“Hey, Boris,” one of the waitresses calls when Gindin finally gets into the restaurant. She is carrying a table across the room, and he threads his way across the packed floor to where she sets it up.
She’s a pretty girl, with long blond hair, blue eyes, and a million-watt smile. She can afford to be extra nice; Boris would make a great catch. She brings him vodka, then herring and fried potatoes, pickles, stew, crusty bread, a quintessentially Russian supper, and he is in seventh heaven.
He has friends in the restaurant, and they have to wonder why he is getting such good service when they may have to wait for a drink or something to eat. But Boris is a regular, he’s an officer, he’s single, and he tips 30 percent.
That night in particular sticks out in Boris’s mind at this moment in the midshipmen’s dining hall, because of the warmth he felt. He was at peace with himself and the world. There were no difficult decisions to be made. No white or black backgammon piece to choose.
The waitress watches him that night, and at one point she comes over and lets him know that she gets off work at one in the morning. She’s interested. She would definitely like to spend some time with him. But it can’t happen. He has to be back aboard ship by midnight.
“Maybe another night,” Boris tells her.
She lowers her eyes in disappointment. “Sure, Boris,” she replies. She looks up and smiles. “May I get you another vodka?”
“Please,” he says.
After she leaves, he spots some friends, who join him for a few hours of fun. They’ve brought a girl, Olya, and everyone dances with her and sings and drinks and has something to eat. It’s not the most perfect night of his life to that point, but it sticks out in his mind right this moment, facing Zampolit Sablin and an absolutely insanely impossible choice.
22. SENIOR LIEUTENANT
Gindin’s thoughts are tumbling over one another now so fast it’s getting difficult to concentrate on any one thing, except for some crazy reason he fixates on how his fellow officers and sailors see him. It’s as if he’s looking at himself through the wrong end of a telescope. He’s way down at the end of the long tunnel, but he can’t make any sense of the details.
He’s always had what he feels is a good relationship with Captain Potulniy and just about everyone else aboard the ship. That includes the cook. But at this moment one incident sticks out in Gindin’s mind. He’s spent two days and nights fixing one of the diesel generators. He’s had little or no time to sleep, nothing substantial to eat, and he’s dead on his feet and hungry enough to eat a bear when he finally gets back to his cabin.
It’s late, well after the dinner hour, when he calls the officers’ galley and asks if the cook could send something up to his cabin.
“I’m sorry, Lieutenant, but dinner is done. All the food has been put away, all the dishes have been washed, and the galley will not be open again until morning.”
“Okay,” Boris says. “I understand.” He goes to bed hungry that night. It’s not the end of the world, but a little something to eat would have been nice.
As it happens, the very next day the cook rushes to Gindin’s cabin. There’s absolutely no water—hot or cold—with which to wash the dishes. “We have to carry all the dishes and all the pots and pans back to the crew’s galley, where they’ve got water,” the cook complains bitterly. “It’s damned hard work, Lieutenant.”
Boris is combing his hair in the mirror and doesn’t even glance over at the cook. “I guess it must be very hard work. But I’m sorry; there’s nothing I can do about it.”
The cook knows better. It’s not that Gindin can’t do anything about the water problem—he’s the engineer after all—it’s that he won’t do anything about it.
After that Gindin never has a problem with the galley. If he has to work overtime and misses a meal, the cook personally delivers something good to eat to the senior lieutenant’s cabin, and in turn the galley is never without all the hot and cold running water it needs. Gindin doesn’t think he’s ever abused the system, but sitting now in the midshipmen’s dining hall he can’t be sure.
And yesterday, after the parade, when the entire ship was in a festive mood, Gindin made the rounds of all the machinery spaces to check everything, including the bilge pumps that ensured the Storozhevoy would not sink at his mooring if he were to take on water.
Gindin was in a mixed mood all that day, happy about the parade, proud to be a Soviet naval officer, sad about his father’s death, looking forward to his new job at Zhdanov, and impatient to get on with his life.
It’s possible, he thinks now, that he might have been impatient with his sailors, too. It was a holiday after all, yet he spent nearly two hours going over every single detail. Nothing missed his scrutiny, not a grease fitting that wasn’t cleaned properly, not an engine gauge reading that was off by one tiny decimal point, not a finger smudge in one of the logbooks. Everything had to be exactly correct.
Maybe at the end of a six-month rotation, when all they could think about was getting off the ship and going home to see their families, they felt he was being too tough on them. Maybe they resented his orders. Maybe Fomenko, who couldn’t get out of his bunk because his father was an alcoholic, was hatching some revenge plot.
Afterward Gindin went to lunch with some of the other officers. They talked, he remembers that much now, but he cannot seem to focus. He can’t get a grip in his head. For the life of him he cannot remember one single scrap of conversation at yesterday’s lunch. Not one word of it.
He does remember returning to his cabin to lie down, but Sergey Bogonets knocks on the door. He wants to talk because he’s lonely. They all are. It’s a holiday and they’re missing their families. Sergey talks about his wife and son. She flew down to Baltiysk, but they could only stay a couple of days before they had to fly home. Their leaving put Sergey into a depression and he just wanted a little human contact.
They went out on deck to smoke a cigarette. It was getting dark and cold by then. Only a few people were still out and about to admire the ships. Now that the lights were coming on throughout the town and aboard the fleet, the evening was getting pretty. Even festive.
Gindin does remember thinking that the people of Riga were at home now, behind the brightly lit windows with their families, getting set to celebrate the holiday: “We envied all those lucky strangers.”
He and Bogonets stayed on deck for a long time before they parted. Gindin went back down to the engine room, this time not to inspect but to talk to his sailors. They seemed to be in just as odd a mood as he was, lonely, missing their families, feeling a little strained.
So they start to talk about their lives before they were drafted into the navy. One of them is a big, tall guy from the suburbs near Dnepropetrovsk in south-central Ukraine. He came from a family of farmers and he and his four brothers had to help with the chores. They had chickens, rabbits, and pigs but no refrigerator. In the spring they would slaughter a pig, cut it into small chops and roasts, pack it in salt, and store it in the root cellar, where it would stay cool. One pig would provide enough meat to feed the entire family all winter. When they wanted to have pork for dinner, a cut would be brought from the root cellar the night before and soaked in freshwater to get rid of the salt.
“It was always salty, just the same,” the sailor lamented. But he would have exchanged the Storozhevoy for just one bite of his mother’s cooking, salty or not.