by Zach Powers
“Here’s to another successful launch, Chief Designer.”
The woman emerged into the lit part of the room as if coalescing from the dark. She was part smiling face, the rest leather jacket, several sizes too big. The high fur collar rimmed her neck. Her hair was cut in a Western style, her makeup like something an actor might wear to portray a pharaoh. She dropped a cigarette, snuffing it out with her heel. The Chief Designer sighed. It was Ignatius, a writer for Glavlit, responsible for crafting every word written about the space program. She was the one who had decided to never use his name.
Two glasses of vodka balanced on the palm of her extended left hand. The Chief Designer took one and accepted her toast. The vodka was pure, obviously filtered many times, better than the swill he and the other engineers had been sharing earlier. He gulped it down. If he believed in such things, it would have felt a little like sealing a deal with the devil.
“Are you here for an interview?” he asked.
She laughed. Not once had she interviewed him, though many, many times she had attributed to him words he never spoke. The nameless Chief Designer of the newspapers orated grand statements of Soviet glory. Seldom did he speak about outer space.
“I simply wished to see the launch,” she said.
“The bunker doesn’t offer the best view.”
“Everyone, even you it seems, thinks only of the ignition of the engines. You wouldn’t need a roomful of people if it were as simple as that.”
“Hardly simple. One day you should count the parts of the R-7.”
“I’m not sure that I’m qualified to tell where one part ends and the next begins. At what division is a part of a part a thing itself?”
“Ask Mishin. Or Bushuyev.”
Ignatius set her glass, still mostly full, on the launch console. The Chief Designer moved it to the communications console, something cheaper to replace should the vodka spill.
“Mars seems sad,” said Ignatius.
“He’s a melancholy sort.”
“Only after a launch, which one might consider strange.”
“Are you here to write about us or psychoanalyze us?”
“I’m here to write about the successes of the Soviet system. As such, I have a vested interest in the continuation of those successes.”
“Are you implying something?”
“Your time in the gulag has made you suspicious.”
“Your presence makes me suspicious.” The Chief Designer turned and faced the wall as if looking through it to the launchpad.
“Chief Designer,” said Ignatius, “we want the same thing. We both want glory.”
“I don’t want glory.”
“You want the moon. What’s more glorious than that?”
“Silence, perhaps.”
Ignatius snatched her glass, splashing some of the vodka though not enough to do damage, and drank the rest in a single gulp. She held the glass up to the Chief Designer’s face. She spun and hurled the glass at the wall, exploding it into a starfield of shards. The pop of the impact was followed by the delicate percussion of the fall.
“Glory is a fragile thing, Chief Designer. You may fool the Presidium, the military, even Khrushchev himself, but you don’t fool me. What would I find, for instance, if I visited the bunker up the road?”
“A broom, perhaps, to clean this up.”
“When I come to clean, it will be with more than just a broom.”
“A threat?”
“I want only what you want, except I don’t care who accomplishes it. The General Designer, perhaps.”
“The General Designer is an ass.”
“If we were to catalog offenses, I think yours would be more numerous.” She held up her hand, fingers spread. “I count five. Four and a half, at least.”
The Chief Designer stared at her. Only a few knew the truth. The twins. Mishin and Bushuyev. Tsiolkovski, of course, though he had vanished years ago. The scar on the Chief Designer’s head throbbed.
“Don’t get me wrong, Chief Designer. I have no desire to expose you. In fact, I’m the only person really on your side.”
“I didn’t ask for an ally.”
She inspected her palm, her fingers still splayed. “So many of us don’t ask for the things we receive. Someone more spiritual might call it fate.”
Ignatius brushed bits of the broken glass into the corner with the toe of her boot. She opened the steel door. Its massive hinges groaned. Daylight peeked through, and a gust of wind carried in a cloud of yellow dust.
She said, “Hurry, or you’ll miss your flight. See you in Moscow.”
The plane would wait, though. That was one thing, at least, over which the Chief Designer retained a modicum of control.
* * *
• • •
THE LATCH CLICKED, and the door creeped open.
Leonid had been watching through the window as the motorcade approached from the control bunker and drove past. A fine grit of dirt plumed behind the cars. The service vehicles came next, technicians returning from the pad. A few people strolled alongside the road to personal vehicles parked at the edge of the launch complex. Within a few hours, no one would be near Leonid for kilometers around. He reminded himself that his brother was even more remote.
When the door opened just wide enough, Nadya slipped sideways into the bunker. She wore the gray suit all cosmonauts were forced to wear on launch day, flat and featureless except for the black trim along the mandarin collar, designed to look futuristic but accomplishing monastic instead. Her hair was pulled back in a bun, something she only did for public appearances, and only then when told to do so. There must have been a photo shoot following the launch. There had been ten thousand photos for every rocket.
“Where’s the Chief Designer?” asked Leonid.
“He left.”
“How’d you get the key?”
“I took it from his pocket. He’s always so distracted before a launch.” She looked at a corner of the room while she talked. Unlike the other earthbound twins, she had never been trained in social graces such as eye contact.
The door closed behind her, and the lock clicked. There was no keyhole on the inside. Four folded cots leaned against the wall. Nadya took one and set it up beside Leonid’s. She sat down, face hung toward the floor. The concrete looked like the moon, pocked and ashen.
“You won’t return to Star City?” asked Leonid.
“I always end up there eventually.”
She reached across the gap between cots and pulled Leonid’s hand to her lap, massaging the faint scar on his forearm with her thumb. It was the same gesture her sister, the other Nadya, used to make after they first arrived in Star City, when the twins, still children, were split up and homesickness rose in waves each evening. That Nadya would go from bunk to bunk, soothing weeping to silence, only returning to her own bed after all the other children slept. Leonid’s scar had been darker then.
There was no confusing that Nadya for this one, who was so much colder and more distant. Maybe this Nadya had once been the same as her sister, but the Chief Designer trained that out of her. For every hour Leonid had spent learning manners from Mishin and Bushuyev, and more recently with Ignatius, for every speech he was required to give to his reflection in a mirror, he knew the space-bound twins had spent just as much time inside simulators and centrifuges. That was how Nadya had lived her whole life up until the launch. She was merely meant to be another mechanical component of Vostok. A switch to flip the other switches.
The other Nadya had been barely more than a child when she launched. Leonid remembered himself then, face dotted with acne, his jawline softer, still shedding the shape of boyhood. Now his cheeks stubbled by lunchtime, and it required mathematical precision to shave the sharp features of his chin and cheeks without nicking himself.
Nadya, this o
ne, hummed softly to herself, a song that never quite realized its own melody. She had taken to that lately, humming the same song as if relearning it from memory. The melody reminded Leonid of the folk tunes of Bohdan, his home village, simple songs about long-dead Cossack heroes.
“What is it,” asked Leonid, “that song?”
The humming stopped.
“Please, go on.”
She tried to start the song again, but the notes came out at random, as if she had not forgotten just that song but the whole concept of singing.
“I don’t remember it,” she said.
Leonid pulled his hand from Nadya’s lap and rested it in his own.
“Tell me about my brother,” he said.
“He’s like you. More confident, maybe, but that’s just the training. Tell me about my sister.”
“She was very little like you.”
The two of them often repeated this exchange when they were alone together. That was usually where it ended, but Nadya raised her face and looked Leonid directly in the eyes.
“What did she say to you?” asked Nadya. “I saw the video. Before she boarded the rocket, you were the last person she spoke to.”
“She said she was glad she was the one to go and not you.”
“Why would she say that?”
“She was your sister.”
“What’s a sister if you’ve barely seen each other in years?”
“She didn’t have to see you to think of you. I still think of her now, and she’s five years dead.”
Nadya stood and paced the perimeter of the room, brushing her fingertips along the rough concrete walls.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said.
“The door locks from the outside.”
“One day, then. One day let’s go for a walk.”
Bohdan, Ukraine—1950
Monday morning and the train didn’t come. The villagers idled by the tracks, kicking at fat stones cascaded down from the mountain. Usually, when the train was late, they swept stones to kill time. There were not enough, though, to warrant the effort. No one could remember the last rains, anything more than a drizzle, strong enough to shake loose even dust from the craggy face of the mountain. The green of the forest had grown less vivid. The wet scent of the firs, once filling the valley like water in a pond, had faded to nothing.
By noon, it was clear that the train would not arrive. The villagers gathered their shed coats, dusty things that hung like sheets over their shoulders, and dragged their empty carts back down the rutted dirt road to the village proper. The tops of the homes, recently shingled by a crew of Russian carpenters, rose like gray peaks above the low trees of the valley’s center. There were perhaps a dozen cottages in all, if one counted the church and the schoolhouse. Even in a village as remote as Bohdan, it was usually best not to count the church.
Leonid—then still known by his birth name—watched the empty carts parade by, wooden wheels clunking unevenly, the people that pulled them gaunt as the legs of horses. His brother, the younger Leonid, crouched in the brush on the other side of the road. They had planned to steal a sugar beet each from the carts as they rolled by, a practice tolerated by the villagers, who had themselves swiped beets from their parents like their parents from their grandparents before them. With no train, though, there was nothing on the carts to steal.
The twins should have been in lessons, but the small clapboard schoolhouse had remained empty since the teacher left with Russian soldiers some weeks before. When the teacher boarded the outbound train, she had paused on the top step, casting a long look around the valley as if she did not expect to see it again. The train chugged away, huffing out great exhalations of snow-white steam, gathering speed and distance, ascending the mountain through the pass where the steam blended with the mist and the train evaporated into the outside world. Grandmother had told the two Leonids that no one who took the train ever returned.
So for weeks there had been no school. The boys read from their tattered lesson books when Grandmother pressed them, but mostly they spent their time outside, exploring the forest or shadowing the villagers.
The swine squealed in their pens as the empty carts ricketed past, kicking up a fecund scent with short stomps of their hooves. Leonid remembered there being more animals, but that was the memory of a toddler, when everything seemed larger and of greater numbers. These animals were more like pets than livestock, spindly and with the shapes of bones visible beneath their skin. Nothing worth eating. The fattest had been sent out on the train months before. Like Grandmother said, what left on the train never returned.
Kasha, the village’s lone dog, owned by no one in particular and fed by all intermittently, emerged from behind a log pile and marched alongside the carts. She was as tall as a man’s knee, all leg and lean muscle, narrow-snouted, fur white like the steam from the train. In better times, the boys would have shared whatever food they had stolen, or the villagers would have dropped something for Kasha to eat. Still, the dog seemed happy, practically prancing as she walked. Her tail, though, hung limp behind her. Some injury, predating Leonid’s memory, had robbed the tail of its motion.
The younger Leonid caught up to the procession and helped old Mr. Yevtushenko pull one of the carts. The left wheel was lopsided and snagged in the path’s ruts once per revolution. The younger Leonid boy’s strength didn’t help much, but it was enough to keep the cart moving. The older Leonid looked for a place to help, too, but the other villagers had no trouble with their own carts. Maybe if they had been laden. He wondered why the villagers had not just left the carts at the top of the hill, so they would be there when the train eventually came. He wanted to ask, but he knew that no adult wanted the advice of a child. So he followed, not helping, saying nothing. Kasha trotted beside him.
The villagers parked the carts by the arid dirt patch that used to be a garden. They huddled as if they might unload the carts, scooping up empty space into buckets and barrows, and then carry the nothing home with them. Some of the villagers would climb into the hills and try their hand at hunting. It was not a village of hunters, though, so they rarely returned with more than a red squirrel, half exploded from the bullet that felled it. Grandmother told the twins stories of roe deer that used to fill the valley’s forests and the feasts their meat used to provide. Those stories rang more like legend than memory.
From the hills, throughout the afternoon, the hopeful sound of gunshots sometimes echoed down from the hills, little pops like hammers on wood. In later months, the sound would become more ominous, emerging as it did from the barrels of Russian rifles.
That night after the villagers went home, the two Leonids climbed atop the cold gray roof of Grandmother’s cottage, brushing aside the sere dirt deposited there by summer winds, and watched the wide crease of sky. Kasha scrambled up the berm at the back of the cottage and flopped between them. Long before they knew the stars had names already, they gave them names of their own.
Moscow, Russia—1964
Leonid and Nadya descended the frail metal staircase pushed up to the side of the Tu-124, the sound of the jets still dying down even as they disembarked. Domodedovo Airport had just opened the month before, and did not yet show the wear of a single Moscow winter. Every other runway Leonid had ever seen was crisscrossed with black lines where the cracks had been filled in, black circles demarking repaired potholes. This runway, though, was flawless gray. Domodedovo’s control tower rose like a stone slab from the tarmac, a giant’s headstone. The jet fumes smelled acrid but also sweet.
After three days in the bunker at Baikonur, Leonid and Nadya had been retrieved by Mishin and Bushuyev in a timeworn Sorokovka armored transport. The cargo bed carried a Vostok capsule, bearing scorch marks as if it had reentered the atmosphere when in reality Mishin and Bushuyev had attacked it with blowtorches. The transport carried them hundreds of kilometers across the steppe to the
supposed landing site. Once there, Leonid helped Mishin and Bushuyev push the capsule off the back of the transport. It landed with a hollow thud and sank into the damp dirt. They attached a parachute and allowed the wind to billow it open. Mishin and Bushuyev radioed the rest of the recovery team, who had no part in the deception. Who believed. Hours more of waiting, followed by a trip to an airstrip another several hundred kilometers away. Leonid found some small amusement in the fact that he had to travel so far to pretend that he had traveled even farther.
Ignatius waited for them on the tarmac at the bottom of the stairs. She wore a leather jacket with a fur collar, several sizes too large, though it was too warm for even a sweater. A black Zil limousine idled behind her, its door held open by a man dressed in a black suit. In the distance, just outside the terminal, a small crowd waited, and with them a military band playing the “Aviamarch.” Nadya sang along in whisper, “Ever higher, and higher, and higher we direct the flight of our birds,” bobbing her head out of time with the beat. She must have heard that song a thousand times after her sister’s launch.
“Comrades,” said Ignatius, spreading her arms, “welcome back to Moscow.”
“It’s only been a week since we left,” said Leonid.
“But you left the planet entirely. Certainly you deserve a welcome home.” She smirked as she said this, turning to the car before Leonid could respond.
Other than for launches, he had only been away from Star City twice since he first arrived as a child, both for trips into Moscow, so that he might know the history and the monuments. Moscow did not feel like home, no matter how close to Star City it might be. But then, returning to Star City never felt like returning home, either.
The Zil’s engine grumbled, and the car slid forward, wheels whirring across the tarmac, then through an ungated gap in the wire fence that surrounded the whole airport. A lone highway threaded away from Domodedovo, nothing much around it, forest and field and an occasional silo breaking through the canopy of trees. On maps, the area was marked with the names of towns, but Leonid saw no sign of them. No one waited for his arrival this far out, kilometers and kilometers from Moscow’s center. He settled back into the plush leather seat. In training, he had been required to sit for hours in a mock-up of the Vostok capsule, the seat padded just enough to make tolerable the way it curled the body like a fetus. Young Giorgi called Vostok the iron womb. He seemed to have a nickname for everything and everyone.