He looked bored. “Who are you?”
“An American agent,” I said. Forcefully, I hope. “I am ordering you to fly us” – I motioned toward the others – “to America. Now.”
“You American?” He had switched, incredibly, to English. “You American agent, Joe? No shit?”
I looked quickly around. The world still seemed to be ignoring us. Minna was tugging at my sleeve. Milan was saying comforting things to the Lettish girls. And I was being spoken to in a strange variety of English by a highly unlikely test pilot.
“No shit,” he was saying. “You American?”
“Yes.”
“I love America,” he said. “I, Igor Radek, I love America! Hey, Joe, Charlie Mingus! Thelonious Monk? No shit!”
“No shit.”
“Always my dream is to go to America. Play the trombone, right? Hot jazz, real cool music. No shit, some of a bitch!”
“Could you take us there?”
“In this plane?”
“Yes.”
“But the authorities-”
“Or would you rather spend the rest of your life following stupid orders?”
“Some of a bitch,” he said. “You right, Joe. We go to America, no sweat, we fly like a bird.” He looked past me at the crowd. “All these peoples going?”
“Is there room?”
“No bombs in the plane, no crew in the plane, sure, no sweat, some of a bitch, plenty of room.”
“And you could get us to Alaska?”
“No sweat.”
“No one could catch us?”
“This plane?” He laughed. “No plane in Russia catch this some of a bitch.”
“Then-”
He looked past me. “Hey, Joe, car coming this way. They after you maybe?”
“Maybe.”
“Then what we waiting for? Everybody inside. No sweat, some of a bitch, everybody inside!”
He threw the door open and led the way, and we scurried up the little ladder and into the plane. From the field a man in a jeep was shouting at us through a bullhorn. Igor Radek shouted, “Drop to dead, you some of a bitch!” And, the last of us inside the bomber, he shut the hatch.
Chapter 16
The plane in which we were all huddled was an experimental fighter-bomber. Military experimentation, we have long been told, leads inevitably to progress in civilian living – peacetime uses of atomic power, as an example. Sooner or later, then, the great advances exemplified by our Russian fighter-bomber would bear fruit in comparable advances in commercial aircraft.
Such an interpretation seemed highly theoretical to me. Our aircraft struck me as several light-years away from adaptation to comfortable commercial flight. The operative word was comfortable; the plane simply wasn’t.
We were loaded into the bomb compartments. The bombs, had the plane been carrying them, would have been strapped carefully into place. Otherwise, subjected to the stresses and strains that faced the plane’s passengers, the bombs would have delivered their payload immediately upon takeoff.
Which is very nearly what happened to us.
At one moment we were perching precariously in the bomb compartments and trying to ignore the fact that the men on the ground were presently surrounding the airplane. And at the next moment, after Igor had increased engine speed and made a bevy of adjustments to the plane’s forbidding instrument panel, and after he had flipped one final lever, we were hurled abruptly into space. No gentle taxiing down the runway, no meticulous countdown to zero in a heavy German accent, no television cameras to increase the moment of drama. No warning at all, really. Just sudden, wild, wholly unanticipated movement.
The girls began to shriek. Milan, evidently convinced that what goes up must come down and that what goes up violently must come down violently, had wrapped his head inside his coat in the manner of a turtle, withdrawing into its shell. And Minna, small and soft in my arms, looked up at me and asked me calmly how long it would be before we reached America. She knew nothing about planes, and thus it had not occurred to her that they were something to be afraid of.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “Not too long.”
“And where will we go when we arrive, Evan?”
“To jail.”
“Jail?”
“A joke. I don’t know, Minna. We shall see what happens when the time comes.”
“Why are the Lettish girls screaming, Evan?”
“Perhaps they are excited to be going to America.”
“But why should they scream?”
“They don’t seem to be screaming much anymore.”
“No,” she agreed, “they have stopped.”
They had stopped because the acceleration wasn’t so pronounced anymore; we had broken the sound barrier and were evidently rather close to our cruising speed. I didn’t want to think about our probable cruising speed. I know how fast planes can go and how high they can fly and I find all of this very interesting, but when I am in one of them I prefer to think of other things until I am on the ground again.
“Evan? When you were talking with the man, I could not understand. Was that Russian?”
“At first we spoke Russian, but then we switched to English.”
“That was English?”
“A form of English, Minna.”
“Oh,” she said. “And I will learn to speak it?”
“Yes.”
“Some of a bitch?”
I closed my eyes for a moment. When they were open again, I said, “Perhaps you should not pay too much attention to the way Igor speaks English. He is not that good at it.” I thought for a moment. “Some of a bitch – actually it should be son of a bitch – well, it isn’t a very good thing to say. Several of Igor’s expressions are not especially polite.”
“Like zirgs-prens?”
“Did Milan -”
“I asked him what it meant, and he said it was not a polite word to say, but he says it all the time. There are some things I do not understand, Evan.”
Zirgs-prens, I thought. Some of a bitch. I said, “I think I ought to go up and have a talk with Igor. Find out how we’re doing. You wait right here, all right?”
“Yes, Evan.”
I stopped first to check on the girls. Some of them seemed a little shaky still from the takeoff, which they had plainly not expected, but Zenta assured me that they were all quite all right. No bruises, no broken bones, just an occasional case of rattled nerves.
Sofija, meanwhile, was telling them about Karlis and his friends in the Latvian Army-In-Exile. “Tall men and strong,” she said, “and all of them hard workers, and with good jobs, and pension plans and insurance and Social Security and Medicare. And many of them without wives, and anxious to marry Lettish women, but where are they to find Lettish women in America? But when we arrive…”
Even the most anxious of them calmed down at the thought. Ears perked up, and eyes brightened. A woman will adjust to any peril at the thought of a husband at the end of the rainbow.
And not merely a husband-
“Washing machines,” Sofija was saying. “Automobiles, new large ones, a car for the husband and another car for the wife. Television sets, color television sets, and all sorts of different channels to watch. If you do not like one program, you switch the channel, and there is another!”
The American dream, I thought.
“And fur coats! And dresses from Paris and houses with more bedrooms than people and a bathroom for every bedroom and wall-to-wall carpeting…”
I checked Milan, who was still huddled inside his coat. I asked him if he was all right. He mumbled something unintelligible. I checked to make sure there was nothing wrong with him. He seemed healthy enough, just violently upset by the entire concept of air travel. I left him then and moved up out of hearing range of Sofija’s reverie of life in America. I hoped the girls would not be unduly disappointed when they were married to the men of their dreams and ensconced in little semidetached row houses in Flushing.