Nevertheless, armed with my important-looking pass from Filin that had been countersigned by the commander of the tracking facility, I was able to hitch a ride on a military truck up into the Koshka Mountains to Simferopol, where I simply flagged down a series of personal vehicles or farm trucks, offering the drivers rubles for a ride to the other coast.
It worked well enough, though the trip took six hours. Fortunately the rain had stopped; the sky sharpened to that lovely Crimean blue I remembered, and coming down the eastern side into Foros, I was stunned by the beauty of the vineyards and the sea beyond. This took my mind off the terror of the ride on a switchbacked roadway in the front seat of a very old truck with its very young driver. Time has mercifully robbed me of his name, though not the image of him hunched over the wheel, knuckles white, swerving dangerously close to death.
After a stop at a crossroads kiosk, I reported to the first militia station I came to — never a bad idea in any case — where the presentation of a bottle of vodka won me the likely location of the sanitorium catering to generals of the Air Force.
So it was evening when I arrived at the gate leading to the sanitorium itself. The guards there were not remotely impressed with my pass, and I had no money for further gifts of vodka, but they were willing to escort me as far as the lobby, where other guards watched me with skepticism as a message was relayed to Colonel-General Ribko.
It was a long wait, which I filled by eating my dinner, purchased at that earlier crossroads, and realizing that a number of unusual personal transactions were going on around me.
I could not have made this comparison in 1966, but the lobby of the sanitarium was like a resort in the West. Its tile floors, shaded lamps, and couches all faced a desk where keys could be got and messages left. It seemed busy when I arrived — pleasantly busy in a way that Russian public places are not, filled with groups of men in relaxed clothing, smiles on their faces. Also women. Many women, most of them my age or younger, all too willing to cling to the arms of these men.
I was seeing my first prostitutes.
I was not so naive that I thought prostitution to be a capitalist curse, though that’s what they taught us in Komsomol. I had just never seen one, that I knew of. Certainly not a whole flock, with their tinkling bracelets, low laughter, floral perfume, high heels—
“Satisfied?”
I turned, and here was my father, standing there with his left arm out to one side in its cast, a look of distaste on his face. His color was better than it had been in the Aviation Hospital, though that could have been caused by annoyance rather than improved health.
“Don’t get angry with me. I’m not running your resort.” My encounter with Artemov, not to mention an aggravating day of Soviet-style travel, had stiffened my spine.
My father sensed this and hugged me. “You’re right. I’m the one who should be ashamed.”
“You’re a single man. You’re allowed to have girlfriends.” Now I was teasing.
“Not like this. These girls are all married women, can you believe that? The director thinks that it cuts down on disease.” Now he was shaking his head. “What kind of a wife or mother would do this? What kind of a husband would let her?”
I followed him out of this den of iniquity to his room. What immediately struck me was the light in the hallways — there was light. Even in Command and Control Center Number 16, half the lightbulbs were stolen and taken home by staffers. This impressed me as much as the cadre of married socialist sex laborers. Or nearly as much.
My father’s room was also nice, certainly the equal of his apartment on Frunze Embankment. There was a big bed, nice curtains, several chairs and a couch, and the biggest color television I had ever seen outside of a space-launch control room.
And food. One of the side tables groaned with caviar, good white bread, and meat. There were a couple of wine bottles, too, unopened, I noted with relief. Cards wishing General Ribko a “speedy recovery,” signed by officers at the headquarters of the Moscow Military District.
I was speechless with admiration, and hunger. “Go ahead,” my father said, waving at the sideboard. “I can’t eat all that stuff.”
As I dug in, he turned off the TV, then sank into a chair with a big sigh. “Now, what the hell are you doing down here?”
I explained the launch of the dogs and my job at the command and control center. Before I had finished, he was already nodding. “I remember these control centers. They’re trying to build a big one out in Bolshevo,” he said, naming yet another town in the forest northeast of Moscow. “I don’t see why they have to build their own cities.”
“Come on, Papa, you know the ministry won’t let them use the existing bases.” I had heard stories on my visit to Yevpatoriya, how the Air Defense Force in particular, who had their own radar dishes all over the place, had protested bitterly at these interlopers from the Central Space Office, complaining that the tracking and communications stations interfered with their very important radar and aircraft beacons. As if allowing another dish at some site in the Ukraine would open the doors to American nuclear bombers!
It was all a matter of resources. You have no idea of how poor my country was in those days, twenty years after the end of the Great Patriotic War, in which an ungodly number of people had died — over twenty million, certainly, and possibly closer to thirty. The Nazis occupied the best of our lands for several years, stealing whatever they could carry and destroying the rest.
We had emerged from the rubble—“victorious!”—determined to have a level playing field with rich, far-off America under its “gentleman shopkeeper,” Mr. Truman, and had devoted most of our resources to the development of nuclear weapons, tanks, aircraft, and missiles. Even our schools, such as Bauman, were essentially military academies, training “soldiers” for this work.
This was why the hallways at Command and Control Center Number 16 were often dark. Why I had to hitchhike across the spine of the Crimea. Why the Air Defense Force guarded its bases, which is to say its allotted apartments and food supplies, so tenaciously.
And why I felt a growing outrage at the luxuries I was seeing here in this sanitorium in Foros, building on the unease I had begun to feel when dining at the Stakhanov with Uncle Vladimir.
Maybe I was still a good, pure little Communist. I didn’t mind being poor, as long as everyone was poor and we were working toward the same goal. “I see that whoever runs this resort doesn’t have to worry about resources.” It bothered me that my father, a notorious straight arrow throughout his career, often openly critical of Party and military “fat cats,” was resting his broken arm in this decadent spa.
“Yes, well, I don’t know how they do it.” He cleared his throat, clearly casting about for a change of subject. “How is your spaceflight coming?” Had we been anywhere other than the private room of a Hero of the Soviet Union, a three-star general, I would have taken my father’s reluctance to talk as a sign we were being monitored.
“The flight is going fine,” I said, and changed the subject right back. “I didn’t realize Foros was so nice. Is this where you and your buddies would always run off to?” Active-duty Air Force officers were required to take five weeks of leave every year. “Did Mama ever come here?”
That was a low blow, a sure sign that I had lost control of my mouth. My father’s eyes narrowed. “I never came here until ordered last week,” he snapped.