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do for you but ask what you can do for your country.
    In the meantime, life in the Soviet Union was a harsh reality. What’s truly sad for Boris is that his father had worked hard all his life but had practically nothing. A small apartment, outdated furniture, hand-me-downs, and even if he had worked for ten lifetimes, he would never have been able to buy a car.
    But Boris is basically a happy person. Nobody else had anything, so the Gindins never worried about it. In those days they couldn’t knowthat a lot of teenagers in the United States had cars, but even if they did it wouldn’t have mattered. It was all propaganda anyway. Soviet sailors were the best sailors on earth. Their navy was the best equipped, the best-run military service on the planet, with the finest officers, the most dedicated men, and therefore the highest morale.
    “Besides, we were defending the Rodina.”
    Despite all that, Boris is not a stupid man. Even as a kid he understood that his only path out of the grinding poverty in which he was raised was to get accepted in a military academy and become an officer. The pay was very good, and the privileges were fantastic. As a civilian, no matter his profession, his pay right out of college would only be 100 to 120 rubles per month. It didn’t matter if he became an engineer or a doctor; the pay was all the same. But Gindin’s pay in the service is 300 rubles per month, plus free meals aboard ship, free uniforms, and when the ship visits any international port the officers are paid in hard currencies.
    Nor were Soviet women stupid. They knew that if they married an officer, they could have lives of luxury beyond the reach of most civilians.
    At the academy where Boris studied engineering for five years, girls paid to get into dances on campus, trying to snag a young cadet. Some of the girls weren’t so good-looking. It was sad to see the same ones year after year not able to convince a cadet to marry them. But the prize was worth the effort.
    He and his friends went over the fence from the academy whenever they got the chance, risking a lot of trouble by going
samovolka,
or AWOL, because the girls in town would do literally anything to get officer candidates to marry them. If you wanted to get laid you went
samovolka,
because the dances on school grounds were closely supervised. No alcohol, no hanky-panky, everything aboveboard. No fun whatsoever.
    Boris is in his fifth year at the academy and will be graduating as a lieutenant in a few months. A dance is going on over at the club, buthe’s not interested. It’s just the same old shuffling around. He wants sex right now, not marriage, which will come when his career is well established. He’d been caught going
samovolka
and is confined to academy grounds for a whole month, so he’s in the dayroom watching television when one of his classmates comes running in all out of breath. Something interesting is going on over at the club. The power is down, and everybody is in the dark with the girls.
    “I was bored to death, so I decided it might be fun. Better than sitting alone watching TV,” Gindin says. When he gets over to the club the place is almost pitch-black. Only a few cadets on patrol are walking around with candles, trying to keep the order until the lights come back on. The whole place smells like sweat and cheap perfume. It’s hot and the air is stifling, but no one is complaining. The dancers can plaster their bodies against each other and nobody is going to stop them.
    Boris is standing near the door, wondering what’s going to happen next, when someone or something brushes up against his arm. At first he thinks he must be mistaken, but then someone
is
there in the dark beside him, touching his uniform sleeve. He grabs an arm and pulls the person close enough so that even in the dark he can tell she’s a girl.
    “What are you doing?” he wants to know.
    She’s feeling for the hash marks on his sleeve to find out what year he’s