MiG Pilot

by John Barron

  The witch is telling the truth. There is nothing she can do. All right, I will find protein for myself.

  The hunt for protein led Belenko into the forest beyond the river that curved along the eastern edge of Rubtsovsk. They may have exaggerated, but old men claimed that the Aley River before the war was so clean you could see plentiful schools of big fish swimming five or six feet below the surface and catch them almost effortlessly. But around the city, continuous pollution from chemicals and factory wastes had turned the river into an open sewer, and the despoilment had eaten into the forest, shriveling flora and leaving a belt of scrubland.

  About a thousand yards past the scrubland, Viktor entered heavy underbrush and, after pushing on for another half mile or so, came into a dense primeval forest colored and perfumed by wild flowers. He felt like Fabien, the doomed pilot in Saint-Exupery’s Night Flight, who, lost and buffeted in a South American storm, suddenly was lifted out of the blackness of the clouds into tranquil heavens lit by stars. Uncontaminated, uninhabited, silent, and serene, the endless forest imbued Viktor with the same sense of space and freedom he was sure awaited him in the sky. And after school recessed for the summer, he virtually lived in the forest.

  With a slingshot he killed birds — mostly sparrows, crows, and quail — that abounded in the forest and roasted them on a spit. He learned to detect birds’ nests which often yielded eggs. And he gathered wild blackberries, strawberries, cranberries, and tart little green apples. Some days he came alone and, after gorging himself until he could eat no more, settled in a patch of light and read until darkness. More often he invited friends, most of whom were veritable waifs like him, and just as hungry. They constructed a log lean-to, and from this base ranged out in all directions to hunt and explore; their explorations were rewarded by discovery of a clear stream populated by plump trout.

  Between May and September Viktor gained thirteen pounds, and with the resumption of school, he looked forward to presenting himself to the librarian. He expected that she would acclaim him for his growth just as she did for his reading. But she was not there. The new librarian would say only that she had retired and “moved away.” To where? None of the other teachers knew, or if they did, they would not say. Why would she go away without saying good-bye to me? What happened to her? He never did find out.

  Viktor continued to pound the punching bag, to exercise and run, and by December he felt ready to stalk the four assailants who had jumped him the preceding February. He encountered one in the same park where they had beaten him. “I have come to pay you back,” he announced. “I am going to fight you. Are you ready?”

  The boy tried to shove him away, as if not deigning to take him seriously. With a short, quick left jab, Viktor hit him squarely in the face, and he himself was surprised by the force of the blow. It is working! He dazed the boy with a left to the jaw, then a right to the ribs. The teenager tried to fight back, but the blow to the ribs had hurt him. Viktor hit him in the jaw with another left and then, with a right, knocked him down. He got up, and Viktor promptly knocked him down once more, this time with a left hook. “Have you had enough?” Viktor shouted.

  “All right, let’s stop,” said the boy, who was breathing heavily on the ground. He slowly got to his feet, whereupon Viktor, without warning, hit him with all his might in the right eye and felled him a third time.

  “I did that so you will understand,” Viktor said. “The next time I will kill you.”

  He caught two of the other three and battered them just as badly. His inability to find the fourth did not matter. He had avenged himself, and the fights, the third of which was witnessed by fifty to sixty students after school, established his reputation as someone who had best be left alone.

  It also gained him an invitation to an adolescent party on New Year’s Eve, 1958. Everyone was gulping homemade vodka, which smelled like a combination of kerosene and acetone. Although Viktor had never drunk alcohol before, he joined in, partially out of curiosity, partially because he thought drinking was expected of him. After about an hour he staggered outside, unnoticed, and collapsed in the snow. He awakened caked in his own vomit. His head throbbed with both pain and fright born of the realization that, had he lain there another couple of hours, he surely would have frozen to death. In his sickness and disgust he made a vow: Never will I do this to myself again. Never will alcohol get a hold on me.

  Later he came to enjoy alcohol, particularly wine and beer. But he drank it in circumstances and amounts of his own choosing. The ability to control alcohol, or abstain from it entirely, gave him an advantage over many of his peers at each successive stage in his life, if only by granting him more time and energy than they had for productive pursuits.

  On a wintry Sunday afternoon a light aircraft crashed near the truck factory. The wreckage was still smoldering and ambulance attendants were taking away the body of the pilot, wrapped in a sheet, when Viktor arrived. The scene transfixed him, and he stayed long after everyone else had gone. Like a magnet, the wreckage kept drawing him back day after day, and he contemplated it by the hour.

  Why did he die? Why did I not die in the fire when the mine exploded? Is there a God who decides who will die and when? They say that God is only the product of superstition and that the whole world happened by chance. Is that so? Do the trees and berries grow, do the cockroaches scoot, does the snow fall, do we breathe and think — all because of chance? If so, what caused chance in the first place?

  No, there must be some Being, some purpose in life higher than man. But I do not understand. Maybe that is the purpose in life — to try to understand. The pilot must have tried in the sky. What he must have seen! Someday I will take his place and see for myself. Some way I will give my life meaning. I would rather that my life be like a candle that burns brightly and beautifully, if only briefly, than live a long life without meaning.

  This embryonic ethos foreordained Viktor to conflict. He wanted to find meaning, to dedicate himself to some higher purpose, to be all the Party asked. Yet he could no more give himself unquestioningly to the Party on the basis of its pronouncements than he could give himself to his grandmother’s God on the basis of her chanted litanies. He had to see and comprehend for himself. As he searched and tried to understand, his reasoning exposed troublesome contradictions between what he saw and what he was told.

  His inner conflict probably had begun with the announcement in school that First Party Secretary Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev had delivered a momentous and courageous address to the Twentieth Party Congress. The political instructor who gravely reported the essence of the speech suddenly turned Viktor’s basic concept of contemporary Soviet history upside down. Stalin, the father of the Soviet people, the modern Lenin, Stalin, whose benign countenance still looked at him from the first page of each of his textbooks, now was revealed to have been a depraved monster. Everything he had heard and read about Stalin throughout his life was a lie. For the leader of the Party himself — and who could know better? — had shown that Stalin had been a tyrant who had imprisoned and inflicted death upon countless innocent people, including loyal Party members and great generals. Far from having won the war, Stalin had been a megalomaniac who had very nearly lost the war.

  The revelations so overwhelmed and deadened the mind that for a while he did not think about their implications. But as the teachers elaborated upon the Khrushchev speech and rewrote history, questions arose. It must be true; else they would not say it. But how could Stalin fool everybody for so long? Khrushchev worked with Stalin for years. Why did it take him so long to find out? Why did he take so long to tell us? If everything the Party said before was untrue, is it possible that what it is saying now is also untrue?

  Khrushchev returned from his 1959 visit to the United States persuaded that corn represented a panacea for Soviet agricultural problems. In Iowa he had stood in seas of green corn rising above his head and seen how the Americans supplied themselves with a superabundance of meat by feeding corn
to cattle and pigs. The American practice, he decreed, would be duplicated throughout the Soviet Union, and corn would be grown, as the radio declared, “from ocean to ocean.” Accordingly, corn was sown on huge tracts of heretofore-uncultivated land — uncultivated in some areas because soil or climate were such that nothing would grow in it.

  But the most stupid kolkhoznik knows you can’t grow corn in Siberia. I have seen it with my own eyes. It is not even a foot high, a joke. How can the Party allow something so ridiculous?

  The effort to amend the laws of nature by decree, combined with adverse weather, resulted not in a plethora of corn but rather in a dearth of all grain, which forced the slaughter of livestock. Serious shortages of meat, milk, butter, and even bread inevitably followed. Nevertheless, the radio continued to blare forth statistics demonstrating how under the visionary leadership of the gifted agronomist Khrushchev, Soviet agriculture was overcoming the errors of Stalin and producing ever-larger quantities of meat, milk, butter, bread, and other foodstuffs.

  If we have so much bread, why am I standing in line at four A.M., hoping I can buy some before it runs out? And milk! There has been no milk in all Rubtsovsk for five days and no meat for two weeks. Well, as they say, if you want milk, just take your pail to the radio. But why does the radio keep announcing something which anybody with eyes knows is not true?

  The population of Rubtsovsk included an abnormally high percentage of former convicts because most inmates of the surrounding concentration camps were confined to the city for life upon completing their sentences. Many were irredeemable criminals habituated to assault, robbery, rape, and murder. Armed with knives or lead taped to the palms of their hands, they killed people for no more than the gold in their teeth and robbed men and women of the clothes off their backs in broad daylight. Innocent citizens lost their lives in theaters or on buses simply because criminals in card games sometimes used as their stakes a pledge to kill somebody, anybody.

  One Saturday night Viktor rode homeward from a skating rink on a bus with passengers so jammed together that it was hard to breathe deeply, and he had room to stand on only one foot. At a stop the front and back doors swung open, people poured out as if a dam had burst, and Belenko was swept outside with them. From within the bus he heard a heart-rending scream. “They have cut her up. Police! Ambulance!” Lying lifeless on a seat was a young woman, a large, wet crimson splotch on her thin pink coat. There were no public telephones on the streets, and calls for help had to be relayed by word of mouth or runners. The police arrived about an hour later. They could do nothing except haul away the body.

  Viktor examined the newspapers the next day. They did not mention the murder, as he was almost certain they would not, for crimes of violence in Rubtsovsk never were reported. They did report the rising crime rate in Chicago along with the rising production of Soviet industry and agriculture.

  Of course, I know there are many criminals in Chicago and everywhere else in capitalist countries. How could it be otherwise? They always are having one crisis on top of another. The people are exploited and poor and hungry and plagued by all the other ulcers of capitalism. We don’t need the newspaper to tell us that. We need to know what’s going on here.

  Why do we have so many criminals, so many people who don’t want to live openly and honestly? They say the criminals are the remnants of capitalism. But the Revolution was in 1917. That was nearly half a century ago. All these criminals grew up under communism, not capitalism. Why has our system brought them up so poorly?

  Having fractured his wrist in a soccer match, Viktor took a bus to the dispensary for treatment. Although his wrist hurt, he recognized that his condition did not constitute an emergency, and he thought nothing of waiting. Ahead of him in the line, though, was a middle-aged woman crying with pain that periodically became so acute she bent over double and screamed. Her apprehensive husband held her and assured her that a doctor would see her soon. Viktor had been there about an hour when a well-dressed man and a woman appeared. A nurse immediately ushered them past the line and into the doctor’s office. The husband of the sick woman shouted, “This is not just! Can’t you see? My wife needs help now!”

  “Shut up and wait your turn,” said the nurse.

  If we are all equal, if ours is a classless society, how can this happen? And why do some people get apartments right away, while everybody else waits years? And look at Khokhlov [son of a local Party secretary]. He’s a real murderer and robber; everybody knows that, and everybody is afraid of him. But every time he’s arrested, they let him go. Why does the Party pretend everybody is equal when everybody knows we are not?

  One of Viktor’s political instructors, the teacher of social philosophy, genuinely idolized Khrushchev as a visionary statesman whose earthy idiosyncrasies reflected his humanitarian nature and his origins as a man of the people. Khrushchev had freed the people of the benighting inequities bequeathed by the tyrannical Stalin, and by his multifaceted genius was leading the people in all directions toward a halcyon era of plenty. On the occasion of Khrushchev’s seventieth birthday the instructor read to the class the paeans published by Pravda. Everyone could be sure that despite advancing years, the Party leader retained his extraordinary mental acumen and robust physical vigor. We are lucky to have such a man as our leader.

  Some months later the same instructor, as if mentioning a minor modification in a Five-Year Plan, casually announced that Khrushchev had requested retirement “due to old age.” For a while nothing was said in school about the great Khrushchev or his successors. Then it began. Past appearances had been misleading. Fresh findings resulted from scientific review by the Party disclosed that Khrushchev actually was an ineffectual bumbler who had made a mess of the economy while dangerously relaxing the vigilance of the Motherland against the ubiquitous threats from the “Dark Forces of the West.” Under Brezhnev, the nation at last was blessed with wise and strong leadership.

  This is incredible! What can you believe? Why do they keep changing the truth? Why is what I see so different from what they say?

  Recoiling from the quackery of social studies, Viktor veered toward the sciences — mathematics, chemistry, physics, and especially biology. Here logic, order, and consistency prevailed. The laws of Euclid or Newton were not periodically repealed, and you did not have to take anybody’s word for anything. You could test and verify for yourself.

  He shifted his reading to popular science magazines and technical journals, to books and articles about biology and medicine, aviation and mechanics. At the time, Soviet students were required to study vocational as well as academic subjects, and those who excelled could participate in an extracurricular club the members of which build equipment and machinery. Viktor designed a radio-controlled tractor which was selected for a Moscow exhibition displaying technical achievements of students throughout the Soviet Union. As a prize, he received a two-week trip to the capital.

  The broad boulevards of Moscow, paved and lighted; subway trams speeding through tiled and muraled passages; theaters, restaurants, and museums; ornate old Russian architecture; department stores and markets selling fresh fruits, vegetables, and flowers; traffic and official black limousines — all represented wondrous new sights. Collectively they elated him while they inspired pride in his country and hopeful questions.

  Is not the Party right after all? Does not what I have seen prove that we are making progress? Will not all cities someday be like Moscow?

  The final morning he joined a long line of men and women waiting four abreast outside the Kremlin to view the perpetually refurbished body of Lenin. The Kremlin, with its thick red walls, stately spires, and turrets, connoted to him majesty and might, and upon finally reaching the bier, he felt himself in the presence of history and greatness. He wanted to linger, but a guard motioned him onward. Leaving reverently, he asked the guard where the tomb of Stalin was. The answer astonished him. They had evicted Stalin from the Lenin mausoleum. Why, they’ve thrown him away like a
dog!

  While telling his classmates back in Rubtsovsk about Moscow, Viktor heard disturbing news. The KGB had arrested the older brother of a friend for economic crimes. He remembered how admiring all had been the year before when the youth had bribed a Party functionary to secure employment in the meat-packing plant. There, as everybody knew, a clever person could wax rich by stealing meat for sale on the black market, and procurement of the job had seemed like a triumph of entrepreneurship. He will be imprisoned. He will be one of them in the trucks. He will be a zek.

  The specter shocked Viktor into recognition of a frightening pattern in the behavior of many of his peers. Some had taken to waylaying and robbing drunks outside factories in the evening of paydays. Others had stolen and disassembled cars and machinery, to sell the parts on the black market. A few, sent to reform school for little more than malicious mischief or habitual truancy, had emerged as trained gangsters, who were graduating from petty thievery to burglary and armed robbery.

  They are becoming real criminals. They never will be New Communist Men. Nothing is going to fix them. How did our communist society do this to them? I do not understand. But if it can make them that way, it could make me that way. That I will not allow. It is as Father said. I must make my own way. I must start now before it is too late.

  Always Viktor had received good marks in school without especially exerting himself. He attended to his homework dutifully but quickly so he could devote himself to his own pursuits. Frequently in class, particularly during political lectures, he read novels concealed behind textbooks. Now he resolved to strive during the remainder of school to earn the highest honors attainable, to obey all rules and laws, to try to mold himself into a New Communist Man. Through distinction, he would find his way out of Rubtsovsk and into the sky.

  Faithful to his vows, he disassociated himself from most of his friends, studied hard, and parroted the political polemics, even when he believed them absurd. As part of the final examinations in the spring of 1965, he artfully wrote three papers entitled “Progress of the Soviet System,” “Crisis of the Western World,” and “Principles of the New Communist Man.” They faithfully regurgitated the dogma of the day and were brightened by a few original flourishes of his own. The teacher, who read portions of “Progress of the Soviet System” aloud, commended his selection of the tank as the best exemplification of the supremacy of Soviet technology. Although Viktor achieved his goal in social philosophy, a perfect grade of five, he was not entirely proud because he suspected that not all he wrote was true.