PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (17 page)

The elevator began the first stage of his ascent into space. Although the cabin rose no more quickly than an ordinary Moscow lift, he soon felt himself enter the rarefied, light-soaked regions of the sky. Beyond the passing red girders that supported the launch gantry, the cleared countryside spread out like a huge plate. It was hard to believe that there was even more to the world than this. At the top of the shaft, in the clean room adjacent to the open hatch of the Vostok capsule, more technicians awaited him, their faces luminous. He deposited his bouquets in a line of vases that had been left there for him. After some preliminary tests on his suit, he was helped into the spacecraft. Leads were hooked into the radio and telemetry jacks. This was followed by repeated radio checks with the Chief Designer, code-named Dawn. Yuri was code-named Cedar. The Chief Designer was the last person he saw as the hatch was shut. Music was piped in to relax him, the song he had heard the night before, “What Moves My Heart So.” All was quiet as the Chief Designer, now watching the rocket through a periscope inside the launch control bunker, announced by radio their passage through the checklist. He asked Yuri again
how he was feeling and how well did he hear him. Yuri said he was feeling fine, he heard him fine. The start key was put in position. The blow valves were opened and then the fuel valves. The cables to the Vostok dropped away. Yuri said he was ready. He reported hearing the valves working. At precisely seven minutes past the hour, the Chief Designer gave the order for ignition. “Let’s
go!”
Yuri cried. That too, would be repeated by each of the men and women who were to follow, another of our customs of departure.

Budyonnovsk

A woman in a small provincial town sits at a table in a sweltering kitchen, a bruise rising under her right eye. The woman is silent, the muscles in her face slack. Her hands are clasped on the table, which is bare save for a beige-and-brown telephone. She stares into the table. In another room children are watching a video paced by a strident, tumultuous sound track. The heat of the day smells like blood.

A man sits across from the woman. Sweat trickles along the side of his face. His shirt is drenched and he is keenly aware of its odor. When he lifts his arm, his skin pulls at the table, leaving a pale, glistening shadow. He repeatedly opens and closes his fist, amazed at this simple motor activity; then he conceives that this unpremeditated gesture may somehow be taken for remorse. He stops. Blood pounds in his temples, flickering his vision. And in fact he is touched by the first cold caress of remorse.

The telephone between them bleats twice. They pretend not to hear it. The man suspects some sort of trick. His remorse evaporates. The electrical impulse that induces the noise has been almost certainly generated by his wife’s mother. Every peal raises the temperature in
the kitchen another degree. Neither the man nor the woman makes a move, as if their argument is about who will answer the telephone. Anger clenches the man’s heart. The structure of time now seems constructed entirely from the knells of the telephone, and in the moments between them the world halts its rotation. With a quick, urgent gesture, the man grabs the receiver and brings it to his face.

“Yeah.”

There’s a brief silence at the other end of the line—no, it isn’t his mother-in-law, the silence and subsequent throat-clearing is masculine.

“This is Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.”

“You’ve dialed the wrong number,” the man says. “You want to speak to Basayev. The Chechens have crossed the border and shot up the town. They’re holding hundreds of hostages in the hospital. They’re demanding safe passage back to Chechnya. The hospital is five thirty-seven fifty-four; we’re five thirty-seven forty-five. People are always making this mistake. We get calls in the middle of the night—drug overdoses, heart attacks, traffic accidents. It’s a nuisance, sir.”

“No, Vasily Yegorevich, I haven’t made a mistake. I want to speak with you.”

The man doesn’t answer. He wishes for a cigarette and suddenly recalls another grievance: there are no goddamned cigarettes in the apartment.

“First, we must be calm,” Chernomyrdin says. His voice is gruff but sonorous, resonating reasonableness and dependability.

“I am calm.”

“Let’s resolve these matters peacefully, without resorting to violent measures.”

“Fine.”

“So, that’s agreed. Now, Vasily Yegorevich, I propose that we begin by discussing the situation in its entirety ...”

The
situation.
Vasya is overwhelmed by the enormity taken in by this single word. It’s like a massive cloud that has floated into the kitchen through the open window. No, it’s like a balloon expanding within the walls of the apartment, crushing against him, displacing the air. He pounds his fists against its sides. Choked with anger and frustration, he usually flees to the dusty, frozen, or muddy street alongside the market—no, not today, today bodies lie in the crimsoned gravel—where he passes the tables and kiosks, circles back, lingers, loiters, finds a friend or an acquaintance and, eventually, yes, a bottle comes unscrewed. And then back in the flat, in the permanently damp bed, there’s a moment in nearly every passage through the night in which the alcohol he’s consumed during the day has exited his system but the natural sleep-inducing chemicals in his blood have not yet sufficiently accumulated—and he wakes in the dark, desperate to reason, fight, or imagine his way out of this trap, this box, this grave, this
situation.

Start with the cigarettes. Vasya buys them, Ira smokes them, perhaps two packs in a single day, less the three or four she sullenly parts with at his demand. At times she’s
enshrouded in smoke, completely protected from the outside world, barely able to see it. She takes no pleasure in the cigarettes, smoking as mindlessly as she cooks, cleans, and talks. Two packs of Bond cost nearly as much as a liter of White Eagle. But she has somehow computed that a bottle is equal to a certain percentage of his weekly earnings and thus a measurable theft of food from their children’s mouths. Despite the softness of her logic
—whatever
the drink costs would be a percentage of his weekly earnings, and why isn’t the pack of cigarettes a percentage? and the children aren’t hungry anyway, just filthy—he knows that she’s right or close enough to right to trivialize his objections, which he cannot in any case articulate. And he usually buys her Russian-made Kazbeks, never Bond. But then, she herself has no weekly earnings from her so-called job in the paper factory, which has been closed for months.

Ira says that he’s lazy, and it’s true and it isn’t. Yes, Vasya perceives that he’s not making enough of an effort. But this is something in his character, against which he actively, furiously labors. He strains against his laziness like Gulliver straining against the ropes of the Lilliputians. But Ira never acknowledges this effort; she cannot appreciate that laziness is like a chronic illness, a climatic condition, a tidal wave. And at no time of the day does he feel more submerged than when, his head throbbing and his lungs bursting, he sees through sleep’s greenish murk the shimmer of morning light several stories above his head. Pedaling his arms and kicking wildly, he never reaches it.
Perhaps it isn’t the morning light to which he strives, but something infinitely better. He wakes to find himself beached on the shore of their ill-lit apartment, enveloped in the vapors of cigarettes and fried fish, the cries of quarreling children and the melodrama of the day’s first video.

He closes his eyes, shutting out his vision of the hours ahead. At this moment he yearns to make any sacrifice, suffer any hardship, and undertake any kind of selfabasement that would change his life. And then he waits, with dissolving faith, for the inspiration that will show him how.

If they had all their teeth, their grins would be predatory, but Yura, Borya, and two fellows Vasya doesn’t know are missing between them an entire mouth. As Vasya approaches, wary, his own smile flutters like the light of a cheap candle. Borya asks him to guess what’s gone. Vasya surveys the park, its crumbling concrete paths nearly obscured by the overgrown grass and shrubbery, its de-slatted benches, its sightless overhead lights. Well, Vasya says, the bottle’s here at least, give it over. Borya steps away, hauling it out of Vasya’s reach and revealing behind the men a squat gray pedestal. Embedded in the pedestal’s granite are two shards of metal in which Vasya perceives the vestiges of two sculpted boots. He stares at these, reminded of a cripple begging in the market this morning, a soldier who lost both feet to a land mine somewhere.

Lermontov’s been swiped, sold for scrap, Yura
announces, as proud as if he’s done it himself. The men laugh, but Vasya softly says, no, Lermontov’s over there, and shrugs toward a still-intact stone figure across the way. They admire the statue for several moments and turn back to the boots. Borya passes Vasya the bottle, its sides slick. Vasya pauses before he drinks. He says, this was Pechorin, remember? You know, from Lermontov’s book. The men nod and offer murmurs of congratulation for his literary knowledge. Vasya smiles at the compliments, but the recalled trivia has given him a proprietary interest in the statue and now a tremor of regret at its loss.

Coffins, say the bills of lading, but scores of Chechen fighters are concealed within the trucks. Arriving in Budyonnovsk, 140 kilometers across the border into Russia, they seize the local administration building in a blaze of gunfire and raise the Chechen flag. They set fire to houses and cars, spray bullets at passersby, and pull civilians out of buses and nearby offices and shops. Several hundred hostages are drenched in gasoline. Then they are marched several kilometers to the town hospital, while the Chechens continue their running gun battle with the security forces, who fire at terrorists and hostages with faint discrimination. Vasya watches it all on television; at one point, the sound of gunfire outside becomes so intrusive that he is forced to close the windows. President Yeltsin leaves Moscow to attend a G-7 meeting in Halifax.

For several days, the Chechens stand off the surrounding police and army units; and then the Interior
Ministry’s Alpha Task Force storms the hospital. In the four-hour assault, dozens of hostages and patients lose their lives as Alpha fires grenades and rockets into wards marked with white sheets. Alpha snipers pick off women and children. When a cease-fire is called, Chechen commander Shamil Basayev frees hundreds of hostages, who beg the security forces not to storm the hospital again. Inside the hospital, hostages volunteer to take up arms against the army and police. The fighters give blood for transfusions. After a second assault is repulsed with more loss of civilian life, friends and relatives of the hostages encircle the hospital to act as a buffer. The attention of the nation rests on the White House in Moscow, where Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin has taken charge. He is prepared to negotiate by telephone, on live TV.

Pictureless, the television cheers, its static the night’s only sound. Vasya, who has awakened from a moment’s doze jammed with a series of complicated, terrifying dreams, lifts his feet from the bed and finds the floor. The fibers of the coarse Ossetian rug, a wedding present, burn his soles. For more than a minute, he wonders whether he cares enough to investigate Ira’s absence. He finally stands and pads by the TV set, following the reach of its gray radiance into the hallway.

At the end of the corridor, in a kitchen suffused by the television’s electromagnetic remains, Ira stands by the sink, sponging herself. She maneuvers the foaming sponge in long, errant strokes, washing him out of her,
showing no more determination than when she cleans the breakfast dishes. There is a soft pop as the sponge seals and releases the crevice between her legs.

Vasya is shamed by their bodies, distended, welted, warted, and pimply. Neither of them is yet thirty years of age, but look ... Outside his cousin’s banya, she stands in the snow with her legs apart, the remnants of a perfectly aimed snowball caught in the space between her breasts. She laughs full-throatedly: at her wonder for being here, at the way the cold has tautened her skin, and also at his embarrassed, appraising stare ... She opens the door to their hotel room in Sochi and behind Vasya, his knuckles poised at the place where the door has been, pass two bearded, middle-aged men in suits. She jumps back as if burned, her tiny hands frantically searching for her sweet spots. As Vasya turns, the two men bow curtly and go on their way ... On a summer afternoon as hot as today’s, but in another decade, her sleeping body stretches across the sheets like a continent.

The market is closed every Monday. On this Monday, Vasya brings a folding table to Pushkina, the street that runs outside the market, and neatly stacks piles of dry goods upon it. At adjacent tables, his competitors sell identical goods at identical prices for the same 5 percent commission, which they receive from the same businessman, who comes around to collect their receipts at the end of the day. Before the arrival of the first customers, the sunbeams accumulate on Vasya’s face; he stands
there as a proprietor, his legs apart, his shoulders straight, and his hands clasped below his waist, rocking a little, unbalanced by anticipation. And then the customers come, picking through the Korean T-shirts, the Bangladeshi baseball caps, and the Indonesian jeans with a listlessness that suggests they have given up finding loose Krugerrands scattered among them. White Eagle and Red Lion ward off the heat and cold. Friends stop by, people he has known his entire life. They take a swallow and congratulate him for his participation in the market economy. This is the best day of the week, even if it profits him barely.

The plant’s main building shimmers in the gray distance, flocked by outbuildings so irregularly constructed and located, their purposes so abstruse, that they can never be totaled; men snort and spit in the dressing room under the pale blue eyes of a golden-braided, white-frocked Katya emblazoned on the panelled wall; each man claims his work place, adjusting his chair and placing his favorite tools within easy reach; the machines clatter and sigh; complaint forges bonds of friendship; the cafeteria’s white-smocked
babas,
passing bowls of stew over the counter, make rude, self-mockingly flirtatious jokes; the brusque foreman tosses off any suggestion or criticism, but is willing to put his own shoulder to the wheel; newly minted rubles slide under the cashier’s grate and crackle like dry firewood in his hands: Vasya’s old enough to know what a real job is, but not old enough to have ever had one. By the time he had left the army, perestroika was in full swing and the chemical factory had stopped hiring, and now only fitfully pays its
workers. He can no longer search for a job, it’s worse than futile, for his inquiries exasperate the acquaintances who may someday be in a position to give him one. When Vasya asks about getting a table in the market, his boss slams his fist against the side of his van, telling him that he’s lucky to work Mondays. The number of tables allowed in the market is strictly controlled.