mess.
“Hurry, Sasha,” she said. “We don’t want to be late.”
I glared at her. “You go ahead without me.”
Her young face clouded. She was genuinely confused. “Why, Sasha?”
I clenched my teeth to keep from shouting. It had been a long day. “I have to clean up this apartment.”
She came back around eleven, a few minutes after I had finally wrung out the mop and put away the broom. I didn’t hesitate. “Jana,” I said, “I think we should wait. I think we should postpone the wedding at least one year.”
Her lovely, suntanned face lost its color. “Why?” she gasped.
“I don’t think you’re ready to be married.”
Finally she realized what had happened. She came and sobbed on my chest. “Oh, Sasha,” she moaned, “I’m so sorry…”
But I remained noncommittal, saying only that I needed time to consider the matter of our engagement. Because I was still so angry, it wasn’t wise to keep talking. Maybe her sloppiness had just been a fluke, or perhaps it was a clear indication that she was impossibly self-centered. I was torn between desire for this beautiful young girl and a nagging inner voice that told me we were completely unsuited for each other.
When my mother returned from her vacation on the Black Sea on August 13, she still seemed tired and strangely subdued, although Misha was deeply suntanned and merry. On an impulse, I told her of the fight with Jana, then expressed my revulsion for the Baglai family. “I want to just cancel the whole thing,” I finally admitted.
Mother was standing at the window, fingering the clean gauze curtains I’d hung there. Her face was strained. “No, Sasha,” she whispered. “We can’t have another canceled wedding.” She reminded me of the embarrassing uproar when I had spurned the blatantly engineered “engagement” with Svetlana in 1983.
“Sasha,” she said, turning to face me, “you can’t escape this time. The plans have gone too far. Be patient. Jana is young and her parents are leaving. You can change her.”
I remained silent for a moment. Maybe she was right. Finally I nodded agreement.
The wedding was certainly everything the Baglai family wanted. Saturday, August 15, was a rainy southern day, with drizzle and low overcast. Colonel Baglai’s colleagues provided the shiny Volga and Skoda sedans for the entourage. The cars were decorated with bright balloons, and everyone was smiling. Jana looked fantastic in her lace wedding dress, which her mother brazenly implied she had selected.
In the grand hall of the ZAGS State Wedding Palace, the woman registrar solemnly read the official vows, then pronounced us husband and wife, “in the name of the Soviet people and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” When I kissed Jana, I looked up at the huge realistic mural on the wall above, the Ideal Socialist Family, handsome, burly husband, demure wife, and radiant blond children, all nicely dressed, surrounded by the bounty of the Workers’ Paradise. Turning, I faced Jana’s own, somewhat less than ideal family. They looked plump and content, as if they had just eaten a satisfying meal. It was not as if they had gained a son, but that they had just managed to legally abandon the responsibility for their oldest daughter. The bust of Lenin gazed down on us, silent and aloof.
The motorcade to the base was boisterous, even by Georgian standards. The citizens of Tskhakaya, like all Georgians, knew much more about the Russians in the military than we knew about them. They always crowded the streets when a senior officer’s family held a wedding, as if to demonstrate their deep affection for their protectors. By tradition, the crowds would block the road until the best man-my squadron mate, Sergei Rastvorov- showered the kids with handfuls of kopeks and hard candy.
The staff of the officers’ dining room had done their best to provide a true banquet for the deputy division commander. I certainly couldn’t complain about the quality of the food, the wine, or naturally, the brandy. Even the DJ who ran the stereo discotheque had some brand-new Western music.
But our wedding night was grim. Jana and I counted the pitiful contents of the gift envelopes, less than eight hundred rubles, not even enough to buy a proper set of dishes. So much for the presents that Jana’s father had assured me would replenish my empty savings account. One of the deputy regimental commanders had set the tone by presenting his own lavish gift: a book bound in imitation leather with thirty or so color pictures of antique china and place settings at the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad. It was the kind of giveaway volume presented as tokens to visiting official delegations, handsome but virtually worthless. Jana and I did not need pictures of plates and serving bowls, we needed the actual items.
Some guests had given us five single-ruble notes, no more. But they certainly hadn’t held back at the buffet table or the bar. And I had seen Jana’s father slipping full bottles of the precious cognac to the sleek clutch of senior men from military district headquarters. This expensive party was just a way to cement his blat connected to these big shots.
“Jana,” I said, shaking my head, “I’m sorry, but we’ll have to skip our honeymoon.”
She nodded soberly, also stunned by the poor selection of presents. “I know,” she whispered.
Late that night I lay on our improvised wedding bed-two soldiers’ cots I had lashed together-watching the breeze billow the moonlit curtains. Somehow I still had to find the money to furnish this apartment.
The week before Jana was scheduled to return to the university in Kiev, she finally transferred all of her belongings to our apartment from her parents’ flat. Helping her unpack, I noticed she had no winter clothes.
“Where are your boots and your heavy coat?”
“Oh,” she said, “Mother kept them for Marina. I’ll need money to buy new things.”
By the time we finished yet another shopping spree through Malhaz’s warehouse, my savings account was completely empty. For the first time in my life, I had to borrow money from friends. It was a disgusting experience.
In late September Jana suddenly returned from Kiev and announced she had managed to enroll in the university’s correspondence program. She had brought several boxes of books and laboratory manuals, so I took her at her word. But two weeks later, those boxes were still unopened.
One night I got back late after an exhausting instrument flying sortie and blew up at Jana for yet again leaving the kitchen full of filthy dishes. She broke into tears and confessed that she was not, after all, enrolled in a correspondence course, but had simply left the university because she was “lonely.”
This was a disaster. I knew her parents would blame me for her quitting the university. And I also realized that, if she did not return now, she never would. The next day I managed to secure a five-day leave and pulled some strings to buy Aeroflot tickets to Kiev with borrowed money.
The next morning we were in the university rector’s office. I wore my best parade uniform with polished wings and the two decorations I’d earned. The old comrade was sympathetic when I explained that Jana had abruptly left the university after I had received a sudden overseas assignment. Now, I told him, that assignment had been just as suddenly canceled. It was imperative that she be allowed to enroll as a correspondence student.
Although the official enrollment deadline was weeks past, I somehow managed to slash through the red tape. When we left Kiev, Jana was glum and pouting, but she was enrolled.
Over the coming months, I learned another painful lesson about the reality of Soviet life. I had always eaten my meals in officers’ dining rooms, where the food was free and plentiful. But now I was a married man and was supposed to buy groceries in the bazaar, where the prices were at least three times those in the Voyentorg. But the Voyentorg was always empty these days. And, unlike Akhtubinsk, we had no transport available to whisk us off to Moscow for shopping trips. On a salary of 350 rubles a month, two healthy young people with normal appetites simply could not eat properly. I now understood why the staff of the Akhtubinsk center had staged their strike.
Because Jana was only making a token effort in her correspondence study, I suggested she find a part-time job to help our finances. Before her father left for Syria, he managed to land her a well-paying position in the division meteorology office. But two weeks passed and she still had not reported for work. When I confronted her, Jana complained that she hadn’t “felt well.” In fact, she had merely slept all day.
Only three months into our marriage, and I was beginning to face the bitter truth that I had probably married Jana for the wrong reasons.
That December my squadron had duty alert when the huge, devastating earthquake struck Armenia. The Ruslan base became a staging and refueling point for Soviet transport aircraft hauling international relief supplies to the victims. Big An-12 and An-22 turboprops were landing and taking off every few minutes, and the convoys of fuel
