LITMIR.BIZ

      I straitened my shoulders proudly and moved forward, deliberately laming on one leg. A great many of people call their alter ego for help at critical moments: a certain confident, strong personality, which, it seems to them, is able to cope with unexpected problems. So, I stepped aboard a mighty airship! The next chair was occupied by a girl whose behavior promised me a perfectly quiet flight before the takeoff. She put some eye drops into her weary aqua blue eyes, put her headphones on, and wrapped herself in a blanket. I was on the phone with Marina at the last moment, «Flying off to Vladivostok. I’m going to text you later with more details when I have a chance.» A few moments later, a female voice with a metallic sound asked all passengers over the loudspeaker to turn off their electronic and radio devices. And in ten minutes, it was all over.

      Chapter 1

      A – Airport

      “Vladivostok” is an international airport located 44 km from the city of Vladivostok, which is connected by road and passenger rail services to the airport station 6 km from the airport. There are a number of direct international flights to Seoul, Beijing, Dalian, Harbin, Osaka, Niigata, Toyama, as well as several seasonal international charter flights, mainly to China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam. It operates inland daily flights to Moscow, Khabarovsk, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. There are flights to St. Petersburg, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg and other Russian cities. There are two passenger terminals and one cargo terminal at the airport. There are also two airfields: “Knevichi” designed for local and long-distance airlines as well as “Lake springs” for local airlines.

      I arrived in the Primorsky Krai at four o’clock in the afternoon. My plane landed at Knevichi airport, designated strangely enough as the air gates of the main city of the region (though you could read the huge letters on the terminal building saying, “Vladivostok Airport”). Not far from here, at a distance of five kilometers, there is a small town called Artem. Miners used to live there, and the settlement was established thanks to the coal extraction, even the three jimmies are depicted lightened by the cheerful sun on the coat of arms. While two main enterprises being developed, aviators and energy men had become the majority of Artem.

      During the flight I was reading a book, given to my father by my grandfather Henry. The book was titled “Civil Aviation of Primorye. Over the centuries.” It contained interesting destinations listed, or to make it sound better “air links”: Sidatun, Laulu, Terney… Most of them are Chinese names. During politically sensitive years, they were given rather down-to-earth Russian names, like, for example, the village of Melnichnoye. However, Terney kept its beautiful and proud name as a reminder of the French mark in the history of Primorsky Krai.

      “Passenger flights Moscow-Vladivostok have been carried out on the Il-12 aircraft since 1948”.2 I don’t have the imagination to feel what it’s like to overcome such vast distances being on such a tiny aircraft by today’s standards. But the back side of the mirror exists – people of the post-war era couldn’t overcome major distances on such a huge aircraft as the one that had just taken me to Primorye.

      I twisted my neck trying to see the local landscape through the blindness of the window. I saw a bluish mountain range, spreading along the horizon as far as the eye could see when I left the aircraft and walked into the world. “It should be Sikhote-Alin3”, I was full of childish rosy cheerful enthusiasm and continued glancing to the ridge of fells, reminding me of the Wizard of Oz and the Emerald City. The fells is a combination of sharp mountains and sloping hills. The definition “sopka” (fell) is a password to the Far Eastern diaspora for the West.

      Receiving my luggage, I found myself on the terminal square and decided to ask around how to get to Artem that was supposedly nearby. In the parking, a lot of bored taxi drivers immediately expressed their desire to take me even to the end of the world for the right fee. But my gestured requests to take me to Artem were flatly refused. “Artem?, it is not far from here and unprofitable for us”. However, there was another man who could understand me as I fiddled with my map. At first, he advised me to wait for a bus number seven, but I did not have a desire to study the local flavor in public transport. That was the reason I place myself in a taxi and hastily scribbled in a notepad: “I would like to have a look of Artem and listen to your story about it”. The taxi driver nodded being slightly lost.

      In the next five minutes, after a short trip along the highway with tired fields stretched around, bloodlessly embraced by the same fells, we ended up in the town.

      Artem was planned as a city on flat land, which provided suitable conditions for an airport to be constructed, the runway, in particular. It’s about twenty kilometers to the seaside – quite far away by local standards, considering that the city of Vladivostok is surrounded by the sea almost everywhere.

      My newly-minted guide was not interested in whether it was my first time here: that answer was obvious. The man showed me a couple of main attractions of the city from his driving seat: A road-header, installed on the pedestal as a symbol of miners labor and a Fighter Yak-38 placed forever in Aviator Park, the monument to the aviator’s feat. The majority of residential areas had five-story buildings. Near the city, there were mines. So five floors were the maximum permissible standard for a building.

      In the town there was also a bus terminal, behind it, there were rows of dusty green private houses, gradually turning into small villages with nice names such as “Krolevtzy” and “Knevitchi” already mentioned. The sky was cloudless. The sun, a heater, gaining momentum. Having dropped me at the bus terminal, the taxi driver summarized the purpose of my trip with the wording, “Craving for new impressions, change of pattern.”

      Was I hungry for a new experience? Definitely, if they suppressed at least for a moment and covered this uneventful and squalid emptiness, which I ran away from to another end of the world. Oh, Primorye, be my life-giving water, become a potion that cures any ailments.

      I remember, there was an Italian fairy tale called «Happy Man’s Shirt». The plot: the king’s son plunged himself into black melancholy, and only a certain shirt could save him. The final is open: Having finally found a completely happy man in the wilderness, the king and his servants, who wanted to save the prince at any cost, were extremely disappointed – there was no shirt on the lucky man. But let’s imagine that the king got what he wanted and the prince recovered. What does this mean? A worthy successor to the throne, a prosperous state. The prince will be busy with the country’s affairs, and will enjoy himself as befits the monarchs to somehow relieve tension: balls, hunting, horseback riding. No painful thoughts alone, everyone is happy. The question is whether he really needs it? Whether he was more ambitious, he would pretend that he cared about  worldly affairs just like his royal forefathers. Had he been bolder, he would have built himself a hut in the forest and led a hermit’s life. The prince was quite comfortable in his palace apartments, staring at the open window mournfully and not letting anyone in. He had no other wishes, as it could be seen from the fairy tale. Buddhist postulate has always seemed controversial to me stating that any desire causes suffering and that, if we

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