The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine (126 page)

“Oh, Im so happy!” Natasha said, looking intently at Zhukov as she always did.

•    •    •

On the ground.

Polibin could not resist the pleasure of announcing to Professor Tolmazov: “I think one could go so far as to say that the airship is navigating perfectly well along a horizontal plane, which to some extent could be seen as contravening your vortex theory.”

•    •    •

In the air.

Eliseyevs voice over the megaphone: “Im preparing for a touchdown!”

“Go ahead,” Murashko answered joyfully.

Eliseyevs voice, sounding clearer: “Prepare for touchdown! Adjust steering!”

Obedient voices responded immediately: “Aye-aye, Captain! Adjusting steering!”

But there was no loss of altitude.

The airship made another circle. Friedman turned the steering

wheel again. Zhukov looked at the altimeter. There was no loss of altitude.

“Comrade Captain!” Friedman announced in a soft voice. “The altitude steering system is not functioning!”

Eliseyev s face flushed.

“Navigate for abrupt altitude loss!”

“Aye-aye, Captain! Navigating for abrupt altitude loss!”

The airship made another circle. Friedman turned the steering wheel. The ring on the tail end of the ship was now shaking. There was still no loss of altitude.

“Good-bye, my little ringlet,” Eliseyev sang to himself, “Good-bye, true love of mine!”

The airship made another circle.

• • •

On the ground.

“What is going on, Comrade Tolmazov?” Vasilyev asked with fear in his voice.

“They cannot land,” Professor Tolmazov said, “which was to be expected.”

“I beg your pardon?” Professor Polibin barked. “What you said was that they would not be able to take off!”

• • •

In the air.

“The wind seems to be pushing us upward,” Eliseyev said with his customary calm. Then, in an abruptly altered voice: “Navigate for all-out altitude loss!”

Friedman turned the steering wheel with all his might. The ring on the tail end of the ship was now rattling loudly. The steering cables tore.

“Im turning off the power and going for a static landing,” Eliseyev said to Murashko with his usual aplomb. There’s no other way I can land with this ring.”

The airship went hurtling over the airfield. Eliseyev looked down at the swaying earth.

“Pilots Friedman and Petrenko! Climb up into the body of the airship, check the tail unit, and fix the steering cables!”

“Aye-aye, Captain!”

Eliseyev and the navigator took over the controls. Friedman and Petrenko climbed into an internal shaft in the airship’s body and crawled along it, steadying themselves on shroud lines that were fluttering in the wind. Holding on to each other, they crawled toward the tail, groped for the torn pieces of cable, and tied them together in a knot.

The wind began to push the airship down toward the ground.

“How are we doing?” Murashko asked.

“Couldn’t be better,” Eliseyev answered. “The steering system is functioning again.” Then he turned and said into the megaphone, “The whole crew, except for the pilots, prepare to jump!”

“Aye-aye, Captain! Ready to jump!”

“Jump? What for?” Murashko shouted.

“Theres no time for explanations!” Eliseyev shouted back, his face crimson. “You will do as you are ordered! You will jump according to emergency guidelines!”

• • •

The first to jump was Murashko. After him came the flight engineer, the navigator, the radio operator, and the airship engineer.

Mop-head managed to shake Friedman’s hand as she hurried to the escape hatch.

Natasha hesitated for an instant at the hatch.

“What about you, Comrade Eliseyev?”

“Don’t ask questions!” he shouted.

And Natasha jumped.

The parachutists hung in the air like little white clouds.

The airship was empty, except for Eliseyev, Zhukov, and the pilots sitting rigidly at the controls.

“Jump, Comrade Zhukov!”

Zhukov refused with a wave of his hand: “Don’t talk nonsense! I’m staying to the end!”

A sharp tug at the gas lever. The gas valve opened with a loud clank. The airship began to descend. Eliseyevs face with its high cheekbones flashed for a second—Friedman’s wide-open eyes.

On the ground.

Raisa Friedman came out of the mess hall building in her uniform jacket. Behind her came two mess hall workers carrying a large platter with a chocolate cake in the shape of an airship.

“Hurry!” Raisa Friedman said. “They are coming home!”

• • •

The airship was descending.

“Cast the anchor ropes!” Eliseyev commanded.

The anchor ropes were cast. The airship swayed and shook a few meters from the ground.

The launch crew came running across the field, grabbing for the ropes swinging in the air. The airships nose bumped against the ground. Eliseyev went tumbling to the side, the control panel split and fell on him. Zhukov fell onto the gangway. The pilots grabbed hold of their control posts.

“Good-bye, my little ringlet,” Eliseyev said. “Everything is fine.” He wiped the sweat from his forehead.

Friedman was trying to turn the steering wheel with all his might.

“You can get off now, weVe landed!” Eliseyev said to him.

• • •

The parachutists touched down one after another. Vasilyev, distraught, came running up to Natasha.

“Tell me, Seryozha, do you remember which formula we used to calculate the Reynolds Factor?” she asked him, gasping for air.

People were running to the airship. Eliseyev and Friedman lowered Zhukovs motionless body out of the hatch.

Friedmans mother was sobbing. Light tears fell onto the cake.

A fiery, scarlet stream of blood was trickling from under Zhukovs black mane of hair and down his high forehead. His snapped spectacles were hanging limply.

“Zhukov, can you hear me?” Professor Tolmazov, running in front of the others, called out.

The stream of blood on Zhukov s face was now flowing down his cheeks.

12.

Night. Three blinding rays of light from hanging lamps illuminated the inclined heads of Natasha, Varya from the draft department, and Leibovich, an old, kindly, bald, gaunt engineer.

Mop-heads inextinguishable eyes shone from a corner plunged in darkness.

“Are you almost done, Natasha?” she said, barely audibly and without moving.

“Yes.”

Natashas team was looking for a flaw in the airships design. At the other end of the corridor, in Murashkos office—his new office with heavy furniture, carpets, and portraits hanging on the walls—another team was also searching for flaws in the design.

It was a stormy meeting, as it is in countless commissions where passions reach the pitch that heralds ominous changes in an institution.

Murashko was sitting rigidly at the conference table. He was unusually pale. Hands clenched into fists were being shaken at him, criticism came flying from all sides.

“We signaled you a thousand times!” Borisov yelled.

“We had every right to take chances,” Friedman shouted, slamming the water jug down on the table.

Friedmans words were drowned in the roar of voices. An unruffled tenor cut through the roar.

“A tempest in a teacup!” Polibin said, entering the room. Taking out a handkerchief, he dusted off an armchair and sat down.

The scorn, self-importance, and primness bordering on squeamishness with which Polibin settled into the armchair were so incompatible with his usual demeanor that the members of the meeting fell silent.

“Carry on, my dear colleague,” Polibin said, putting away his handkerchief and nodding to Murashko. “Please carry on, you have my full attention.”

• • •

The design department, filled with the specters of distress and silence.

“Natasha, are you almost done?”

Natasha got up and, hesitating, walked on legs that seemed not her own to Leibovich’s drafting table, placed a blueprint on it, and with her eyes motioned to Mop-head.

“Leibovich, I think this is where the problem is!”

The lamps illuminated their heads leaning over the blueprint.

•    •    •

In Murashko’s office. Murashko was talking, his head thrown back, his hands leaning on the edge of the table: “I object, and I shall continue to object until the very end!”

“Do get to the point, dear colleague,” Polibin interrupted him.

•    •    •

In the design department.

Varya, Natasha, and Leibovich jumped back, as if they had seen a snake slithering over the blueprint.

Natasha closed her eyes and then opened them, her face wet with tears.

“My sweet little Mop-head!” she said, stretching her arms out to

her.

“So that’s all it was,” Varya said, shaking her boyish head bitterly. “So thats why it crashed.”

Mop-head looked at Leibovich, then at Varya and Natasha. “Leibovich! We have found the flaw!” Natasha said. She braced herself, grabbed the blueprint, and went running out of the room.

• • •

The committee members came pouring out of Murashko’s office and into the corridor in a noisy crowd.

“I will burn that damn airship to a crisp!” Friedman said with uncharacteristic gravity to Petrenko, who was walking next to him. “There wont even be anything left for the gravediggers. You don’t know what I’m capable ofl”

“Yes, I do,” Petrenko said.

Murashko walked past them. Polibin, running with dainty steps, caught up with him and took him by the arm. “Polibin asked to join your Airship Construction Project,” Polibin said, “and how was he

treated? He was sent packing! But here I am again! I think you will find you haven’t gained anything by picking a fight with me!”

And he hurried on with mincing, pattering steps. Natasha came rushing past him, borne on the wings of happiness. These wings brought her to Murashko.

“Well, that’s that!” Murashko said to her. “They listened to what I had to say, and their verdict: Murashko will have to suspend all work until everything has been looked into. I’m to get rid of Zhukov, and drag the airship to the nearest scrap heap, or find some pawnshop to pawn it off to.”

“Alexei Kuzmich!” Natasha interrupted him, her whole body trembling.

“And that isn’t even all! We are to hand over everything to the Justice Department.”

“Alexei Kuzmich,” Natasha went on in a hushed voice, taking him by the arm. “I found the flaw.”

13.

Zhukov was drafting. His face was bent low over the table. The magic light of the lamp fell on his mane of hair and the bandage, through which blood was seeping.

The doorbell.

“Come in,” he called, lowering his face even closer to the blueprint.

But it was the front doorbell that was ringing. Natasha, Friedman, and Mop-head were standing outside.

Night. The face of Vasya the driver shimmered through the windshield of his car.

The incessant ringing of the bell.

“He doesn’t hear the bell,” Friedman said, tugging at the door handle.

The door opened. It wasn’t locked. Tiptoeing in, they crossed the hallway and the children’s room in which the four little Zhukovs were asleep.

Zhukov raised his head from the blueprint and saw his guests.

“Comrade Zhukov,” Mop-head said in a trembling voice filled with clumsy severity and emotion. “In the name of the Komsomol

Committee, and in the name of all our Komsomol members, we would like to express our sympathy, and to affirm—”

“I found the flaw,” Natasha said in her caressing voice.

“The airship will fly, Maestro!” Friedman shouted, suddenly stopping short. Zhukov s absent face. The bloodstain, like a star, on his bandage, his eyes fixed over the heads of his guests.

“Comrade Zhukov,” Mop-head said, stepping closer. “We must continue working on the project right away.”

“This is what we have to continue working on!” Zhukov answered, unrolling a blueprint containing the drawing of a strangely shaped monstrosity. “We have to work on the space capsule of the future.”

He tugged at his bandage.

“Here is the realization of interplanetary flight. The flight to the moon! A speed of a thousand kilometers an hour in the outer atmosphere!”

“The moon can wait, Comrade Zhukov,” Friedman said. “Come back with us to the airship dockyard.”

Friedman and the other Komsomols looked troubled, almost frantic.

“While you are hiding here, Murashko is being put under incredible pressure!” Mop-head said, distressed. “Tomorrow another team is coming to take over, and it will be too late.”

“What you are doing is wrong, Comrade Zhukov,” Natasha said. The sound of Natashas steady, hushed voice made Zhukov shrink, then jump up and stiffen.

“It is of vital importance that the USSR 1 pass the test,” she continued.

“Show me what you have there,” Zhukov said, reaching for the notebook with her calculations that she was holding.

Natasha handed it to him.

Mop-head tiptoed into the next room. She picked up the telephone receiver and quickly dialed a number.

“The Central Committee of the Party? Number 518. I want to speak to Comrade Murashko of the Airship Project. . . . Comrade Murashko? Were trying to bring Zhukov back.”

“What state is he in?” Murashko s voice came from the receiver. “His state? He s talking interplanetary space travel. But we re going to drag him over to the airship dockyard now.”

Zhukov was sitting silently in front of Natashas calculations. He got up, and looked about dispiritedly. There was an expression of sadness and helplessness on his face.

“Comrade Zhukov,” Mop-head said timidly. “We are all waiting for you. The whole assembly crew is waiting.”

Zhukov closed his eyes.

“New aerodynamics calculations,” he said, as if speaking to himself. “Changes to the ring. Impossible . . .well never manage.”

He walked up and down the room with uncharacteristic slowness and fatigue. He smiled unexpectedly at Natasha. He tossed his head back, marched off into the adjoining room, picked up the telephone, and dialed a number. Awkwardly, he spoke provincial words into the receiver: “Have I managed to put a call through to the apartment of the academic, Tolmazov? Should Ivan Platonovich wish to come to the telephone, could he please do so?”