PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (16 page)

“What are you, a Hun?” Zinia said, faking contempt. “Are you going to carry away our most beautiful girl on horseback? Are we civilized people? Are we Russians? There are a few niceties and proprieties to observe.”

“Zinia, please. I have to get back to the cottage.”

“Go then. We won’t stop you.”

Tania’s demurral, Grigoriev’s buzzer, Zinia’s prank: these were all signs that he should return to the cottage now. It was not like Yuri to resist portents and omens. But it was one thing to crawl into a window, another thing entirely to crawl out of it, especially in front of these girls. And Ludmilla’s embrace had only quickened his appetite.

“Where is she?”

Zinia grimaced. “We have a few questions for you.”

“For God’s sake, Marshak’s going to find me! They’ll fly Titov!”

Zinia took a notebook from her pocket. Ludmilla and the other girl sniggered. They gazed upon him with feverish eyes.

“What is the significance of this date? 18 September 1939.”

These prenuptial questions were another custom, one of our traditions. How we loved our customs, how we drew a skein of folk belief, tradition and superstition around the most prosaic events of our lives. We would never give them up.

“Tania’s day of birth?”

“That was too easy. What does this number represent? One hundred fifty-six.”

“Her height,” Yuri replied. “In centimeters.”

“Forty-eight?”

“Um, her weight, in kilos.”

“Two thousand and sixty-four.”

“Zinia, I don’t know. Just tell me where she is!”

Zinia had a laugh as frothy as steamed milk. “Look how he’s dying for it! Girls, have you ever seen anything so pathetic? It’s the distance from Baikonur to the village of Kozino, in versts.”

Yuri smiled at this. We had stopped using versts before the Revolution.

“What’s Kozino?” Yuri asked.

“The place where Tania was born, lieutenant! One should know, after such a long courtship ... You must pay
vykup.”
Literally: ransom money. It was the custom to pay a token sum for every incorrectly answered question.

“I’m not carrying a single kopeck.”

“Then what kind of lover are you?”

“Honestly, girls. Where I’m going, there’s not a thing to buy.”

“Just like Tyuratum.” That was the name of the old Kazakh town outside the cosmodrome. “Has space been collectivized too? Well, go away then.”

Yuri briefly flushed at Zinia’s political brazenness. “But I have something. A kiss for each of you.”

Zinia snorted. “A kiss! He thinks his kiss is better than money.” She grabbed at his trousers. “It’s going to take more than a kiss.”

He pulled away. “It’s all I can give.”

Zinia said, “All right then. Me first. You call that a kiss? And how do you kiss your mother?”

Yuri grinned. “Wait a minute, I have some questions
for you, some numbers to identify. Eight kilometers per second. Three hundred twenty-seven kilometers. One hour forty-eight minutes.”

Now it was Zinia’s turn to color. Her expression became serious. The smiles on the faces of the other nurses also faded, though not the shine in their eyes. Zinia said, “Lieutenant, I can only guess at what they mean. I’m sorry, we’re not cleared for this technical information.”

He nodded soberly. “Better not guess then. Here’s one last number, another date: April 12, 1961. I believe you won’t forget it.”

Zinia said softly, “There’s a girl in Room 3 who’s hoping to circle April 11 on her calendar.”

“Is Marshak in her office?”

“She should be. She said she would take a nap.”

Yuri kissed Zinia again, once on each cheek, and tenderly embraced her. Then he kissed Ludmilla and the other nurse. These were chaste, serious kisses; not romantic, almost religious. A new sense of the following day descended upon them, as if the shuttered storeroom had been lit by the dawn. Yuri turned away and opened the door. In the hallway he stopped to listen. The infirmary was still, as soundless as space promised to be. Room 3 was down the hall, away from Grigoriev’s.

Yuri had seen the Chief Designer’s plans for a spacecraft of the future, a vessel whose great domed living and research quarters would be separated from its nuclear power supply by a long cylindrical axis. The infirmary now offered itself as a model for something similar, a primitive space station, dim, silent, and remote. His softsoled shoes were drawn to the floor of the hallway not by
gravity, but by the infirmary’s centrifugal spin through the void. And why not? A man of the future, he would take the girls into the future with him.

Hurtling in the direction of the day after, he turned the corner and nearly collided with another swiftly moving object, in a white lab coat, moving toward the day before. It was Marshak. Yuri hadn’t heard her approach.

Several moments passed, her heels clattering, before Marshak fully recovered from the near impact. She was a tall woman well into middle age, with sallow skin offset by brassy red-brown hair. Her plastic, yellow-tinted eyeglasses were perched halfway down the bridge of her nose. She scowled as she identified him in the murk.

Yuri’s testicles retracted. He set to work concocting a reason for his presence in the infirmary: the need to stretch his legs, a minor headache ... He had been in worse scrapes before. This would take some doing, but Marshak would want to believe him.

“Poor Grigoriev ...” he began.

“Lieutenant,” she snapped. “Hurry. Where have you been? Come, come.”

She spun on her heels and scurried back down the hallway. For a moment, Yuri wondered whether she had really seen him or was somehow sleepwalking. He decided against pretending to be a dream. He followed her past the door to Room 3, which was closed, but Yuri sensed life—throbbing and abundant—beyond it.

They entered Marshak’s office, a small, wallpapered room with a metal desk, a medicine cabinet, a white plaster bust of Lenin worn almost to featurelessness, and, in a shadowed corner, an examination table. A short, stocky
man lay on the table with his shirt off and his eyes wide open.

Yuri cried, “Sergei Pavlovich!”

The face of the Chief Designer, as much of a military secret as his name, was paler than Yuri had ever seen it. It was a handsome, frail face, easily betrayed by suffering. A smile now fluttered weakly across it.

“Yuri,” he whispered.

In alarm, Yuri looked away, at Marshak.

She shook her head. “It’s just angina. I’ve given him a sedative, but he has to calm himself. He’s brought it on through excessive worry.” The Chief Designer tried to make a self-deprecating chuckle, but it came out as a faint moan. “Lieutenant, he asked for you, that’s why I called the cottage. When you couldn’t be found, he became panicked. I thought he would have another attack. And I don’t know where my useless staff has gone to ...”

“Don’t worry,” Yuri said to the Chief Designer. “Please.”

“He’s had some kind of premonition. He caught himself whistling indoors. A bird tapped on his window. He passed a woman carrying an empty bucket. He stumbled with his left foot. He discovered that he was wearing one of his socks inside out. Now he wants to call off the flight.”

Yuri bit his lip and reached for the Chief Designer’s shoulder. The skin was clammy and gave off a sweet, nicotine smell. He smoked several packs a day, the most popular brand. It was named after the White Sea Canal, which had been dug by political prisoners.

“No, you can’t call off the flight.”

“I’ve been given too much responsibility,” the Chief Designer rasped. “I can’t accept it, not with my health. It’s not just your life, Khrushchev says the future of the Soviet Union depends on it, socialism, world peace ... Khrushchev’s a madman. He’s obsessed by Kennedy. He doesn’t care about space or rockets or science, only about Kennedy. He says we have to fuck Kennedy ... He calls me nearly every day, sometimes twice a day ... sometimes only to tell me that we have to fuck Kennedy ... He expects daily, even hourly progress reports, he considers every stuck valve an act of sabotage. He makes threats, terrible threats. But there’s too much to do, we’re going too fast. We still don’t know why the R-16 blew up or what are the effects of zero gravity upon human physiology. How about cosmic radiation? Or micro-meteorites? Will the retro-rockets fire? We need more tests. We have to send up more dogs.”

“I won’t let a dog fly my spaceship.”

“Who do we think we are?” the Chief Designer asked, closing his eyes. “Is man really destined to leave the earth? Now? How can that be? Have we evolved that far? We’ve barely descended from the apes. We still fight wars and behave unspeakably toward each other. Are we going to take our failings into the heavens with us? What good will that do? We’re not ready for it. Our children won’t be ready either, I’m afraid. Perhaps their children ... A generation that hasn’t known war ...”

“Please, comrade, calm yourself.” Marshak took his wrist and timed his pulse.

Yuri pulled a stool over to the table and kneeled on it, bringing his face close to the Chief Designer’s. The Chief
Designer’s eyes were wet and unfocused, their pupils indistinct. Yuri gripped the Chief Designer’s other hand as hard as was possible without hurting him.

“Look at me, Sergei Pavlovich. We
are
ready. You’ve told me so. You’ve proven it to me.”

Yuri then spoke for the next quarter of an hour, in a voice as measured as the feed of a fuel line. He recalled everything that the Chief Designer had told him. The need to explore the unknown was intrinsic to human nature. Space flight was the next logical development in human history, as inevitable as anything set down into print by Marx or Lenin. Titov would fly next, then the others, followed by multicrew spacecraft, space rendezvous and docking maneuvers, and eventually a permanent orbiting station, a stepping-stone to the moon and the planets. Kosmograd-1 was already on the design table, orbiting the earth sixteen times a day. Hundreds of cosmonauts would live and work there; women, too. Children would be born in space and soon a way of life would be established there upon completely scientific principles. Perhaps it was only in space that a true communist society could exist, floating free of terrestrial compromise, its economy as finely regulated as its air and water supplies.

Great vessels would ply the spacelanes between the earth and the moon. Man would settle Mars, colonize the moons around Jupiter, explore and exploit Saturn’s satellite Titan. And then the stars would beckon. Man would encounter extraterrestrial civilizations raised by creatures of outlandish biology and aspect, yet their societies would also be subject to the laws of history. Perhaps the extraterrestrials had already reached the final stage
of their development. Indeed, because the human race was still comparatively young, living in a universe many times older than itself, it was only logical to assume the technological and social superiority of the extraterrestrials. They would have already abolished economic exploitation, class, national chauvinism, superstition, neurosis, and perversion. There would be much for mankind to learn. But by then mankind would have evolved so far as to be almost unrecognizable to the people of the mid-twentieth century.

“And, Sergei Pavlovich, we shall take the first step, together, tomorrow morning.”

The Chief Designer didn’t respond. He closed his eyes again.

Marshak kept her eyes trained on her watch. Finally, she said, “That’s better. The sedative’s taking effect. He must sleep, that’s most important.”

Yuri nodded. Marshak studied him for a moment. Her expression was soft and distracted.

“You should sleep, too. You have less than six hours. Have you seen the timeline?”

“All right,” he said. “Good night then.”

As he turned to go, Marshak rushed at him. For a moment, Yuri believed that the doctor was about to strike him, that she was the CIA assassin of whom the KGB had warned. Her body, solid and unyielding, slammed against his before he could defend himself. In his gut he received a presentiment of weightlessness. Then she buried her head in his chest through his open flight jacket. She held him for a long time, her body quaking.

“Thank God,” Marshak said at last, lifting her tearstreaked face to him. “Thank God it’s you he chose. Go to her now. She’s in the next room.”

 

In the next room the drapes were parted and half of Tania’s body was silvered by the moon, like an airplane fuselage on a runway. She stood by the window in an open white robe. In the sharp relief of the moonlight, the illuminated curves and spheres of her figure were disconnected by vast occulted regions, positives and negatives, pros and cons, truths and lies. Her lips, the visible portions seeming to hover in space, trembled and then he himself was seized in a passion of anticipation. He took the remainder of the steps toward her. Tentatively, she reached for his hands, gently clasped them, and even more gently carried them to between her breasts. Her body was warm. Let’s
go,
she whispered.

 

In the future, every male cosmonaut would urinate on the side of the bus that brought him to the launch pad: Titov, Leonov, Komarov, Romanenko, Tsibliyev ... It would become one of our customs. Yuri zipped up and joined the Chief Designer. Some of the Chief Designer’s color had returned. He was still anxious but appeared to be relieved and even surprised that the morning had come. He again gazed at the checklist, studying it as if it contained the secrets of the inner workings of the universe.

They walked to the elevator. At the foot of the open elevator shaft, about twenty flight technicians greeted Yuri with sustained applause. It echoed like the sound of buckshot on the flats around the launch complex. Yuri
shook their hands and accepted more bouquets. He cleared his throat and then spoke in a quiet, passionate voice, drawing the workers to him. He thanked them, told them they were embarking together on a great adventure. “Right now, all my life seems to be one wonderful instant,” he said, looking at the notes the Chief Designer had composed on the bus. “Everything I have ever done, everything I have ever experienced, was for the sake of this minute.”