Vladimir Savchenko: Self-discovery

The plump, blonde, middle — aged passenger in the express train between Novosibirsk and Dneprovsk was agitated by the fellow in the upper berth. He had rough — hewn but handsome features, a windblown face, dark curly hair with a lot of gray in it, strong, tanned hands with thick fingers and old calluses on the palms — and yet he had a gentle smile, charm (he had offered her the lower berth when she got on at Kharkov), and an intelligent manner of speaking. The fellow lay with his square chin on his hands, greedily looking at the trees, houses, streams, and road signs flashing by. And he smiled. “Handsome!” she thought.

“Probably familiar territory?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You’ve been away a long time?”

“A year.”

He was recognizing things: they went under the highway where he used to ride his motorcycle with Lena. There was the oak grove where the locals went picnicking. There was Staroe Ruslo, a place of secluded beaches, clean sand, and calm water. There was the Vytrebenki farm — and hey! new construction! Probably a chemical plant…. He smiled and frowned as the memories came back.

Actually, he had never ridden a motorcycle anywhere with any Lena, nor had he ever been in the grove or on those beaches — it had all been done without him. It was simply that once there had been a conversation, and to be accurate, even that took place without his active participation.

“Here’s an application. (The variants of human life!) Look: ‘A Vladivostok shipbuilding concern is looking for an electrical engineer to do fitting work on location. Apartment supplied. Aren’t I an electrical engineer? Fitting on location — what could be better? A Pacific wave lapping up against the fittings! You pay out the cable, lick the salt from your lips — you against the elements!”

“Yes, but.”

“No, I can understand. Before it was impossible. Before! You and I are men of duty — how can you just quit a job and go off to satisfy your wanderlust? So we all stay where we are — and the longing for places we’ve never seen and never will stays with us too, and for people we’ll never meet, and for events and occasions that we’ll never participate in. We drown this longing in books, movies, and dreams — it’s impossible for a man to lead several parallel lives. But now — “

“But now it’s the same thing. You’ll go off to Vladivostok to lick your sea spray, and I’ll remain behind with my dissatisfaction.”

“But… we can trade. Once every six months. No one would notice. no, that’s nonsense. We’d be distinguished by six months of practical work experience.”

“That’s just it! By heading down one of life’s paths, a person becomes different from the person he would have been had he taken another path.”

But he headed for Vladivostok anyway. He didn’t leave to still his longings — he ran away from the horrors of memory. He would have gone even farther, but farther there was only ocean. Of course, the job opening as a fitter in the ports had been filled, but he found work excavating underwater cliffs, to clear space for ship berths — that wasn’t bad work either. There was enough romance: he dove into the blue green depths with his scuba gear, saw his quivering shadow on the bottom rocks, dug out holes in the cliffs, set the dynamite, lit the fuse, and scattering the fish that would be floating belly up in a minute, swam at breakneck speeds for the power boat. And then, missing engineering work, he introduced an electrohydraulic charge, which was safer than dynamite and more effective. He left behind all memories of himself.

“Are you coming from far?” the woman insisted, interrupting his reverie.

“From the Far East.”

“Were you recruited to work there or did you just go?”

The man stared at her and laughed curtly.

“I went for a cure.”

His traveling companion nodded warily. She had lost all desire for conversation. She pulled out a book and buried herself in it.

Yes, the healing began there. The guys on the team were amazed by his fearlessness. He really had no fear: strength, agility, exact calculation — and no deep wave could touch him. He literally held his own life in his hands — what was there to be afraid of? The most terrifying times he had lived through had been here, in Dneprovsk, when Krivoshein played God with his life and death. With many deaths. You see, Krivoshein did not understand that what he was doing was much worse than torturing a helpless person.

The man’s body tensed automatically. A chill of anger puckered his skin into goose bumps. The monsoons had blown a lot out of his system in a year: depression, panicky fear, even his tender feelings for Lena. But this remained.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have come back? I had the ocean that made me feel small and simple, good pals, and hard and interesting work. Everyone respected me. I became myself out there. But here… who knows how things will go for him?”

But he could no more not return than forget the past. At first, it would creep up on him, after work, on days off, when the whole team took a speedboat into Vladivostok. The thought would pound through his head: “Krivoshein is working. He’s alone there.” Then the idea came to him.

Once when they were clearing the bottom in a nameless cove near Khabarovsk, where there were warm mineral springs along the shore, he jumped from the boat and fell into a stream. He almost screamed from the horrible memories in his body! The water tasted just like that liquid, and the sensationless, warm gentleness seemed to conceal that ancient threat to dissolve, destroy, and extinguish consciousness. He moved ahead, and the cold ocean water sobered and calmed him. But the impression remained. By evening it had turned into a thought: “The experiment could be run in reverse.”

And, while healing from his former memories, he “caught” this one. His researcher’s imagination was aflame. How enticing it would be to plan an experiment, to try to predict the enormous results that would bring great benefit! The underwater explosions seemed like a dull, gray waste. Now without fear, he played back everything that had happened to him, projected the variations of the experiment. And he could not remain there with the idea that Krivoshein had probably not thought of it yet. You couldn’t come up with it by pure reason alone. You had to have lived through everything that he had.

But — the implacable logic of their work brought another idea forward in his mind: all right, so they would find a new way of processing a man with information. What would it give them? This thought was harder than the first. On the way from Vladivostok to Dneprovsk he turned to it often, and he still had not thought it all the way through.

Outside the window, the girders of a bridge reflected the clattering wheels of the train: they were crossing the Dnieper River. The man was distracted for a moment, watching a powerboat skim the water’s surface down the river’s current, and looking at the green slope of the right bank. The bridge ended and little houses, gardens, and hedges flashed by the window.

“It all boils down to the problem of how and with what information can man be perfected. All the other problems rest on this one. The system is a given: the human brain and the mechanisms for introducing information — the eyes, ears, nose, etc. Three streams of information feed the brain: daily life, science, and art. We must distinguish the most effective one in its action on man — and the most directed one. So that it would perfect him, ennoble him. The most effective is naturally the daily information: it is concrete and real, forming man’s life experience. It’s life itself; nothing else to it. I suppose that in reality it has a mutual relationship with man according to the laws of feedback: life affects man, but by his actions he affects life. But the action of daily life can be most varied: it can change man for the better or the worse. So, that can’t be it.