PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (14 page)

The entire enterprise had been nearly destroyed by failure and tragedy. An R-16 ICBM had blown up on its launch pad the previous October, killing Marshal Nedelin, the head of the strategic rocket forces, and 164 other officers, scientists, and technicians. The launch pad had been wrecked. Khrushchev had been furious.

The space program had survived only through the heroism of the Chief Designer, and behind him a corps of workers and technicians, and behind them the entire workers’ state, all of us. Look at what we were about to accomplish: sixteen years after the end of a cataclysmic war, forty-four years after deposing a regime steeped in reaction and ignorance, our nation was about to send a man into space. This was not because we were smarter than anyone else; rather, we had organized ourselves to draw the best from each other, from each according to his ability. Yuri’s flight would make the definitive argument for socialism. By breaking the chains of gravity, man was about to embark on a new stage of his evolution, a step
made possible only by the transformation of society. Within a day, the whole world would know it.

Yuri could not bear to lie in bed awake, not that night.

He pulled on his trousers, shirt, boots, and flight jacket and then stepped from his room, past Titov’s, and out onto the porch, gently shutting the door behind him. At the railing he peered into the oceanic dark. The only sounds belonged to the Kazakh wind. A scatter of stars effervesced behind a haze—high-altitude clouds, nothing serious. At ground level, electric lights burned at the edges and corners of a few nearby structures, almost all of them constructed in the past two years.

The air was cold, and he zipped his jacket. Absentmindedly—and this was perhaps his only absentminded habit—he searched his jacket pockets before recalling that he had finished his cigarettes while Dr. Marshak was writing her final medical report. His hands lightly grasped the railing. The launch pad was in Sector K, too distant to be seen, but the lights around it shimmered on the eastern horizon like the aurora borealis or the first drops of milk in a cup of coffee.

The thought of his last cigarette redirected his attention toward the infirmary, about 200 meters across the scrub. Its white clapboard showed gray and ghostly in the dark. At one of its corners a red light winked. He gazed at the electric bulb and his sense of anticipation became tumescent. Tomorrow: space. Across the darkened American sky, he’d be a light himself. He had always known he would be the first, it was a matter of wanting it badly enough. Already he felt consumed by expectation, pride and, and ...

A smile crossed his face. Desire. He winked back at the electric bulb.

Descending from the porch, he found the ground hardened from the cold. A few frozen twigs snapped, but otherwise his passage across the empty field was without weight or sound. He was not afraid, he never was.

Deliberately overshooting the infirmary’s entrance, he set an elliptical trajectory around the building, past the surgery. Most of the windows were draped or shuttered, but through them drifted soft romantic music from a radio or a phonograph. A radio, he decided, detecting the echoing signature of skip-distance reception.

Beneath his returning arc, behind one of these windows, lay the infirmary’s single resident patient, Grigoriev. A victim of the R-16 blast, with burns over 90 percent of his body, he was too ill to move and too ill to recover. Grigoriev had been a candidate-cosmonaut, among the most promising in the nimbus of candidates below Yuri. Yuri respectfully tipped his head as he passed the window of what he believed to be the patient’s room.

He came to a large undraped window at the end of a hallway. Its polished wood floor reflected a yellow streak of light. He paused there a moment before moving on to the next window. Its blinds didn’t reach all the way to the bottom of the frame. The room was unlit save for the indirect glow reflected from the hallway, like earthshine softening the lunar night. Something stirred in the room and left it. He glimpsed a nurse’s white uniform, but couldn’t determine to which nurse it belonged. Several were on duty at any given time. He had seen only the girl’s back.

Gradually he apprehended a storeroom: cardboard boxes, a shelf of beakers and tubing, and a wall lined by folded linen. With eyes that a famous song would someday say were as keen as a hunting dog’s, he noticed that the side of the window sat unevenly against the frame, not fully in its embrace.

Grinning, he pushed against it and swung the window open on its hinges. He heard footsteps and pulled away. Someone came into the storeroom. Standing among the sparse weeds outside the infirmary, his back to the clapboard, Yuri couldn’t guess what she was doing, only that her hands were too full to turn on the light. He gazed across an unplowed field and felt a rising, accelerating excitement. He heard the nurse step away again, humming along to the radio music: “What Moves My Heart So.” He turned just as her ankle disappeared around the door. By its slender, sinewy musculature, the ankle declared itself to be Tania’s. In a single, effortless motion, as if he were already weightless, Yuri lifted himself up and through the window.

Tania returned a minute later, contemplation sharpening the features of her petite, triangular face. From deep within the storeroom’s shadows, where Yuri lurked like an undersea creature, her olive complexion seemed even more oriental, her eyelids even flatter. And everything about her face was in perfect proportion, almost isoscelean. Yuri never failed to be astounded by the totally anonymous beauties harbored in these remote Soviet provinces.

With a languor redolent of the Tatar centuries, she
placed some folded towels on a pile of linen and reached for something on a shelf above her head. For an extended moment the line of her body, from the balls of her feet through the flex of her ankles and the sweep of her legs, buttocks, and back, was a perfect curve, a single quadratic running through the dark. Yuri waited until she returned to earth before he stepped from the shadows.

The nurse gasped and clutched a spool of bandages to her chest. Another spool dropped soundlessly to the floor. The discomposure of her expression was like the shattering of crystal, which in the spectacle of its disintegration revealed new aspects of its intrinsic beauty.

“Lieutenant!”

He raised a finger to his lips, approached, and then laid the finger against hers.

She recoiled as if struck.

“We must be quiet,” he whispered.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded. Her almond-shaped eyes were as dark as the sun was bright. “What do you want?”

“Tania, Taniatchka, relax. I’ve just come for a little visit. Shhhh.”

“How did you get in here?”

“Shhhh,” he said, placing his finger again on his lips and then, very gently, on hers. This time she didn’t pull away. Heat radiated from the translucent labial flesh. He hadn’t been wrong: her single, shyly appraising glance the other day and a slightly lingering touch this evening when she applied the telemetry strip had told him all that he had needed to know.

“Listen, I’m leaving Baikonur tomorrow. In the most extraordinary way. Shhh. Don’t speak, Tania. Let’s not speak at all.”

He removed his finger from her lips and then returned it, pressing more firmly. She kissed it, almost reflexively, but not quite reflexively.

“But what are you doing here?”

He put his arms around her small body, slightly lifting her. The embrace was gentle, the power of his arms merely implied.

“I’ve come to say good-bye.”

A giggle escaped. “Here?”

He ran his hands up her sides. Her body shivered beneath them. It was just a meter or so to the soft wall of linen. With sure, insistent pressure, he danced her back. Her eyes misted and her resistance slowly deliquesced, until the moment her bare calves scraped against the towels. Then she froze and slid from his grasp.

She whispered, “Are you crazy?”

“The doctors say no. I’ve been tested.”

“We can’t do this.”

“Why not?”

“In the storeroom? Yuri, I can’t. For God’s sake, you can’t!”

“I can.”

“Marshak’s here!”
she hissed.

Yuri was taken aback, at least momentarily.

“This late?”

“All night. It’s because of the launch. She’s in her office.”

Tania moved away, but his hands reached out and touched her wrist. His hands didn’t close, it wasn’t a grab, but she couldn’t bear to move away. And, besides, his foot was against the door.

“Well,” Yuri said. “Then you surely can’t go. Look what I’ve risked coming here.”

In the stiffening of her facial expression and the clearing of her eyes, he witnessed the physiological consequences of her blood running cold. Yuri himself was not unnerved by the contemplation of the risk, even though it was a little like talking about a plane crash before a flight. For the hundredth time he recalled the moment a few hours earlier when, hunched over the electrical leads, Tania had worked on his chest and the top of her uniform had opened and fallen away, an act of delicious sabotage. Her brassiere had been loose and ill fitting, nearly spilling her breasts, each as round as a planet.

His arms now encircled her again. He pressed his body hard against hers and felt her yield.

A buzzer went off. Although submerged in their kiss, Yuri recognized the low, rasping moan at once: the booster rocket’s first stage release indicator. He picked his head up and again heard the signal, down the hall. This buzzer and the one for his rocket had clearly been supplied by the same military contractor in Chelyabinsk.

“I have to go,” Tania said breathlessly.

“Where?”

“That’s Grigoriev, he wants something. I’m on duty.”

“Come back, I’ll wait.”

“Yuri. I can’t.”

“You can,” he said calmly. “I’ll be here.”

She made a hopeless little grimace and fled out the door.

A shimmer of domestic perfume remained. He assumed the perfume was domestic—where would she get foreign perfume?—and resolved to send her a bottle of French perfume from Moscow, after his flight, if he remembered.

He rested against the towels and revisited the feeling of her body in his arms and the taste of her lips and tongue. Then he entertained the conceit that the storeroom was the Vostok capsule itself, poised to plunge into the tender blue of the sky. He paced the room, which was illuminated only by the stray outside light, and imagined himself floating weightless to the ceiling, imagined himself pressed against the linen as he accelerated away from the earth, and finally, again, imagined himself pressed against Tania.

Marshak was still in the infirmary. Yuri knew that he should return to the cottage before his absence there or his presence here was discovered, but it didn’t seem right, not after getting this far. It would have done violence to his nature.

 

Sergei Pavlovich Korolev had been arrested early in the morning of June 27, 1938. Precisely one month later, fulfilling a prosecutorial norm, he confessed to “subversion in a new field of technology” and was sentenced to ten years of hard labor. In the unbroken sub-zero temperatures of a Kolyma gold mine, he worked without adequate clothing, food, or shelter. Most of his teeth fell out and a
fractured jaw, incurred during his interrogation, failed to mend properly.

Five months after his arrival in Kolyma, he was summoned back to Moscow for a rehearing of his case, but no transportation was provided. A truck driver took him the 150 kilometers to Magadan, demanding his sweater as fare. In Magadan, Korolev learned that the port was already frozen and that he had missed the last boat of the season. Living in rough, makeshift shelters, he worked as a laborer and shoe repairer to keep himself alive through the remainder of the winter. He finally managed to sail to Vladivostok, terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, but on the journey from there back to Moscow he became disoriented and was no longer able to stem the blood flowing from his mouth. He had scurvy. With deep bruises pooling beneath the soft surfaces of his swollen body, like the lava seas that had once congealed beneath the skin of the moon, he was taken off the train at Khabarovsk.

Outside the station he lay for hours on a cold stone bench, spitting teeth and blood. At some point in the early morning, two militiamen checked his documentation, assuring themselves that he had a travel warrant into the netherworld, and they left him alone. Korolev closed his eyes but didn’t sleep. And then after a long while he became aware that his carrion body was being sniffed. It was not an entirely unpleasant sensation: there was a kind of warmth attached to the scrutiny. Through his muddlement he discerned that these were not staccato canine inspirations, as he might have expected, derelict in this remote province, but something much more considered.

When Korolev opened his eyes, the deeply creviced face of an old man in a ratty fur cap occupied his field of view. The man’s Asiatic features were surmounted by a large, bulbous Russian nose, from which grew many thick, dirty hairs. But the whites of his eyes were absolutely clear, like two mechanical instruments that Korolev might have worked on in another life. For a long time the old man gazed into his face, in judgment, thought Korolev, who had been denied a trial in Moscow. And then the old man roughly lifted him by the arms and pulled him from the bench to a thin, leafless tree rising off a berm alongside the train station.

The old man deposited him there, his back against the birch, his face opposite the sun that had just crested over the morning haze into an empty sky.

Korolev did not know for how long he was abandoned, but it was long enough for him to become intensely aware of the heat of the sun that fell upon his closed eyelids and face and dried the blood that had soaked into his beard. The sun was a star, less than two hundred million kilometers away, almost close enough to touch. The solar radiation suffused through his tissue. After a winter in which he had witnessed a human death nearly every day, in which his own death had seemed to hover before him just beyond the fog of his breath, the solar heat was a promise redeemed. And it was now, with his eyes still shut, that an idea began to incubate. The idea was nothing grand, nothing ostensibly scientific. It had something to do with an awareness of his determination that was encased within his soft, battered self like a shard of granite.