‘Great idea,’ she said. ‘But won’t I get cold?’
‘It won’t take long,’ said Schwarzenegger. ‘Get up.’
Maria shrugged and took a cautious step towards the point where the fuselage protruded above the flat surface of the wings like the curved spine of a fish, and then sat down on it neatly.
‘No,’ said Schwarzenegger, ‘you can ride side-saddle when we go to my ranch in California. Right now you had better sit the ordinary way, or the wind’ll blow you off.’
Maria hesitated for a moment. ‘Look the other way,’ she said.
Schwarzenegger smiled with the left corner of his mouth and turned away. Maria threw her leg over the aluminium crest and straddled the fuselage. Underneath her the metal was cold and slightly damp with dew; she hoisted herself up slightly in order to tuck the hem of her jacket underneath her, and suddenly had the strange sensation that the very tenderest parts of her body had been flattened across the angular hips of a metal man lying on his back - some mutant cross between the iron Dzerzhinsky toppled by the wind of change and a robot from hell. She shuddered, but the brief hallucination disappeared abruptly, to be replaced by the feeling that she was sitting on a frying-pan which had just been taken out of the fridge. She was feeling worse and worse about what was happening.
‘Arnold,’ she called, ‘are you sure we ought to do this?’
She usually reserved these words for entirely different circumstances, but this time they just seemed to come out on their own.
‘It was you who wanted to soar up into the sky,’ he said, ‘but if you’re afraid…’
‘No,’ said Maria, pushing aside her fear, ‘I’m not afraid in the slightest. It’s just that I’m being such a bother to you.’
‘No bother,’ said Schwarzenegger. ‘It’s going to be very noisy, better put your earphones on. What is it you’re listening to, anyway?’
‘Jihad Crimson,’ said Maria, settling the small pink pads on her ears.
Schwarzenegger’s face froze absolutely still. A strange flickering red light ran across the lenses of his dark glasses - Maria thought it must be the reflection of the leaves falling from the maple trees that stood just behind the garages.
‘Arnie,’ she called.
The corner of Schwarzenegger’s mouth twitched a few times, and then he seemed to recover the power of movement. He turned his head with difficulty, as though it were rotating on a bearing clogged with sand.
‘Crimson Jihad?’ he asked.
‘Jihad Crimson,’ answered Maria. ‘Nushrat Fatekh Ali Khan and Robert Fripp. Why?’
‘Nothing,’ said Schwarzenegger, ‘it’s not important.’
His head disappeared into the cockpit. Underneath her, somewhere deep in the plane’s metal belly, she heard an electrical hum that expanded in the space of just a few seconds into a monstrous loud roaring until it seemed to Maria that she could feel the foam-plastic pads being forced into her ears. Then she was tilted smoothly over to one side and the garages drifted down and away behind her.
Swaying from side to side like a boat, the Harrier rose up vertically into the air - Maria had not even been aware that aeroplanes could fly like that. She thought that if she closed her eyes it might be less frightening, but her curiosity proved stronger than her fear, and in less than a minute she had opened them again.
The first thing she saw was a window moving straight towards her. It was so close already that Maria had a perfectly clear view of a tank turning the muzzle of its gun in her direction from the screen of the television in the room. The tank on the screen fired, and at that precise moment the plane banked steeply and soared away from the wall. Maria almost slid across on to the wing, and she squealed in fear, but the plane soon righted itself.
‘Hold on to the antenna!’ shouted Schwarzenegger, poking his head out of the cabin and waving to her.
Maria looked down. Protruding out of the fuselage directly in front of her was a long metal form with a rounded, slightly swollen tip - it was strange that she hadn’t noticed it before. It looked like a narrow vertical wing, and it immediately roused immodest associations in Maria’s mind, although its dimensions were significantly larger than any encountered in real life. One glance at this powerful protuberance was enough to quell her fear and replace it with a joyful inspiration that had always been so lacking with all those languid Miguels and drunken Ivans from the television.
Everything was quite different this time. The rounded swelling -at the tip of the antenna was covered with small holes which reminded her slightly of a shower head and at the same time set her thinking of strange, non-terrestrial forms of life and love. Maria pointed to it and glanced inquiringly at Schwarzenegger. He nodded and gave a broad smile, and the sun glinted on his teeth.
Maria decided that what was happening to her now must be a childhood dream coming true. In some film or other she had spent a lot of time poring over fairy-tales in books, looking at the pictures and imagining herself flying through the sky on the back of a dragon or a huge bird, and now it was actually happening. Maybe not exactly the way she’d dreamed it, but then, she thought as she laid her palm on the steel projection of the antenna, dreams don’t always come true in the way we expect.
The plane banked slightly and Maria noticed it was obviously responding to her touching the antenna. More than that, the movement seemed to her to be incredibly animated, as though the plane were alive and the antenna were its most sensitive part. Maria ran her hand along the steel rod and squeezed its upper part tight in her fist. The Harrier twitched its wings nervously and rose a few yards higher. Maria thought to herself that the plane was behaving exactly like a man tied to a bed, unable to take her in his arms, incapable of anything but twitching and jerking his entire body. The similarity was enhanced by the fact that she was sitting just behind the wings, which looked like a pair of wide-spread legs, incredibly muscly, but quite incapable of movement.
This was certainly amusing, but it was all a bit too complicated. Instead of this huge steel bird, Maria would have preferred to have come across an ordinary camp-bed in the empty space between the garages. But then, she thought, with Schwarzenegger it couldn’t really have been any other way. She glanced at the cockpit. She couldn’t see much, because the sun was reflected in the glass, but he seemed to be sitting there, moving his head gently from side to side in time with the movement of her hand.
Meanwhile, the plane was rising higher and higher. The roofs of the houses were now far below them, and Maria had a magnificent panoramic view of the city of Moscow.
There were church domes gleaming on all sides, making the city look like an immense biker’s jacket embellished at random with a remarkable quantity of studs and rivets. There was far less smoke hanging over Moscow than Maria had imagined from down below on the embankment; though some was still visible here and there above the houses, it wasn’t always clear whether it was a fire, pollution from factory chimneys or simply low cloud.
Despite the revolting ugliness of each of its component parts, viewed as a whole the city looked extremely beautiful, but the source of this beauty was beyond all understanding. That’s always the way with Russia, thought Maria, as she ran her hands up and down the cold steel - when you see it from afar, it’s so beautiful it’s enough to make you cry, but when you take a closer look, you just want to puke.
The plane suddenly jerked beneath her, and she felt the upper part of the steel rod dangling loosely in her hand. She jerked her hand away, and immediately the metal knob with the small holes fell away from the antenna, struck the fuselage and flew off into space; the powerful protuberance was reduced to a short hollow tube with a screw thread around its top, with the torn blue and red strands of two wires twisted together protruding from its end.