MiG Pilot

thirteen wandering the muddy streets of Chuguyevka, a child destined to live his blurred, uncomprehending life unhelped, the butt of jokes and pranks, the village idiot whose purpose was to amuse by his idiocy and make his superiors glad of their superiority. He saw her, too.

Only you. Always, only you, Viktor. Oh, Maria, where are you?

On the road again, he stopped and talked casually with strangers in small Kentucky and Missouri towns; some revelations congealed in his thoughts. Many Americans would rather live in small towns or the country. Why? Because in many ways life is easier and better for them. They don’t have to go to the city to buy food and clothes. The government doesn’t allocate supplies first to some cities, second to others, third to the small towns, and fourth to the sticks.

And where are all the criminals? Where are the fences? Why, in Rubtsovsk or Omsk or Salsk, if you didn’t have high fences around houses like the ones everyone lives in here, and dogs, too, the criminals would loot everything! The Americans, they complain about crime. They don’t know what crime really is. Let someone strip the clothes and underwear off their wives or daughters at knifepoint in broad daylight on a street corner just so they can sell those clothes and underwear, and they will begin to understand crime.

In Kansas City, Belenko visited the farmers’ market, the greatest, most dazzling assemblage of food and produce he had ever seen, and all so cheap. No residual doubts or reservations could withstand the sight. Before his eyes stretched the final, conclusive proof.

No, this system works. They can produce enough food for ten countries, for twenty countries if they want. If anybody goes hungry in this country, he’s just stupid.

From the market he wandered into a seedy section of the inner city and there at last found it — something just like in the Soviet Union: a stinking, dark bar crowded with bleary-eyed, unshaved, unkempt drunks growing drunker on beer and cheap rye whiskey. Ah, he knew them well; he had seen them all his life. What he had seen in America usually seemed initially like a mirage; this was real, and he was quite at home.

Sipping a beer, he questioned the bartender. Where do these men work? How do they get off from their jobs in the day? How much do they earn? The bartender, after a fashion, explained the unemployment compensation, welfare, and food stamp programs.

What! You mean in this country you don’t have to work even if there is a job for you! You mean the government pays you and gives you food so you can be a deadbeat and sit around and drink all day! Why, the Americans have done it! They have built True Communism! It’s just like 1980!

Walking from the bar along a deserted street at dusk, Belenko recognized trouble ahead. Two thugs were eyeing him, wavering in their judgment as to whether they could take him. He knew them well, too. Rather than wait for them, he ran at them and belligerently demanded directions to his motel, which in their surprise they gave.

“How about giving us a quarter?” one said.

“My pockets are full of quarters. But not one quarter I have says deadbeat on it.” They turned away, maybe sensing they were confronted by someone who hungered to hit them.

The pristine mountains and cool, pure air of Colorado made him think of parts of the Caucasus, and an indoor skating rink recalled good times skating in Rubtsovsk and Omsk, and he saw Nadezhda gliding toward him, waving.

I would like to see her and my friends just for a day. Skate in the park; go back to the forests; stop by the factory.

Las Vegas, in consequence of Party conjurations, always had been the supreme symbol of the iniquities and depravities of capitalism, surpassing even the famous decadence of Hollywood. He fully expected to see couples copulating and gangsters shooting it out on the streets, while the bloated rich played cards amid sniffs of cocaine in opulently upholstered and cushioned casinos. So what he saw disappointed, then surprised, then beguiled, and ultimately entranced.

He marveled that a city so clean, neat, and spacious could rise in the midst of desert. His motel in the center of the city was inexpensive; but the rooms were elegant in size and appointments, and the swimming pool was splendid. The shows at the casinos were excellent, yet also inexpensive, as were the drinks.

I will just drink this cheap whiskey and watch all the people. Look at them. They are all kinds of people, and they are enjoying themselves. It’s like a carnival, not a brothel. Of course, they are foolish to gamble. The chances are they will lose their money. But it’s their choice. If that’s the way they want to have a good time, it’s their business. They lied about this city. They lied about everything.

In the awesome grandeur of Wyoming, Montana, and Washington and the national parks, he saw more lies, for the Party said greedy capitalism had raped, robbed, and emaciated all the land. He stayed a night in a logging town set in a valley by a clear river surrounded by mountains. The climate and the expanses were like Siberia, and he longed for Siberia.

About forty miles outside San Francisco, he started noticing signs advertising all sorts of lodging, restaurants, and nightclubs in the city. That’s right. There are no signs outside Rubtsovsk or Omsk or Moscow because there are no places to stay or eat. You stay in the railway station if there’s room. Sure, we have signs. They tell how great the Party is, how much the Party is achieving. No signs tell you where to buy sausage.

He stayed in another downtown motel owned by immigrants from India. His room was dean, cheap, and had a big color television. At his request a taxi driver dropped him off in the “worst area” of downtown San Francisco. It was a cesspool of garish nightclubs, pornographic shops, prostitutes, homosexuals, transvestites, junkies, pimps, filthy, unhealthy-looking dropouts, and rebels against society. He ate in a hole in the wall and felt as if he were in a human zoo, yet the fried fish, fried potatoes, and coleslaw, for which he paid $1.50, were good.

Two prostitutes, one black, one white, tried to lure him into a brothel, “For thirty dollars, we’ll give you a real good tune.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t be stupid. You know. For thirty dollars you can have both of us.”

Here the Party was right. The dregs accumulated here were to him as disgusting as anything the Party ever claimed, and such human waste, insofar as it was visible, would be flushed out of Soviet society.

As it was early when he went back to his room, he switched on the television and turned the knob from channel to channel until he saw something very familiar. How wonderful! In progress on the screen was a superb public television performance of Anna Karenina.

There were so many choices. Before, the discovery and contemplation of them had invigorated and stimulated, as did the contemplation of a daring and original move in chess. Now he didn’t care. All visions of what could be were clouded, dulled, marred by yearning for what might have been with her.

At a roadside cafe near Odessa, Texas, a Latin girl served him. She was not so pretty as Maria, but she smiled and carried herself like Maria. He bolted his meal and raced the breadth of Texas in fewer than twenty-four hours and sped foolishly, suicidally toward the institute.

Everywhere they had been together he revisited. He drove to the hacienda and en route back pulled off the road and stopped about where she had spoken to him. And now a delirium of irrationality afflicted him. It was illogical, senseless, but in its effects on him, it was as real as a typhoid delirium. He wanted to flee from himself, from her, from America, the extravagant successes of which made it seem now like an alien planet where he never could be a normal inhabitant.

Primordial impulses seized and held and pushed him, and he could not resist them. He wanted to feel the mud of the streets, smell the stink in which he had grown up, be among the desolate, cold huts, hear Russian, be in the land of his birth, his people, his ancestors. He was hearing and being drawn by not only the call of the Mother Country, but the Call of the Wild.

Did they not say all I have to do is telephone and in twenty-four hours I will be in Moscow? Did not Brezhnev himself promise they would not punish me? Can I not fight for my people better by being among them? Is not my duty to be with my people as Maria is with hers? I will do it. I will go home.

He left his flight jacket, his flight suit, and everything else in the apartment and started north toward Washington — and the Soviet Embassy.

Great stakes rode with him. His voluntary return would prove to millions upon millions within and without the Soviet Union that the Party was right, that Soviet society was superior to American society, that it was the beacon lighting the way to the future of man. A New Communist Man who had seen and judged, who had been captured