First Cosmic Velocity

by Zach Powers

  “I’m sorry,” said the driver. He glanced back again in the mirror. “Surely, though, you can master driving. You’ve flown a spaceship, after all.”

  “I’m not sure the two are related,” said Leonid.

  “Was he also a cosmonaut? This Giorgi?” asked the driver.

  “He was a friend, more like a brother.”

  “I’m sorry,” repeated the driver. “If you wish, I can let you drive the car before you leave.”

  The convoy veered off the road they had been following, made a series of quick turns down side streets, and stopped alongside a cemetery wedged between two concrete tenements. The buildings here were new, but had the same worn look as everything erected by the Soviets, not much different from the headstones sandwiched between them. No aging or decay could affect these buildings because they were old from the start.

  Everyone exited the cars and passed through a gateless gap in the cemetery’s low iron fence. Kasha waited by the car. One of the drivers attached a leash to her, even though she made no signs of moving. The soldiers, who had ridden in the first car behind the hearse, were already unloading the casket. They marched it through the gate, barely wide enough for them to pass, toward a fresh grave, wet black dirt piled high beside it. Several people, family members dressed for mourning, faces stretched to unusual shapes by sadness, already stood by the grave. An officer that Leonid did not recognize stood beside them. He had a hand on the shoulder of a woman Leonid assumed to be Giorgi’s mother. Her face was the same as Giorgi’s, broad features, a mouth that would likely launch into a grin on another occasion. Now, though, she wept at the sight of the casket, as did the children, teenagers maybe, beside her.

  The soldiers navigated an indirect route through the close-packed graves, sometimes straddling the casket over the top of a gravestone when there wasn’t room for them all to pass on one side. By the time they reached the fresh hole, the soldiers struggled under the weight of their burden, muscles trembling as they stooped and set the casket onto the straps of the lowering device.

  The officer who had been consoling Giorgi’s mother stepped forward and began to speak. Leonid ignored most of what he said, letting the words wash over him like the white noise of the Antonov’s engines. He picked up just enough to know that the man spoke as if he had been Giorgi’s superior officer, but Leonid had never seen this man at Star City. Ignatius, holding her leather jacket tight around her by the fur collar, stared intently at the officer, mouthing the words along with him. That was the story, then. Giorgi’s death, officially, had come in a plane crash. Giorgi had been a test pilot, though of planes, not spaceships. He was being posthumously awarded some sort of minor medal. Honor and the Motherland and honor and pride and superiority and honor. Leonid wanted badly for this man to shut up.

  Next, one of Giorgi’s relatives, a brother by the looks of him, spoke, or tried to. He managed a few words, and then fell into tears. A few more words, more tears. Most of what he said seemed familiar to Leonid, and he recalled the words were parts of the Psalms the old village priest had used before the Soviets hauled him away. Even before the famine, there had been enough funerals for Leonid to have learned the usual phrases. Here, though, any reference to the creator was absent. No lords, thys, gods, almightys. Just the little poem at the start of each Psalm. My soul cleaves to the dust. Turn my eyes from looking at vanities. The brother choked out a few final words, face wet from crying, and someone, maybe a sister, led him from the graveside.

  Giorgi’s mother stepped forward and touched the coffin, caressing the wood as though it were her son’s skin. Leonid thought that it was probably more like skin than Giorgi’s own, crisped in the fire, flake and ash. She turned to face the semicircle of mourners. Her eyes were pink but her face dry. She thanked everyone for coming. At her words, behind her, the cemetery’s caretakers cranked a handle and the straps supporting the coffin lengthened, lowering Giorgi into the ground. The mourners turned and left. The sound of shovels piercing the dirt reached Leonid as he ducked his head back into the waiting car.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN THE CONVOY stopped again, it was in front of a row of townhomes that still showed scars from the German occupation. Roofs had been rebuilt and windows replaced, but the stone of the walls bore white gashes and dark streaks, gouges and burns. At the sight of so many shiny black cars, several children on the opposite side of the street halted in the middle of a game of Dragon. They stared openly at all the strangers, paying particular attention to anyone in uniform.

  Ignatius crossed over to the children. She grinned and spoke to them, and the children laughed at whatever she said. She pulled a handful of candy from her pocket and distributed it, reprimanding a girl who tried to take more than one piece. Everyone but Leonid had already siphoned into the house when Ignatius recrossed the street.

  “Do you always carry candy with you?” asked Leonid.

  “You never know when you might need a piece,” said Ignatius.

  “You’ve never shared with us.”

  “You never seem hungry.” She turned around in place, observing the buildings and the few cars other than those the funeral party had arrived in. Far down the sidewalk, a couple strolled arm in arm. “I like streets like this. I’m from the country, a collective farm. Well, it’s collective now. When I was a child, it was just a farm, but everyone in the area worked there anyway. A few buildings with kilometers and kilometers of land. The first time I went to the city—and it was not even a real city, just a town—I knew that was where I had to be. A place where you would every day come across people you didn’t know by sight, much less by name. But I like streets like this because it’s a little of both. For this one block, you might know everyone, but anonymity is just around the corner.”

  “Do you ever think about what it’s like for Nadya, for whom no such corner exists?”

  “It’s my job to make sure no such corner exists for any of the cosmonauts. So yes, I think about it often. But there’s one difference. Nobody knows Nadya. They just know her face. Her accomplishments. Part of being famous is being anonymous. A hero isn’t a person but an act. An ideal to worship. That’s what it is. Worship. In a nation without a god, we must provide an outlet for faith. We must show the people that greater heights exist, not on some ethereal plane, but right here on Earth. Or, in Nadya’s case or yours, in outer space.”

  “So we’re just symbols, not people?”

  “Of course you’re people. Just not the people that everyone thinks you are.”

  Ignatius unwrapped one of the candies from her pocket, a Lobster Neck, the outer shell like streaked brass. The white wrapper crinkled as she kneaded it into a ball between her fingers. She held the candy in her other hand, observing it as if it were a smooth pebble, something she’d stumbled across on a riverbank instead of pulled from her pocket. She opened her mouth and pushed the candy toward it, but stopped, and instead offered the piece to Leonid. He took it and sucked on it without really tasting.

  “Do you know the General Designer?” asked Ignatius.

  “I know of him, but we’ve never met.”

  “At his last rocket test, there was an explosion. Somewhere around a hundred people died.”

  Leonid gulped down a mouthful of sugar-sweetened spit, almost choking down the candy with it.

  “Marshal Nedelin was among those who died.”

  “I only met him the once,” said Leonid. He recalled that meeting, the graciousness of the man, how even Nadya had seemed at ease with him.

  “This is a dangerous business.” She pulled out another Lobster Neck and plopped it in her mouth. She looked up at the tops of the buildings, where the little architectural flourishes, a superfluous crenellation, a pattern in the bricks, were evidence that the structures predated the Revolution.

  “If he’d survived,” continued Ignatius, “Giorgi, that is. If Giorgi had survi
ved, he would have flown the next mission. The Chief Designer believes he has a capsule ready for reentry.”

  “Believes?”

  “I have my doubts. How many dead now? And not one success. Not a real success, at least.”

  Leonid looked at her. She had already admitted that she knew the truth of the twins, but Leonid still felt as though he should keep the secret. Of course Ignatius knew. There was never a moment when she appeared unprepared, as if the big leather jacket she wore contained not just candy but all the answers, as well. Ignatius glanced at Leonid and caught his stare and held it for a moment.

  “Now that Giorgi’s dead,” said Ignatius, “there’s only one trained pilot. The Chief Designer plans for her to finally complete the mission she couldn’t five years ago.”

  “She’ll fly?”

  “And I think it unlikely that she’ll survive. At least not so likely that I’d bet on it. The Chief Designer is a dreamer, a noble one, but sometimes the dream gets in the way of his better judgment. The whole plan was a mistake. Tsiolkovski’s folly. But it was the Chief Designer who turned Tsiolkovski’s perverse science into outright deception. Twins not as experiments but as expendable.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Nadya’s life can’t be put at risk. If she were to die on this flight, I couldn’t cover it up. It would be a scar on the face of the nation.”

  “Stop the Chief Designer.”

  “He has Khrushchev behind him, so I’m not in a position to act. My superiors would prefer that I not cross the First Secretary himself.”

  “I’ll talk to the Chief Designer.”

  Leonid turned toward Giorgi’s family home, but Ignatius grabbed him by the shoulder, a firm grip though not unfriendly. She reached into her pocket, the one on the opposite side of the jacket from where she’d pulled the candy, and retrieved a piece of paper folded over several times into a palm-sized square. She handed the paper to Leonid.

  “What is it?” he asked. There was no mark that he could see on the paper to identify it.

  “Nadya’s inside the house,” said Ignatius. “You have a car. Buy me the time I need to resolve this issue.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  Ignatius crunched through the outer shell of the candy in her mouth and chewed away at the shards. She clapped Leonid on the shoulder and walked away, not toward the house, but toward the street corner she had gestured to earlier, the corner around which she would find only strangers. Leonid unfolded the paper. A stack of rubles, doubled over and bound with twine, fell out. Leonid bent down and picked up the money. All the bills were in denominations of a hundred. He shoved the stack into the inner pocket of his uniform jacket. His knuckles brushed against the piece of paper the Americans had given him. He pulled the note out and read it. He put it back in the pocket. The inside of the paper Ignatius had given him was printed with a map of Ukraine, railways and train stations marked with red pen. He shoved that into his pocket, as well.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN LEONID FOUND HER inside the house, Nadya was standing alone in the corner of an otherwise unoccupied room, humming the same simple melody as always. The room was small, crowded by a dining table too large for the space. No chairs. Nadya held a drink in her hand, but it did not look like she had taken a sip. Several blond strands had slipped free from the bun on her head and draped over one eye. The rest of the guests could be heard in other parts of the house, sharing stories about Giorgi, Leonid assumed. What would the people from Star City say? What lies had been prepared for them to tell Giorgi’s family? The honorable death of a soldier. The facts scrubbed smooth to nothing. Ignatius had briefed them before they came, but Leonid paid no attention. If anyone were to ask, he would tell the truth. Not the whole of it, but much of who Giorgi was had nothing to do with his training. The games and songs and paintings. Leonid felt he owed Giorgi’s family whatever honesty he could manage. Perhaps he should say nothing, silence the only assurance that what he said was true.

  “Nadya,” he said. “Have you ever thought about what you would do if you weren’t a part of all this?”

  “This? This is an actual home.” Nadya pointed to each corner of the ceiling in turn. “This already feels like it’s far away from everything we know.”

  “It’s not our home, though.”

  “And that’s always the problem.”

  “I know a place we could go. A place where not even Ignatius could follow.”

  “I expect Ignatius to crawl out from underneath my bed each morning.”

  “She’s not as bad as that.”

  Nadya eyed him. “You want to leave?”

  “Yes. Right now. Both of us.”

  “Where would we go?”

  He stepped closer to her. “In London, I met two Americans. Ignatius said they were spies, but I don’t care. They gave me an address. Right here in Ukraine. If we go there I think they’ll find us. They’ll take us to America.”

  “America? I don’t remember much from my visit. Yuri said he would have stayed there if he could have, but what do any of us really know about the place?”

  “I know that there I would still have a brother and you a sister. I don’t need to know anything more than that.”

  Nadya pushed herself from the wall. “Did she ever tell you her real name? My sister.”

  “No, none of us ever shared much that was personal. It was easier that way, to forget the past rather than hide it. What was her name?”

  “If she didn’t tell you, it’s not my place.” Nadya rounded the table toward the door. “Let’s go, already. I can’t stand any more time spent in this home. I thought I might learn something of Giorgi, but he’s not here. If he once was, then he took all of himself when he left.”

  Leonid lingered after Nadya exited. He took in the ceiling, the floor, the strip of wood along the base of the wall, beveled across the top into a quarter-arc with a semicircular lip below that. Leonid had never known a home like this one. He was unsure how such a strip of wood was even crafted. The work of machines or a patient hand? What was its purpose? He tapped the baseboard with the toe of his shoe, leaving a small black smudge, and then followed Nadya outside.

  She waited on the narrow sidewalk, a recent addition to the neighborhood, the poured concrete like pure snow compared to the old stone architecture. The line of black cars a streak of midnight. All the drivers waited inside their vehicles, except for Leonid’s, who sat on his hood smoking a cigarette, and another who held Kasha’s leash as the dog poked her snout through an iron fence to sniff at the wilted plants on the other side.

  Leonid whistled and Kasha’s head, ears perked to perfect triangles, jerked in his direction. She strained against the leash, hacking as the collar dug into her neck.

  “It’s okay,” said Leonid. He crouched, holding out his arms.

  The driver released the leash, and in a white flash Kasha was in Leonid’s embrace. The metal fastener on the leash clattered against the sidewalk. Leonid unhooked the leash from the collar and hung it from the fence.

  “We’re taking her for a walk,” said Leonid, explaining it to the driver who had been tasked with dog-watching. And then to his own driver, “I think I’m ready to try my hand at driving.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE CAR SPUTTERED forward, and then the engine turned over once and fell silent. Leonid had been trying to master the clutch for twenty minutes, but all he had accomplished so far was to grind the gears down near to nothing. The driver, who had proved to be a patient teacher, could no longer hide his grimace at every incorrect sound the car made. Beads of nervous sweat dotted his brow.

  In the backseat, Nadya sat with Kasha. The dog scampered back and forth, from window to window, as if the car was moving and the scenery changed with every moment. Her claws tapped the glass each time
she jumped up for a better view.

  Leonid restarted the engine, slipped the clutch, and the car lurched another half-meter forward. He could see the other drivers, still in their cars parked ahead of him, watching in their mirrors. At first, there had been laughter, but now their faces, what he could see of them, looked almost bored. His incompetence, it seemed, was only entertaining for so long.

  “Would you like if I drove?” asked the driver.

  “It would be best if I drove myself,” answered Leonid.

  The car lurched forward again.

  Leonid rested his head on the steering wheel. Much longer and their escape would fail before it even began. The contingent from Star City would be exiting Giorgi’s family home at any time. The car’s back door unlatched, thunking shut immediately after. The driver’s side door opened. Leonid raised his head. Nadya stood outside, arm extended as a silent instruction for him to exit the car.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I’ll drive,” said Nadya.

  “Do you know how?”

  “I know I’m at least as skilled as you. Get out.”

  The driver, who could not have understood the conversation in Russian, still laughed. He understood enough.

  “That’s why she was the first and you the fifth?” he said. He pointed both fingers up and wiggled them. “To fly to outer space?” The laugh that followed rocked the whole car, and the driver was still shaking with the aftershocks as Leonid, now chuckling himself, ceded the driver’s seat to Nadya. Before Leonid could get back into the car, she started the engine, shifted into gear, and pulled the car away from the curb and several meters forward. She revved the engine and waved out the window for Leonid to catch up. He went to the passenger side and opened the door on the surprised driver.

  “Friend, we must borrow your car,” said Leonid. “You can retrieve it at the train station south of the city.” Without counting them, he pulled bills from the stack of rubles Ignatius had provided and gave them to the driver.