I was accepted into the Soviet Space Program and started my training in the lab of the resident space biomedical expert, Dr Yazdovsky. I found myself unexpectedly pleased to be back home among my Russian countrymen after so many years overseas, and I quickly became one of the doctor’s favourite animals. He nicknamed me Bert, because Soviet intelligence had uncovered the existence of a nasty cartoon character in the US named Bert the Turtle, who campaigned for the American public to duck and cover in the event of the Soviets attempting to liquidise them with an atom bomb. I wasn’t a turtle, but that wasn’t the point. The nickname was really just an excuse for Dr Yazdovsky to start singing the Bert the Turtle song as loudly as he could whenever he saw me wandering about in my massive, state-of-the-art Soviet terrarium.
I thought Dr Yazdovsky’s frequent serenading might increase my chances of being sent up in a rocket, but during the early to mid-1960s he was very much focused on putting dogs in space. The Americans favoured monkeys because they could use their hands, but Dr Yazdovsky felt that small dogs would be less restless in the rocket cabin than apes; they also cost less to train, and two dogs could be sent up together without a problem, generating two comparative data sets. Female dogs were preferable, as they didn’t have to lift a leg to urinate (a plus in the small cabin); mongrels were ideal since they were hardier than purebreds and could better withstand the tribulations of space flight. All of Dr Yazdovsky’s dogs had white fur, to show up better on film recordings transmitted from their capsules. Most of the dogs tolerated the training well (learning to wait patiently for weeks in small compartments; being spun in a centrifuge; using special trays to get food). The only problem was that they had a habit of running away just before the scheduled takeoff, almost as if they could sense they were about to be shot out into the ether.
While I was living in the lab, one of the dogs, Smelaya, managed to escape the day before her launch and went missing in the wilds surrounding our remote research facility. Dr Yazdovsky went into a panic, not because he had lost a test-flight subject, but because he was worried she would be eaten by the packs of wolves who lived beyond the facility, whom we sometimes heard howling at the moon as if they too wanted to go there. He had a kind heart, Dr Yazdovsky, though he tried to hide it. When Smelaya returned the next day, right on time for her rocket launch, he let her lick his face, something he always told the other lab workers never to do, for it encouraged dog–human bonding. She and her co-pilot, Malyshka, were shot into low orbit, and found dead in their sealed metal container after it parachuted back to earth.
I would have liked to have known Laika, the first animal to orbit the earth. She was a stray that Dr Yazdovsky noticed lurking beside the rubbish bins outside the facility and on a whim decided to put in the cabin of Sputnik II when it was blasted into orbit around earth in 1957. The video recorders in the cabin revealed that she was quite happy up there at first, able to move a bit, bark, and eat food pellets from an automatic dispenser. Then the capsule overheated and she died within a few hours of the launch, though the Soviets told everyone she had orbited the earth alive for a week.
I didn’t get to hear much about the dogs’ experiences in space because most of them were one-way passengers. The few that did make it back I spoke to whenever I had the chance. I suppose it was my early lessons in the varieties of solitude – from Oleg, from Alexandra, from Virginia, even from George – that had stayed with me; here was a chance to know what it might mean to be truly alone, in the ultimate solitude of space. I longed for the chance to experience that solitude myself.
Here is a transcript of an interview I did with a pair of dogs, Veterok and Ugolyok. They made it back alive after a space flight onboard Kosmos 110 in 1966, after breaking the record for the number of doggy days survived in space (twenty-two) and number of earth orbits (three hundred and thirty):
What did you think about during your time up in space?
VETEROK: I was intending to think about my work – consolidate my training, plan my next approach to Dr Yazdovsky’s maze, or perhaps even come up with an introduction for a pep talk to the other lab dogs on my return. But I found I could not think about anything clearly. I did very badly on the tests the lab engineers set for me up there, basic stuff. I felt restless all the time.
UGOLYOK: Yes, me too. I felt as if I had no control over the content of my thoughts. If I saw a pellet of my shit floating about in the capsule, I could think of nothing but shit for hours, even days. I began to hallucinate, to see and hear strange things – one morning I heard a choir singing and saw the sun rising above the steeple of a church. I thought a mini–rocket ship had implanted itself in my stomach and I tried to scratch it out.
VETEROK: Oh, and another thing. I thought a lot about that American monkey, Enos – you know the one in the photograph stuck on the wall in the lab, when he’d just returned from his trip into space and he looks angry as hell? I never understood that before, why he would be so furious. I knew the story, that up goes Enos in his capsule into space, and he’s pulling all the correct levers to get water and banana-flavoured tablets, just like he’s been trained. But there is mechanical trouble while he’s up there and instead of getting sips of water or tablets, he starts getting zapped by the electric pads wired to the soles of his feet. He gets back to earth, gets out of the capsule and the NASA guys are smiling, holding his hands, but Enos is fucking mad. This used to make me laugh. But up in space, I just had to think about this, about Enos getting buzzed on his feet for doing the right thing – the right thing! what he’s been trained to do! – and I wanted to bite somebody’s face off.
Did you two get on up there?
UGOLYOK: Absolutely not. We drove each other mental, cooped up like that together. It’s not natural. If Veterok touched my toy ball, I just couldn’t stand it, it became a really big deal.
VETEROK: It was very stressful. We both felt as if our survival instincts were kicking in even though we knew rationally we had enough resources for us both to survive the trip. We became very selfish, childishly possessive.
Which part of the trip was the hardest, the beginning or the end?
VETEROK: It’s funny, you know, but actually it was the middle that was worst for me. It’s exciting at the start and the finish – lots of adrenaline, the stuff of peak experience – but in the middle it gets monotonous. And I took this out on Ugolyok but also on the crew members on the ground. They couldn’t tell, of course, they didn’t know why I was barking so much, but I was telling them where they could stick it, among other things. It was displaced tension from the stress of the situation we were in, but the rage I felt was very real, very justified, in the moment.
UGOLYOK: Yes, it was in the middle that we started to really irritate each other. I got a bit depressed during that time, once I’d mastered the basic tasks I’d been set by the crew on earth, to test my reactions. That’s when the doubts kicked in too – about what we were doing, and why. I mean, you see the earth below you – it’s just like they say, suddenly there it is, a colourful ball floating in the middle of absolutely nothing, and … well, I just don’t know if anybody can ever recover from that. I’m still struggling to take life seriously again now that we’re back down here. It seems like one big sick joke. I thought it would be liberating but — [Veterok mutters something to cut him off]
What advice would you give to other dogs being trained for spaceflight?
VETEROK: If you go up in a pair, you must try to think of the other dog first, however hard it is. Let him drink water first, let him play with your toy ball, let him tell the same dumb joke over and over. You have to be tolerant. And you have to be flexible, adaptable. Things change so quickly up there, and if you can’t accept that sort of unpredictability, you’re not going to make it.
UGOLYOK: I would say, get as fit as you can, physically and psychologically, so you’re less likely to fall into a depression. You can’t think that a trip into space is going to solve your personal problems. Once you’re up there, those pr
oblems will not go away. They will come at you worse than ever before.
Blue Water Sailor
It was only in 1968 that the biomedical engineers shifted their attention from dogs and began to consider sending less conventional animals like me into space. They decided to take a chance and send a spaceship into orbit around the moon and back, and see what impact this lunar fly-by trip might have on the living creatures inside; a Noah’s rocket-ark of biological specimens, including – finally – a little Russian tortoise. For once I could trump the dogs in the lab because, unlike them, I could survive on very little food, and Dr Yazdovsky was hoping I might even hibernate through the whole thing. I was to be one of the first animals of any kind to circumnavigate the moon. There was no way I was going to hibernate.
On 15 September 1968 our moonship, Zond 5, was launched. On board in the cabin, other than me in my terrarium, were some mealworms and wine flies, two spiders, lots of seeds, some plants, and bacteria in sealed Petri dishes. I had a good spot in the cabin, beside the clear porthole. I’d been washed with iodine and sprinkled with antiseptic powder where the electrodes were attached to my body. I felt good.
As the rocket full of explosives beneath our capsule propelled us up and out, I thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s words, the ones Alexandra had read aloud to me so many years before, and felt grateful to have my own thoughts to keep me company in this, my final lesson in solitude in my terrarium with a view of space. As we accelerated, as my vision dimmed and I could feel I was about to black out, I felt secure knowing I had been preparing for this my whole life, that I wanted nobody’s company but my own.
When I regained consciousness, this sense of security had been replaced with the agony of banishment. I was being punished, exiled from earth like the original scapegoat in the Old Testament, a goat upon whose back all the sins of Israel were placed, and who was driven out into the wilderness for the demon Azazel. My shell felt as if it were made of metal, unbelievably heavy against my back. I was carrying the weight of all human sin, just as Oleg had said. What demon would be waiting for me behind the moon?
Once the main engine had been cut off, which I knew meant we had nearly reached orbital speed and would not fall back to earth, this paranoia dissolved. Microgravity felt wonderful. I hallucinated some music, an appropriate soundtrack for my out-of-body, out-of-earth experience: strange static chords, similar to the sounds received from the first radio contact with Venus. I did a small vomit, and felt better. I sensed in my weightlessness my blood pooling not in my feet but in my head and along the top of my shell, which felt weird but not unpleasant, like I was thick in all the wrong places. A thought occurred to me: Why do humans choose to see so many animals in the arrangement of the stars? Who joined the first dots?
Thoughts ceased for a while. When they returned, along with a headache, I wondered for a long time – minutes? hours? days? – if I had gone blind, and it was with relief that I saw the light flashes I’d heard the dogs describing, which meant we were passing through the radiation belts. Things got lyrical. Through the porthole, on the way to the moon, I saw the earth. It was just as the dogs had described, a glassy illuminated marble. And yes, I did check, just once: there are no tortoises holding it up.
I watched one of the spiders squeeze its unbelievable way through the tiniest seam in the curved wall of our capsule, out into space. We are the new blue water sailors, just like the humans in the earliest days of sailing, the ones who were prepared to set off across the open ocean with no compass to guide them. The ones willing to sail out of sight of land, the ones who stirred up the world’s organisms, taking them where they hadn’t been and shouldn’t have gone. One day, in the very far-off future, when humans arrive on Titan, they will find pairs of dogs and monkeys waiting for them there, pairs of spiders and rats, and one very old Russian tortoise. It seems to be the curse of all earth’s creatures, that we cannot help but spread ourselves around, always making a mess, carrying life with us, leaving it behind.
I decided space smells like ice – for I could smell it outside the capsule’s walls – more sensation than scent. The spider was gone, escaped into the universe, already caught up in a stream of celestial plankton on the way to Titan. I thought of Darwin and the tiny exotic spider, no bigger than a poppy seed, that he’d noticed hitching a ride back to Britain on the rigging of the Beagle; how he’d thought it innocent, been blind to its hunger to rule a new world: ‘The little aeronaut as soon as it arrived on board was very active, running about, sometimes letting itself fall, and then reascending the same thread; sometimes employing itself in making a small and very irregular mesh in the corners between the ropes.’ Little aeronaut indeed.
I watched as the second spider, the one that had stayed behind in our capsule, began to spin a floating web in microgravity. This is when the solitude of certain death came upon me. I didn’t know how to die, how one dies. In her depression before her suicide, Virginia had recited de Montaigne’s words to herself: ‘If you do not know how to die, never trouble yourself; nature will in a moment fully and sufficiently instruct you; she will exactly do that business for you, take no care for it.’ I had spent my life in the company of writers who’d found their way to a perfect solitude: a hermit, a suicide, a vagabond, a lone avant-gardee; writers who had recognised in me a matching contradictory desire never to be let go of, always to be let alone. After the first blast of creation, we were all left homeless, every creature on earth.
The spider’s threads grew thick. I thought of the legend of Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927, that in fact he’d had company in the cockpit in the form of a common fly. Afterwards he’d said it had given him solace knowing something else was alive in his cold little cabin, for all those solitary hours flying across the night ocean.
Around the moon we went, the spider and I.
I, THE ELEPHANT, WROTE THIS
Soul of Elephant
DIED 1987, MOZAMBIQUE
…why, some even say that man himself was made out of what was left over after the elephant had been created …
José Saramago, THE ELEPHANT’S JOURNEY
My twin sister and I, like all young elephants in our herd, were raised on a feast of stories about our ancestors, whose souls glowed at us from constellations in the sky. On certain summer evenings, the elders would point out identifying features among the stars: the tip of a trunk, or the triangular ends of an ear spread out in preparation for a charge – the same shape as the continent of Africa. They would tell us the story of one of these hallowed forebears looking down on us. My sister and I liked to re-enact what we had heard, living out an ancestor’s great moments on earth and imagining what it might feel like to be transmuted into a soul that sparkles forever, wheeling about on an invisible axis.
It was clear to us from early on that only the ancestors who had died a noteworthy death made it into the stars. This fostered in us both a secret longing for a death deserving of a small legend that could be told and retold as the years and generations and eons passed. We decided that a dramatic individual death would be best, such as our ancient ancestor who was killed by a dragon wanting to drink her blood. But mass historical death would be grand – to die along with hundreds of thousands of beasts of burden sacrificed to Yahweh at Solomon’s Temple, to be one of the five thousand animals ordered slaughtered by Roman Emperor Titus at the opening of the Colosseum, to be among the fifteen thousand killed in a single day’s hunt by the Moghul Emperor of India! These outsized deaths seemed to guarantee eternal life in the stars.
* * *
Once my sister and I were a bit older, no longer babies coddled by the maternal force of the herd but still young enough to get away with certain mischief, I decided to ask one of my aunts why it was that all the ancestors whose stories were told and retold, whose distinguishing features we joined the star-dots up above to see, had lived in lands so far away from our native Mozambique. I knew she had a taste for marula bark because of the pleasan
t intoxicating effect of ingesting the beetle pupae embedded in the wood, and I waited until she was swaying slightly before I approached her.
‘We don’t make distinctions between our geographical lineages,’ she said. ‘We believe all elephants share a common ancestor, which makes us all kin, no matter where we live.’
‘But so many of the ancestors in the skies are Indian elephants, or forest elephants from North Africa. What about the African savanna elephants, where are the stories about us?’
‘Oh, but darling, there are stories about us, plenty of them. Most of the souls in the sky lived out their lives right here, in these lands.’ Then she caught herself. ‘How old are you and your sister now?’
‘We’re twelve,’ I lied. We were only eleven.
She hiccuped. ‘On second thought, I suppose there are fewer stories about us, because those Indian and North African ancestors of ours had more interesting lives,’ she said. ‘Being closer to Europe and all.’
I gave up on that line of questioning. ‘But why did they all live so long ago?’
‘It takes time for their souls to appear up in the sky,’ she said.
I sensed my question had caused her some discomfort. ‘How long?’ I pushed.
‘Well,’ she said cautiously, ‘which ancestor’s story have you heard that is closest to our own time?’
‘Castor and Pollux, the sibling zoo elephants,’ I said. ‘The ones who died in the Jardin des Plantes during the Siege of Paris.’
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