The Good Life Elsewhere

by Vladimir Lorchenkov

  “Vasya, I’m afraid of hei …”

  “I know. That’s why you’re going to fly. And you’re going to cry, you animal – you’ll cry all my family’s tears, and the tears of my murdered Uncle Greisha.”

  “Vasya, you’re speaking like an anti-Soviet,” said Koval, wiping his tears.

  “No,” Vasily smiled. “You’re the anti-Soviet, because you nearly suspected the first Soviet replica of the Wright Brothers plane of being a suspicious mishmash! And I made it in secret, to bring joy to the Moldovan Communist Party and its Secretary, Comrade Bodiul. And to the leadership of the entire USSR and to Comrade Brezhnev. And you, you scumbag, you wanted to mess with the happiness of Comrade Brezhnev and Comrade Bodiul. So what does that make you now?

  “An anti-Soviet,” whispered the defeated Koval. “Oh, people – forgive me.”

  They dragged the plane outside and Koval set off for the office, to tell the regional bosses about the seventeen-year-old self-taught Vasily Lungu, who joined the VSCAAF and made the first Soviet replica of the Wright Brothers plane all in order to make the party, Comrade Bodiul and Comrade Brezhnev proud. The bosses in Chisinau reported back their decision to send the plane on a tour of Moldova, to give the people a jolt and infect the youth with a yearning skywards. And they decided the first lecture would be delivered in Larga, in the hometown of the seventeen-year-old self-taught Vasily Lungu, who joined the VSCAAF and made the first Soviet replica of the Wright Brothers plane, all in order to make the party, Comrade Bodiul and Comrade Brezhnev proud.

  The chairman thought about the impending flight and let out a cry. But in his heart he understood that going for a spin in an airplane was peanuts compared to what he had done to Vasily’s family. He cried anyway. It seemed like the thing to do. Meanwhile, Vasily kept talking and the crowd was transfixed. Nobody expected such a silver tongue from a boy from Larga!

  “Actually, Comrades, I lied to you,” said Vasya, sadly. “I lied to my fellow villagers, I lied to the comrades from the region and to my friends from the Komsomol organization.”

  “Aha!” The people said in surprise. “Oho!”

  Vasya gave a wide grin and shook an unruly lock of his ink-black hair.

  “I told you there was an airplane in front of you. But I lied. This is no plane.”

  “Aha,” said the audience, surprised and scared.

  “Oho,” Chairman Koval’s heart skipped a happy beat and he reached into his pocket for the scraps of paper with the report and confession.

  “In front of you, Comrades,” said Vasily, aiming his pointer, “is not exactly an airplane; it’s actually a biplane glider – just a bit bigger and more durable.”

  Cries of “Oho!” rang out happily from the crowd.

  “Aha,” exclaimed Koval, bitterly. “Aha …”

  “And a twelve horsepower gasoline engine weighing over two hundred and twenty pounds is sitting on the rear wing,” said Vasya, under the proud gaze of his father. “Next to that, you can see the pilot’s seat and the steering rudders. Do you know how much steam the motor picks up?”

  “More than our tractors?” the newly-minted mechanics shouted boisterously. “Impossible!”

  “Possible,” Vasily answered boisterously. “The motor can reach one and a half rpms and with the help of a train drive it turns two pusher propellers three meters wide, laid out symmetrically in back of the wings.”

  “Well, I’ll be!” said the surprised mechanics.

  “That’s right!” laughed Vasily. “And now, Comrades, in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of this machine, how easy a time she has up in the air, how pretty she looks, we’re going to take an experimental flight.”

  “Hurrah!” rejoiced the young people. “Choose me, Vasily! Choose me!”

  “No, Comrades, I’ve already promised the first flight to our chairman, Secretary Koval,” said Vasily, chewing his lip sympathetically. “Our joint flight will be a symbol of the link between the Komsomol youths and the tried-and-true party elders. It is only to Comrade Koval that I can offer the copilot seat on this, the first Soviet replica of the Wright Brothers plane, built in order to bring joy to the party and Comrade Badiul and Comrade Brezhnev …”

  “Hurrah!” answered the young folks, enviously.

  The crowd triumphantly lifted Koval and Vasily in the air. From that alone the chairman felt sick. Finally, the crowd put them back on their feet and Vasya helped the chairman put on his silly helmet and climb onto the wing, and then into the cockpit. Vasily, too, got in. A group of young Largans took hold of a cable and dragged the glider to give it speed, after which the machine caught an airstream and took off. Shaky, unsure of itself – but it took off. From down below, the plane looked so exhilarating that Vasily’s father teared up again. Even Chairman Koval was so taken by the beautiful view opening up as they climbed heavenward that he forgot his fear.

  “What do you think, bloodsucker?” Vasily turned toward him and laughed. “Afraid yet?”

  “No,” smiled Koval, groping in his pocket for the report. “No, I’m not afraid anymore. It’s so beautiful!”

  “Tell me, what was it like to eat people alive, eh?” Vasily asked suddenly. The question was so serious and full of thought that the chairman, not expecting such pep from a seventeen-year-old kid, went cold.

  “What you’re feeling’s not fear,” said Vasya, as if he were reading Koval’s mind. “It’s the ascending altitude.”

  “Ah!” shouted the chairman. He was happy and relieved. “For a minute there I … Listen, Vasya, you have to understand, the times were different. Sure, we cracked some eggs. But we put the country on its feet.”

  “Atop the bones of my uncle, who died from hunger as a baby in Siberia?” asked Vasily, once again proving tougher than his years.

  “You know, it …” Koval was completely flustered. “Well …”

  “Enough,” shouted Vasily, “the hell with you, you’re all bastards. You know, I pulled a fast one on you, too.”

  “What was that?” shouted the chairman happily, since they could barely hear each other on account of the wind.

  The plane circled above the rapids of the Dniester. In the north of Moldova, the Dniester looks wild when glimpsed from the sky, and the white limestone hills sparkle at the river’s edge like the bones of some strange animal who lived in the sea that was once here billions of years ago …

  “I told you it was the first Soviet replica of the first Wright Brothers plane,” shouted Vasily at the top of his lungs. “But in the first Wright Brothers plane, there was no seat for a copilot. Me and you, chairman, we’re flying in the first Soviet replica of the second Wright Brothers plane!”

  “Peanuts!” said Koval, bobbing his head. “So what, so what. The main thing is—it’s a replica! The party’s happy! That’s the main thing!”

  “Oh yeah,” said Vasily, as the plane climbed higher and higher on the airstreams. “There’s one more thing I lied to you about.”

  “Again?” said Koval, then added: “Maybe we’ve gone high enough?”

  “The earth is round,” laughed Vasily. “Everything’s relative. Maybe we’re falling.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Koval.

  “Eh, don’t worry about it.” Vasya waved his hand, the plane swerved, and the chairman’s heart tore a hole through his shirt. “So you want to know what I lied about?”

  “Spit it out already,” said Koval, “and let’s start our descent.”

  “The second Wright Brothers plane didn’t have a bomb hatch. Ours, the Soviet replica of the second Wright Brothers plane, does. And what does that mean? It means it’s not a replica of the second Wright Brothers plane, either!”

  “Sure, sure,” said the chairman, fawning cheerfully. He was far removed from aviation and none of this meant anything to him. “Sure, sure. So, when are we going to descend, huh?!”

  “You?” said Vasily, turning toward him. His face lit up. “Before you can say, ‘Now!’”

  Vasily p
ulled the lever for the hatch. Spinning slowly, like a scuba diver backing into the water, Koval realized he was falling. At first he was frightened, and then he rejoiced at the unforgettable feeling of flight. Then he was distressed again because, after all, he was flying toward his death. And beyond that border, the old Bolshevik Comrade Koval knew, there was nothing, nothing at all to speak of.

  And in fact, he was right. There was nothing. Neither big agriculture, nor Communist Party; no Soviet replica of the first, second or third Wright Brothers plane; no goddamn Greisha Lungu—who used to visit the chairman in his dreams from time to time—swollen from hunger, dead in Siberia; there were no sobbing men, no laughing women, no happy young lads with movie star looks. Terrifying to think of it – no movie stars, either! And no svelte Soviet pop singers and not even the Secretary of the Moldovan Communist Party, Comrade Bodiul – even he didn’t exist down below, in the land after death, where there were no vineyards, no sun, no shame, no confessions. The single, solitary thing that exists down there is this: Nothing.

  But the chairman could no longer confirm nor deny. And having ceased to be—Finito!—he couldn’t be sure whether he’d ceased to be. Finito!

  The investigation revealed that Koval, drunk on the fresh high-altitude air and the beautiful view, acted recklessly and was responsible for his own fall. Vasya barely managed to land the plane, which suffered irreparable damage, and so it was impossible to carry out a follow-up flight investigation. They buried the chairman on the highest hill in the village. On his gravestone they placed a monument, a five-pointed marble slab with a plane carved on it, and stars suspended above. In the newspaper Independent Moldova, there was a lofty obituary with the title, “He gave his life to the earth, his death – to the sky!”

  The national VSCAAF held a grand competition the year after Koval’s death, which became, as the press so aptly remarked, a fine tradition. Moldovan pioneer scouts composed songs and poems about the simple village toiler who, for sixty years, worked to feed the Soviet Union, gaining bloody calluses on his hand, and who dreamed of the heavens in his heart. When he was already at retirement age—although he thought it corrupt to allow himself to take the government’s money for a pension—he flew in the sky with a young Komsomol member. Their plane lost control and the Komsomol member was inexperienced. Comrade Koval told him, “Be calm, son, I’ll save you,” and jumped out of the plane to maintain equilibrium. Koval went down, and the Komsomol member landed the plane in tears.

  Of course, there was also a school named in the chairman’s honor. And in the village council they hung a marble plaque with his portrait. But that all happened later. Right after the tragedy, maybe a month later, Komsomol member Lungu was issued an honorary Komsomol trip to somewhere out of harm’s way.

  “Vasily, we’re sending you to tractor school,” the new chairman grandly announced to the young man. “At least when you fall out of a tractor, you won’t die!”

  15

  AS HE WAS REMEMBERING THIS, VASILY LUNGU, WITH his friend, Serafim Botezatu, gulped down a few jugs of wine.

  “Admit it,” said Serafim, smiling. “You ejected the chairman from the airplane on purpose.”

  “No!,” said Vasya, and crossed himself. “Cross my heart. Orthodox style, with the Life-Giving Cross.”

  “What difference does it make, your Life-Giving Cross?” said Serafim. “Anyway, you don’t believe in God.”

  “I’ve flown through heaven,” Vasily laughed. “It was empty.”

  “Tfu.” Serafim said. Then he spit, more out of form than conviction. “So tell me, you want to go back again? Up there?”

  “No,” lied Vasily. “What business have I got in the skies? Back then, I admit, the only reason I even got started with the whole thing was thanks to the chairman.”

  “Aren’t you afraid?”

  “We’ve had a new order here for twenty years, Serafim! These days they’d probably give me a letter of commendation for killing a Bolshevik!”

  “They won’t give you anything—”

  “Exactly …”

  “Here.”

  “Meaning? What are you trying to say?” Lungu asked.

  “I’m trying to say, a man with hands like yours has got no business staying in Moldova,” Serafim blurted out.

  “Akh,” said Vasily and waved his hand. “You’re on about that again. About your stinking Italy …”

  “Not stinking at all,” argued Serafim. “Blessed, beautiful and surprising. Come on. Have you seen our river crossing at the Dniester? It’s dirty, it’s skimpy. It’s basically just a name, not even a bridge. But in Venice, you know, there’s an entire city built on piles. It’s a city in the sea. And everywhere – bridges, bridges, bridges. It’s clean, it’s neat. Out-of-this-world beauty. The salaries are enormous. Tell me, would you want to become a gondolier?”

  “What, so I can pull oars all day and cover my hands in calluses? I can get calluses here if I want them.” Vasily shrugged his shoulders.

  “Moron,” Serafim upbraided him. “They’ve been using motorboats for a long time.”

  “Motorboats?” asked Vasily, dreamily. Then he shook his head. “No. It’s not for me.”

  “What’s more,” pressed Serafim, while the iron was still hot, “there are factories there. Fiat. Everything’s mechanized, everything’s covered in machine grease. The steel thunders, grumbles … Ekh!”

  “Machine grease,” said Vasya …

  “I could set you up there,” Serafim said casually. “A guy I know from the village of Varzaresti has been in Italy five years now. He called me a little while ago. He can’t help me get to Italy, he says, but once I’m there, he’ll find me a job. And you, too, and whoever else you come with.

  “At Fiat?”

  “At Fiat.”

  The men were silent a while. Vasily ponderously spun a bicycle chain in his hands. What he would use it for, he wasn’t sure yet, but he’d been hoping to find a solution to this problem all evening. Serafim had distracted him from his task. Vasily was mad at his friend, but his anger dissipated.

  “And how are we supposed to get there?” he asked Serafim glumly. “Borrow money again? Nobody’d give it to us.”

  “We don’t need money.”

  “Oh yeah? How then? By God’s grace, or what? They don’t let beggars cross borders.”

  “Who’s talking border crossings? We’ll bypass them.”

  “Oh yeah, how?” asked Vasily stubbornly.

  “In an airplane.” Serafim was calm; he knew that Vasily was softening. “In an airplane, my good man …”

  “Plane tickets cost money!” Vasilly was vexed. He raised his voice. “I’ve been trying to explain that to you for two hours!”

  Serafim took a sip of wine and rubbed his hands.

  “We won’t have to pay to get on this plane,” he explained, satisfied. “We’re going to take our own plane. And you’re the one who’s going to make it!”

  Vasily, at a loss for words, gathered air into his lungs and held it. For a minute he sat motionless. Finally, he exhaled and, inhaling again, lifted a finger.

  “We’re going in an airplane that I’m going to make?”

  “We’re going in an airplane that you’re going to make,” confirmed Serafim.

  “ To Italy?”

  “ To Italy.”

  “ To the Fiat factory?”

  “ To the Fiat factory.”

  Vasily was quiet. When he started talking again, he grew more and more animated.

  “The model I built in my younger days won’t work. That was a biplane, and it barely held its equilibrium. The first gust of wind would smash us back to the earth. We’ll have to build a real solid airplane. Real solid.”

  “From what?” inquired Serafim, all business. “What material will we use?”

  Vasily thought a moment. Then he said:

  “We’re going to steal my tractor.”

  16

  MARIAN LUPU, SPEAKER OF THE PARLIAMENT OF MOLDOVA, wi
th a look of outward intelligence quite unusual for a man in his position, straightened his back with pleasure and wiped the sweat from his brow.

  “Marusya, bring me some of that yummy water,” he boomed in a stentorian voice to his spouse. “I need a drink, and how!”

  His wife snorted and went to the well for some water. Of course, there was running water in the modest three-storey house, which President Voronin had given to Lupu when he rose to his current position. There was water, too, in the four summer pavilions standing at the corners of the vast piece of land. Water for any taste. Carbonated mineral water, uncarbonated water, carbonated plain water, alkaline water, rainwater, meltwater, luxurious French Perrier and its modest Moldovan imitation, sweet water and water with juice, water with sugar and sherbet, and finally, kvas and beer.. But Lupu demanded his wife bring him nothing but water from the well. He liked to watch her shapely back as she strained her muscles and turned the crank. He liked to stare at her as she nearly stooped to see if the bucket was nigh; he liked how she drew it out of the well and, splashing her bare feet, carried the clean well water to him.

  But how could the speaker have known that the well was filled with tepid water, and that a specially-trained scuba diver was swimming inside, on duty around the clock? Catching sight of Lupu’s bride above the surface of the water, the scuba diver hefted onto the chain not the old rusty bucket the speaker was so fond of, but a clever imitation: a silver pail with gilding made to look like rust, tightly closed with a special lid. When the water reached the top, the lid fell off, all by itself. A special mechanized lift was attached to the crank and the statesman’s wife only pretended to strain herself. And Lupu was the recipient of water specially filtered in a laboratory …

  Lupu knew none of this, and with pleasure his gaze followed his wife as she brought him the pail of water. Marusya wasn’t her name, actually, but it was so resonant of ancient folk tales that he called her that anyway. What difference did it make to the head of the country’s legislative body, when he wished to get back to a simpler life and become one with nature, in a bond à la ancient Rus. All the more, since this was an act of domestic protest by Lupu, in light of the—to put it delicately—worsening relations between Moldova and Russia.