunate victims of the lingering influences of decaying capitalism. Although the past could not be altered, nor their plight remedied, the misery they personified eventually would end with the advent of True Communism.

  Shortly before Viktor’s tenth birthday his father married a co-worker, the widow of a friend killed in an assemblyline accident. They moved in with her, her mother, sixty-eight, son, six, and daughter, three. She owned a house, a real stucco
house consisting of three rooms and a kitchen, well built by her late husband and his relatives on a small parcel of land her parents had been permitted to keep. The outhouse was only a few paces away in the backyard, and the well less than a minute’s walk down the block.

  The stepmother was a plump, shapeless woman of thirty-five, slightly cross-eyed, and she wore her lusterless hair swept straight back into a tight little bun, a style that emphasized the plainness of her face. Formerly a teacher, she managed both her accounting job at the factory and the household well, for she was by nature efficient, industrious, and, Viktor thought, conniving. He disliked her instantly and, while treating her civilly, gave her no cause to be fond of him.

  Despite his father’s admonitions, he addressed her formally as Serafima Ivanovna, refusing ever to call her Mother or even Serafima. One Sunday their soup contained meat which he perpetually craved, but he said nothing when his eye caught her deftly ladling out larger portions of meat into the bowls of her own children. Always he had asked his father for spending money to buy a hockey stick, soccer ball, books, or whatever. Now his father required that he ask Serafima Ivanovna, and usually she declined, politely explaining that the family budget at the moment could not accommodate any frivolities.

  Looking for a pencil after school, he found some of her papers and records, studied them, and made a discovery. She was maintaining two bank accounts. Into one she put all of his father’s salary and part of her own for general family use; into the other she sequestered some of her salary for the separate benefit of her children. That evening Viktor confronted her with his findings, and during the shouting, abusive argument that ensued, their mutual animosities spilled out. In front of the family Viktor’s father took off his belt and flogged him furiously for three or four minutes until his own exasperations were spent. Maybe Viktor could have stopped it sooner, had he cried, but he did not.

  The next day he enlisted a schoolmate into a compact to run away, south to the sunshine and orchards of Tashkent. Eluding railway police, then an aged conductor, they slipped aboard a train just as it started to roll out of the Rubtsovsk station. The train, however, was headed north, and they got off at a station some fifty miles away. As they attempted to sneak onto a southbound train, police grabbed them by their collars, dragged them into the station, interrogated and beat them. Unable to verify their false identities, authorities interned them in a detention center for orphans and delinquents pending investigation. The second night they escaped into the countryside by scaling a barbed-wire fence and hid on a kolkhoz for a few days before venturing back to the railroad station. There the police again caught them, beat them, and dragged them back to the center. Some three weeks later Viktor’s father arrived to bring him home. He was calm. “I cannot stop you from running away. But if you do it again, they will put you in reform school. That is like a prison, and once you have been there, you will never be the same. Think about it; you must decide.”

  Father is happy with Serafima Ivanovna, and they are good for each other. I am a problem for them both. I do not belong with them. Yet I am forbidden to leave. I cannot change what is. So until I am older, I will stay away as much as I can. Then, on the first day I can, I will leave.

  The school maintained a superb library with a large collection of politically approved classics. The room was warm and quiet and it became a sanctuary into which Viktor retreated in his withdrawal from home. Pupils were not permitted to choose specific books; instead, the librarian selected for them after assessing their individual interests and capacities.

  Viktor wondered about the librarian because she was so different from others. Although elderly, she walked erectly and held her head high, as if looking for something in the distance, and her bearing made him think of royalty. He often saw her walking to or from school alone; he never saw her fraternizing with the other teachers or, for that matter, in the company of another adult. There were stories about her. It was said that her husband had been a zek and that many years ago she had come from Moscow, hoping to find him in the camps. Some even said that she herself had been a zek. Viktor never knew what the truth was. But whatever her past or motives, the librarian elected to invest heavily of herself in him.

  Having questioned him for a while, she said, “Well, tell me, young man, what interests you? History, geography, science, adventure… ?”

  “Adventure!” Viktor exclaimed.

  She handed him a copy of The Call of the Wild, which he brought back in the morning. “You disappoint me,” she said. “Why do you not want to read the book?”

  “But I have read it.”

  “Really? Please, then, recite to me that which you read.”

  His accurate and detailed account of the novel by Jack London evoked from her the slightest of smiles and a nod. “Let us see if you can do as well with these,” she said, handing him copies of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. “However, do not neglect your studies. You have time for many adventures.”

  Guided and stimulated by the librarian, Viktor became an omnivorous reader, each book she fed him intensifying his hunger for another. He developed the capability of reading any time, any place light allowed, his concentration unimpaired by conversation, noise, or disturbance around him. And he fell into what was to be a lifelong habit of almost reflexively starting to read whenever he found himself with idle tune, whether a few minutes or a few hours. The authors he read became his true parents, their characters his real teachers and, in some cases, his models. He saw in Spartacus, who had led Roman slaves in revolt, the strengths and virtues he desired in himself. To him, Spartacus was even more admirable than the forthcoming New Communist Man because his worth originated from within himself rather than from his external environment. Then the works of the pioneering French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery unveiled to him the brilliant vistas of flight, and the pilots who braved the storms and unknowns of the sky to discover and explore its beauties were his heroes.

  Discussing Saint-Exupery with the librarian, he said he longed to fly.

  “Why?”

  “I think to fly would be the greatest of adventures. The sky has no boundaries, no restrictions. There nothing is forbidden.”

  “You know, Viktor Ivanovich, great adventure can be found in poetry. Tell me, who is your favorite poet?”

  “Lermontov. Absolutely. Lermontov.” The great nineteenth-century Russian poet was a dashing officer frequently in official disfavor and sometimes in exile. Viktor admired him both for his adventurous personal life, which ended in a duel at age twenty-six, and for his art.

  “Here is a collection of his works you might enjoy.”

  Leafing through it, Viktor noted the lightest of little checkmarks penciled by a poem that began “An eagle cannot be caged….”

  Subconsciously or otherwise, Viktor tried to emulate the exploits of fictional characters, and in school he behaved like a Russian reincarnation of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Learning in physics class how to create short circuits, he put out the lights in the entire school on a dark whiter afternoon and forced dismissal of class for the rest of the day. In chemistry class he taught himself to make firecrackers with timing devices. He thus was able to keep a class popping with a succession of little surprise explosions while he was innocently far away. Once he stole a key, locked the social philosophy classroom from the inside, and jumped out a second-floor window, preventing the class from convening for three hours. He achieved perhaps his best coup by letting loose fifteen lizards in the Russian literature class. Girls shrieked and ran, and the equally hysterical female teacher took refuge from the beasts by jumping atop her desk. Manfully Viktor volunteered to save them all by rounding up the lizards, and the grateful teacher reported his gallantry and good citizenship to the school director.

  After a hockey game in a park in February 1958, four boys, considerably larger and three to four years older than Viktor, now eleven, surrounded him and demanded his money. Instinc
tively and irrationally he refused. Before taking his few kopecks, they beat him about the face, ribs, and kidneys with a brutality unnecessary to their purposes. He lay on the frozen snow for five or ten minutes before gathering strength to make his way home slowly to the censure of Serafima Ivanovna, who remarked about the disgrace of hooliganism.

  He tended to his wounds as best he knew how and stayed to himself for several days. He could conceal the pain in his sides but not the bloated discoloration of his face, and besides, he wanted to think. What would Spartacus do?

  The librarian evinced neither curiosity nor surprise when he asked if there were any books about boxing and physical culture. She came back with a book about each and a third book — about nutrition. Viktor filled a burlap bag with sawdust, hung it from the tree in the backyard, and began methodically, obsessively, to punch the bag according to the books. He ran through the streets, chinned himself on the tree, and, with loud grunts, did push-ups and pull-ups until Serafima Ivanovna admonished him to cease the racket. For once his father interceded in his behalf. “What he is doing is not so bad. Let him go his way.”

  Emboldened by the unexpected endorsement, Viktor asked Serafima Ivanovna if they could add more protein — meat, fish, eggs, cheese (he had never tasted cheese) — to their daily fare of bread, potatoes, and cabbage. According to the nutrition book, protein was essential to the strength and health of the body, especially growing bodies. “All you ask is expensive and hard to buy,” she replied. “We do the best we can; I cannot promise more.”