«This will be a psychiatric examination. It is clear to me that this officer is insane. I am sure that is what the examination will find.»
Belenko, clad in a ragged robe, was locked alone in a hospital room. Nobody, not even the orderlies who brought the repugnant rations which must have come from the soldiers' mess, spoke to him. Probably the solitary confinement was meant to intimidate him, but it afforded him sufficient respite to realize that he must say or do nothing which might give anybody grounds for labeling him insane.
On the third morning he was led to Malenkov's office, and the doctor shut the door behind him. The pilots liked Malenkov because they felt he appreciated both their mentality and frustrations. He had been a combat infantryman in World War II, then trained as a physician, not because he wanted to be a physician — he yearned to be an architect — but because the Party needed doctors. He had served the Party as a military doctor for a quarter of a century. Asked what had happened, Belenko explained, and they talked nearly an hour.
«Viktor Ivanovich, I know you are all right. I know that what you say is true; at least, I have knowledge of some of the incidents you describe. But why try to piss into the wind? If you want to live in shit the rest of your life, go ahead and express your feelings. If you want to sleep on clean sheets and eat white bread with butter, you must learn to repress your feelings and pay lip service.
«Golodnikov is not a bad fellow; he's a friend of mine. You drove him into a corner, and you have to let him out. If I tell him you were temporarily fatigued from overwork, that you recognize your mistake, that you regret it, that you will pursue this no further, I'm reasonably sure it all will be forgotten. Why don't we do that?»
If I do that, I always will know that I am a coward. For what purpose do I live? To grovel and lie so I may eat white bread? What would Spartacus do?
«I will not do that. I will tell the truth.»
Malenkov sighed. «Oh, Viktor Ivanovich. Now you drive me into a corner. What can I do? I will have to tell the truth, too, and try to help you. But we still have to go through with the psychiatric examination.»
Although Malenkov could have chosen a local psychiatrist or a military psychiatrist, he instead drove Belenko to the medical institute in Stavropol, one hundred miles away. There he had a personal friend, an eminent psychiatrist whose name Belenko never caught. As they entered, he said, «All you have to do is relax and tell the truth.»
The psychiatrist and Malenkov talked alone some twenty minutes before calling in Belenko. «Well, well, what do we have here?» he asked Belenko, who as factually as he knew how reported his confrontation with Golodnikov. «Why, we have an open rebellion! Nothing less,» exclaimed the psychiatrist. «You must be very distraught or very brave.»
For an hour and then, after a brief pause, another two hours the psychiatrist questioned Belenko about all aspects of his life, from early childhood to the present. Neither his mannerisms nor wording disclosed anything to Belenko about his reactions to the answers, and until the last few seconds Belenko did not know whether he had «passed» the examination.
«So, Lieutenant, tell me. Just what is it that you want?»
«I want to be a fighter pilot I want to grow professionally. Most of all, I want to get away from all this lying, corruption, and hypocrisy.»
«Well, that seems to me like a healthy, progressive ambition. We shall see. You may go now.»
Escorting Belenko to the door, the psychiatrist extended his hand and gripped Belenko's very hard. In a half whisper he said, «Good luck, Lieutenant. Don't worry.»
Four days later Belenko learned the results of the examination entirely by chance from an Armavir classmate who was visiting the base with an inspection team. An ear problem had forced him to quit flying, and he worked in the personnel center of the Air Defense Command. When he offered congratulations, Belenko asked what he meant.
«Haven't you been told? You're going to a MiG-25 squadron in the Far East. The general here gave you a fantastic recommendation. Said you're such an outstanding pilot you belong in our most modern aircraft. You must have been licking his ass every day the past four years.»
Belenko did not ask whether the records mentioned the psychiatric examination. Obviously they did not. Doubtless Malenkov and/or the psychiatrist had convinced Golodnikov that in the interests of his self-preservation he had better give Belenko what he asked and ship him as far away as possible as soon as possible.
Belenko was thankful for the transfer but unmollified and unforgiving, and in the days preceding his departure, his bitterness swelled. While he was away, word had spread or had been spread that he was insane. Krotkov, the guitar player, and a couple of other instructors welcomed him. Everybody else avoided him; they feared to be seen near him. He thought of scenes in The Call of the Wild. If a husky in a dogsled team was helplessly wounded, accidentally or in a fight, the other huskies, along whose side it had toiled, would turn on it as one and devour it.
I knew them as individual human beings. Now they act like a pack of animals. Our system makes them that way.
There is nothing I say say to them. There is no way I can defend myself, against them or our system. There is no way anybody can defend himself. If it hadn't been for Malenkov, I'd be in a lunatic asylum right now. If our system can do that to me, it can do it to anybody.
He was not conscious of it at the time. But within him the dam that contained the poisonous doubts, the disastrous conclusions, the recurrent rage had burst, and nothing could repair it. In a sense different from that in which they were spoken, the words of Golodnikov did apply. For Belenko it indeed was now too late.
Ludmilla cried every day their first week or so in Chuguyevka, 120 miles northeast of Vladivostok, almost a continent away from Salsk. By comparison with this village of 2,000 souls, isolated in forests not far from Korea to the south and Manchuria to the west, Salsk, which she so despised, seemed glittering and glamorous. The streets were unlighted and unpaved, the frame houses were unpainted, the outhouses and open garbage pits in their yards buzzed with flies and crawled with worms, and the whole place stank as bad as the poorest kolkhoz on the hottest summer day. The social center of the village was Cafe No. 2, popular because it sold beef which local entrepreneurs imported from Vladivostok. The patrons laced the beer with vodka, and because of the effects of overindulgence, the cafe also reeked. Sausage and meat were unavailable in the three stores, and fruit and vegetables also were scarce except at the bazaar on Sunday.
A sawmill was the main employer of the village. A few citizens, among them a number of Ukrainians exiled to the Far East for life, worked as supervisors at a kolkhoz a couple of miles away or at the chemical factory on the outskirts. Electrified barbed-wire fences guarded the chemical factory, the labor force of which was composed of zeks. They were marched in each morning in a column, their shaved heads bowed, their hands clasped behind their backs, watched by dogs and guards with machine guns. Their rags, their canvas boots, their forlorn, empty eyes were the same as those Belenko remembered seeing twenty years before in Rubtsovsk.
A few days after Belenko reported to the base seven miles from the village, the commandant, Lieutenant Colonel Yevgeny Ivanovich Shevsov, and the chief political officer convened all pilots and officers in a secret meeting. To Belenko, their candor bespoke desperation.
«Drunkenness induced by aircraft alcohol is constant and widespread,» they said. «The soldiers are running away from the base and taking girls from the villages away into the forests for days. Several times the soldiers have refused to eat their food. We have had strikes here! We have brawls among the soldiers, and to our shame, some officers have been involved in them. Soldiers are writing letters to their parents about what a horrible situation we have here, and the Organs of State Security have been investigating. At any time we could have an inspection. If there is an inspection, it will show that this regiment is not combat-ready. Our planes often cannot fly because everybody is so drunk or people have run away.