Like You'd Understand, Anyway

by Jim Shepard

  Bykovsky is married, though he told me he hasn't touched his wife in years.

  The plan was to make dual use of the second stage of this group mission to put the first woman in space. And after everything— the written examinations and the centrifuge, the parachute jumps and the pressure chamber, the psychological prodding and poking and the endless humiliations of the medical testing—Solovyova was judged top of the list. But Korolyov was concerned about her unsteady morals. It was felt she gave improper replies in the final interviews. When asked what she wanted from life, she said she wanted everything that it could offer. She maintained that a woman could smoke and still remain decent. She was unapolo-getic for having traveled unescorted into town.

  When asked what I wanted, I said I wished to support the Komsomol and the Communist Party. I took no trips to town. I do not smoke.

  In the end, there were advantages to favoring a farm girl over a teacher's daughter. I was a girl from the backwoods— the way Gagarin and Premier Khrushchev were boys from the backwoods—and our country was telling the world that even we could achieve at the highest level. “The meek shall inherit the earth,” Solovyova said when the other women sought to console her after the news had been released.

  “When have you managed this grand passion?” she wanted to know last night, when I confided in her. “Where have you managed it?” She used “grand passion” with an unpleasant emphasis.

  The truth is that he hasn't entirely committed to my feelings for him. A week ago we managed for ourselves an hour or so alone by plunging off the trails on a recreational hike, during which we kissed, in the darkness, as though all of our sharing would be accomplished by that alone. I had before those kisses kissed only two other boys: those memories a little keepsake-box of reticence and disappointment. But there in the forest we came together like an immersion, oceanic in its possibilities. The branches above showered us with cold drops shaken off at the breeze. Around his mouth he smelled of sun and beach, with an edge of herbs.

  He was shorter but seemed older, and parted his hair on the side in the German manner. He expressed himself so well in our first meeting that I kept glancing at him as though I were doing something wrong. This was the first gathering of the finalists. We'd been asked to mark on mimeographs of a map where our relatives were located. I'd been holding mine upside down, causing the other women to laugh. “I guess you won't be navigating,” one of them scoffed. But he said with a smile that his was illegible too, and that these were poor mimeographs. And I thought he was kind. And that I wanted some of that kindness inside me.

  He's not wildly good-looking. He hoards his green vegetables, whether from superstition or trauma, he won't say. Solovyova thinks his hands are too small. She has a man's hands, like mine.

  14 June 1963 Afternoon

  Solovyova napping again. In the morning we spent two hours reviewing checklists and two playing badminton for physical conditioning. The badminton was filmed for posterity. Solovyova worked up a sheen of sweat on her golden forearms. Every time she hit a winner she would smack her lips like someone enjoying a sweet. Korolyov watched like a proud father. Afterward he sat with us in the shade. He called us his little swallows. He singled out Solovyova for special praise, reminding her that it was harder to be the backup than the primary pilot. I could detect her inner refusal to tear up.

  During our academic examinations all of the finalists scored in the excellent category except me. Korolyov attributed this to my having been too nervous. It was decided that since I would have done better otherwise, there was no need to retest me. On May 14, Solovyova and I were rated Most Ready to Fly, and a week later the selections were announced. We stood before the panel and then she turned to shake my hand. She had a way of inspecting me that reminded me of auctions. She had the characteristics that give Tartar women their reputation for beauty, especially the hair. I asked why she looked sad and she answered so they could hear, “I'm not sad, but serious, as always.”

  If I've occasionally taken first place in life's races, it's only because of my oxlike perseverance. I've always had to labor at tasks, reiterating them. On school tests, teachers forced me to stop writing, the classroom long since emptied. Eventually I developed the philosophy that everyone could be of use. I grew proud of my diligence. And before Bykovsky, I would have cited calmness as my other virtue.

  14 June 1963 Evening

  When I was eight, three daredevils risked their lives in a balloon that ascended to a height of 20.8 kilometers. They radioed their achievement, then began their descent. Nothing more was heard from them, though a day later shattered remnants of the gondola were retrieved, along with some body parts, which were described as unrecognizable. I remember my mother's indignation that such a detail would be reported. I remember spending the rest of the day in our chicken coop playing with a small stuffed bear. I remember thinking of them so far up and alone, the slipstream an ocean's roar, the cold an unprecedented affliction. Their bodies coming apart at such unbelievable speeds. My nights were filled with impressions of an inescapable and implacable landscape rushing up at me. Where did I get such images? I never discovered. But at eighteen I was allowed to join a nearby parachute club, and when told that I'd handled my first jump with poise, I answered, “Well, I've been jumping all my life.”

  “He's a bit of a turnip, isn't he?” Solovyova asked the other day. Bykovsky was consulting a tractor manual while his mates horsed about with a rugby ball. But he appeals to me because of his intelligence: I observe him closely and still feel only occasionally able to predict his next move. Which is rare for me. Also, we're both very good with slide rules.

  14 June 1963 Late Night

  This evening the movie was Vostok 1. The actor who played Gagarin was especially good. Once we were bedded down for the night, it again fell to me to make conversation, Solovyova having turned to the wall and pulled the summer blanket to her ears. I noted to her that I didn't feel even mildly anxious. Was that normal, did she think? She didn't know what was normal, she answered. Korolyov looked in to wish us good night. “And good luck,” she reminded him. Oh, in five years the state'll be subsidizing vacations in space, he told her.

  We've been told that strain gauges have been placed under our mattresses to record the quality of our sleep. Wires trail from our bunks to a hole in the wall leading to instruments in a little shed outside the cottage. So we concentrate on lying still. Even now our roles could reverse. A hint of upset in our “sleep” and the doctors could declare the other candidate better rested and more fit for duty. It might come down to who rolls over fewer times during the night.

  Her hip under the blanket is a snowy hill in the electric light from outside. Her hair is a glossy cascade. Two hours have passed like this. Who knows what she's been thinking? I've been thinking, Soon, I'll be with him and not with him. I've been controlling hours of agitation.

  Feelings are unruly. You tell them one thing and they tell you something else. When I was young and read about immaturity in books, I never encountered myself, but when I read about grownups, I did. That always left me pleased. Now I seem incapable of contemplation. I'll think the agitation has ended but then from somewhere hope will stir, swelling until it dominates my chest, like that moment when a level ski encounters an unexpectedly steep drop: it's joy, but joy attenuated with dread.

  Sometimes I think it's the sacred duty of every mother to devote her life to her child in order to avoid producing strange isolates like me.

  I call him Hawk. He calls me Seagull. Both have been accepted as the call signs for our flights. The mission patch for Vostok 5 features two rockets streaking up at a diagonal, side by side.

  15 June 1963 Morning

  The doctors woke us at 05:30, as they will tomorrow. They wanted to know how we slept. “As you taught us,” Solovyova told them. We were fed concentrated calories and vitamins in a dark brown paste followed by a breakfast of meat puree, black currant jam, and black coffee, and then attended another meeting o
f the Flight Committee on the contingency plans for emergency recovery. There is no realistic chance of our survival if we land at sea. However, plans must be made. Two carrier groups as well as four Tu-114s would be required to make recovery feasible. These are not available.

  We were eager to hear how Bykovsky's mission was progressing. We were told that all was well and that we'd be able to listen in on transmissions in an hour. I asked if I might peek in before then. Kamanin responded that I should worry less about Vostok 5 and more about my own mission.

  “Eros 7, Vostok 5,” Solovyova whispered to me in response, as though relating a football score.

  15 June 1963 Morning

  The mission calls for the use of a three-stage R-7 rocket that can lift a mass of 4.6 tons into a circular orbit at 155 miles altitude, though my altitude will probably be slightly less. The descent and instrument modules together are only 4.4 meters long; the little sphere of the descent module, only 2.3 meters in diameter, its size limited by the available volume inside the launch shroud. Two minutes into my flight, the strap-on boosters will shut down and separate by the firing of their explosive bolts. The nose shroud will open a minute later, exposing the Vostok. The second stage will continue to burn until it too is depleted and falls away. Then the third will do the same until I've achieved orbit. The spherical shape of the descent module, chosen for its stability, has its center of mass aft so that, protected by its ablative coating, it will assume the correct orientation during reentry, descending along a ballistic trajectory. “In other words, like a bullet, with no attitude control,” Solovyova clarified during one of our classroom sessions. Another of those indiscretions that probably counted so decisively against her.

  Soft-landing such a mass would have required an enormous parachute and retro-rocket system—a problem considered too time-consuming, given the race with the Americans—so the designers settled on an ejection system initiated by inertial and barometric sensors. Before Gagarin, no one had ever ejected at that altitude or speed. In the event of a trajectory deviation, the ejection could be activated sooner, though no one knew what the result would be. Sputnik 3 with its two dogs reentered the atmosphere after retrofire at an incorrect angle and burned up. The audio monitors recorded the dogs' cries before the transmission went to static.

  We've had to ignore whispers of other disasters, some of them enormous. Bondarenko burned alive in the isolation chamber. A premature ignition of the R-7 that annihilated the launch gantry. Even we knew that mostly what our rockets did, in the early days, was blow up.

  So you see, Diary: lovesickness has crowded none of the responsibilities, or apprehensions, from my mind.

  15 June 1963 Afternoon

  A practice press conference. We're told we both gave incorrect answers about our appetite. Earlier we observed Bykovsky via television. He made no motion while sleeping. “Look at him,” I murmured, and even Solovyova was alarmed by my tone. She said all she could make out was his helmet.

  Apparently there'd been consternation that they'd kept from us: on orbit 23 he was to communicate with Earth, but no transmissions were received. The Central Committee had been frantic. When he finally did respond, they asked why he'd been silent. He told them he'd had nothing to say. They're still angry.

  During our last private moment together I reminded him that when we returned a new life would begin for us, as celebrities and representatives of the Soviet system. His mind was on his launch vehicle. He handled my arms like they were attitude control handgrips. Gagarin and Titov, I told him, dreaming, had been such big stars, afterward; they'd done whatever they dared. We were in a maintenance room of an electrical substation in the basement of the gantry supports. There was nowhere to sit. He entered each of our kisses dutifully, but gave himself over to them once they were initiated. I felt a wash of sadness each time. “Do you want to touch me?” I asked him. “I am touching you,” he told me. But then we heard the heavy jingling of wrenches on someone's utility belt down the hall, and we were out of time.

  15 June 1963 Afternoon

  That first night when the male and female candidates were brought together, I just stood there with my eyes closed, immersed in the different voices. Ponomaryova, an engineer and city girl with some of the starved attractiveness of the old cinema stars, carried on about how much she admired the children of peasants, who got by without adults, the adults laboring in the fields all day while the children became the emperors and explorers of their own world.

  I fit in poorly from the very beginning. “Let's go to the cinema!” the other women would say when we had a free moment. “I can't,” I'd tell them. But I wanted to so much I could have cried. Why did I do such things? It was hard to watch how much less they came to like me than each other. They were the sort of people who always had stories to tell because something was always happening to them. They looked at me like I was a horse in a stall. Soon we became so petty we stopped handing each other cups during afternoon tea.

  And even so, Solovyova had befriended me. We'd taken walks. We found an overgrown pond we christened the Night Witches' Hideout.

  But during the mixed gatherings we were more diffident, and I gravitated to Bykovsky He'd traveled on foreign expeditions and told stories about tropical forests and typhoons. We took our own walks around the grounds. “Did they tell you about city boys, down on the farm?” Ponomaryova asked one night as we lay in our bunks. Solovyova was turned to the wall. The other women simpered. I answered with a joke, telling myself my conscience was clear. But the truth was that a new reality was coming into being for me. Waking up each morning I felt an astonishing absence of emptiness, something I hadn't gotten used to. He was becoming a pressing concern, always present somewhere. Early one morning I gazed at Solovyova's sleeping hand trailing on the floor like a vine and remembered him remarking that he loved my dozing because it seemed such a self-aware form of sleep. And I thought I had to have this love so I'd no longer be so endlessly alone. I could feel it making me new.

  After Gagarin's flight, the Kremlin had been flooded with letters from women asking to be considered for spaceflight. Soviet women believed they belonged with men in this greatest of all adventures. Because of the ejection requirements, only those who belonged to parachute clubs were part of the initial selection, after which there was further screening for medical fitness, age, size, and weight. Interviews then took that pool from fifty-eight to five. Those who flew would become heroes. Those who didn't would remain unknown.

  We were told to inform our families that we'd been selected for a special parachuting team. We were tested for exposure to vibration, noise, pressure, extremes of temperature, and long-term isolation. Various tests exposed various weaknesses. Yerkina was eliminated during an isolation test when she removed her boots and ate only two helpings of rations in three days. Ponomaryova, who'd been so pleased to be the only pilot and engineer, reacted badly to the centrifuge. She complained afterward that we might as well have passenger cosmonauts, since the individual was the insignificant recipient of the collective's work. Sour grapes. I did everything that was asked of me, keeping an eye on Bykovsky advancing through the men's ranks beside me. “Look at the level of your absorption!” Solovyova exclaimed at one point. “It's like a warped version of intellectual activity.” I tried to emulate the way he applied his mind to his business, refusing to dwell on the relentless instants that were bearing everything away. Separations were like return visits from nearby desolation, the way my father's death would come to me some minutes after I awoke, even years after it happened. Was something good or bad news? It began to depend on how it influenced my seeing Bykovsky.

  “You know, soon we'll never see one another again,” Solovyova said from the bathroom, apropos of my distress. She pointed out that our menstrual cycles had fallen into synchrony, which happened at times when women lived together. I told her that I felt ready to accept whatever lay ahead. She threw up her hands and left the room.

  15 June 1963 Night

&
nbsp; Meeting with the Command Staff followed by dinner. Koro-lyov seemed well pleased with what he calls my preternatural calm. Kamanin remarked upon my appetite. Poor Solovyova: all through the meal I could see her thinking, If I spill the beans about her, maybe then I could go … But of course she can't. Perhaps none of us could. We've all long since understood that the only accepted way to compete was to outpace one another in cooperation and teamwork.

  The R-7 has already begun its departure from the main assembly shed. It runs the length of its hydraulic platform, which is mounted on a rail car. Korolyov is dawdling alongside it in the dark like a nervous suitor. It's nosing along extremely slowly to minimize the vibration damage. Maintenance personnel poke at it, fussing and adjusting. Around dawn it will be brought upright on the pad, the service towers raised, the umbilical connections joined.

  There's no question of sleep, though again we're each trying not to move. Solovyova lies on her back, gazing upward in the moonlight as if the ceiling were an affliction.

  When I was twelve I told my father I was bored, and he answered, “I hate people who always say, ‘I'm bored!’” “Well, you'll never hear me say it again,” I told him. And he never did. I took long walks. I spent afternoons jumping over the runoff from storm drains. On dark winter mornings I left for school early, my steps resounding softly in the empty hallways. It was the usual sort of district school: pitiful academic standards, teachers with ungrammatical speech, fistfights between classes. But I preferred it to home. I was beginning to register that I shared many attributes with regular people. Two spirits wrestled inside me: one was the girl who wanted only to please, while the other sought to dedicate her life to something larger. Why couldn't I be someone else? Why shouldn't I imagine myself contented? I resolved to train to become someone I would like. On my thirteenth birthday I told my mother that I would probably become an arctic explorer, and she answered that she always found my conceited-ness appealing.