of honour from the wall of the forester’s hut—it had their photographs on it—and madean improvised table. For the next hour, Ivan saw nothing but fleeting glimpses of feet, and he heard nothing but drunken speech in a foreign language and the swift muttering of the interpreter; he was almost crushed when the Americans danced on the table. When it grew dark and everybody left, the treaty was signed and Marat was dead. A thin trickle of blood flowed from his open jaws onto the blue evening snow, and a golden Hero of the Soviet Union star glittered on his fur, where the manager of the reserve had hung it. All night the father lay opposite his dead son, crying—and feeling no shame for his tears.
•
I suddenly understood anew the long-lost meaning of the words I was so fed up with seeing staring at me every morning from the wall of the training hall: “Life always has room for heroism.” It was not just romantic nonsense but a precise and sober statement of the fact that our Soviet life is not the ultimate instance of reality but only, as it were, its anteroom. I imagined it this way: that there is no space anywhere in America, between the glaring shop window and the parked Cadillac, for heroism, and there can be no space for it—apart, of course, from that rare moment when a Soviet spy passes by. But here in Russia, you can only be on an apparently identical pavement outside an identical shop window in a Post-War or Pre-War Period, and this is what opens the door leading to heroism, not in the external world, but within, in the very depths of the soul.
“Well done,” said Urchagin, when I shared mythoughts with him, “only, be careful. The door leading to heroism certainly does open up within us, but it is in the external world that the act of heroism takes place. Don’t fall into subjective idealism, or your proud flight aloft will be robbed in a single short second of all its meaning.”
It was May, the peat bogs around Moscow were on fire, and a pale sultry sun hung in the smoke-veiled sky. Urchagin gave me a book to read, by a Japanese author who had been a kamikaze pilot during the Second World War, and I was astounded by the similarity between my state and the feelings he described. Just like him, I didn’t think about what lay ahead of me but lived for the present day—engrossing myself in books and leaving the world completely behind as I gazed at the fiery explosions on the cinema screen (on Saturday evenings they showed us war films), even worrying seriously about my marks, which weren’t too good. The word “death” existed in my life like a note reminding me of something I had to do that had been hanging on my wall for ages—I knew it was still there, but I never paused to look at it. Mitiok and I never discussed the subject, but when we were finally told it was time for us to begin practising on the actual space equipment, we glanced at each other and seemed to feel the first breath of an icy wind.
From the outside the moonwalker looked like a large laundry tank set on eight heavy tram wheels. Numerous different items protruded from its fuselage—various-shaped antennae, mechanical arms, and so forth. Noneof these worked, and they were really there only for television, but they were very impressive all the same. The lid of the moonwalker was covered with small oblique incisions: this was not deliberate, it was simply that the metal sheeting it was made from was the same as they used on the floor in the metro, but then again, it made the machine appear more mysterious.
The human psyche works in peculiar ways: it needs details first of all. I remember when I was small I often used to draw tanks and aeroplanes and show them to my friends, and they always liked the drawings with lots of lines that didn’t really mean anything, so I actually began adding them on purpose. In just the same way, the moonwalker managed to look like a very complicated and ingenious piece of equipment.
The lid
•
I suddenly understood anew the long-lost meaning of the words I was so fed up with seeing staring at me every morning from the wall of the training hall: “Life always has room for heroism.” It was not just romantic nonsense but a precise and sober statement of the fact that our Soviet life is not the ultimate instance of reality but only, as it were, its anteroom. I imagined it this way: that there is no space anywhere in America, between the glaring shop window and the parked Cadillac, for heroism, and there can be no space for it—apart, of course, from that rare moment when a Soviet spy passes by. But here in Russia, you can only be on an apparently identical pavement outside an identical shop window in a Post-War or Pre-War Period, and this is what opens the door leading to heroism, not in the external world, but within, in the very depths of the soul.
“Well done,” said Urchagin, when I shared mythoughts with him, “only, be careful. The door leading to heroism certainly does open up within us, but it is in the external world that the act of heroism takes place. Don’t fall into subjective idealism, or your proud flight aloft will be robbed in a single short second of all its meaning.”
It was May, the peat bogs around Moscow were on fire, and a pale sultry sun hung in the smoke-veiled sky. Urchagin gave me a book to read, by a Japanese author who had been a kamikaze pilot during the Second World War, and I was astounded by the similarity between my state and the feelings he described. Just like him, I didn’t think about what lay ahead of me but lived for the present day—engrossing myself in books and leaving the world completely behind as I gazed at the fiery explosions on the cinema screen (on Saturday evenings they showed us war films), even worrying seriously about my marks, which weren’t too good. The word “death” existed in my life like a note reminding me of something I had to do that had been hanging on my wall for ages—I knew it was still there, but I never paused to look at it. Mitiok and I never discussed the subject, but when we were finally told it was time for us to begin practising on the actual space equipment, we glanced at each other and seemed to feel the first breath of an icy wind.
From the outside the moonwalker looked like a large laundry tank set on eight heavy tram wheels. Numerous different items protruded from its fuselage—various-shaped antennae, mechanical arms, and so forth. Noneof these worked, and they were really there only for television, but they were very impressive all the same. The lid of the moonwalker was covered with small oblique incisions: this was not deliberate, it was simply that the metal sheeting it was made from was the same as they used on the floor in the metro, but then again, it made the machine appear more mysterious.
The human psyche works in peculiar ways: it needs details first of all. I remember when I was small I often used to draw tanks and aeroplanes and show them to my friends, and they always liked the drawings with lots of lines that didn’t really mean anything, so I actually began adding them on purpose. In just the same way, the moonwalker managed to look like a very complicated and ingenious piece of equipment.
The lid
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