Omon Ra

their lives without a trace of sentimentality; their words were the same simple ones you heard in the kitchen at home, so the very essence of their heroism seemed to spring from the ordinary, from the petty details of everyday life, from the grey, cold air around us.

The person I remember best of all from “Strong in Spirit” is retired Major Ivan Trofimovich Popadya—a funny kind of name. He was tall, a real Russian Hercules, and his jacket was festooned with medals. His face and neck were red, and dotted all over with small white scars. He wore a patch over his left eye. His life was very unusual: He began as a simple huntsman in a hunting reserve used by Party leaders and members of the government, and his duties were to drive the animals—wild boar and bears—towards the marksmen hiding behind the trees. One day there was a terrible accident. A big male boar broke across the line of flags and fatally injured a Party leader who was firing from behind a birch tree. He died on the way to the nearby town, and a session of the supreme organs of power adopted a resolution forbidding the leadership to hunt wild animals. But, of course, the need remained, and one day Popadya was summoned to the Party Committee of the hunting reserve, where they explained the whole business to him and then said: “Ivan! We can’t order you to do it—and even if we could, we wouldn’t, not this. But it’s something that needs to be done. Think about it. We won’t force you.”

Popadya thought hard about it all night long, and next morning he went to the Party Committee and said he agreed.

“We didn’t expect any other answer,” said the Party Secretary.

They gave Ivan a bulletproof waistcoat, a helmet, and a boar skin, and he went to work at his new job—a job which it would be no exaggeration to describe as daily heroism. For the first few days he felt a little afraid, especially for his exposed legs, but then he got used to it, and the members of the government, who all knew what was going on, tried to aim at his side, at the bulletproof waistcoat, which Ivan padded with a small pillow to soften the impact. Occasionally, of course, some old codger from the Central Committee would miss his aim, and then Ivan would go on extended sick leave and read a lot of books, including his favourite, the memoirs of the famous flier Pokryshkin. Just how dangerous this work was—every bit as bad as active military service—can be judged from the fact that every week they had to replace Ivan’s bullet-riddled Party card, which he carried in the inside pocket of the boar skin. When he was wounded, his shift was worked by other huntsmen, including his own son Marat, but Ivan was always regarded as the most experienced, the one to be trusted with the most responsible jobs. They tried to take care of Ivan Popadya. Meanwhile, he and his son studied the habits and the calls of the wild inhabitants of the forest—the bears, wolves, and boars—and improved their professional skills.

The accident happened a long time ago, when the American politician Kissinger visited our country. He was conducting important negotiations, and a lot depended on whether we could sign a provisional nuclear arms limitation treaty (this was especially important, because our enemies must not be allowed to know that we never had any nuclear arms). So Kissinger was entertained at the very highest state level, and all the various state services were involved—for instance, when it was discovered that he liked short, plump brunettes, a quartet of plump brunette swans was found to drift across Swan Lake on the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre, under the glinting gaze of Kissinger’s horn-rimmed spectacles up in the government box.

It was thought easier to negotiate while hunting, and Kissinger was asked what he liked to hunt. Probably in an attempt at subtle political witticism, he said he preferred bears, and was surprised and rather alarmed when next morning he was actually taken hunting. On the way he was told that two bruins had been lined up for him.

These two were none other than the Communists Ivan and Marat Popadya, father and son, the finest special-service huntsmen in the reserve. The guest of honour laid out Ivan straightaway with a well-aimed shot, just as soon as he and Marat reared up on their hind legs and came out of the forest, roaring; they attached the hooks to the special loops on his body and dragged it over to the car. But the American just couldn’t hit Marat, even at almost point-blank range, when Marat was deliberately moving as slowly as he could, exposing the full expanse of his chest to the American’s bullets. Suddenly something quite unpredictable happened—the foreign guest’s gun jammed, and before anyone realised what was happening, he had thrown it down in the snow and flung himself at Marat with a knife. Of course, a real bear would have dealt very quickly with any huntsman who behaved like that, but Marat remembered the responsibility he bore. He lifted up his paws and growled, hoping to frighten the American away, but the hunter was out for blood now, and he ran up and stuck the knife into Marat’s belly; the slim blade slipped between the plates of the bulletproof vest. Marat fell. And all this happened as his father looked on from where he lay a few metres away; they dragged Marat over to him, and Ivan realised that his son was still alive—he was groaning almost inaudibly. The blood he left on the snow wasn’t the special liquid from his little rubber bladder—it was the real thing!

“Hold on, son!” Ivan whispered, swallowing his tears. “Hold on!”

Kissinger was beside himself with delight. He suggested to the officials accompanying him that they should all drink a toast right there, standing on top of the “teddy bears”, as he called them, and they should sign the treaty on the spot. They covered Marat and Ivan with the board of honour from the wall of the forester’s hut—it had their photographs on it—and made an 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 my thoughts with him [...].