Public Loneliness: Yuri Gagarin's Circumlunar Flight (15 page)

I think about this. If we manage
a ballistic reentry straightaway, it will send me into the Indian Ocean, and
we’re prepared for that; there are Soviet ships tasked to retrieve me. And the
normal reentry profile, the guided skip reentry, will bring me back to a landing
on Soviet soil, like every other mission we’ve had. But this…I imagine the
possibilities: Indians, Indonesians, Chinese, Chileans, Brazilians, British,
Americans.

At last I respond: “You can hold
off on that announcement.”

This delay feels long, puzzled:
“Hold off?”

“Yes. Don’t say anything until
it’s necessary. When the ballistics center knows when I’m coming down, we
should at least have a short notice. That’s when we should announce it, and
only to whomever might be positioned to help.”

Blondie comes back on: “You’re
sure, Yura?”

“I’m sure. There’s no need to
look foolish.”

•••

What else is there that you wish
to know about me? They say actions reveal character, and I’ve tried to give an
honest account of my actions. Do you wish to know more, still?

Again, I have told you about
catastrophes, but not my own.

Do you want to know about Foros?
The truth is I don’t remember all that much.

It was September of 1961, just a
few months after my flight. Everyone knew I needed a break after the relentless
touring, and Titov had just landed, so we were vacationing in the Crimea. We
were boating, and we were drinking, and I injured my hand, and they patched me
up. Then came more drinking, and I woke up in the hospital, and everything was
explained to me, the fall and the surgery, and the fact that I’d have to miss
the 22
^nd
Party Congress, which was coming up in a few weeks.

I understand everyone’s
explanations of my actions, but I still have a hard time believing them. The
official story is that I hit my head while trying to grab my daughter and keep
her from falling. I can tell you the official story’s untrue. I cannot tell you
the truth, for I don’t know it. It’s possible that it happened the way it was
explained to me. Still, I can’t help thinking that somehow Kamanin had
engineered the whole event to discredit me, or at least to have some leverage.
Certainly after that I made it a point to be better friends with the agents in
my security detail!

There was another night I
recall—somewhat—from that December. I believe I was in Ceylon. The whirlwind
had stopped, briefly, after Foros, but it had picked up again, and strengthened
into a tropical cyclone. Titov was touring too, now, and they’d brought along
my wife to keep an eye on me, but it was relentless all the same. Here I was, a
world traveler—I, who had never been out of the Soviet Union before my
orbit!—visiting places on a moment’s notice after last-minute changes in
itinerary, places I had never heard of, places I had to go back and find on
maps and globes just to know where I’d been.

So my wife was with me, and our
children were back at home with my parents, and we desperately wanted just to
go out shopping, to feast our senses on all the local strangeness, the sights
and sounds and smells of the bustling markets, the dark-skinned locals and
their babbling tongues, the leafy palms and tea trees.

Instead I was making speeches,
planting ceremonial trees, meeting with the prime minister. Sitting on the
couch for what was ostensibly a chat—as if either of us spoke the other’s
language!—but was really an excuse for people to take pictures of us together.

It was like I’d been cursed, one
of those strange curses in folklore where you asked for something good but
weren’t specific enough. I’d wanted to see the world; I’d seen it all in 106
minutes. And now I was seeing it again, taking a lower orbit, one that felt
much faster.

I complained to Kamanin briefly,
at the end of a grueling day which was to be topped off by a reception at the
Soviet embassy. We were alone in the car with Alexei driving and Venyamin
riding along and my wife’s car following behind. A few precious minutes alone.

“Is something wrong, Yuri?” he
asked.

I burst. “We need to slow this
down! I’m burned out! I can’t enjoy any of it! I went to India, and I met
Nehru, but I never saw an elephant!”

“You wouldn’t have been picked if
you weren’t the right man for the job.”

“It’s too much!”

“It’s necessary!” Kamanin
exclaimed. “Do you think this is about…seeing elephants? This is necessary!”
Briefly he seemed about to lose his composure. But he took a deep breath and
continued. “We are…in a competition, Yuri. Our country. Another war. But we
have the ability to fight this one in newspapers and on television screens,
rather than on the battlefield. No death, no destruction, just…competition.
Think about that! Think of all the hardships you’re saving us! We’ve already
endured two wars this century. The second far worse than the first. The third,
if it comes, will be immeasurably worse than the second. But if it doesn’t
happen…” He stared at me. “We can keep it from happening, Yuri. You can keep it
from happening. If they’re in awe of our rockets, of our technology…You are the
face of that, Yuri! Nobody knows who Sergei Pavlovich is. You are the face of
it! Think about that.”

I hated to think about it. But he
was right. What could I do?

Back at the embassy, there were
more photographers, more reporters. We were swept inside on the crest of a wave
of people.

I found myself seated at the head
table, as usual, throwing back shot after shot with everyone who cared to come
up and drink with me. I’m sure I was a little tipsy by the time the ambassador
from the German Democratic Republic came up. His wife eyed me suggestively.

“My wife wanted me to come up and
drink a toast with you. But you’re already looking a little red!” Slurred but
passable Russian. He patted me on the back.

His wife added, in far better
Russian: “Back home in the Western Zone, during the August crisis, they were
carrying signs saying ‘Better red than dead.’”

“We can drink to that, then!” I
exclaimed, and my wife gave me an awful look. “Better red than dead!” We drank.
And the ambassador’s wife looked like she’s never heard anything more
entertaining.

Soon they were swept away. And
the vodka was, in truth, getting to my head, and having its other usual
effects, so I headed off to avail myself of the facilities. And I was
walking—one of those drunken walks where it’s as if every wall has developed
its own gravitational field—and I happened to bump into the ambassador’s wife,
alone this time. And I sensed that it hadn’t been an accident, that she had
timed her own trip to the facilities to coincide with mine. And I’m sure I
blushed a bit, but truth be told, there was some thrill in knowing she was
chasing me. And I was just about at that level of drunkenness where you forget
about marriages, rules, commitments—or perhaps you just decide not to care.

And I think our dialogue went
something like this:

She said in my ear: “You look
like you need to get away from all of this.”

I’m sure I turned even redder.
“They tend to keep an eye on me at these things nowadays.” I nodded towards
Alexei.

“There’s always a way to get
away,” she smiled.

“Together?”

“I’ll go outside, you go to the
bathroom, and you can climb out the window! They don’t follow you in there, do
they? Come on! It’ll be like a secret mission.”

I must have murmured some form of
assent. In the bathroom, I relieved myself, standing unsteady, doing one-armed
push-ups against the wall, and I wobbled back to the sink and eyed myself in
the mirror, chuckling at the craziness of it all. But sure enough, I pried open
the window and took off my uniform jacket with all its medals in red and gold
and clambered awkwardly out, and the next thing I knew I was tumbling to the
tropical grass with a thud.

I cursed myself. Maybe this was
what had happened at Foros, after all. Perhaps it was all happening again. A
depressing circularity.

Then I heard laughter. Somehow
she was already outside.

“Yuri, are you all right?” The
informal
you
. (Granted, we’d left formality back inside.)

Against my better judgment I,
too, started laughing. “Yes, yes.”

“Not as dignified as your last
return to earth, I’m sure.”

Again I thought of Foros. But of
course she was talking about East-1. That’s all anyone talks about with me.

“It was another adventure, at
least,” I smiled. “All right, now where do we go?”

“Why do we need to go anywhere
now?” Her face was beautiful in the moonlight: pale, immaculate, pristine.
“We’re outside, away from the crowd, it’s a beautiful night. What else is
there?”

She talked as if she knew me.
That’s the thing about being famous: after all the press conferences and
newsreels, after watching you greet so many unfamiliar situations, everyone
thinks they know you. And perhaps they do. But you don’t know them.

And yet it seemed like I
did
know
her. That moment when you see someone and you really make eye contact in a way
that energy flows between you—sometimes you have that moment right away with
someone and you are instantly talking like old friends.

“Well, let’s have a smoke at
least,” I said. And I rooted about in my pockets, but my cigarettes had been
crushed in the fall.

“I’ve got a few,” she said, and
pulled a silver cigarette holder from her clutch.

And in my drunken state I said,
“Do you want to go anywhere?” and she said I’d already asked that.

I don’t know what I wanted, what
I expected. You can ascribe all sorts of motives, and in truth, in drunkenness
our motives so frequently get distorted and tangled and lost. But my heart was
heavy, and even the alcohol hadn’t gotten rid of that. And I wanted so much.
Maybe I just wanted to explore the city as a normal man, to spend time as a
real man, not an icon or a poster or a photo opportunity. To wander empty
streets, to walk along the beach and dip my feet in tropical surf. Or to fly
above it all, swoop down over the waves…

When I lit my cigarette I took a
deep breath and it all fell away. All the weight. We sat and leaned against the
embassy wall in the pale moonlight and looked up at the deep blue night and the
tropical trees.

“What are those trees?”

She laughed: a most delightful
laugh. “You know what a palm tree is, don’t you, Yuri?”

“No, I have never heard of palm trees.
I am Ivan the Fool. I never left the Soviet Union before this April, and even
then I just went once around the world and came back home as quickly as I
could, so as to spend as much time as possible in paradise.”

Again she laughed. “Really?”

“That is true. I never left the
country before this year. But I do know what a palm tree is. No, those other
ones…” I pointed.

“They might be cinnamon trees.”

Now it was my turn to laugh.

She asked what was funny.

I explained: “When I was a little
boy, before the war, my mother made tea cakes, with cinnamon. There were
shortages of everything, we were poor country folk in Stalin’s Soviet Union.
But she had made tea cakes, and she had cinnamon in them, for the first time in
a long time. And she gave me one, but I wanted more, so I snuck back to the
kitchen and I ate all of them. And my father, he was a…cranky drunk, always.
And he exploded: ‘Cinnamon is scarce, Yuri! But you act as if it’s everywhere.
You act like it comes from the trees!’”

And she laughed again, a deep and
hearty laugh, and I laughed too, and it felt shared and real and true and more
genuine than anything.

And the moon was full and
gleaming and it occurred to me that there was nothing between it and us but
distance. No walls, no barriers, no guards, just distance. What if we could go
there?

And perhaps you are wondering
what was going to happen next. Would there have been something, some
inappropriate romantic moment with this woman who was not my wife? Well I don’t
know, either. For there came a whispered angry voice. “Yuri!” Alexei in the
shadows, whispering through clenched teeth.

I got up, threw my jacket back
on, and in standing realized I was still drunker than I thought, and my
trousers were torn, and my shirt was untucked. “Just catching some fresh air.”

In the moonlight I could tell he
was angry and frustrated, the strange strangled feelings of a subordinate and
minder who needs to dig his superior out of trouble. “Kamanin is looking for
you, Yuri. And your wife’s upset. We need to get inside now, without anyone
seeing.”

And we circled the building and
there were few enough people out front that it seemed safe, but when we came
inside there were faces and voices. “Comrade Gagarin, what were you doing
outside?” and “Who is that woman?” and “Look at him, he’s drunk!” And there
were flashbulbs, flashbulbs, flashbulbs.

And Kamanin glared, as angry as
I’d seen him. Still, he did not talk to me but instead turned to the nearest
photographer and said he needed the man’s film. And I think the man hesitated,
but then Alexei reminded him that we were technically on Soviet territory, and
the man said we would all be reading about this, and Kamanin asked if they
wanted me to get in trouble when I got back to the Soviet Union. And my wife
was watching, and I do believe she was less than pleased, and someone said: “I
think he’s in trouble now!”

Still, Kamanin and Alexei started
taking the cameras from the photographers and pulling out the rolls of film and
exposing them. And someone got upset and tried to hold back, but Kamanin
whispered something in his ear, and sure enough, he gave up his film to be
destroyed.

And then came a loud voice,
proclaiming that I was a fake and a phony. It was the German ambassador—and he
was more than tipsy himself! He said: The face of the people cannot be drunk!