MiG Pilot

The witch is telling the truth. There is nothing she can do. All right, I will find protein for myself.

The hunt for protein led Belenko into the forest beyond the river that curved along the eastern edge of Rubtsovsk. They may have exaggerated, but old men claimed that the Aley River before the war was so clean you could see plentiful schools of big fish swimming five or six feet below the surface and catch them almost effortlessly. But around the city, continuous pollution from chemicals and factory wastes had turned the river into an open sewer, and the despoilment had eaten into the forest, shriveling flora and leaving a belt of scrubland.

About a thousand yards past the scrubland, Viktor entered heavy underbrush and, after pushing on for another half mile or so, came into a dense primeval forest colored and perfumed by wild flowers. He felt like Fabien, the doomed pilot in Saint-Exupery’s Night Flight, who, lost and buffeted in a South American storm, suddenly was lifted out of the blackness of the clouds into tranquil heavens lit by stars. Uncontaminated, uninhabited, silent, and serene, the endless forest imbued Viktor with the same sense of space and freedom he was sure awaited him in the sky. And after school recessed for the summer, he virtually lived in the forest.

With a slingshot he killed birds — mostly sparrows, crows, and quail — that abounded in the forest and roasted them on a spit. He learned to detect birds’ nests which often yielded eggs. And he gathered wild blackberries, strawberries, cranberries, and tart little green apples. Some days he came alone and, after gorging himself until he could eat no more, settled in a patch of light and read until darkness. More often he invited friends, most of whom were veritable waifs like him, and just as hungry. They constructed a log lean-to, and from this base ranged out in all directions to hunt and explore; their explorations were rewarded by discovery of a clear stream populated by plump trout.

Between May and September Viktor gained thirteen pounds, and with the resumption of school, he looked forward to presenting himself to the librarian. He expected that she would acclaim him for his growth just as she did for his reading. But she was not there. The new librarian would say only that she had retired and “moved away.” To where? None of the other teachers knew, or if they did, they would not say. Why would she go away without saying good-bye to me? What happened to her? He never did find out.

Viktor continued to pound the punching bag, to exercise and run, and by December he felt ready to stalk the four assailants who had jumped him the preceding February. He encountered one in the same park where they had beaten him. “I have come to pay you back,” he announced. “I am going to fight you. Are you ready?”

The boy tried to shove him away, as if not deigning to take him seriously. With a short, quick left jab, Viktor hit him squarely in the face, and he himself was surprised by the force of the blow. It is working! He dazed the boy with a left to the jaw, then a right to the ribs. The teenager tried to fight back, but the blow to the ribs had hurt him. Viktor hit him in the jaw with another left and then, with a right, knocked him down. He got up, and Viktor promptly knocked him down once more, this time with a left hook. “Have you had enough?” Viktor shouted.

“All right, let’s stop,” said the boy, who was breathing heavily on the ground. He slowly got to his feet, whereupon Viktor, without warning, hit him with all his might in the right eye and felled him a third time.

“I did that so you will understand,” Viktor said. “The next time I will kill you.”

He caught two of the other three and battered them just as badly. His inability to find the fourth did not matter. He had avenged himself, and the fights, the third of which was witnessed by fifty to sixty students after school, established his reputation as someone who had best be left alone.

It also gained him an invitation to an adolescent party on New Year’s Eve, 1958. Everyone was gulping homemade vodka, which smelled like a combination of kerosene and acetone. Although Viktor had never drunk alcohol before, he joined in, partially out of curiosity, partially because he thought drinking was expected of him. After about an hour he staggered outside, unnoticed, and collapsed in the snow. He awakened caked in his own vomit. His head throbbed with both pain and fright born of the realization that, had he lain there another couple of hours, he surely would have frozen to death. In his sickness and disgust he made a vow: Never will I do this to myself again. Never will alcohol get a hold on me.

Later he came to enjoy alcohol, particularly wine and beer. But he drank it in circumstances and amounts of his own choosing. The ability to control alcohol, or abstain from it entirely, gave him an advantage over many of his peers at each successive stage in his life, if only by granting him more time and energy than they had for productive pursuits.

On a wintry Sunday afternoon a light aircraft crashed near the truck factory. The wreckage was still smoldering and ambulance attendants were taking away the body of the pilot, wrapped in a sheet, when Viktor arrived. The scene transfixed him, and he stayed long after everyone else had gone. Like a magnet, the wreckage kept drawing him back day after day, and he contemplated it by the hour.

Why did he die? Why did I not die in the fire when the mine exploded? Is there a God who decides who will die and when? They say that God is only the product of superstition and that the whole world happened by chance. Is that so? Do the trees and berries grow, do the cockroaches scoot, does the snow fall, do we breathe and think — all because of chance? If so, what caused chance in the first place?

No, there must be some Being, some purpose in life higher than man. But I do not understand. Maybe that is the purpose in life — to try to understand. The pilot must have tried in the sky. What he must have seen! Someday I will take his place and see for myself. Some way I will give my life meaning. I would rather that my life be like a candle that burns brightly and beautifully, if only briefly, than live a long life without meaning.

This embryonic ethos foreordained Viktor to conflict. He wanted to find meaning, to dedicate himself to some higher purpose, to be all the Party asked. Yet he could no more give himself unquestioningly to the Party on the basis of its pronouncements than he could give himself to his grandmother’s God on the basis of her chanted litanies. He had to see and comprehend for himself. As he searched and tried to understand, his reasoning exposed troublesome contradictions between what he saw and what he was told.

His inner conflict probably had begun with the announcement in school that First Party Secretary Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev had delivered a momentous and courageous address to the Twentieth Party Congress. The political instructor who gravely reported the essence of the speech suddenly turned Viktor’s basic concept of contemporary Soviet history upside down. Stalin, the father of the Soviet people, the modern Lenin, Stalin, whose benign countenance still looked at him from the first page of each of his textbooks, now was revealed to have been a depraved monster. Everything he had heard and read about Stalin throughout his life was a lie. For the leader of the Party himself — and who could know better? — had shown that Stalin had been a tyrant who had imprisoned and inflicted death upon countless innocent people, including loyal Party members and great generals. Far from having won the war, Stalin had been a megalomaniac who had very nearly lost the war.

The revelations so overwhelmed and deadened the mind that for a while he did not think about their implications. But as the teachers elaborated upon the Khrushchev speech and rewrote history, questions arose. It must be true; else they would not say it. But how could Stalin fool everybody for so long? Khrushchev worked with Stalin for years. Why did it take him so long to find out? Why did he take so long to tell us? If everything the Party said before was untrue, is it possible that what it is saying now is also untrue?

Khrushchev returned from his 1959 visit to the United States persuaded that corn represented a panacea for Soviet agricultural problems. In Iowa he had stood in seas of green corn rising above his head and seen how the Americans supplied themselves with a superabundance of meat by feeding corn to cattle and pigs. The American practice, he decreed, would be duplicated throughout the Soviet Union, and corn would be grown, as the radio declared, “from ocean to ocean.” Accordingly, corn was sown on huge tracts of heretofore-uncultivated land — uncultivated in some areas because soil or climate were such that nothing would grow in it.

But the most stupid kolkhoznik knows you can’t grow corn in Siberia. I have seen it with my own eyes. It is not even a foot high, a joke. How can the Party allow something so ridiculous?

The effort to amend the laws of nature by decree, combined with adverse weather, resulted not in a plethora of corn but rather in a dearth of all grain, which forced the slaughter of livestock. Serious shortages of meat, milk, butter, and even bread inevitably followed. Nevertheless, the radio continued to blare forth statistics demonstrating how under the visionary leadership of the gifted agronomist Khrushchev, Soviet agriculture was overcoming the