PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (13 page)

As waving and shouting Jews dangled from the train’s windows, Settlement No. 1 ground to a stop on a cold, crystalline afternoon in September 1928. The station was no more than a weather-stained cottage surrounded by a scatter of small wooden buildings and some ambiguously agricultural equipment. Neither the buildings
nor the equipment looked new. A wide dirt road trailed past some scrubby, mostly leafless trees and then into a meadow. The view beyond the meadow stretched for tens of kilometers to a low range of pale, gray mountains. The settlers fell silent. Larissa wondered if they were overwhelmed by the fact of their arrival or disappointed by the emptiness of the place. She herself had expected to be disappointed; she was now surprised by the bubble of excitement that rose through her body, squeezed her breasts, rushed blood to her cheeks and ears, and pulsed in her head. She glanced over at Israel. His eyes were as soft as a newborn kitten’s.

“It’s beautiful,” he whispered. “More beautiful than they ever told us it would be.”

By the time the first travelers had descended from the train, men and women from the fields and from inside the houses had begun hurrying to the station. A young blond man on a cart, waving a slice of birch—Iosif Reznick, Israel knew him well!—urged his white horse into the deepening pool of arriving settlers. From one of the longer buildings emerged a half dozen uniformed, red-scarfed children. They carried banners. Cries and shouts faintly penetrated the train car’s windows.

The adults carried banners as well: “Welcome, Jewish Workers!” “Tsu a Yiddish Land!” and others that Larissa didn’t have time to read in the rush to disembark. The passengers lined up to pass the bags from the car and onto the ground next to the tracks. After a month’s companionship, Larissa subdued the urge to say farewell to her fellow travelers. She’d be spending the rest of her life
with them. Descending onto the earth, her feet tingled, surprised at its solidity.

It was as if the new arrivals had never breathed air before. They stood alongside the train gluttonously filling and emptying their lungs. The tenous, midday sky was enormous and a purplish blue the dark of twilight. Despite the near-freezing temperature, the travelers weren’t cold: this electric sensation on their arms and chest and inside their lungs was something better and more lifegiving than cold. As the train, with a (congratulatory? derisive?) burst of steam, abandoned them, Larissa sensed that she had been hurtled into deep space.

A dark-haired, grinning-almost-to-tears schoolgirl handed her a bouquet of wild flowers, purple, blue, and orange. The flowers’ perfume was of some sweet alien spice. Larissa tried to clear her throat, to offer thanks, but already the girl was presenting a bouquet to another arrival. Around Larissa, freely crying men and women fiercely grappled with each other, tattooing their faces with wet kisses. Something she couldn’t see bit her.

Israel had already accepted his bouquet and placed it alongside his bags and was now ignoring the old friends calling his name and streaming past him. He was very still, taking everything in, the entire natural landscape, in the event, it seemed, that he would be forced to leave immediately and would need to recall it the rest of his life. The mountains, the fields, the sky. Did colors like this exist in Europe? Were there
any
colors in the graveyards and cobbled streets of his ancestors?

Among the last to emerge from the shacks was Leo
Feirman, ambling among the settlers and new arrivals, an unlit cigar in his hand. Like many of the men, he wore a blue workshirt and an oilskin jacket. His face was tanned and he had lost some weight. He nodded hello to a few people and then gazed down at their luggage. He made his way to Israel indirectly, surveying the new settlers. His approach was casual, as if he had seen Israel just the other day.

“Is this everything?” he asked.

“Hello, Leo. Yes, it is. You look terrific.”

The cigar twitched like something alive, but Leo smiled and gave one of Israel’s bags a little nudge with his foot.

“All personal belongings. Am I right?”

“Mostly books, I suppose. What’s the matter?”

Leo smiled in surprise at the question. “Nothing at all. No, it’s all right. Have a nice trip?”

“To tell you the truth, Leo, I’ve already forgotten the trip. Listen, I have some letters from your sister and nephews.”

“The only thing is, Israel,” Leo drawled, his glance again caressing the travelers’ luggage. “The only thing, Israel, is that I have a cable from the Commissariat for Land Issues. It was sent a month ago. According to the cable, you were bringing supplies. More equipment. Plow blades, shovels, seeders, wire. Hammers. Sickles. We need everything. We’ve already got enough nails for every man, woman, and child, but nothing to drive them in with, and nothing to drive them into. How do you like that? We’ve been getting cables all summer. The commissariat says there was a 600,000-ruble disbursement made
on behalf of Komzet in July. Do you know anything about it?”

Israel shook his head absently, looking now at the structures in the foreground. “These houses. They’re
old.”

“We’re renting from the Cossacks. Cash money.”

Israel studied the landscape. He counted the buildings and looked toward the horizon for other signs of human settlement. The grounds were littered by a dozen or so gray canvas tents, latrines, and cooking equipment. Finally, he said, “There’s no new construction.”

“You stupid prick,” Leo said gently, almost affectionately. “How can you build a house if you don’t have a hammer? Do you know how cold it’s going to get in a month?”

A young woman Larissa’s age approached her, smiling broadly. She was round and fair-haired and her face was roiled by insect bites.

“You made it!”

Larissa studied the tracing of welts, as if it were a map waiting to reveal important secrets.

“Is everything all right? Larissa, the journey ...”

“No, I’m fine. It’s just a shock.” She exhaled a frail chuckle, shaking her head. “You know, I’m sorry, I had forgotten you would be here. As if I were going someplace entirely different, or someplace that was nowhere at all.”

“Gitten yur!
Happy New Year!” When Larissa looked at her blankly, Rachel added, “What luck that you made it in time!”

Rachel handed her something. It was heavier than it looked and unpleasantly wet. Larissa hadn’t celebrated the Jewish New Year since she was a small girl.

“It’s soaked in honey,” Rachel explained. “Cake. For a sweet year. That’s the custom.” She beamed in apology. “It’s the best we can do. We’re short on eggs.”

The settlers had begun loading the luggage onto Iosif’s cart, joking about the bags’ weight. One of the suitcases burst open, revealing bourgeois dresses and lingerie and occasioning much laughter that lingered in the open spaces. The settlers straggled across the way. Larissa watched them but stayed where she was, tenaciously, as if she were afraid that the ground would slip away from her. Israel had bent and wrapped his hands around the grips of his suitcases, but now he let go and straightened his back. He smiled. Rachel waited. Larissa was keenly conscious of their presence, and also of love washing over her like a warm bath. She could close her eyes and immerse her face in it. She knew also that the moment she moved, perhaps thirty seconds from now, history would begin moving again too. Her gaze led her beyond Israel, past the settlement, a small pond, a stand of bare trees, a sliver of river, sere meadows, and then all the way to the shadowy borderlands rimmed by mountains.

Orbit

—Monument dedication, Central Army Park, Moscow

 

First, they sat for a minute. That was one of our customs of departure. They each took a seat: Yuri, Ivanovsky, Karpov, Kamanin, and the Chief Designer. There wasn’t a seat for Titov, who hunkered alongside Kamanin and stared into the floorboards. Not a word was spoken. Outside the cottage a bus raced its engine. His helmet on his lap, Yuri grinned at the Chief Designer.

The Chief Designer strained to return the smile. He dropped his gaze to the clipboard and studied his checklist and the timeline, trying to recall if there was anything they had forgotten. It was bad to return for something after you had left; if you did return, you’d have to look in a mirror and stick out your tongue. Yuri’s ventilator hummed.

“All right,” the Chief Designer said. His sigh verged on a groan. He slapped and rubbed his thighs and rose heavily to his feet. The men followed him out.

Cheers and rhythmic clapping: Yuri hadn’t expected this pool of strangers at the bottom of the steps. A pretty schoolgirl in bows and a taffeta frock rushed up, curtsied,
handed him a bouquet of pink lilies, and then rushed back to hide behind her mother’s skirt. Yuri’s toothy smile warmed the mother’s wan, moonlike face. The mother smiled shyly, casting her eyes at her feet. There were perhaps no more than thirty onlookers—approved military personnel and their families—but it seemed like half the world. Later we would throng Red Square. Yuri strode to the bus. The Chief Designer mounted the steps ahead of him and took the ventilator, which was the size and weight of a small suitcase, as Yuri climbed aboard. The crowd cheered again and he gave the thumbs-up sign.

The bus took off and passed the infirmary, across the way from the cottage. Its curtains were parted, but he couldn’t see through the morning glare upon the windows. No matter. He didn’t wonder when or if he would see the infirmary again.

Nearly everyone at the base knew of the launch. Scores of us lined the road, waving flags and hoisting banners that, because of military regulations, were circumspect in their exhortations: “Manufacturing Unit Wishes You the Best!” “Good Luck on Your Journey, Comrade!” and, simply, “Go!” A detachment of redscarved Pioneer-scouts waited by the gate to the launch compound, some so stricken by his approach they could do nothing but stare. At the window in the passing bus, Yuri jerked a thumb and offered a smile whose recollection would illuminate the darkest nights of their lives. He blew kisses to the girls.

Wreathed in venting gases, the R-7 rocket and its support assembly were the only objects on the horizon. As the bus drew near, Klaxons sounded.

The bus stopped a few dozen meters from the elevator that would carry him to the Vostok capsule cabin. At the elevator waited Leonov and Popovich, as well as more than a dozen technicians and workers, most of whom he recognized. Some carried flowers and flags, others clipboards and hand tools. Yuri descended from the bus, holding his helmet in one hand and the ventilator in the other. The air smelled of kerosene.

“Wait a minute,” he said to the Chief Designer.

Yuri walked along the side of the bus to the back wheels, noting the gentle contours of the tarmac. He carefully placed the ventilator and his helmet on a nearly microscopic rise. Turning to the side of the bus, Yuri unzipped his flight suit. The Chief Designer, Ivanovsky, and Karpov, and behind them the technicians, watched attentively as he unfolded his prick from the suit. This wasn’t on the timeline. Yuri placed his hands on his hips. The stream’s arc intersected with one of the bus’s tires, blackening a wedge of it. The urine burned. He gave his prick a last squeeze and a shake, and the burning sensation returned and intensified. As steam rose off the tire’s mud-caked treads, Yuri wondered whether he was taking into space a dose of the clap.

 

It was not anxiety that had kept him awake the night before, nor on any other night. The medics had taped the sensors to his body and then there had been a dinner in the cottage, with a big meat
pirog,
followed by a last round of toasts. The Chief Designer tried to speak a few words but was overcome by emotion and in the end simply embraced him. Afterwards, Yuri lay in his cot, unable
to sleep, confidence surging through him, something in his blood.

Yuri’s confidence existed as a discrete phenomenon, virtually capable of being sized and weighed. His superb physical condition and quick wits had been proven by the most rigorous battery of tests ever undergone by free men. He had been whirled, dropped, scorched, frozen, blasted by sound, left on his own in the dark and the quiet, examined by psychiatrists, and interrogated by commissars. Blind and deaf in the sensory deprivation tank—which in fact had been rife with sour organic odors—Yuri had drifted weightless in a realm of thought. It was then that he had first articulated to himself his awareness of his strength, his imperturbability and his dominating desire to be first.

The Chief Designer hadn’t known what he was looking for in the candidate-cosmonauts, his
sokoliki,
his little falcons. The rigors of space flight were mostly hypothetical, yet as the selection process continued and new tests were formulated and new considerations taken into account, the Chief Designer became convinced that he was approaching the definition of the space traveler’s essential nature: physically fit, yes; cool-headed, of course; superior lung capacity, yes; height, no more than 167 centimeters, given the dimensions of the capsule; claustrophobic, no—paradoxically in the void of space claustrophobia would be fatal; agile, yes; and confident, yes, absolutely, and it was not only the presence of this confidence that was vital, but its source. It could not derive from loving parents, kind teachers, or achievements on
the fields of sport or battle; it had to be something integral to the man, fused with his being.

For months the Chief Designer had postponed his decision. Each candidate was further probed, physically shaken and emotionally manipulated, so that the extraneous bits of his character were flaked off, leaving his naked self. He ran through fields of snow. He jumped from planes. He confessed his secrets. Yuri, Titov, Leonov, Popovich, and Grigoriev felt themselves being remade. They sensed, long before their actual selection, their own elevation as men of the future, spacemen.