The school maintained a superb library with a large collection of politically approved classics. The room was warm and quiet and it became a sanctuary into which Viktor retreated in his withdrawal from home. Pupils were not permitted to choose specific books; instead, the librarian selected for them after assessing their individual interests and capacities.
Viktor wondered about the librarian because she was so different from others. Although elderly, she walked erectly and held her head high, as if looking for something in the distance, and her bearing made him think of royalty. He often saw her walking to or from school alone; he never saw her fraternizing with the other teachers or, for that matter, in the company of another adult. There were stories about her. It was said that her husband had been a zek and that many years ago she had come from Moscow, hoping to find him in the camps. Some even said that she herself had been a zek. Viktor never knew what the truth was. But whatever her past or motives, the librarian elected to invest heavily of herself in him.
Having questioned him for a while, she said, «Well, tell me, young man, what interests you? History, geography, science, adventure…?»
«Adventure!» Viktor exclaimed.
She handed him a copy of The Call of the Wild, which he brought back in the morning. «You disappoint me,» she said. «Why do you not want to read the book?»
«But I have read it.»
«Really? Please, then, recite to me that which you read.»
His accurate and detailed account of the novel by Jack London evoked from her the slightest of smiles and a nod. «Let us see if you can do as well with these,» she said, handing him copies of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. «However, do not neglect your studies. You have time for many adventures.»
Guided and stimulated by the librarian, Viktor became an omnivorous reader, each book she fed him intensifying his hunger for another. He developed the capability of reading any time, any place light allowed, his concentration unimpaired by conversation, noise, or disturbance around him. And he fell into what was to be a lifelong habit of almost reflexively starting to read whenever he found himself with idle tune, whether a few minutes or a few hours. The authors he read became his true parents, their characters his real teachers and, in some cases, his models. He saw in Spartacus, who had led Roman slaves in revolt, the strengths and virtues he desired in himself. To him, Spartacus was even more admirable than the forthcoming New Communist Man because his worth originated from within himself rather than from his external environment. Then the works of the pioneering French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery unveiled to him the brilliant vistas of flight, and the pilots who braved the storms and unknowns of the sky to discover and explore its beauties were his heroes.
Discussing Saint-Exupery with the librarian, he said he longed to fly.
«Why?»
«I think to fly would be the greatest of adventures. The sky has no boundaries, no restrictions. There nothing is forbidden.»
«You know, Viktor Ivanovich, great adventure can be found in poetry. Tell me, who is your favorite poet?»
«Lermontov. Absolutely. Lermontov.» The great nineteenth-century Russian poet was a dashing officer frequently in official disfavor and sometimes in exile. Viktor admired him both for his adventurous personal life, which ended in a duel at age twenty-six, and for his art.
«Here is a collection of his works you might enjoy.»
Leafing through it, Viktor noted the lightest of little checkmarks penciled by a poem that began «An eagle cannot be caged….»
Subconsciously or otherwise, Viktor tried to emulate the exploits of fictional characters, and in school he behaved like a Russian reincarnation of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Learning in physics class how to create short circuits, he put out the lights in the entire school on a dark whiter afternoon and forced dismissal of class for the rest of the day. In chemistry class he taught himself to make firecrackers with timing devices. He thus was able to keep a class popping with a succession of little surprise explosions while he was innocently far away. Once he stole a key, locked the social philosophy classroom from the inside, and jumped out a second-floor window, preventing the class from convening for three hours. He achieved perhaps his best coup by letting loose fifteen lizards in the Russian literature class. Girls shrieked and ran, and the equally hysterical female teacher took refuge from the beasts by jumping atop her desk. Manfully Viktor volunteered to save them all by rounding up the lizards, and the grateful teacher reported his gallantry and good citizenship to the school director.
After a hockey game in a park in February 1958, four boys, considerably larger and three to four years older than Viktor, now eleven, surrounded him and demanded his money. Instinctively and irrationally he refused. Before taking his few kopecks, they beat him about the face, ribs, and kidneys with a brutality unnecessary to their purposes. He lay on the frozen snow for five or ten minutes before gathering strength to make his way home slowly to the censure of Serafima Ivanovna, who remarked about the disgrace of hooliganism.
He tended to his wounds as best he knew how and stayed to himself for several days. He could conceal the pain in his sides but not the bloated discoloration of his face, and besides, he wanted to think. What would Spartacus do?
The librarian evinced neither curiosity nor surprise when he asked if there were any books about boxing and physical culture. She came back with a book about each and a third book — about nutrition. Viktor filled a burlap bag with sawdust, hung it from the tree in the backyard, and began methodically, obsessively, to punch the bag according to the books. He ran through the streets, chinned himself on the tree, and, with loud grunts, did push-ups and pull-ups until Serafima Ivanovna admonished him to cease the racket. For once his father interceded in his behalf. «What he is doing is not so bad. Let him go his way.»
Emboldened by the unexpected endorsement, Viktor asked Serafima Ivanovna if they could add more protein — meat, fish, eggs, cheese (he had never tasted cheese) — to their daily fare of bread, potatoes, and cabbage. According to the nutrition book, protein was essential to the strength and health of the body, especially growing bodies. «All you ask is expensive and hard to buy,» she replied. «We do the best we can; I cannot promise more.»
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.