Boomerang of Happiness - 1

In the late 1980s, Alex was a promising young Soviet engineer and inventor gifted with a special ability to clearly see and predict where the communication technologies would move in the future. He was one of those rare types whom nature generously gave everything: looks, smarts, and kindness of heart. Alex was about 5’9”, had an athletic body thanks to his passion for volleyball, swimming and biking, wavy black hair that he always wore short, and deep hazel eyes. Thanks to his good nature, Alex had a lot of friends who always wanted him at their parties because he played a guitar and had a great singing voice. In short, everyone loved him and he had great prospects for his future.

Upon graduation from a leading Russian telecommunications college with honors, he was sent as a resident engineer to a cutting-edge telecommunications station in the middle of nowhere in a vast Kazakhstan steppe, tasked with the development and testing of new Soviet satellites. The residency was supposed to be for two years, and he took it in stride, as a first step on his career path, because he knew that living in northern Kazakhstan would not be easy. He was born and raised in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan’s capital at the time, and his parents still lived there. His father had some relatives in the northern part of Kazakhstan and as a child he visited them quite often. The trips were all right in the summer, when he went swimming and fishing and biking with other boys, but he dreaded the winters in the great white steppe, when it was so cold and windy that no one ventured to go outside. However, the vast steppe was also a great testing ground for the Soviet scientists, where they launched all sorts of things, starting with satellites and ending with ballistic missiles and space ships.

He was engaged then to a beautiful young woman he had met in college. Irina was slim, about 5’4”, wore long blond hair in beautiful wavy locks and possessed very delicate face features: shapely full lips, small straight nose and large blue eyes framed by long eyelashes. People often refer to women like Irina as “a classical Slavic beauty.” In addition to her good looks, Irina was smart, with natural aptitude for hard sciences. She graduated the top of her class as an engineer of communications networks from the same college as Alex and could have built her own successful career in any of the three major Soviet cities she was offered for her residency. But Irina and Alex were so much in love that she decided to follow him to his new job in Kazakhstan.

As a part of the Soviet defense system, the station was classified as a secret strategic object and as such had been built literally in the middle of nowhere, about 50 miles away from the nearest city. There were no open positions for Irina at the time and she started to work as an elementary school math teacher in a small town nearby, where most of the station’s non-essential personnel lived. Similar to many other typical Soviet “closed towns” serving strategic objects, the town consisted of apartment blocks, a couple of schools, a cinema, a library, and a hospital. Most of the people lived there only for three to five years, as the station personnel rotated often and scientists and engineers moved on to their next career posts, taking their families with them. This is why the town’s residents were for the most part young families with small kids.

As one of the most essential personnel, Alex was provided with a dorm room right on the station’s premises. He and his young bride had a small room that hardly took in a bed for two, a small desk with a couple of chairs that they used for both work and meals, and a wardrobe. They had to share bathroom facilities and a large kitchen equipped with four gas stoves with residents of the other four rooms in the hall. Other residents on the floor were all unmarried male engineers, and they suspected at least one of them was a KGB officer. Irina was the only woman on the floor, and it was really hard on her with no female companionship. Besides, she took it upon herself to keep the kitchen and other common areas clean. So every Sunday morning she cleaned the bathroom and the kitchen and washed the floors in the hall, loudly complaining about how sloppy the men were.

On the weekdays, Irina had to take a special service bus that ran between the station and the town where the school was, taking people to and from work. Irina was the only one who, as she joked, rode against the tide: since no one else went into town in the mornings, the bus driver, a burly good-natured middle-aged Kazakh man, picked her up right at their dorm’s entrance. She was also the only one going back from the town to the station after work, and the bus driver loved her company. They entertained each other on those short 15-minute rides, telling funny tales of the day and sharing the wisdom and tricks for living in harsh Soviet and climate conditions. When Irina got off the bus near the dorm, where Alex would wait for her after work, she had such a big smile on her face and was in such a good mood that Alex often asked jokingly if he should be jealous of the driver.

Alex remembered warmly those fifteen months they lived together in the station’s cramped-up dorm room. He thought they were probably the happiest months of his life. He would never forget their first anniversary of living together, which they celebrated on July 3 in their little room with a bottle of sparkling wine shamelessly and notoriously called “Soviet Champagne,” a Napoleon layered cake and a long night of passionate love. As a young couple, they lived in near poverty, just like most fresh college graduates of the late Soviet era did, but they did not need much, dreaming of the better future once he’d establish himself as a lead engineer in his field. They had each other and loved each other, which at that time was the only thing that mattered.

Alex would never forget the Sunday in early November when they had that stupid fight. It started, just like with so many young couples, with a small, insignificant thing: unwashed dishes in the shared kitchen’s sink Irina discovered during her usual morning cleaning session. She started to push Alex to find out who the perpetrator was and talk some sense into him. Because, you see, she was no maid to them, and everyone was supposed to clean up after himself. Alex said he’d rather wash the dishes himself than conduct an investigation and pick a fight with a neighbor, but Irina thought this was cowardly and wanted him to end it, man to man, once and for all. The disagreement quickly escalated to many more things that seemed important to Irina and insignificant to Alex. They were both stubborn and no one wanted to give in or give up, so at the point when the fight became too much to bear for both of them, she slammed the door and left.

Alex could never forgive himself that he did not try to stop her or run after her then. He thought she just went outside to cool off and would come back soon – there were no places to go for miles around, especially on a Sunday. With everyone, except for staff on duty, in nearby town or even farther places for the weekend, the station looked deserted and dead. Alex was sure she was just walking around the station somewhere. But Irina never came back and in a couple of hours a powerful cold sand storm landed on the station, paralyzing it and the nearby town for several hours. After the storm passed, Alex circled the station for hours, looking for Irina everywhere with no success. It was almost midnight when Alex finally reached the nearby town by foot, exhausted, desperate and in distress, hoping to find Irina at her teacher friend’s apartment. She was not there; the friend and her husband helped him form a search party, they went to everyone who knew Irina, but she was nowhere in town.

The search continued for a whole week. They estimated the radius of the area where Irina could have ended up if she had ventured outside the station and was caught in the storm. They called in a rescue team and used dogs to pick up her trace. It was all in vain. An old Kazakh man, who had lived in the steppe all his life and served as a guide for them, finally said on the eighth day, when they lost all hope of finding Irina: “She must have perished in the great wide steppe. How can a fragile city girl survive here in a vicious storm?”

The fact that they never found the body gave Alex a flicker of hope that she had somehow managed to get to the railway station from the nearby town. Even though he knew she had no money or documents on her, he still hoped Irina would turn up at her parents’ in Russia or some other place alive.

But she never did. Her parents, who treated Alex as their own son, never lost hope and were sure she was alive and well somewhere. Alex blamed himself for her disappearance, and Irina’s parents tried to console him, saying that it was not his fault she had left. They believed she would come back to him after she’d cool off or at least would let him know she was alive if she decided not to get back with him. Because that was how they had raised her – honest and brave, and caring for the people she loved. She simply couldn’t be so cruel as not to let them know she was alive…

To Part 2