MiG Pilot: the Final Escape of Lt. Belenko

The pristine mountains and cool, pure air of Colorado made him think of parts of the Caucasus, and an indoor skating rink recalled good times skating in Rubtsovsk and Omsk, and he saw Nadezhda gliding toward him, waving.

I would like to see her and my friends just for a day. Skate in the park; go back to the forests; stop by the factory.

Las Vegas, in consequence of Party conjurations, always had been the supreme symbol of the iniquities and depravities of capitalism, surpassing even the famous decadence of Hollywood. He fully expected to see couples copulating and gangsters shooting it out on the streets, while the bloated rich played cards amid sniffs of cocaine in opulently upholstered and cushioned casinos. So what he saw disappointed, then surprised, then beguiled, and ultimately entranced.

He marveled that a city so clean, neat, and spacious could rise in the midst of desert. His motel in the center of the city was inexpensive; but the rooms were elegant in size and appointments, and the swimming pool was splendid. The shows at the casinos were excellent, yet also inexpensive, as were the drinks.

I will just drink this cheap whiskey and watch all the people. Look at them. They are all kinds of people, and they are enjoying themselves. It's like a carnival, not a brothel. Of course, they are foolish to gamble. The chances are they will lose their money. But it's their choice. If that's the way they want to have a good time, it's their business. They lied about this city. They lied about everything.

In the awesome grandeur of Wyoming, Montana, and Washington and the national parks, he saw more lies, for the Party said greedy capitalism had raped, robbed, and emaciated all the land. He stayed a night in a logging town set in a valley by a clear river surrounded by mountains. The climate and the expanses were like Siberia, and he longed for Siberia.

About forty miles outside San Francisco, he started noticing signs advertising all sorts of lodging, restaurants, and nightclubs in the city. That's right. There are no signs outside Rubtsovsk or Omsk or Moscow because there are no places to stay or eat. You stay in the railway station if there's room. Sure, we have signs. They tell how great the Party is, how much the Party is achieving. No signs tell you where to buy sausage.

He stayed in another downtown motel owned by immigrants from India. His room was dean, cheap, and had a big color television. At his request a taxi driver dropped him off in the «worst area» of downtown San Francisco. It was a cesspool of garish nightclubs, pornographic shops, prostitutes, homosexuals, transvestites, junkies, pimps, filthy, unhealthy-looking dropouts, and rebels against society. He ate in a hole in the wall and felt as if he were in a human zoo, yet the fried fish, fried potatoes, and coleslaw, for which he paid $1.50, were good.

Two prostitutes, one black, one white, tried to lure him into a brothel, «For thirty dollars, we'll give you a real good tune.»

«What do you mean?»

«Don't be stupid. You know. For thirty dollars you can have both of us.»

Here the Party was right. The dregs accumulated here were to him as disgusting as anything the Party ever claimed, and such human waste, insofar as it was visible, would be flushed out of Soviet society.

As it was early when he went back to his room, he switched on the television and turned the knob from channel to channel until he saw something very familiar. How wonderful! In progress on the screen was a superb public television performance of Anna Karenina.

There were so many choices. Before, the discovery and contemplation of them had invigorated and stimulated, as did the contemplation of a daring and original move in chess. Now he didn't care. All visions of what could be were clouded, dulled, marred by yearning for what might have been with her.

At a roadside cafe near Odessa, Texas, a Latin girl served him. She was not so pretty as Maria, but she smiled and carried herself like Maria. He bolted his meal and raced the breadth of Texas in fewer than twenty-four hours and sped foolishly, suicidally toward the institute.

Everywhere they had been together he revisited. He drove to the hacienda and en route back pulled off the road and stopped about where she had spoken to him. And now a delirium of irrationality afflicted him. It was illogical, senseless, but in its effects on him, it was as real as a typhoid delirium. He wanted to flee from himself, from her, from America, the extravagant successes of which made it seem now like an alien planet where he never could be a normal inhabitant.

Primordial impulses seized and held and pushed him, and he could not resist them. He wanted to feel the mud of the streets, smell the stink in which he had grown up, be among the desolate, cold huts, hear Russian, be in the land of his birth, his people, his ancestors. He was hearing and being drawn by not only the call of the Mother Country, but the Call of the Wild.