I arrived back at Tskhakaya the day after Jana Baglai returned from Kiev to begin her summer holiday. Sasha Olmelchenko’s girlfriend, Yelena, mentioned that Jana had asked after me.
That first weekend I invited her to an outdoor restaurant on the slopes of Senaki Mountain dominating the vineyards and orange groves north of Tskhakaya. Over a glass of good Georgian white wine, I plunged right into the subject.
“Well, Jana,” I said, taking her hand across the table, “maybe we should think about getting married.”
Her response was immediate. “Yes, Sasha, I want to.”
We had not had much of a romantic courtship. But this was often the case for Soviet military officers. Whatever romance there was would come after the engagement.
I sipped my wine and looked across the plastic tablecloth at this beautiful young woman. I felt lucky. It was common knowledge that many pilots’ wives were “noncultured,” but attractive rural girls whom the officers had snapped up out of desperation when they got an assignment to the deserts of Central Asia or the endless forests of eastern Siberia. This was usually an embarrassment because, by definition, the pilot was an educated man with four rigorous years of a service academy under his belt, while his wife was often a school dropout with only the minimum eight years of education.
But Jana had already completed a year of university toward her degree in biology. By the time we were ready to have children, I’d be a major, an established test pilot, and she would be a member of the intelligentsia with her university diploma. The more I imagined the lovely dark-haired girl sitting across the table from me in the shade of the grape arbor as my wife, the more desirable she became. Jana was exactly the kind of partner I wanted, not one of the nagging, frowzy military wives you saw in the lines at the Voyentorg, bloated fat at a young age, their hair in plastic curlers, wearing a stained housecoat instead of a proper dress. The only interest such women had was material possessions, and they drove their long-suffering husbands half-crazy with impossible demands for cars and household appliances.
But Jana and I would be different. We would have more in common than just sexual attraction and gluttony for possessions. I smiled. I was trying to be so logical about this engagement, but gazing at Jana’s face, it was exciting to realize that this beautiful girl would soon be my wife.
We sat under a shady arbor, sipping our cold wine and discussing the pleasant details of our wedding plans. Outside on the terrace, I saw a table full of noisy, drunken officers from the base. The group was hosted by the most corrupt staff officer at Ruslan. He had probably sold so much aviation alcohol and gasoline to the local black marketers that he was hosting this lavish luncheon to reward those other crooked officers who had helped him. This criminal even had soldiers cut the grass around our runway for sale as fodder to local dairy farmers. Men like that were a dishonor to their uniform and their country.
I turned back to Jana. We had decided to have our wedding in August, when my mother passed through Tskhakaya after her Black Sea vacation, and before Jana’s parents had to begin packing for their new assignment; Colonel Baglai was scheduled to become a senior military adviser in Syria. I was honest with Jana about my finances. After five years as an officer, I had managed to save just over 4,500 rubles, although I had already agreed to spend almost 500 on my mother’s fiftieth birthday holiday. So I suggested we plan a very small wedding with only our immediate families and then take a two-week honeymoon on the Black Sea ourselves. That would leave us with around 3,000 rubles to furnish the new apartment I was sure we would be assigned, once I announced our engagement. To me, the compromise represented a proper balance between the practical realities of Soviet life and the pleasant occasion of a family wedding.
Jana reluctantly agreed to convince her parents that this was what we both wanted.
But her parents would not hear of it. When I met them formally in their four-room apartment in one of the better buildings of the military housing compound, Colonel Baglai came right to the point.
“My daughter will not have a shabby little wedding, Captain,” he said, speaking with his deep, brusque “command” voice. “Her mother and I have many social responsibilities and obligations. Jana is not just some factory girl, and you are not some truck driver who runs off to the wedding palace, then drinks warm beer in the railway station buffet.”
I clenched my teeth, torn between speaking frankly to my future father-in-law and deference to an influential senior officer. By tradition, the families of the bride and groom shared equally in the wedding expenses. And the groom’s family was expected to pay for the wedding dress, shoes, and flowers, plus all the other expensive decorations required for a “proper” ceremony and reception. Colonel Baglai assured me that we would split the real costs of the reception — champagne, wine, brandy, and food — equally.
“Don’t worry, Sasha,” he said, clapping my shoulder and addressing me informally, “all the senior officers we invite will load you down with generous presents.”
When I attended weddings of junior officer friends, I always presented the couple with an envelope containing five new red ten-ruble bills.
“We have so many close friends,” Jana’s mother, Yevgenia Vasilyevna, added. “And, with my husband’s important position, we simply can’t avoid offering a large reception. After all, Jana is our first child to marry.”
“Perhaps,” I conceded. I nodded silently, appraising my new in-laws.
The colonel was a typical professional Soviet officer, stocky but energetic, with dark hair and even darker, intelligent eyes, a face rendered just short of handsome by a broken nose squashed like a potato by years of wearing tight-fitting oxygen masks. He was known as a good pilot and a forceful leader. I quite liked him, although I resented his bulldozer decision about the wedding.
Jana’s mother was another matter. She was in her late forties, several years older than her husband, chunky, rather coarse-looking. As a younger woman, I imagined she had been quite sensually attractive, but she had aged badly; her skin actually looked stretched, like a sausage casing. And she tinted her hair and wore it in tight, springy curls. I realized that she had been one of the plastic curler matrons I’d seen on the Voyentorg.
I saw that there was no sense arguing with a woman like this. It was clear from the determined glint in her eye that the opulent wedding reception of their oldest daughter to a successful fighter pilot would be Yevgenia Vasilyevna’s crowning achievement at Tskhakaya; they could depart for Syria at a high point, the perfect Air Force family.
I was already deeply worried about the expense of all this empty ceremony, and had to hold back from speaking my mind. The Baglais’ apartment gave me some indication of the kind of family I was joining. They had inherited the flat from the former division commander, General Anosov, who had “hijacked” an additional room from the next-door unit by ripping down a wall when the other apartment was temporarily empty. Jana’s mother boasted of Anosov’s clever ploy, oblivious to the hardship it placed on their neighbors, a hapless maintenance captain and his wife who had to share a small room with two children, while the Baglais enjoyed the luxury of a storage room.
With a sinking feeling, I suddenly knew that this spacious apartment and the shelves of decorative books epitomized the Baglais’ heartless materialism. Jana and my wedding would be just another decoration; acquiring an Air Force captain with a promising career would be one more enviable possession.
This was not a good way to begin married life.
But I had no choice in the matter. The wedding date was set for August 15, 1987, and the ceremony would be in the big hall of the ZAGS State Wedding Palace in the city. Colonel Baglai was inviting friends and colleagues from all over the military district and from several Soviet bases in eastern Europe. Jana’s mother gave her a list of wedding clothes. It was my responsibility to locate these scarce items and, of course, to pay for them.
Naturally the Voyentorg had nothing we could use. They could hardly provide milk and eggs, so it was unrealistic to imagine they stocked full-length wedding gowns with lace veils, silk stockings, or satin shoes.
Instead, I turned to my resourceful Georgian friend, Malhaz. He ran an unofficial private shop, among other profitable enterprises. His small store was stacked with imported Dresden china, Polish and Romanian sport clothes, and a good collection of Japanese electronics and videocassettes. We had become friends the year before, when I greeted him in the shop with the formal Georgian salutation, “Gamargoba,” a courtesy few Russian soldiers ever learned.
When I had asked Malhaz how he managed to obtain all the import permits for his rich selection of goods, he’d replied silently with a gold-toothed grin, rubbing his right index finger and thumb together briskly. There was a large framed photo of Gorbachev prominently displayed on his wall. Then he had added: “Our Party leaders are very reasonable men.” Under Gorbachev a man like Malhaz got along “like a cheese rolling over in sour cream,” as the old Russian saying went.
