Voroshilovgrad Read Online Free PDF

she had poured from the thermos. The drink smelled like a mix of cinnamon and valerian. I tried it. It had an acerbic and spicy taste to it. I drank it all. I was knocked out immediately.

    Wheat fields surrounded the airport. Some bright, poisonous-looking flowers were growing closer to the runway. Wasps were hovering lazily above, frozen in mid-flight as if there were corpses below them. Every morning the sun heated up the asphalt and dried out all the grass poking through the concrete slabs. Flags were whipping in the wind off to the side, above the air-traffic control station. A bit farther away, behind the administration building, the blistering morning sun touched down on a row of trees woven together by spiderwebs. Strange gusts of wind tore across the fields like animals emerging from the night, attracted by the airport’s green lights, only to retreat back into the wheat to hide from the burning June sun. As it warmed up, the asphalt reflected the sunlight, blinding the birds flying over the runway. Gas tanks and a couple of trucks were parked at the fence. Some empty garages, smelling of sweet stagnant water and oil, were just emerging from the darkness. After a while, some mechanics appeared, changed into worn black overalls, and started fiddling around with their machines. The early June sky hovered abovethe airport, flapping loudly in the wind like freshly washed sheets, rising and swooping down to the asphalt. Around eight, the laborious roar of an engine made itself heard, heaving air in and out of the depths of the atmosphere. The airplane itself was still hidden behind the sun, but its shadow scurried across the wheat fields, scaring the hell out of the birds and foxes. The surface of the sky shattered like porcelain. A good old Antonov An-2, the pride of Soviet aviation, a model that had seen its share of combat, though this one was almost certainly a crop duster, was descending nearby. Deafening the morning with its prehistoric motor, it spun around the sleepy city, awakening its residents from their light and fleeting summer dreams. The pilots scoped out the fields of crops topped with sunny honey, fresh grass sprouting on the railroad ties and embankments, the golden river sand, and the chalky banks the color of silverware. The city was left behind with its factory smoke stacks and railroad; the airplane was getting ready to land. Light poured into the cockpit and shone coldly on the metal. The machine whipped across the runway, its stiff wheels bouncing up and down on the cracked asphalt. The pilots hopped down onto the ground and started helping the baggage handlers pull out large burlap sacks full of regional and Republic-wide newspapers, letters, and parcels. Once everything had been unloaded, they walked over to the building, leaving the plane to warm up in the sun.
    My friends and I lived on the other side of the fields, on the outskirts of the city, in white panel apartment buildings surrounded by tall pine trees. In the evenings, we would escape from our neighborhood, roam around in the wheat, hiding from passing cars and scampering along the fence, and then we’d take a rest inthe dusty grass and look at the aircraft. The An-2, with its all-metal airframe and canvas-upholstered wings, looked like something not of this world, some conveyance utilized by demons who burned the sky above us with oil and lead. God’s messengers were riding inside it; the mighty propeller was smashing the blue ice of the sky and hurling poplar fuzz into the next world. We came home well after dark, pushing through the hot, thick wheat, all the while dreaming about aviation. We all wanted to become pilots. The majority of us became losers.
    From time to time I still have dreams about aviators. They’re always making an emergency landing somewhere in wheat fields. Their planes cut at dusk through the thick wheat like razors; all the canvas upholstery gives with a loud ripping sound as the stalks wrap