Tashkent seemed as worlds-apart from Moscow as Moscow from Cincinnati, but Joe could only guess: he hardly saw more than the skyline from Mrs. Vogl's balcony, whose view was partially blocked by a Lenin monument. Here he was in the Central Asia of his five years' study and research, and spending his entire stay within four walls with pretensions to enclose a
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Statler room. After each bang, he resolved to say good-bye to this thin-faced Betty with the hunger exceeding his own but could not leave her in the lurch. She liked meals in the room and was delighted with his ability to arrange this by actually talking that gobbledegook on the telephone. On the last morning, she promised to return via Moscow rather than Hawaii after the tour's India circuit.
From Tashkent to Samarkand, the second leg of his journey, Joe's companion was a gangling young "scholar" who introduced himself as Pavel, then groped for his surname. The circumstances of their meeting were quite enough to unmask his function: before fully arranging his limbs at Joe's side in the airport, the stranger with the genial smile but edgy eyes instantly had begun marveling about all they had in common—muffing, however, some of his lines. Quaintness can soften crudeness, thought Joe aphoristically. In such things, clumsy obviousness can add an element of Old World charm.
As Pavel had it, their main mutual interest was Ulug-Beg, a nephew of Tamerlane and the subject of his graduate research. What luck! They could spend time together in Samarkand! With nothing to hide and a year's experience of how to conduct himself with student narks, Joe did not mind that someone had been assigned to him for the trip, or even that Pavel knew almost nothing about Mongols and the fourteenth century. It was summer, after all, and understandably difficult to recruit someone of his own specialized background at short notice. Young Pavel's compulsion to point out every new cinema and row of trees as a Soviet Achievement in the former Asian badlands was disconcerting, but this very clumsiness was reassurance that he, Joe, was not taken seriously as a threat to Soviet security. This was routine surveillance, and all things considered—including Samarkand's evening dullness—he was grateful for the company.
Because it was the holiday season, Joe found few of the professors he wanted to interview. But he did spend time exploring minarets and glorious azure mosques—in which Pavel, to his own delight, developed an interest. And although thorough Sovietization had transformed the city from a fabled oasis lying across the world's most important spice route to a tackier version of modern Moscow, the new construction made Tamerlane's
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tomb and other surviving Islamic treasures all the more important. Joe thought his way back to the dusty days of Marco Polo, Ghenghis Khan and his own Tamerlane.
Soon it was time to fly to Bukhara, former oasis, ancient rival of Samarkand, rich prize of warring Arabs and rapacious Turks. Joe was much looking forward to this: Bukhara was said to be far less spoiled, still a city of mud battlements and tapestries. His fluency in Russian—and Pavel's mistake—resulted in their placement on an ordinary milk-run flight, rather than one of the better ones onto which foreigners were usually herded. The plane for the hundred-and-fifty-mile journey was a two-engined propeller job modeled on the old, workhorse DC-3. Fine—but why was it skimming so low over the baking scrub and sand?
"And why are you, my friend, so often nervous?" answered Pavel from the aisle seat, taking this cue to provide a mini-lecture about Aeroflot, the world's safest airline.
Joe reasoned that Pavel might be apprehensive for having delivered him to this crate's din and dirt in violation of his brief. But accepting that he, Joe, often did fret unnecessarily, he opened his guide book. Because concentration was difficult (despite their seemingly perilous altitude, the nose seemed to be pointed down instead of up) he switched to memories of the best moments—that is, the wordless ones—with Mrs. Vogl. But if broken seats and a metal floor with cigarette butts didn't necessarily reflect safety procedures, why were the engines whining so? The scarlet-haired stewardess preferred not to interrupt her bickering with a swarthy passenger to reply. Their yells had begun over his right to keep a sack of slaughtered chickens under his seat, but the question of whether they stank or merely smelled led to mutual observations about the fragrances exuded by the disputants themselves. Oh well, sighed Joe, if she's not worrying, why should I?
Turning to the window after a shuddering wobble, he saw a lick of blue flame dance out from the engine. A moment later, the propeller was feathered. He pushed past Pavel's knees, seizing the stewardess to inform her of the fiery substance to his suspicions. Returning from the pilot's cabin to which Joe had virtually pushed her, she assured him that everything was absolutely fine, Comrade. The pilot had said that the plane was
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in its normal pattern, and the sun's glare on the wings often played tricks on people unaccustomed to flying.
She went forward again, snapping an oily curtain behind her. Through a rip, Joe saw her examining a pair of new pumps with her dumpy colleague. They giggled into each other's ears. The shoes had obviously been procured in some machination "on the left."
The following fall—that is, last September—Joe asked the British air attache why he thought no announcement had been made about the crippled engine.
"Not in the pilots' manual," the Britisher replied. "The blighters feel they must deny any and all malfunctions, even when lives are at stake. You know the revolutionary instinct: refute all imputations of shortcomings as anti-Soviet slurs."
Joe agreed that keeping the passengers in ignorance conformed to the country's spirit. They were only ordinary prols, after all; their fate in the air was entrusted to the pilots, just as their lives on the ground to the wisdom of Lenin's Party. And the Party not only knew what was best for, but also when to tell what to the masses it led.
But that was when he had the leisure and composure to analyze the episode. Now, as it approached an obvious climax^— either a dramatic escape or a dramatic something else—the crew's silence seemed surrealistic. Believing he wasn't crazy, he assumed they must be.
His agitation alerted Pavel, who became one of the few to surmise that something was seriously wrong. His efforts to conceal this prompted a tenderness in Joe for all human beings forced by a code of something, usually gibberish, to violate their most basic instincts. Instead of fearing for his life, poor Pavel had to feign ardor for socialism. The engine on the opposite wing was now so straining that Joe felt a certain sympathy for it too. He remembered a morbid story about the copilot jerking off" told him by the class wise guy the first time he flew.
Involuntarily, he also remembered a series of recent New York Times articles about Aeroflot. The line's first fifty years passed in almost total ignorance about its safety record, during which the Soviet authorities claimed to have eliminated human failure and many foreigners took them at their word. (Until the late 1960s, it
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somehow seemed natural to picture Soviet mechanics working to the highest possible standards, just as Soviet kitchens were always clean in the imagination and Soviet trains ran on time; certain sorts of slovenliness had no schematic place under socialism.) But when Westerners began traveling in the country, rumors of horrendous human and mechanical mishaps reached them; and now the newspaper series was giving details of no less than ten major crashes, taking some twelve hundred lives, in the last nineteen months. And these were only the planes in which Westerners were flying, or which fell at or near airports open to Westerners: an old kite like this—which Joe wasn't supposed to be on—wouldn't have qualified. He regretted having spent so much breath in so many offices and bureaus wangling permission to have his daily Times delivered (fifteen days late, on average) to his dormitory room. He regretted reading it so diligently. But both activities derived directly from his character, like those that kept his room stuffed with his drugstore assortment. Stacks of newspapers, magazines, Kleenex boxes . . . what good would they do him now?