Orchestra

Chapter 3-1

3

Nikolai Shilin had come to the Arctic from Germany. In those days, a top student could choose his own place of assignment after flight school, and the newly-minted lieutenant chose Germany, the Western Group of Forces. From the airfield in Potsdam, fighters would occasionally take off to make interceptions, to fly along the border, or to patrol the air corridor leading to West Berlin. Naturally the entire territory was kept under vigilant guard. Radar operators had their sights on Europe, but they kept especially close watch on airfields nearby that were directed toward the east. A plane needed only to take off in an easterly direction and immediately Soviet interceptors would take to the air. Based on the guidance of the radar station – course, altitude, bearing – the interceptors would stick close to the target plane until it landed, or they would move to patrol a section along the border.

Of all the occupying forces, the Americans were the most brazen in the sky. The French and English behaved themselves, but the Americans would often soar recklessly, openly bullying the Soviets; they might feign an attack, or violate East German airspace in order to locate the radar stations there and determine their communication frequencies and codes, or simply to play on the nerves of their former allies and make them lose their cool.

One could hardly catch any sleep as a fighter pilot. The situation on the border of the occupied territory grew increasingly tense by the day, and the level of determination rose with each new order. Day and night, the squadrons kept a sleepless vigil, their ears sharp at all times. They kept watch over the sky like a diligent landowner over his garden. It often seemed as if a fight was just about to break out, a battle in the skies, but at the last minute the American Spitfire would pull away, as it knew precisely the boundary that could not be crossed without bloodshed ensuing.

At the airfield, the pilots stood watch, ready to scramble at any moment. They sat in the cockpit with their flight suits on, their fuel tanks full, their weapons armed, and the aircraft connected to the power supply. As soon as the order “Airborne!” was given, they could take off immediately – the entire process took only three minutes.

The skies above Germany seemed awfully cramped to these pilots. A plane had only to take off, maneuver, gain altitude and set a course, and Western Europe seemed already to be rushing straight at it. At those speeds, the entire continent was a stone’s throw away, and you could violate another country’s airspace before you even knew it.

This represented a real headache for many Soviet pilots, accustomed as they were to their spacious homeland. Back in the USSR, there was plenty of room to move around, and one could fly on and on in any direction, but in East Germany the border was always right there, and the pilots felt as if they were cooped up and on an invisible leash. If you so much as blinked, you were already over foreign territory, and if you were not intercepted, then be happy, your luck was in.

Shilin knew many of the American pilots and ground operators by name. In turn, they knew everyone in his squadron and his regiment. The Americans would often broadcast on the Soviet regiment’s frequency, and sometimes they would be the first to congratulate officers on a promotion, one day, two days, or even a week before the message came down from headquarters. This was the Americans’ distinctive swagger, a demonstration of their capabilities, of their ability to gather intelligence: fly on, little one, you just fly, we know everything about you. They knew the Soviet pilots’ entire service records, and sometimes even details of their families. In the Cold War, playing on the opponent’s nerves was fair game.

Germany was dramatically different from Russia. Ah! The old cities of Saxony and Harz: Quedlinburg, Wernigerode, Königstein, and the rest. They were like enchanting dreams, pages from children’s picture books: knights’ castles on hilltops, walls and towers, mossy bulwarks, moats, drawbridges, narrow, medieval lanes, cobblestones, houses that looked like gingerbread, tiled roofs, everything impeccably clean… From the walls of the fortresses, one looked down onto a dense expanse of sharp roofs, steeples, weather vanes, and chimneys.

Unforgettable were the cozy little beer halls, the merry, good-natured burghers and the way they sat on the heavy wooden benches as they drank and sang in a chorus, the oak barrels, their wood darkened by time, the firm smell of good beer and fried sausages that the walls had absorbed over the centuries.

Sometimes the pilot sat there – “ein Bier, bitte” – among the upright and smiling Krauts, craftsmen and artisans, adherents of the Lutheran Bible, frugal-minded folk with their quiet and measured speech. There was none of the swearing, shouting, scuffles, or brawls, none of the dirt-spattered floors, sticky tables, or foul-smelling and suffocating air of provincial institutions back in Russia, where morose drunkards whiled away their lives.

Indeed, as long as Shilin sat there silently, no one would have taken him for a Russian. There was something European in him, though you could not tell right away what it was. His features suggested membership of a northern race. In other words, Nikolai Shilin looked more Scandinavian or Anglo-Saxon – a rare trait for someone who hailed from Siberia. His face held not the slightest hint of the prominent cheekbones of the steppe peoples, those bow-legged, swarthy, slant-eyed, stocky, horse-riding nomads. A facial feature that had been gifted to the Slavs by the Turks, and the Scythians, Khazars, Kipchaks, Cumans, and Mongols…

When the pilot was in Europe, he did not feel as if he was in a foreign land, though he had been born and raised in Siberia. He felt as if unknown lands had been revealed to him in childhood, or even earlier, before he was born, in the mists of the past, but what lands, where? His intuition, his gut feeling, suggested somewhere to the west. There, faintly and dimly, in the murk beyond an unseen boundary, as if in forgotten dreams, he felt a foreign presence, and he sensed strangers to whom he strangely felt attached. Part of Shilin’s own nature seemed to lie there among them.

If you asked Shilin what these unlikely suspicions meant, he would not know the answer. But sometimes – not too often, but sometimes – he would find sneaking up on him the absurd notion that only part of him was in Russia, and somewhere beyond the horizon, in some other reality, was to be found the rest of him.

Thus it was that military aviator Nikolai Shilin came to Division X at the beginning of March. On the snowy hill behind the trees, he caught a glimpse of an Orthodox monastery which, as was the custom in the Middle Ages in Russia, had guarded the approach to the capital: high towers, walls, embrasures for firing arrows, golden domes. This was so unexpected a sight that doubt and bewilderment arose within him, like a sleepy bird: had he come to the right place?

Before leaving his place of assignment, Shilin had received orders setting out the route he was to follow, and as a military man he had executed them to the letter. He had even taken a local bus from the station to the indicated stop and then walked, following his instructions. According to the paper, the captain had arrived at his destination, but now here was a monastery staring right at him. Atop the hill, an impregnable fortress rose above the forest. The mighty walls and towers inspired awe, as does any building that has stood for centuries. This stone fortification resembled an ancient city in the sky, something fantastical, something out of childhood fantasies. Before he approached the massive gates, the pilot looked around hesitantly, not quite believing, as if searching for a government office where he should go to report his arrival, present his documents, and hand over a sealed package. He apparently did not know that after the Revolution, the Bolsheviks had housed many secret institutions in monasteries. He did not know, or had forgotten.

The pilot had come into the world in a camp for enemies of the people, shortly before the end of the war. His mother had given birth to him in the small prison hospital, which lacked any special maternity ward. It is true that prisoners were categorically forbidden to have children; the Great Leader had prudently banned the ideologically harmful from reproducing. However, the pilot had been conceived while his mother had still been a free woman, so it was too late. The only thing that remained was for him to come into the world – a bold step under these conditions and maybe even a turn for the worse.

Soon after Shilin had been conceived, his mother had been arrested and immediately sentenced – the tribunal at the front did not bother to go through the ritual of a prosecution opposed by a defense. His mother gave birth to him when she had already spent a summer, fall, winter and part of spring in the camp.

Did the infant, as he was being born, know that he was an enemy of the people? No one had ever pressed any charges against him personally. He had wound up in his prison camp without any trial, and just by coming into the world he had sentenced himself to ten years without any right of appeal. He served his sentence in full, without parole, and his birthday fell on the day of his release. As one can imagine, little Nikolai firmly believed that the world was one big prison, for the camp was all he knew. The untrodden taiga stretched all around him, and a bumpy unpaved road led from the nearest pier to the camp – a day’s journey on a creaking truck.

For reasons that were not explained, in the camp the boy was given the nickname of “the American”. This nickname originated in the camp offices, where the case files were held. No one gave him any details, no one explained the reason. The women prisoners mocked him, the camp personnel smirked at him. The child lived in complete ignorance, but he grew used to being referred to as the “American”. After all, why fight it, when there were worse nicknames around: one of the camp guards was known as the Ghoul. And the Great Leader and shining light of Communism was known in the camp, for some odd reason, as Minai, though when he was a child and still living in his native mountainous region, he had also been given the nickname Chopur after suffering from smallpox; “Minai” means “pockmarked” in Georgian. Shilin’s nickname of “the American” seemed to mean something beyond the child’s ken – some kind of contempt, spite, or reproach. It hinted at a mysterious guilt.

After the death of the official in charge of the entire prison region, the camp administrators reviewed the cases and many were released. Nikolai’s mother served her whole sentence, however. She served every day to which the tribunal had sentenced her, for the Great Leader may have already been laid to rest but the Soviet regime had not gone anywhere and could not forgive a Soviet officer, let alone a political operative, for a monstrous crime such as hers. In the end, the military interpreter served ten years, plus an extra month due to the perennial inaccessibility of the place: only rarely could a ship make its way up the shallow river, and they were lucky to catch one.

To reach the pier, they spent an entire day in the back of a truck, and then for a week they floated downstream on a barge hauled by a little tugboat, until finally they reached the Yenisei. Then for two weeks they suffocated in the stinking hold of an old steamboat whose shuddering wheels would slam into the water in a difficult battle with the impetuous current of the mighty river.

The Shilins settled in Krasnoyarsk. Nikolai’s mother did not have the strength to make it all the way back to Moscow, where she had been born and from where she had been sent to the front. There was another reason that made them settle in Siberia, however: the local teacher-training school had opened a department for foreign languages, and there was a need for instructors. The school gave Olga Shilina a room in the dormitory, so they decided to go no further, and settled in Krasnoyarsk. That fall Nikolai’s mother turned thirty years old.