4.(18-20) Honeymoon in Siberia?

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18. "Honeymoon in Siberia"

exclaims Olga between bites of breakfast upstairs in the honeymoon suite at 7 AM. Boris had shaken her awake at 6 AM with “Olenka! I pick up supplies and return at eight. Don't forget! Wear the pants, shirt, jacket and sneakers I leave here. No questions! Trust husband!” And he is off.
   Nothing referring to the wedding bedding! Five times! Wow! Her inner thighs tingle. She is not sure how many orgasms 3, 4 or more she'd had; she only knows she'd met Mr. Man and His desires are her gives.
   Despite being excited she notes Meela's dishy delishy breakfast: especially the beautifully brewed coffee – El Dorado – a Spanish blend imported to Khabarovsk in the luggage of a Spanish Civil War veteran. And the bagel whose outside is covered with small baked-in seeds. “Puppy zeeds,” exclaims Meela. “Vot zey yoose tsu maken zie opium. Gibt goo gefeelin.”

   Olga loves drugs in Tokyo so why not in the poppy seeds on bagels?

   Then Meela serves blini, which Olga has eaten back home and knows to be crepe with cinnamon powder sprinkled over it and eaten with honey. Exquisite!

She showers, dries, notes the clothes, then glances at the wedding bed and sighs. Casting off gown and stepping in front of mirror, she notes her skin and bones body and jokes to herself. “Looks like I lost at strip poker.” Then sits down on edge of chair, pulling-on one white stocking at a time over her brilliantly painted toenail feet and rolling each up to mid calf. She stands to draw on white cotton panties, then pulls over her head the pink flannel undershirt with long sleeves. Out of season, she thinks but I’ll be out of sight in Siberia so who could care.
   Boris had selected a logger's type red woolen shirt. “Ah!” She exclaims, buttoning it up her flat front, “A hunting we shall go, in red so no one mistakes me for prey.”
   The pants are perfect fit – brown corduroy with big, baggy, low, button-down, horizontal-top side-pockets and higher oblique slit pockets. Pockets are useful, she thinks, and, deeper the better.

   Boris got her a black-visor bright red cap with French foreign legion back-flap to cover nape of neck. "Aha!” Her Sherlock mind deduces destinations dangereuses from insect bites that might transmit Russian summer brain fever.

   Finally over all is a bright, yellow button-up windbreaker with deep side, front, and inner pockets.

   “Boris is choost park car!” Meela shouts from downstairs. Olga knows he wants her downstairs and not to waste time. Throwing travel bag over right shoulder she hurries down, kissing Meela and rushing out door.

19. On Way to Airport

Boris explains that the Soviet government is worried about a German invasion of Russia. The USSR has many ethnic Germans living within its western border, descendants of settlers attracted there by great Empress Catherine, grandma of the Enlightenment Emperor Alexander of War and Peace. Catherine being a German preferred Germans to settle in European Russia. This German minority stood out – blond and blue-eyed – and Stalin's foremost fear is they will go Nazi in return for leadership in puppet states of Ukrainia, Byelorus, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. So, early as 1936, these Germans started being “transferred” to the Siberian Maritime Region. On the surface it is not a forced; but rather a “Go east young volk” campaign that promises good work in logging and ideal conditions of housing and health. And it worked so well that already the Germans had formed a logging community at Siziman Bay on the east coast 50⁰ north latitude opposite mid Sakhalin. But this newly transported population, owing to what immunologists call a ‘naïve immune status' due to no childhood acquired immunity, has started coming down with Russian summer-spring brain fever from tick bites. Humans walk in the grass with exposed skin, and virus-infected ticks bite them. The tick excretes virus on bite site, the site itches, the bitten-human scratches the virus into his blood, and, like moth to flame, the virus zeroes in on brain. Each virus particle that settles into a brain cell reproduces millions, destroys the cell and infects more cells, and the infected human becomes a gibbering, spitting, drooling insane lunatic.
   Preventing this brain fever is the Why of the trip. The Pasteur Institute in Paris, with its communist scientists, has developed a first batch of anti-encephalitis vaccine. Boris will deliver it; thus the mission and their honeymoon in Siberia.

20. Whirlybird

Boris flashes his ID and drives past guards onto a brown sod runway and Olga sees the sight of her life, presently a center of activity. Weird aircraft! And – running up and down the portable stairway carrying cartons, food bags, jars of drinking water, petrol canisters and big, bulging dirty gray mailbag – Chinese porters. Behind the aircraft a gasoline tanker truck with gas tank and a grimy woman mechanic in jumpsuit checks engine. Remind me not to be a Soviet woman, Olga thinks.

   A stocky, short, middle-aged, Stalin-mustached man in uniform of Red Army major stands with a young woman brightly dressed in red combination knee-length skirt and over-jacket. She has a large identifying card pinned to left lapel.
  Pretty and likes to show legs, Olga muses and smiles as she is introduced to ‘Zhenya’ (Russian equivalent of Jeanne), flight attendant-nurse. The Red Army major introduces self – Leonid Davidovitch Pevzner.

   Olga has never seen anything like this before: Not airplane! No props! No wings! What imprints on her brain as she views is its wide, long body tapering thin in rear. With wings, the aircraft would be about right for a Pan Am Clipper like in the Hollywood movie Flying Down to Rio. It has a door beside which is portable stairway, and windows to look out of from the sides, and a compartment for pilot in front. But what makes the aircraft different from all others that Olga has seen is the overhead horizontal propeller-like rotor of twin blades, and in rear a vertical one! Boris, too busy to explain, leaves her with the doctor and Zhenya.
   A little later Boris drops into the seat beside her. “Not to worry, Olenka. This is helicopter like Leonardo da Vinci sketched and our Soviet aero engineers are producing since 1935. Very safe.”

   Dr. Pevzner getting into the seat facing Olga chimes in: “Do not have anxiety, dear lady. I make trip 10 times. Every time is pleasure.”

                           Read on, click 4.21 An Autogiro? No!