About 11:30 A.M. the master welder shoved some money at Viktor and in a patronizing tone said, “Kid, go buy some juice.”
“I don’t want anything to drink.”
“I didn’t ask what you want. I told you to go buy vodka.”
“No! I won’t.”
Brandishing a wrench, the welder approached Viktor. By not retreating, he created a confrontation which neither man could back out of except through humiliating surrender.
He will swing from the right. I should duck under to the left. No. If I fail, the wrench will kill me or cripple me.
Viktor jumped at the welder and with a succession of rapid jabs knocked him against the wall and twisted the wrench out of his hand.
He turned and saw three other mechanics coming at him with wrenches. Stepping left, then right, then backward, he tried to prevent any of them from getting behind him, but they succeeded in maneuvering him toward a corner.
“Enough!” Yakov shouted. “All of you!”
Wielding a wrench of his own, Yakov grabbed Viktor by the arm and, jerking him away, announced, “The young man and I will buy the vodka.”
They walked four or five minutes before Yakov spoke. “You realize they would have killed you.”
“Maybe I would have killed some of them first.”
“And in your grave, would you have been proud? Listen to me, young one; I know. In a socialist society do not be a white crow among black crows; else you will be pecked to death. If you want to be a different kind of bird, never let the others see your true colors.”
At Yakov’s insistence, Viktor attempted an apology to the welder; it was hard, but he offered his hand, which the welder refused. After they drank awhile, though, he slapped Viktor on the back and shook hands.
Viktor had violated both a daily ritual and a longstanding custom requiring the most junior man to fetch the vodka.
Typically, about 11:30 A.M. Yakov signaled the effective end of the workday. “Well, enough of that business. We can do that anytime. Let’s talk real business. I have eighty kopecks. Let’s organize something and send the kid. He’ll bring us gas.”
The ensuing exchanges seldom varied. “I have a ruble.”
“I’ll support you with seventy kopecks.”
“I can’t. I have no money today.”
“Well, I’ll lend you fifty kopecks.”
“All right, kid. Take the money, and do your job.”
Viktor jogged or ran, which he liked to do anyway, to a store a quarter of a mile away to arrive before the noon crowd formed. His duty was to bring back the maximum amount of alcohol purchasable with the money collected, after he had set aside enough for bread and canned fish. The cheapest vodka cost three rubles sixty-two kopecks a half-liter, and a bottle of Algerian red wine one ruble twenty kopecks; a kilogram of good Russian bread could be bought for sixteen kopecks, and a can of foul-tasting fish for forty kopecks.
Yakov entertained his colleagues by lining up the glasses, shutting his eyes, and, measuring by sound, pouring almost exactly the same amount of vodka or wine into each glass. Glasses filled, the party began and lasted until there was no more to drink. The men then settled by the coal stove to play dominoes, smoke, and tell jokes, allowing only an emergency to intrude on their leisure. The garage manager did not bother them; they accomplished in half a day all that was demanded, his superiors were happy, and by keeping in their graces, he could count on the mechanics if serious need arose.
Viktor in turn empathized with them; he understood that the garage was their prison and that they had given up even dreaming of parole. He realized, too, the meaning of the words that followed Yakov’s first swig of vodka. “Ah, this puts a little pink in the day.” For him the garage became a comfortable haven from which he could pursue his overriding goal of flight.
Having survived scrutiny of his ideological stability, study of his education, and a rigorous physical examination, Viktor was one of forty young men selected for DOSAAF preflight training. Five nights weekly he hurried from work to the cafeteria, then took a bus across town to DOSAAF offices located in a prerevolutionary bank building. The subjects — aerodynamics, navigation, design and construction of aircraft, radio and electronics, meteorology, and rules of flight — were not inordinately difficult. Many cadets, though, could not manage both the volume of study required and a daily job, and by the end of the first month fully a fourth had dropped out.
Viktor never had been so happy as in DOSAAF classes. They were devoid of cant, pretense, hypocrisy. Defying regulations, the chief instructor omitted the teaching of political theory. Careers and lives might hinge on how much and how well they learned, and there was no time for trivia. The instructors were retired Air Force pilots, and in Viktor’s eyes they stood as real men who had braved and survived the skies. They treated the cadets as both subordinates and comrades, as future partners from whom nothing should be hidden. Direct questions to them elicited unequivocal, comprehensible answers, and for any question concerning flight, they had an answer. The closer they led him to flight, the more its challenge engrossed him.
The first parachute jump was scheduled in December, and a parachutist, an Air Force major, readied them for it. He said that although he had jumped more than a thousand times, he still was afraid before jumping. “Do not fear your own fear,” he told them. “It is natural.” The temperature was forty degrees below zero as Viktor and eight other cadets climbed into the small AN-2 transport at an airfield thirty miles from Omsk. He was not afraid; he was terrified. He felt only like an automaton irreversibly programmed to proceed to its own doom. When the parachutist swung open the door and freezing air rushed and whistled into the cabin, he had to reach into his deepest reserves of strength and will to make himself stand up and take his place, third in line. Will it open? Will I remember? Am I now to die?
The parachutist slapped his shoulder, and he plunged headlong into the void. Remember! Count! Now! Pull! A tremendous jerk shook his body, and he yelled in exultation. He was suspended, adrift in endless, pure beautiful space; he was free, free from the earth, unfettered to any of its squalor, confusion, pettiness, meanness. He laughed and sang and shouted. I am being foolish. But what does it matter? No one can hear me. No one can see me. I am free.
Absorbed in the rhapsodies of the sky, Viktor returned to earth ingloriously, landing squarely on the back of a cow. Under the impact, the startled cow involuntarily relieved herself and bounded away, dumping him in the manure. He only laughed at himself, for nothing could detract from his joy. He wanted to go back up immediately and jump again. Before, he had longed, hoped, imagined. Now he knew. His future was clear. As long as he lived, he would live to be in the sky.
After written examinations in mid-April, the students met their future flight instructors. Viktor was mortified upon being introduced to his. He had counted on being taught by a real fighter pilot, perhaps one who had flown against the Americans in Korea or Vietnam. Instead, he was assigned to a woman, Nadezhda Alekseyevna, who was about thirty-five. She still had the figure of a gymnast, and despite a rather rough complexion and bobbed hair, she was pretty. It almost would have been better had she been ugly.
The sullenness with which he etched a hollow outline of his background betrayed to her his disappointment. She recognized all the cues of male resentment, for she was one of the few female pilots in DOSAAF, if not the sole one. She had earned her wings and place only through prodigious determination. At age eighteen, she had joined a parachutist club open to women and subsequently finagled her way into a glider club. Through influence in Moscow, she had graduated from gliders to DOSAAF flight training and so excelled that she won grudging acceptance as an instructor. For the past eight years she had taught, always having to be better to be equal, always having to prove herself anew, always having to tolerate the lack of any separate facilities for women at air bases.