until there was no more to drink. The men then settled by the coal stove to play dominoes, smoke, and tell jokes, allowing only an emergency to intrude on their leisure. The garage manager did not bother them; they accomplished in half a day all that was demanded, his superiors were happy, and by keeping in their graces, he could count on the mechanics if serious need arose.
Viktor in turn empathized with them; he understood that the garage was their prison and that they had given up even dreaming of parole. He realized, too, the meaning of the words that followed Yakov’s first swig of vodka. “Ah, this puts a little pink in the day.” For him the garage became a comfortable haven from which he could pursue his overriding goal of flight.
Having survived scrutiny of his ideological stability, study of his education, and a rigorous physical examination, Viktor was one of forty young men selected for DOSAAF preflight training. Five nights weekly he hurried from work to the cafeteria, then took a bus across town to DOSAAF offices located in a prerevolutionary bank building. The subjects — aerodynamics, navigation, design and construction of aircraft, radio and electronics, meteorology, and rules of flight — were not inordinately difficult. Many cadets, though, could not manage both the volume of study required and a daily job, and by the end of the first month fully a fourth had dropped out.
Viktor never had been so happy as in DOSAAF classes. They were devoid of cant, pretense, hypocrisy. Defying regulations, the chief instructor omitted the teaching of political theory. Careers and lives might hinge on how much and how well they learned, and there was no time for trivia. The instructors were retired Air Force pilots, and in Viktor’s eyes they stood as real men who had braved and survived the skies. They treated the cadets as both subordinates and comrades, as future partners from whom nothing should be hidden. Direct questions to them elicited unequivocal, comprehensible answers, and for any question concerning flight, they had an answer. The closer they led him to flight, the more its challenge engrossed him.
The first parachute jump was scheduled in December, and a parachutist, an Air Force major, readied them for it. He said that although he had jumped more than a thousand times, he still was afraid before jumping. “Do not fear your own fear,” he told them. “It is natural.” The temperature was forty degrees below zero as Viktor and eight other cadets climbed into the small AN-2 transport at an airfield thirty miles from Omsk. He was not afraid; he was terrified. He felt only like an automaton irreversibly programmed to proceed to its own doom. When the parachutist swung open the door and freezing air rushed and whistled into the cabin, he had to reach into his deepest reserves of strength and will to make himself stand up and take his place, third in line.
The parachutist slapped his shoulder, and he plunged headlong into the void.
Absorbed in the rhapsodies of the sky, Viktor returned to earth ingloriously, landing squarely on the back of a cow. Under the impact, the startled cow involuntarily relieved herself and bounded away, dumping him in the manure. He only laughed at himself, for nothing could detract from his joy. He wanted to go back up immediately and jump again. Before, he had longed, hoped, imagined. Now he knew. His future was clear. As long as he lived, he would live to be in the sky.
After written examinations in mid-April, the students met their future flight instructors. Viktor was mortified upon being introduced to his. He had counted on being taught by a real fighter pilot, perhaps one who had flown against the Americans in Korea or Vietnam. Instead, he was assigned to a woman, Nadezhda Alekseyevna, who was about thirty-five. She still had the figure of a gymnast, and despite a rather rough complexion and bobbed hair, she was pretty. It almost would have been better had she been ugly.
The sullenness with which he etched a hollow outline of his background betrayed to her his disappointment. She recognized all the cues of male resentment, for she was one of the few female pilots in DOSAAF, if not the sole one. She had earned her wings and place only through prodigious determination. At age eighteen, she had joined a parachutist club open to women and subsequently finagled her way into a glider club. Through influence in Moscow, she had graduated from gliders to DOSAAF flight training and so excelled that she won grudging acceptance as an instructor. For the past eight years she had taught, always having to be better to be equal, always having to prove herself anew, always having to tolerate the lack of any separate facilities for women at air bases.
“Do you really want to fly?” she asked Viktor.
“Very much.”
“All right, we will work on it together. I am proud of many of my students. Some now are fighter pilots. I hope you will make me proud of you.”
By law, the garage had to grant Viktor leave of absence with three-fourths pay during his flight training at an airfield north of Omsk. The field had long ago been abandoned by the Air Force to DOSAAF, and it was closed except during late spring and summer. They had to open the mess hall and World War II barracks and keep wood fires burning around the clock because even in early May the temperature was below freezing. Instructors, cadets, Air Force administrators, mechanics, cooks, and guards all joined in clearing the runways of snow and making the base serviceable.
On their first training flight in the YAK-18U, an old, yet excellent trainer easy to handle, Nadezhda Alekseyevna told him, “Place your hand lightly on the stick and throttle and your feet on the rudders. Do not exert any pressure. Just follow my movements.” She climbed leisurely to about 5,000 feet. Suddenly she threw the plane into violent maneuvers — dives, an inside loop, an outside loop, barrel rolls, a stall, then a spin. The whole earth was rushing up into Viktor’s face to smash him. He did not know what was happening, only that the end was imminent. Persuaded that she had scared him enough, Nadezhda Alekseyevna deftly pulled out, circled, and landed.
Viktor stood uneasily, still adjusting to the ground. “Do you still want to fly?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you think I can teach you?”
“I know you can.”
“All right, from now on, let’s work together like adults.”
On their fourth flight, she instructed, “Make a ninety-degree turn to the left.” He banked and, pulling out a little late, altered course about 100 degrees but otherwise executed flawlessly. “Okay, ninety degrees to the right'. This time he watched the compass carefully and straightened out on a heading exactly ninety degrees from the previous course. “I’m going to put us into a spin and let you try to rescue us.” She arched the plane upward and throttled back the power until it stalled, then nosed over into a dizzying spin. “Now it’s up to you!”
Easily Viktor pushed the stick forward, stepped on the rudder, halted the spin, and pulled back out of the dive.
“Very good! Try a loop.”
Viktor dived, then lifted the plane upward and over and backward into a loop. At the height of the loop, when they were upside down, he snapped the plane into a half roll and righted it, effecting an Immelmann turn, a much more difficult maneuver than could be expected of him.
“Impudent! But good!”
Without instructions, he did a full loop, then a series of quick rolls.
“All right! All right! Let’s see if you can land.”
Unharnessing their parachutes, Nadezhda, who heretofore had addressed Viktor formally as Viktor Ivanovich, said, “Viktor, you can do it. You have the talent. You can be a great flier.”
Everyone else saw it, too. Viktor could fly, as naturally as a fish swims. And to him the sky had become as water is to a fish. Before his first solo flight, he was cocky and, afterward, still cockier. When he landed after his final flight test, the lieutenant colonel who flew in the back seat shook his hand. “Young man, outstanding. I hope we see you in the Air Force.”
The instructors and cadets gathered in the mess hall on a Friday night, their last before returning to Omsk, for a great party. Even before vodka began to evaporate inhibitions, Nadezhda abandoned her role as a superior and confided that his performance had won her a commendation. “You have made me proud, Viktor.”
In the morning melancholy replaced euphoria as Viktor canvassed his immediate future. It was too late to apply this year for Air Force cadet training. He could continue the nightly DOSAAF classes, but now the theory of flight seemed a pallid substitute for the reality of flight. He would have to subsist during the next months in the dark
