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second-year student backed away from me down another corridor, and we stopped beside a door upholstered in black with a large brown plaque that I couldn’t read because of my uncomfortable position. The door opened, and I was rolled into a room with an immense crystal chandelier in the shape of an aircraft bomb hanging from the ceiling; the upper section of the walls was decorated with a band of bas-relief ornamentation made up of sickles, hammers, and urns entwined with grapevines.
    They took my straps off, and I propped myself up on my elbows, trying not to look at my legs: straight ahead of me at the back of the room a green lamp stood on a massive desk that was illuminated by the slanting grey light from a tall narrow window. The person sitting at the desk was hidden from me by the open pages of a copy of
Pravda
, from the front of which a wrinkly face with radiantly kind eyes stared straight at me. The lino on the floor squeaked, and Mitiok’s bed came to a halt beside mine.
    The newspaper rustled a few times as its pages were turned, and then sank down onto the table.
    There in front of us was the little old man with the scar on his forehead, the one who had grabbed me by the arm during the interview. Now he was wearing the uniform of a lieutenant-general with brocade at the buttonholes, his hair was neatly brushed down, and hisgaze was clear and sober. I noticed that his face seemed like a copy of the one that had been looking at me from the front page of
Pravda
just a minute before: it was just like in a film I saw, where they showed one icon for a long time, and then another one gradually appeared in its place—the images were similar, but not quite the same, and because the transition was blurred, it seemed as if the icon were changing in front of your eyes.
    “Now, boys, since you and I will be seeing quite a lot of each other for quite a long time, you can call me Comrade Flight Leader. Allow me to congratulate you on the results of your exams—and the interview in particular,” said the old man, winking. “You have been registered immediately for the first-year course at the KGB secret space-training school—so you’ll just have to wait a bit before you become Real Men. Meanwhile, get ready to go to Moscow. I’ll see you there.”
    I didn’t realise what he’d said till we’d been taken back to the empty ward along those long corridors, where the lino sang a quiet song of nostalgia beneath the tiny casters of the bed, reminding me somehow of a day in July by the sea.
    Mitiok and I slept the whole day (it seems they’d drugged our supper the previous evening—I was still sleepy the next day), and that evening a jolly yellow-haired lieutenant in squeaky boots came for us, and laughed and cracked jokes as he wheeled our beds out onto the asphalt parade ground in front of the platform with the concrete shell-shaped canopy, where several senior generals with kind intelligent faces, including Comrade Flight Leader, were sitting at a table. Of course, Mitiok and I could have walked there on ourown, but the lieutenant said that this was standing orders for first-year cadets, and he ordered us to lie still so as not to upset the others.
    All those beds stacked up against one another made the parade ground look like the yard of an automobile factory or a tractor plant: a subdued groaning traced a complex flight path above it—dying away in one place, it sprang up in another, and then in a third, as though some huge invisible mosquito were darting about above the beds. On the way out, the yellow-haired lieutenant told us that a combined graduation party and final state exam was about to begin.
    Soon we were watching our lieutenant, the first of about fifty like him, as he danced the “Kalinka” for the exam committee. He was pale and nervous, but he performed with incomparable mastery, to the sparse accompaniment of the assistant political instructor’s accordion. The lieutenant was called Landratov—I