Nor were Soviet women stupid. They knew that if they married an officer, they could have lives of luxury beyond the reach of most civilians.
At the academy where Boris studied engineering for five years, girls paid to get into dances on campus, trying to snag a young cadet. Some of the girls weren’t so good-looking. It was sad to see the same ones year after year not able to convince a cadet to marry them. But the prize was worth the effort.
He and his friends went over the fence from the academy whenever they got the chance, risking a lot of trouble by going samovolka, or AWOL, because the girls in town would do literally anything to get officer candidates to marry them. If you wanted to get laid you went samovolka, because the dances on school grounds were closely supervised. No alcohol, no hanky-panky, everything aboveboard. No fun whatsoever.
Boris is in his fifth year at the academy and will be graduating as a lieutenant in a few months. A dance is going on over at the club, but he’s not interested. It’s just the same old shuffling around. He wants sex right now, not marriage, which will come when his career is well established. He’d been caught going samovolka and is confined to academy grounds for a whole month, so he’s in the dayroom watching television when one of his classmates comes running in all out of breath. Something interesting is going on over at the club. The power is down, and everybody is in the dark with the girls.
“I was bored to death, so I decided it might be fun. Better than sitting alone watching TV,” Gindin says. When he gets over to the club the place is almost pitch-black. Only a few cadets on patrol are walking around with candles, trying to keep the order until the lights come back on. The whole place smells like sweat and cheap perfume. It’s hot and the air is stifling, but no one is complaining. The dancers can plaster their bodies against each other and nobody is going to stop them.
Boris is standing near the door, wondering what’s going to happen next, when someone or something brushes up against his arm. At first he thinks he must be mistaken, but then someone is there in the dark beside him, touching his uniform sleeve. He grabs an arm and pulls the person close enough so that even in the dark he can tell she’s a girl.
“What are you doing?” he wants to know.
She’s feeling for the hash marks on his sleeve to find out what year he’s in, and she’s not embarrassed to admit that she doesn’t want to dance with a second- or third-year cadet because they’re stuck at the academy most of time. But if she gets a senior she knows that he can get time off to come into town and spend the night with her.
If Boris wants some steady sex, clearly this is the girl for him. But her honesty turns him off. Maybe it’s because the hunt itself is sometimes more exciting than the conquest. Or maybe it’s because now that he’s so close to graduating and going out into the fleet, he’s that much closer to meeting the right girl and settling down.
“I told her that I’m not interested,” Boris says. “‘Don’t waste your time on me.’“
Looking across the river at the city of Riga and all the ships lined up at their moorings, Boris is finally just about ready to settle down. Once they get back to base at Baltiysk, Captain Potulniy has promised to write him a letter of recommendation for a shoreside job working as military liaison and inspector at a shipyard. There’ll be no more six months of sea duty separating him from his family. Just a few more weeks and he’ll visit his mother and sister and then start looking for a wife.
But something is pulling his thoughts back to the academy and that girl in the dark, so desperate to find a fifth-year student to marry.
“I suppose that living in the academy did some mental damage to most of us,” Boris says. “We lived in a very strict environment. Everything was regulated; every minute of our days and nights was monitored. We felt deprived of the love and affection that our parents and relatives gave us when we lived at home. Remember that we were only seventeen or eighteen when we enlisted, and five years is a very long time for a kid that age. This was why lot of students got married as soon as they graduated, and why eighty to ninety percent of all those marriages didn’t work out.”
Boris never wanted to suffer that same fate. He wants to follow in his father’s footsteps as an engineer with a loving wife and children. Only Boris wants to do it as a naval officer and not a poor civilian. But for reasons he cannot know at this moment, he’s already developing a bad feeling, an itch between his shoulder blades as if a sniper is pointing a high-power rifle at him from some great distance and nothing he can do will change it. Some of the other officers feel the same way as he does, and that fact is even more unsettling to him this morning than his own misgivings.
It’s their zampolit, Valery Sablin; not only was he in an odd mood this morning at breakfast, but he had been even stranger yesterday morning when he came down to the mechanical room, where Gindin was checking the gas turbines and every other piece of machinery that he’s responsible for.
“Good morning, Boris,” Sablin said. He was more than full of his usual good cheer. “How is everything going in Gas Turbines?”
“Good, Comrade Captain,” Gindin replied. He was a little busy just then, but Sablin was the zampolit.
Sablin took Gindin aside, out of earshot of the other men. “Are you happy down here, Boris?” he asked.
The question just then struck Gindin as odd. But he nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Tell me, are you satisfied with the seventeen sailors in your section? Do they know their jobs?”
Again Gindin nodded, but this time he was a little wary. What the hell was the zampolit looking for? “They’re good boys. They know their jobs.”
“Good. That’s very good.” Sablin started to leave, but then he turned back all of a sudden, as if he’d forgotten something important. “I have some extra time now in case you would like a little help with your political lectures. You know, I could fill in. Give you a little extra time off.”
“Sure,” Gindin readily agreed.
Sablin ranks just below the captain, so he’s important aboard the Storozhevoy. He almost always has a smile plastered on his face that sometimes seems just a little forced, like now. He is married and has one son, but more important, Sablin comes from an important, well-to-do family and attended the Frunze Military Academy, the most prestigious military school in all of Russia. You’ll never make it to the top in the navy unless you’ve graduated from Frunze. This is where all the officers of the line went to school, but instead of opting for a command position, Sablin chose to become a political officer. Ideologues, these guys are sometimes called. They’re almost always the ones with the cobs up their asses, who’ve swallowed the Party line and whose one mission in life is to shove it down everyone else’s throats.
“But he’s a very social guy,” Gindin says. “Always talking to the sailors and officers about their families.” Once, when Gindin comes back from a vacation to Leningrad, Sablin wants to know how people are getting along in the city, what their mood is, what they’re talking about, and whether they are generally happy with the way things are or seem to be dissatisfied. Those are strange questions to be asking a young officer, but even stranger this morning is Sablin wanting to know the procedures for the emergency start-up of the gas turbines. Normally it takes a full hour to go through the necessary steps to safely bring the engines on line from a cold start. But if the captain is in a big hurry the engines can be started and brought up to full speed in as little as fifteen minutes. It’s a dangerous procedure and has to be done just right to avoid any sort of problem. Sablin also wanted to know if Gindin’s sailors knew these procedures. In a real emergency, if Gindin was injured or unable to reach his duty station, could his men do the job? Of course they could; Gindin has trained them well.