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heard his name when the Flight Leader handed him a red diploma and congratulated him on receiving it. Then the same dance was performed by all the others, and by the end I was bored stiff watching them. I turned to look at the sports field immediately beside the parade ground—and suddenly realised why it lay under such a thick covering of wild grass.
    I lay there and watched the stems swaying in the wind. The grey, rain-cracked fence topped with barbed wire just beyond the ruined soccer goalposts seemed to me like the Great Wall, still stretching, despite all the warped and missing planks, all the way from the fields of distant China to the town of Zaraisk, making everything that appeared against its background look ancientand Chinese—the latticework pavilion where the exam committee worked, the obsolete fighter plane, and the ancient army tents I could see from where I lay on my bed, clutching in my fist the nickel-plated knob I’d unscrewed for a souvenir.
    The next day a truck carried Mitiok and me off through the summery woods and fields: we sat on our rucksacks, leaning against the cool steel of the side of the truck. I remember the edge of the tarpaulin swaying, and beyond it glimpses of tree trunks and grey, dried-out telegraph poles from which the wires had long since been torn down. From time to time the trees parted and I glimpsed a pale, pensive triangle of sky. Then there was a halt and five minutes’ silence, punctuated only by a dull, distant rattling; the driver, who had got out to relieve himself, explained that they were firing short bursts on the one or two machine guns they had at the shooting range close by. Then it was back to the truck’s interminable jolting: I fell asleep, and woke up again for a few seconds only when we were already in Moscow, as the chink in the tarpaulin revealed a glimpse of a sight from some long-ago summer of my schooldays—the archways of the shop Children’s World by the Lubyanka.

As a child I often used to imagine an open newspaper, still smelling of fresh ink, with a large portrait of myself right in the centre (wearing a helmet and a smile), and the caption: “Cosmonaut Omon Krivomazov feels just fine!” It’s not easy to understand just why I wanted this so badly. Maybe I was dreaming of living part of my life through other people—the people who would look at this photograph and think about me, and try to imagine what I thought and felt, the inner workings of my soul. Most important of all, perhaps, I wanted to become one of these people myself—to stare at my own face, made up of thousands of typographic dots, and wonder what kinds of films this man likes, and who his girlfriend is, and then suddenly remember that this Omon Krivomazov is me. Since then I’ve changed, gradually and imperceptibly. I’ve stopped being interested in other people’s opinions, since I realised that other people wouldn’t be interested in me anyway; they wouldn’t be thinking about me but about my photograph, and with the same indifference I feel for other people’s photographs. So the news that my heroism would remain unknown was no blow to me. The blow was the news that I would have to be a hero.
    Mitiok and I were taken by turns to see the FlightLeader the day after we arrived, as soon as we were kitted out in black uniforms, with bright yellow epaulettes bearing the incomprehensible initials HSS. Mitiok went first, and I was called an hour and a half later.
    When the tall oak doors first opened to admit me, I was astounded how closely the room resembled a scene from some war film. In the centre of the office stood a table covered with a big yellow map, with several men in uniform standing round it: the Flight Leader, three generals, and two colonels, one a short fat man with a bright scarlet face and the other a skinny man with thinning hair who looked like an aging sickly little boy—he was wearing dark glasses and sitting in a wheelchair.
    “Commander of Central