Yefgenii’s bruises became less sore but he’d got a tear that made opening his bowels an agony. He couldn’t conceal his suffering because the boys did so into an open sewer.
In class the slower ones were learning their arithmetic by rote. Those who hadn’t already gone were bound for the yards and factories. Yefgenii peered down at the algebra problems the master had set. He pictured himself in an officer’s uniform with officer’s pay and officer’s status. He pictured airplanes. He imagined himself soaring. If he felt like he was living at the bottom of a well, then this was a chance to claw his way out. His chalk began to scratch out solutions. These were the rules that governed rest and motion and, though he didn’t know it, they even governed the stars and planets.
Babak followed him out of the schoolroom. “Let’s see how well you do when you can’t write.” It took all three of them — Babak, Pavlushkin and Boytsov — to pry open his fist so they could break a finger. They’d’ve broken all of them if he hadn’t screamed out. He didn’t intend to. It just hurt so much. Babak pulled him in close by the ear. He was older and heavier but they stood eye to eye. Yefgenii felt the lobe ripping. “It’s my place at Chkalov, it’s mine, I’m the one getting out of this shit-hole.”
Blood trickled from Yefgenii’s ear. He had to pull his finger straight. Tears streamed down his face while he did it. He could feel the fracture under the skin where the finger was livid and swollen. He tugged it from the knuckle. Pain jolted up to his elbow and shoulder. Later he tore a strip of cloth from his shirt and used it to strap the finger to its neighbor.
That night he lay awake but they didn’t come for him. They didn’t need to. If he resisted they’d injure him till he was unfit for training. It was Babak he pictured in an officer’s uniform, Babak smiling, Babak soaring. From today in the schoolyard he could still hear Babak’s breathing, he could feel it on his face, could smell his spit. They were eye to eye.
In the morning the warden saw his hand. “What’s all this, then, Yeremin?”
Yefgenii remained silent. All the other boys were staring straight ahead. Babak glanced at him for a moment then looked straight ahead again.
The warden lifted Yefgenii’s hand. Yefgenii winced. The warden unwound the strapping and inspected the fat black finger. “Well…?”
Yefgenii gazed down and away. A smirk curled the corner of Babak’s mouth.
The warden dropped the wounded hand. “Have it your own way—”
“Sir, it was Boytsov and Pavlushkin, they did it.”
They protested their innocence of course, but the warden still led them away. They shrugged and followed. They knew no one would dare corroborate Yefgenii’s story and, after a lecture from the director — interspersed with bouts of respiratory distress — they’d be back to carry out a reprisal.
Among the ruins, Yefgenii worked with one hand. He kept the other bound tight enough to press the fingers together but not so tight that he couldn’t make a fist. Boytsov and Pavlushkin would be returning soon. He had only a little time. His heart drummed inside his chest. Everywhere the poundings split the air — metal on metal, metal on stone, stone on stone. The people toiled under a pall of cloud. Stalingrad’s chimneys were black towers; they were mausoleums.
Babak crossed the rubble to piss into the sewer. Yefgenii had chosen a stone an hour earlier and had laid it close by and now he scooped it into his injured hand. His fingers closed. He shut out the pain. Next he was running. Babak turned at the sound of footsteps skittering over the rubble and Yefgenii struck him in the temple. Babak went down crying out with the shit and reek of the sewer all round and already the other boys were turning to look. Yefgenii crashed down onto Babak’s chest. Ribs snapped like sticks of celery. He got his good hand round Babak’s throat. He was choking him but the purpose was to hold the head still. Babak’s knee smashed into his back and his arms battered his side but Yefgenii held on fast and dug the thumb of his bad hand into Babak’s eye socket. He pressed into the eyeball and now Babak was screaming and boys were gathering round. The boys kept glancing back. Men were coming over from the other side of the site. The boys shuffled together, closing up the gaps through which the men might glimpse the fight. Babak was bucking and writhing but Yefgenii held him down and with his thumb he pressed harder and harder till at last the eye burst into blood and humour.
Yefgenii was up and among the other boys when the men got there. They found them all gazing down at the one in the sewer with his eye mashed.
The foreman looked along the row of boys. “What’s going on here? What happened?” He stared at each boy in turn but none of them would speak. His gaze came to rest on one boy who was big for his age with blond hair and blazing blue eyes who looked like he might be the leader. “What happened to your mate?”
But the boy only straightened up. He shook his head and looked away.
A couple of the men were now carrying Babak by his shoulders and ankles, up into the rubble where they laid him out, the boy who’d now never go to the Air School at Chkalov. Yefgenii felt himself soaring; he imagined sunlight breaking through onto his face.
The foreman asked them again but none of the boys would say anything. So he put them back to work. There was a country to rebuild.
Korea
1952–1953
AT FOUR-THIRTY, the falcons of the 221st IAP crowded into the Operations hut. All wore the same olive drab flying suit without name or rank but bearing the insignia of the Korean People’s Liberation Army Air Force. Yefgenii Yeremin stood at the back with the other rookies, while the seasoned fighter pilots took seats in front and chattered about killing Americans.
Polkovnik Kiriya entered first, followed by Podpolkovnik Pilipenko. The room came to attention. As Kiriya took his chair in the front row, the banks of men behind slumped back down. Pilipenko orbited between the map and the chalkboard, twirling a pointer between his fingers like a drum majorette. “Weather for Antung, twelfth of May, 1952, 0400 Zulu, valid to 0600. Surface wind 070 at 5. Visibility greater than 10 kilometres. One-okta scattered alto-cu, base between 3 and 5,000 metres….”
Yefgenii’s eyes drifted to the giant chart at the front of the room. The Korean Peninsula dangled off the northeastern tip of China like a stubby finger pointing at the tail of Japan. A thick red line followed the turns of the Yalu River, which divided Korea from Manchuria. Antung was a black circle edging its mouth. A second red line ran north of the 38th Parallel, the former border between North and South Korea, over which North Korean troops had poured two years earlier to overwhelm the South.
Pilipenko’s pointer struck the map and Yefgenii snapped back to attention. “United Nations aircraft are forbidden to operate north of the Yalu. You are at liberty to operate south of the Yalu. You are permitted to engage and destroy any United Nations aircraft operating south of the Yalu. You will not overfly the sea. You will not enter South Korean airspace — that is, not operate farther south than this line.” His pointer indicated the red line joining P’yŏngyang in the west with Wŏnsan in the east. “You will not transmit in Russian unless absolutely necessary. You are pilots of the Korean People’s Liberation Army Air Force. The VVS is not here. Its pilots are not here. Duties will be notified at 0500.” Then he ended as he always ended. “Thank you for not being here.”
Outside, an arch of light mounted the horizon. Soon the dawn re-created gray mountains to the west and gray paddies east to the Yalu. A blanket of heat was settling on the airfield, raising a scent of oil and kerosene, while ground crews rolled MiG-15s out of the hangars and onto the dispersal. Their shouts and the whir of tow trucks carried into the crew hut, where the rookies gathered at the window.