Ascent by Jed Mercurio

by Ascent (com v4. 0)

  One year was the normal tour of duty in the Arctic, one year or at most two, but after three and a half years, Yefgenii received orders in the spring of 1959 that he remain in Franz Josef Land for the remainder of his flying career. This was his exile, yet he clung to a fragile hope. One day the American bombers would cross the ice in earnest and Ivan the Terrible would rise again.

  Having been beaten by Sputnik, the United States declared its intention to send the first man into space. In April they selected a group of seven test pilots to begin training for spaceflight. Among them were John Glenn, Gus Grissom and Wally Schirra; they’d been distinguished supporting players in Korea but now they were the heroic stars of the Space Race. The Americans called them “astronauts” — star voyagers. Magazines carried their life stories. They appeared on television. In interviews some of them referred to God as if he really existed.

  But the Soviets had more powerful and reliable rockets. Recruitment teams were already travelling out from Moscow. In utmost secrecy they toured VVS bases across the Soviet Union in search of pilots with the talent and courage to venture into space. No one came to Graham Bell.

  Yefgenii flew long, lonely patrols. Afterwards, he stowed his kit in his locker and hung his helmet on the rack. He took the base bus home. A light glowed in the little redbrick house, snow matted the roof, and icicles glistened off the gutters. In the sitting room, the widow nursed their infant son, while their daughter lay sleeping in the bedroom. This was his life. This was him now.

  THE SEASONS CYCLED. Ice moved in great shifts up and down the islands. Snows fell and melted. Yefgenii changed too, the face becoming gaunter, the forehead higher, and so did the world. Both nations had missiles now, not only capable of carrying a bomb from aircraft to target, but rockets that could carry nuclear warheads over oceans and across continents. They were building enough ICBMs to destroy every major city in their enemy’s homeland, enough to destroy civilization. If war came, the missiles would soar high over Franz Josef Land. The fighters were redundant; the job of air defense lay in the gloom of radar stations and SAM silos.

  Two bomber squadrons were removed from Nagurskoye, a fighter squadron from Graham Bell. The crew rooms were airier, the streets and schools quieter. Empty cabins were pulled down, others were left to rot.

  Yefgenii remained, of course. He feared he’d be kept here even if there was only one aircraft, only one man. He looked to the north, the cap of ice and cloud shrouding the curve of the earth like a ridge of white mountains. He longed for a sky filled with metal, but he knew the American bombers would never rise, Ivan the Terrible would never rise again.

  That winter, the winter of 1960–1961, the darkness fell fast. The aurora’s spectral lights shimmered on the cloud tops and on the gleaming metal of his wings and the clear plastic of his visor. His blue eyes swam behind a flickering cascade of reds, greens and blues.

  Icicles glistened on the gutters of the redbrick house. Snow blanketed its roof. The house smelled of cooking. He shook snowflakes off his coat and slapped them off his hat. The widow stood at the stove. The boy slept in the bedroom. As Yefgenii pulled off his boots, the girl told him her news. Yefgenii smiled. Anything that wasn’t flying struck him as unimportant, but he indulged her. The widow took the girl to bed. Yefgenii kissed her as she went and then he sat at the small wooden table in the single downstairs room while a meat stew bubbled on the stove.

  When the widow returned she said, “She keeps asking about the dog.”

  “What dog?”

  “The one in space. What’s this one called?”

  “Chernushka.”

  “We were so sad about Laika, but this one will come back, won’t it? That’s what I told her, anyway.”

  Soviet rockets were carrying dogs into space; the Americans sent chimps. Soon it would be a man. Both nations proclaimed the man would be theirs. The winner would secure the advantage of the military high ground; they would also lay claim to the superior ideology; and the man himself would be renowned for the remainder of human history, longer than there’d be countries.

  The widow put out two bowls and ladled the stew into them. Steam rose from the surface. He stirred the liquid. They sent dogs into space. He felt lower than a dog. “This is good stew,” he said. “Just what I needed,” he said.

  Yuri Gagarin flew into space aboard Vostok 1 on April 12th. Crammed inside a capsule too small for a man of average size, he made one orbit of the earth then landed near the city of Saratov, on the Volga. Premier Nikita Khrushchev himself greeted Gagarin when he returned to Moscow. They stood along with leading Party members atop Lenin’s Mausoleum while the crowd in Red Square cheered in jubilation.

  At Graham Bell that day, Yefgenii Yeremin didn’t fly. The whole country was celebrating the victory over the Americans. Yefgenii admired Gagarin’s valor, admired the qualities he must’ve had in order to win selection ahead of all the other cosmonauts.

  He drank toasts with the other men. They were young, they were full of vigor. Many of them wanted to apply for the space program. It was a new world, and theirs. Yefgenii felt aged beyond his years. The cold and emptiness of the Arctic had bit by bit desiccated the life out of him. He swallowed vodka and studied his reflection floating in the veneer of the bar top.

  He shambled home, alone, drunk.

  Snow fell in clumps and the wind drove it in his eyes. It stuck in his hair and lashes, stung his cheeks, beaded his hat and coat. He was turning white, becoming a ghost that stumbled along the empty streets at the edge of the base, bent against the wind. The wind pushed him to a standstill. Snow blinded him. He threw off his hat and coat. He opened his arms to the wind. He challenged it to drain him to a husk and blow him away. The wind here was strong enough to knock a man over. Yefgenii’s boots slipped on the snow as he struggled to stay upright. A gust caught him off balance and he tumbled.

  The falling snow began to cover him. The wind heaped it against him in a mounting drift. He felt ice biting through his skin. However courageous Gagarin was, however dedicated and resolute he was, however intelligent and personable and handsome he was, a VVS pilot with no combat experience who was so short he needed to sit on a pillow to see out of the cockpit of a MiG-15 had become the first man in space. In less than two hours of flying Yuri Alexeievich Gagarin had become the greatest of all Heroes of the Soviet Union. He’d even been promoted during the flight, not one rank but two, going up a starshii-leitenant and coming down a major. Yuri Gagarin’s single victory over the Americans counted for more than all of Yefgenii Yeremin’s put together. Soon the Americans would be going up too, already rich and famous, some of them men who’d flown over Korea and achieved so much less there than he had.

  New fields had opened for the great powers to battle over; for machines, it towered in the rarefied flight paths of missiles, high above men and airplanes; for men, it lay in space, and Yefgenii Yeremin played no part in any of it.

  He let the cold take him.

  When the widow came looking for him, only his head, shoulder and hip poked out of the snow. “Yefgenii!” She shook him. She could feel how stiff his body was, how cold. “Yefgenii!” His hands were livid, his nose, his lips. “YEFGENII!”

  He moaned.

  She tried to drag him to his feet. She held him up but he fell again.

  “Leave me,” he said.

  She dragged him up again, calling for help. “Let’s get you inside,” she said.

  “Let me die.”

  People came out of one of the houses, men in uniform, coming to help.

  He fell again. He lay there crying, with the widow clinging to him and men barking out orders to get him inside, to get him in front of the fire.

  THE WIDOW NURSED HIM over the next few days. She brought him hot food and hot drinks, she massaged his hands and feet. The tips of his fingers and toes and the tip of his nose were gray from frostbite that would either recede or turn gangrenous.

  She kept a fire burning day and night in the little bedroom t
hey shared. His face turned pink and sweat glistened on the high dome of his forehead, but he said little and his eyes were pale and empty when she looked into them.

  The door to the room hung ajar. One morning it creaked as it swung open a little more. Two tiny faces peered through the gap, one’s eyes at the level of the doorknob, the boy’s, and the other’s, the girl’s, a head higher. Yefgenii turned his pale empty gaze toward them. The widow turned and shooed them; they defied her, which was just like them, but they said nothing, which wasn’t.

  Because the Americans had been beaten, President John Kennedy appealed to Congress for the United States to commit itself to landing a man on the Moon before the end of the decade. To many the proposal seemed ludicrous, of spending vast sums of money on an endeavor carrying so little prospect of success. But then that was the reason to target the Moon: a goal so far beyond current technical capabilities that it gave the United States a fighting chance of overtaking the Soviets.

  The widow kept Yefgenii warm, she kept him well fed. Some days she went without so he would have extra to eat. He watched her with blank eyes. “You could say thank you,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  He watched her go about her routine. She’d gained weight, lost what looks she’d had. She rubbed warmth into his fingers and toes. She massaged the stiffness at the base of his back. She laughed that if his willy had been affected she would be happy to massage that too.

  He found himself laughing in return. He stroked her hair. She peered down at him, surprised by the gesture. He kissed her.

  She gazed back at him, a spark of youth and beauty returning to her eyes. He knew now he’d been wrong all these years to suppose she was one of any number of women who would’ve fulfilled his expectations of a wife. No other would’ve been so devoted, no other would have been so faithful. If you were a romantic, you would call these criteria “love.”

  In the mornings, the children would sneak into their bed. They snuggled with their mother but, now that he wasn’t leaving before dawn for the flight lines, they found him there too. The girl would bounce on his chest. The boy would bury his face in the pillow when he looked at him. He would tickle them and they’d laugh. He’d tickle them and they’d cry. They wouldn’t want to kiss him. They’d want to smother him in kisses. He was discovering these strange creatures of little parts, of soft chubby flesh, of big eyes and unpredictable behavior.

  His strength returned. He walked about the base but there was little for him to do. He had no hobbies or interests. He was not a reader of books. Because of the frostbite in his hands, he wasn’t suitable for a desk job.

  That summer the wall was built to divide Berlin. Cold War tensions accelerated the Arms Race. On a large wasteland to the south of Franz Josef Land, named Novaya Zemlya, the Soviet Union detonated a 100-megaton hydrogen bomb. It was named the Tsar Bomba, the King of Bombs, and for fear of its strength it was detonated at half yield.

  They saw the flash on Graham Bell. Seconds later, they felt the ground tremble. The explosion was nearly four thousand times more powerful than the one that had devastated Hiroshima; it was the biggest explosion recorded on Earth barring natural cataclysms such as the meteorite impact that obliterated the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs had ruled the planet for more than a hundred million years and the nuclear arsenals of man contained energy on a par with that which had made them extinct.

  Yefgenii watched the mushroom cloud ascend. If men destroyed man, this would be their closing vision, the endpaper of history.

  He turned inside. Photographs stood in frames all around the little house. He’d hardly noticed them, these pictures of the widow, the children, some of him in uniform. If one day he was gone from their lives, this would be all that remained. The children would gaze at pictures of this man, they might remember a moment between them and not know for sure if it was a dream or a reality; over time even that memory might be lost.

  One day the widow asked him, “Why did you do it?”

  He lay on his side. He spent many hours like that, awake on the bed in the middle of the day, or slumped in an armchair, his face blank, his mind empty. After she said it, he wanted to roll away from her but she clasped his elbow and held him still.

  “Why did you do it?” she said. “Why did you want to leave me a widow, leave your children without a father?”

  She slapped his head, surprising herself with the suddenness of the action. He stared at her, mute, his eyes the eyes of a dumb animal. She struck him again and again about the head and back and shoulders.

  “Six years we’ve lived here! Six years. Other families suffer for one, they can tell their children next winter won’t be so cold, it won’t be so dark, because daddy will be posted somewhere nice, but what can I tell our children, what can I tell myself? We’ll be here for the rest of our lives!”

  She hit him one last time, but sadness and despair weakened her anger. She said, “Your wife loves you. Your children love you. We’re the only warmth you’ve got.”

  That night, after she’d put the children to bed, they ate supper together at the table in the communal room that served as kitchen, diner and lounge. From time to time the little house trembled under jets passing overhead on routine night patrols.

  “You could take the children somewhere else,” he said. “You could live somewhere warmer. I would send you money, what money you needed. Perhaps you and the children would be happier without me.”

  A spoonful of stew was about to pass her lips. She held it in midair.

  “Who knows how long they’ll keep me here? Maybe till the end.”

  Steam rose off the spoonful of stew. “The end?”

  He hunched his shoulders. He peered down into the bowl between his elbows. “I don’t expect my life to have a happy ending.”

  She said, “Nor do I, Yefgenii Mikhailovich,” and of course that was the reason he’d married her.

  He’d regressed to a man who steps into a bath and displaces no water. Yet he’d found a part of existence hitherto obscure to him. The widow cooked the next supper. The boy travelled under furniture, always pursuing a ball, or being pursued by one. The girl loved to draw. She would hunch at the table, with her fine blonde hair fringing her eyes, choosing colours from a fistful of pencils. He’d come close to leaving their lives, and now, for the first time, he feared what it would mean if they left his.

  Before winter came, the frostbite began to recede. The doctor was ordered to visit him, and, as he conducted his examination, he asked if he’d intended to kill himself. “I got drunk celebrating the triumph of Comrade Gagarin,” Yefgenii said. “I fell and couldn’t get up.” The doctor asked him if he’d lain in the snow because he’d wanted to die and Yefgenii said, “I was so drunk I didn’t appreciate the danger, I just fell asleep, like a drunken idiot.”

  “You’ve been here a long time, Kapetan. Did you lose hope?”

  Yefgenii shook his head, a firm movement, a fixed look. “The toughest flying conditions in the VVS, the Americans so close you can smell their fat. I belong here.”

  The doctor nodded and made a note.

  Yefgenii Yeremin was pronounced fit to fly. He’d continue to serve out his days. In the authorities’ eyes his collapse in the snow proved he considered his own life as expendable as they did, and perhaps one day this would be useful to know.

  Alan Shepard was America’s first man in space, and Gus Grissom the second. In 1962 John Glenn became their first astronaut to orbit the Earth. Wally Schirra followed.

  The Soviet Union answered by keeping men in orbit longer. The next stage was already in development: to launch a two-man crew, then to operate outside the capsule. Now that both nations had proven to themselves that their rockets worked and their men could operate in space, they were ready to commit the necessary resources. Perhaps it would even divert attention from obliterating each other. Each nation’s goal was simple: the enemy must not be allowed to fly his flag over the surface of the Moon. The Space Race had a
finishing line.

  Ivan the Terrible patroled the Arctic seas, invisible, unknown. He waited, always he waited, for American wings to rise across the white ridge at the top of the world. His own wings turned, the endless patrol went on.

  IN THE FIRST WEEK OF APRIL, the Sun rose at midnight and set in early evening. By the end of the month, it had stopped setting at all. It was their eighth spring on Graham Bell. Gulls and kittiwakes circled the volcanic outcrops. Once again the ice cap had begun its long recession but only the southern isles were released, never this one.

  Yefgenii let himself out of the little redbrick house. He eased the door shut so as not to wake the widow and the children. A few other men were emerging from their houses, leaving their wives and children asleep. The bus paused at the stop; he mounted the step and nodded an acknowledgment to the driver. Two more men entered the bus, talking to each other, laughing; they nodded at Yefgenii but sat elsewhere.

  Today was May Day, the festival of the worker and of spring: May Day 1963. The whole country was starting two days of celebration. Only essential personnel were required to work. Yefgenii was one of the unlucky ones.

  After met brief, Yefgenii put on his kit. His hands ached with weariness as he endured the routine of zipping into his immersion suit and g-suit. Then he slumped in a chair in the crew room. For the rest of the country there were plans for parties and parades — his children had been making banners all week — but he’d read, he’d sleep, he’d update his logbook.

  Hours evaporated in the crew room. There was only one crew on duty, and they didn’t fly till afternoon. The zveno leader, Kapetan Ges, gave the men a twenty-minute warning. He passed out cigarettes and the men strolled clear of the fuel bowsers, chatting among themselves and with the ground crew.

  Yefgenii found a space nearby to bend and stretch. He worked his fingers hard into the hollows of his back, to keep it supple. Ges watched him. This was Ivan the Terrible. He’d noted already he was an outstanding flier, quick and precise in formation, a smooth stick in maneuvering, wheels banging the numbers at every touchdown. Ges stubbed out his cigarette and ordered the other pilots to stretch too.