On the other hand, he was proud of his self-control. He sensed that disaster was imminent and somewhere was violently afraid; yet also recognized there was nothing he could do about anything and kept his composure. He had not expected so comforting an answer to his old question of how he would behave in a crisis. He, Joe Sourian, could think first of the effect of his death on his professors and poor mother. He could be brave!
It was impossible to determine whether his fellow voyagers could be too, since they were still unaware of the trouble. The cabin was pungent with a human odor, but it was the normal bouquet of forty unwashed bodies in this land of black shawls and mules, not the smell of fear. The other passengers—a typical selection of small dark men in dusty suits and busty women with large moisture stains under the arms of their print dresses—continued to swig from bottles, gesticulate in prosecution of heated card games and fan themselves with limp sheets of Uzbekistan Pravda. Except for a lingering agitation after their characteristically frenetic Soviet shoving into the plane to make sure they weren't left behind or removed at the last minute, they might have been the lower-middle-class population of some Macedo-
The Lenin Library X109
nian town. But given Soviet roadlessness and intensive use of civil aviation, surely they'd flown before? Then why on earth (if, in the circumstances, that figure of speech was permissible) did none of them notice that the plane was now down to almost rooftop level? And in this stretch of emptiness broken only by an occasional one-story abode, rooftops were probably lower than sea level—which was the way it came to Joe to say that the craft was insanely depressed.
Suddenly another native characteristic revealed itself as new, rather than the psychological key to everything in the cabin which Joe hadn't found until this moment. It was that no one, least of all the stewardesses, cared about anything not directly and manifestly bearing on his individual well-being. Not only his neighbors' welfare, but also all larger questions were of no concern to any of the good citizens aboard. The condition of the plane? Aeroflot's business. The way they'd been snarled at in the airport and kept on the approach to the runway for fifty-five minutes (in that heat! and without even a door being opened in the absence of an air-conditioning system!) with no explanation? Well, what the hell could they, ordinary Soviet citizens, do about it except shut themselves off from thoughts that could bring only frustration. In this political, let alone meteorological, climate, only personal grievances mattered. Each for himself and only himself (the converse, naturally enough, of the endlessly repeated "one for all and all for one" of newspaper language); it was quite enough to claim, fight for and guard one's own, without worrying about anything that was officially the responsibility of someone else. As if to illustrate that everyone cared only about his private interests, another client-crew fracas was in progress. A livid woman near the tail was screaming at the fatter of the two stewardesses about the ten unoccupied seats near the front of the cabin. Told at check-in that the flight was fully booked, she had to leave behind her husband and brother in Samarkand, where they might have to wait days for another flight. The irony wasn't lost on Joe: in this case, the usual practice of turning customers away, even when empty seats existed, had saved the victims. Deaf to the woman's woe, a conspiratorial-looking man seated beside her got up to trade a melon in his valise for a bottle of someone's homemade wine. Other men were singing in groups;
some in celebration of a legendary Uzbek princess, others in anticipation of the family reunion planned for that evening.
Neither the cacophony nor the temperature (not flames here, but the plane's heaters were on) disturbed yet other passengers from dozing on each others' shoulders. What a bunch to die with, Joe said to himself It's as if my family came to America by mistake, and now I'm back. Pavel had stopped talking. Joe looked out of the window and, from some reading years ago, recognized the scrub as camel's thorn. Thank God this steppe can't support trees (for smacking into), he thought, feeling better immediately for his combination of observation and wit. Perhaps he could have been a parachutist or a frogman. In the past ten minutes he'd learned to take for granted his coolness under pressure. But to be on the safe side, he removed his glasses.
The instant he put them on again to check the window, the wing on his side grazed a high-tension wire. (Leading to a secret military communications center? Joe wondered. Just my luck! In the middle of this desert, what other use could there be for so much electricity?) Although there seemed no room for the maneuver, the plane performed a cartwheel. All but the few passengers who had actually seen the wing touch the wire still appeared oblivious to any danger. As if to confirm that negotiating the Kara Kum Desert upside down was a splendid demonstration of socialist progress, Pavel recovered from his trance and started to say something about the exhaustiveness of Soviet pilot training—or was it a statement about the dialectical incompatibility of crashes under a social system of and for The People? How sad, thought Joe again: even now, the poor fellow was trying to dream up a Save Soviet Face story for him. Wouldn't it be better if he could devote these last seconds to his own reflections, or to coming to terms with his Maker?
Joe wished he could think of something to say to his Maker. For it was clear that these were his last seconds too; only some James Bond feat would enable him to survive. And he was spending them in second-rate speculation about a man who meant nothing to him. On the other hand, perhaps this was a message about the importance of literally loving your neighbor, since you never knew who he would be or what you might go through together. Or a sign that he, Joe, was not a selfish slob
because—although his hfelong pattern of rushing around doing favors for everyone was a phony pose—here he was, at the finish, more concerned about Pavel's peace of mind than his own.
But in general, Joe was not disposed to philosophizing, despite all he'd read about men facing death. It comforted him more to settle some little things. It was a mistake to have risked it with those glasses, he realized, pulling bits of shattered lenses from his cheeks. The sickening sound of crunching metal offended, rather than terrorized him. He realized the plane was crashing and crumpling. Then blackness descended for an indeterminate interval. He had an extremely peaceful sleep although, despite the seeming contradiction, it was also filled with profoundly disturbing dreams. He awoke to a midday sun mercilessly searing his face and a ghoulish chorus of grunts and moans from the dying, somewhere out there, on his right.
Weeks later, he learned that half of the forty-eight passengers and crew were killed on impact or expired before nightfall. He was saved by being thrown clear and landing, on the cushion of his fat, in a sizable ditch of water and mud. You mean it actually rained in this Sahara sometime during the last six months? he heard himself wondering. No, Joey-boy, this is some irrigation scheme to make the socialist desert bloom. It had better be that: Mama would be destroyed to learn I expired in a pile of camel shit.
He passed out again. The afternoon hours were an alternation of blessed unconsciousness and the awfulness of the others' wails and moans. The wall of the irrigation ditch shaded his forehead; his body told him not to move. A man in an Aeroflot uniform, only relatively more crumpled than the average one, was wandering about, cursing his luck and lazy mechanics. Evening was evidently approaching, but the sun did not relent. Joe wondered whether he would join the passengers who had stopped making pitiful sounds.