Derek Lambert - The Red Dove

Talin sipped his tea. He glanced at his watch. 8.20. In one hour and ten minutes he had to meet Sedov to fly to the factory where they were building the fusilages of the fleet of Doves.

In the bedroom he heard the chink of cup on saucer, the rustle of sheets. He was still aroused: this almost-married state acted like an aphrodisiac. What would their honeymoon be like?

He went back to the bedroom. She was sitting on the edge of the bed searching for her slippers with her feet. He returned to the window and said: ‘Come here and look at the snow,’ and thought: Sly dog.

He put his arm round her. He could feel her warmth and the curve of her hip. Her body wasn’t as soft as those of other women he had known: it was fit and disciplined and supple.

He slipped a hand inside her nightdress, cupping one firm breast.

‘Nicolay,’ she protested, without removing his hand.

He turned her towards him and pressed her to him so that she could feel his hardness.

‘Nicolay!’

He removed his hand from her breast and, with both hands, lifted the nightdress from her body and threw it on the bed. She stood naked, nipples hard. Every time they made love they made progress; this was the first time she had stood like this, previously she had always slipped swiftly between the sheets, like a shy schoolgirl in a dormitory – although she had soon discarded her inhibitions. The snow, now pouring from the sky, probably helped, made her feel that she was veiled from outside. He undid the belt of his dressing-gown and they were both naked and his penis ached to be inside her.

He was a little ashamed of the directness of his need. It was too much part of the old image of the selfish Russian male. Impatient thrusts, duration decided by the intake of vodka, climax followed by snores as crude as belches. Selfish? Well, those old goats missed a lot.

Talin remembered the intense pleasures of the previous night, pleasures derived both from arousing and being aroused. From kissing her lips and kissing her breasts and kissing her lingeringly between the golden curls between her thighs while she…

He pulled her towards the bed. She lay down, thighs open and, despite his slavering lust, he started to make love the selfless, enlightened way, but huskily she said: ‘No, not now,’ and pulled him down on to her and, as he slid easily into her, he realised that they had both wanted it this way.

There was a time, he mused afterwards, for sophistication and there was a time to be an old goat. He smiled and she asked him what was so amusing him and he told her; that, too, was progress.

‘But no children yet,’ she said. ‘You understand, don’t you Nicolay? I have to dance… for a few years, anyway.’ She snuggled up to him. ‘And now I’ll let you into a secret.’

He stroked her cheek, outside the snow fell steadily. ‘Well?’

‘They’re writing a ballet especially for me. Do you know what it’s about?’

He shook his head.

‘It will be performed next year, sixty years after Lenin’s death. It’s a choreographer’s dream. It’s all about the future, about space. It’s called The Red Dove,’ she whispered into his ear.

On the way to Domodyedove, Moscow’s domestic airport, in the back of a black Volga provided by the Ministry, Talin considered the tail-end of his conversation with Sonya.

She had remarked how simple it was for Soviet women to avoid pregnancy by taking contraceptive pills, apparently unaware that more than half of them still relied on the abortion service provided by the State for birth control.

That was typical of Sonya, typical of her class.

Beside him sat Sedov. His eyes looked as though they hurt and he barely spoke. Too much vodka to celebrate the engagement, Talin guessed. And probably drunk alone.

The Volga swung through the gates of Domodyedove. They climbed out of the car and ducked through the snow into the departure lounge.

It was very different from the antiseptic smartness of Sheremetyevo, the international airport. Soldiers and peasants lounged on worn seats as though they had been left over from summer; queues stood becalmed in front of Aeroflot check-in desks; passing stewardesses looked like the ugly sisters of the svelte girls on the foreign routes.

Every one of the 350 seats on the elephantine 11–86 was taken. Sedov closed his eyes and fell instantly asleep. Ten minutes before they were due to land at Voronezh, 360 miles south of Moscow, Talin woke him.

As Sedov opened his eyes he said: ‘It’s a boy, my love,’ and, transiently, there was pain in his eyes that owed nothing to vodka before he asked: ‘How much longer?’

The car waiting to take them to the Tupolev factory was a new Lada, pale blue and snappy. A wind from Siberia was driving misty rain across the city; the driver, overcome by the presence of his passengers who were actually going to fly the Doves, answered questions in monosyllables.

Yes, the shuttles were almost finished. No, the ordinary citizens of Voronezh weren’t supposed to know what was being made at the factory. But, yes, they did.

‘Amazing, isn’t it,’ Sedov said, ‘the Americans have got satellites and spy planes which can pin-point a single missile silo on the Chinese border but they can’t find out where we’re building a dozen shuttles.’

‘It can’t be that easy,’ Talin said.

‘Why not? Their embassy in Moscow is crawling with CIA. It doesn’t take a superhuman intelligence to work out that if Tupolev abandons building the TU-144, the Concordsky as the Americans called it, then they must be building something exceptionally important instead.’

‘You’d think they’d make the connection,’ Talin agreed. ‘After all we stole the TU-144 from them. Much good it did us,’ referring to the disaster at the Paris Airshow in 1973 and the two subsequent crashes in Soviet territory.

‘One Minuteman missile here,’ said Sedov as the Lada stopped at the heavily-guarded gates of the factory, ‘and we’ve lost the heavens to the Americans.’

‘You make it sound like a war,’ Talin said, showing a militiaman his red passbook.

Sedov didn’t reply.

The Chairman of the Works Committee was much like any other factory manager whose mind buzzes with quotas; he was worried, fussy, pompous and intimidated by anyone who could fly his products. Talin decided that the manager himself had been conceived as part of a five-year plan. But he displayed his merchandise with commendable pride.

The line of Doves looked awesome, but only when you knew their capabilities. Otherwise they didn’t look all that different from conventional jets. The set of the main engines in the rear with a sea-level thrust of 400,000 lb was frightening, the set of the nose endearing.

Talin smelled oil and paint and power.

‘Which is Dove II?’ he asked the Committee Chairman.

‘You’re standing in front of it.’

Talin stared curiously at the bird. It stared back; impudently, he thought. ‘I should have known,’ he said.

Could you form an attachment to an inanimate object? More fancifully, could it form an attachment to you? The former certainly, the latter well… no harm in believing it as long as you didn’t communicate your feelings to humans and get carted off to a clinic. He restrained an impulse to wink at Dove II.

Instead he appraised her with a professional eye. Within the next few months he would be flying her and the Russian people would be following ‘another giant step forward into space’ – Talin could hear the commentator’s words.

They would be told that Dove II was more revolutionary than any American shuttle; that it was more manoeuvrable and could return to orbit if anything went wrong on re-entry to the earth’s atmosphere; that the flight was the final rehearsal for actual construction of a station 150 miles above the globe.