by Heekyung Eun
3
THE COSMONAUTS IN 1991
Chapter 5: The Return of the Cosmonauts
With the Vostok launch close at hand, only the third of a total of six trials had been successful. The first spacecraft went off course and was lost in space, and others exploded or burned up. An accident exactly one year earlier in which a fueled rocket waiting for launch exploded, killing 268 people, caused the national news agency Itar-Tass to prepare the obituary of Yuri Gagarin, on board the Vostok, in advance. On the day of the launch, a few minutes before lift-off, a problem was discovered with the device keeping the doorway of the spacecraft airtight. One by one, the thirty-two bolts on the cover had to be loosened and then retightened. As soon as the spacecraft detached from the rocket, it went into a pirouette and nearly drifted off course. There was even a problem with the oxygen supply mechanism in the space suits. At the end of the flight when the spacecraft had returned to earth, the possibility of it landing safely on the ground was not high with Soviet technology of the time. Yuri Gagarin used the ejection seat to escape from the spacecraft at an altitude of 7,000 meters and came down to the ground by parachute. This was kept secret because the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale would acknowledge the feat only if the spacecraft was manned for both takeoff and landing. Yuri Gagarin was the first human to fly in outer space, which means that he was the first among those who left the earth for space to actually return. M did not acknowledge Yuri Gagarin. He maintained that the Soviet cosmonauts who’d gone into space and disappeared forever were indeed the real heroes. The Soviets had sent up the first manned spacecraft in a technologically imperfect state in order to beat the Americans to it. Of course, they left no record of the incident. It would all have been made public had they succeeded, but they didn’t, so the missing Cosmonauts were buried in darkness forever. “It’s precisely the existence of these missing cosmonauts that exposes the violent duplicity of the socialist Soviets,” M would rant.
A year before Gagarin’s successful space flight, Italian radio operators had picked up human voices coming from space.
“S.O.S. to the whole world!”
“Hey, it’s no use. Who’ll come to save us when no one even knows we’re here?”
It was in Russian. Soviet authorities disposed of the missing cosmonauts’ personal documents, and even airbrushed their faces out of all group photographs. There was no sign of the cosmonauts’ existence on earth, but their remains would drift in space for eternity.
K’s concerns lay elsewhere. He gravely accepted the cosmonauts’ state of panic upon returning after the collapse of the Soviet Union as his own. Colonel Yury Romanenko spent 326 days aboard the space station Mir. In a place where night and day remained unchanged and the sun rose and set twice every twenty-four hours, he ate only food from tubes and had to tie his body down when he slept. Romanenko’s long exile opened up the possibility for humankind to colonize space. The Soviets had been deprived of being the first to land on the moon, but they regained supremacy over the Americans with the space station. The cosmonauts were heroes. Now, however, their glorious homeland was disappearing. After 1991, with Russia in chaos, the world would inevitably become a stranger and more frightening place to the cosmonauts than even space.
What had started as an argument over drinks that night gradually turned into a fight as they became more intoxicated. They spoke with rage, using language usually found on a propaganda poster.
“Let’s drink to the garbage in space! Hey, build a monument to them and blast it out there! And why don’t we hold a funeral for human barbarism while we’re at it?”
“Give it a rest! Just think of the chaos then, when the cosmonauts came back from distant space to find that their homeland was gone. Whether they colonized the boundless cosmos or not, what changed their lives was the political reality of their country!”
“You sure love the homeland. If you want to suppress violence, all you need is a hero. What for, the liberation of the people? Should that cause such an immediate collapse?”
“You know it happened like that because the place is swarming with naïve anarchists like you, don’t you?”
“Right. I have no intention, either, of wrangling with freaks like you over this bloody land. Can you live in a completely hopeless, backward country, struggling like an insect to survive? I’m leaving first thing tomorrow. I’ll never set foot here again!”
“You treacherous bastard!”
“If I’m a traitor, then you’re a dogmatist!”
“Do you want to have a go? Fine, let’s do it! I’m ready to sacrifice myself as a warning shot to this damn world and its chaos of ideologies.”
“You know, I’m so fed up with assholes like you and your poses that I’ve already turned my back.”
“Shut your trap and put ‘em up!”
“Okay, come on. You bastard!”
K picked up his glass and smashed it on the floor, and at almost the exact same time, M pushed the table back and stood up.
M’s girlfriend, who hadn’t left his side even for a moment and would normally have been making a sharp criticism on the obligation forced only upon women to maintain their virginity, was wedging herself between K and M as the argument escalated. With night deepening, she’d fallen asleep flat on the table at some point, snoring now and then as if voicing a grievance with M. What had awoken her was the sound of K and M struggling to take hold of one another. She shot up and with a lightning quick movement slapped M on the cheek, shouting, “You prick!” With the three of them taking turns sitting and standing around a table dizzyingly scattered with liquor bottles, a quarrel was averted.
I too was drunk beyond my control then. I’d taken pens one by one from my pockets, and I’d torn a page out of the manuscript in my bag and scribbled something. Maybe I just wanted to act drunk, even for myself, since I knew no one was paying any attention to me. Actually, around that time in my life I’d get teary-eyed at the slightest provocation, and then in that mood scribble down something resembling poetry. I thought that everything in the world had a special significance, so I would always seek to learn what I could from anything, no matter how trivial it may seem.
I suddenly came to my senses walking across a bridge over the Han River with dried vomit on my sleeve and my pants wet in the front. I didn’t have my black vinyl bag. I stopped periodically to lean my staggering body over the bridge railing and stare at the light from the lampposts shimmering in the black water. I felt my hot cheeks cool down.
I wonder if that was the day I wrote the letter to Eun-sook. And if I actually sent it, and if it contained lines like, let’s meet on this day in exactly fifteen years. Would she have believed it despite all the ambiguity and uncertainty? I wonder if there was a time when we loved each other. It was a sincere letter, but it was full of childish sentences. I think the last line was especially touching, something like, “I’ll remember you for the rest of my life. You and I, the lonely Cosmonauts. Our point of return was at River Seine. Farewell, my youth. Oh, Yuri Gagarin’s blue star.”
I wonder if I said the same thing when I tossed the bag carrying the manuscript down into the river. “Don’t chase after some achievement as brilliant as the lights in the river. Don’t ever hurry, even if your dreams turn like the orbit of the moon. Don’t rush your stupid, poor ideas like an insect in the ground that doesn’t open its eyes. Farewell, my youth. Oh, Yuri Gagarin’s blue star.”
At 6:35, the editor in chief called again on the intercom. “Sir, I just found out something by chance while speaking with my friend on the phone. She said there’s a café near her office called River Seine.” Before she could say anything else, I envisioned a dimly-lit room clouded with smoke. It was after I’d already remembered that the place was close to my senior’s publishing company where I’d worked as a part-time proofreader. Lampshades with a red checked pattern and wooden tables covered with graffiti. A few chansons were repeated endlessly at regular intervals, and Eun-sook and I were the only p
atrons left at closing time. I always felt choked up when I was around her, and I don’t think it was only because of the cigarette smoke.
With my vinyl bag at my side, I’m climbing the wooden stairs to the publishing company. K climbed those stairs, too, when he came looking for me carrying the manuscript of a novel written by one of his juniors. When I told him that I didn’t know if a story about astronauts would work, K asked me to review the manuscript before he showed it to the boss. The junior may even have been J. Was J also the one sitting next to me at Eunsook’s wedding? I’m not sure. The one certainty is that J has eaten his in-flight meal by now and has probably fallen asleep with earphones in his ears. And because I lost that manuscript fifteen years ago, the author, whoever it was, wrote the whole thing again right from the beginning. Life goes by, so it can’t be changed. But maybe a story that has passed can be rewritten.
The Cosmonauts in 1991
Chapter 6: Farewell, my Youth
Twenty-seven-year-old Soviet Lieutenant Yuri Gagarin left the earth at around nine o’clock in the morning. No one knew what would come of sending humankind into space. Inside the single-passenger spacecraft Vostok, meaning “east,” Gagarin breathed in oxygen through his spacesuit. When he arrived in outer space, he swam like a fetus in a womb, and holding his breath like a baby ready to be born, he waved his arms. Floating all alone in the heart of a deep blackness tens of thousands of kilometers from Earth, Gagarin was already drifting away from the existence of his ego. With everything dark and weightless, it was like nothingness. He was anxious and lonely. Just then, a globe shining with light appeared before Yuri Gagarin’s eyes. In the very middle of a universe filled with black empty space, a beautiful star was there, floating mysteriously. Gagarin trembled. “Is this why I penetrated space and travelled such a distance, just to see that star?” Finally, Yuri Gagarin muttered toward the star he had left and into which he would once again be born: “April 12th, 1961. The Earth is blue.”
I left work at exactly seven o’clock. Finding a long-unused briefcase in the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet, I dusted it off and put the manuscript inside. I didn’t meet anyone in the six-floor elevator trip down. The whole world was strangely quiet, like a still image. The only distinct sound was the sound of my footsteps.
The Earth’s blueness signifies that it’s a planet of water. Even J, looking down at Los Angeles from the sky, would be able to see the blue water of the swimming pools between the palm trees. Like Yuri Gagarin, J went on a long journey in order to see his own world from a distance. To renew himself thoroughly, he left his youth and his cigarettes with me.
Today I could be standing, just for a moment, at the crossroads of time. In Yuri Gagarin’s world, it may be possible to fold time as one does with origami. When I think of time as a long belt, a very long space lies between the day I went to that woman’s wedding fifteen years ago and today. If I took the period of time from the wedding to yesterday, folded it up and sent it to a black hole, everything would be different. It would slip through the black hole and move to another dimension. Fifteen years of time, including the wedding, would vanish. Then she wouldn’t have gotten married, and I wouldn’t have thrown away the manuscript. K wouldn’t be dead, and M wouldn’t have yet left for Germany. My letter wouldn’t yet be written. And because the day after that day would be today, I could go and meet Eun-sook carrying the briefcase containing the manuscript. The Blue Star that was thrown into the river would’ve been retrieved and put into a different briefcase.
Tomorrow morning I should hear from J that he’s arrived. He’s at an altitude of ten thousand meters now, and we’re completely cut off. I also feel cut off from the world’s time, as well as from all the days of my life. Tonight’s an exception, an unknown time that doesn’t belong anywhere in my life. It’s gradually getting darker. The spring night envelops the streets in a mysterious light. Deep into the alleys, the air is filled with the scent of flowers, and the stars are cold and distinct.
Every time a poem flows from my mouth, my heart aches. With hot tears running from my eyes down to the ground, I lament the end of love. The air in the alley is damp from the breath of my drunken friends who’ve come outside to urinate. The high musical notes drawn dizzyingly on my t-shirt wobble endlessly up into the air. Beyond the sound of a glass breaking and a woman’s muffled cries in some bar, someone’s singing a song in a trembling voice. Someone’s in the corner with a red pen, writing a letter without spaces, and his friends are crouching in the alley, sharing a cigarette, when, without realizing it, they all look up at the stars in the sky. Yuri Gagarin’s beautiful and troubled youth is up there, too. From a spring night in 1992 at River Seine, the point of our return.
EUN HEEKYUNG made her entrance to the Korean literary scene in 1995 with her short novel Duet. The next year won the Munhakdongne Fiction Award for her novel A Gift from a Bird, which portrayed the world of adults through the skeptical eyes of a 12-year-old narrator. Since her debut she has written ten books, including six collections of short stories and four novels. Secrets and Lies, published in 2005, is the three-generation story of two interrelated families.
YOONJIN PARK and CRAIG BOTT are married and live in Canada with their two daughters. This is their first published translation.
SORA KIM-RUSSEL is a Korean-American poet and translator originally from California and now living in Seoul, South Korea. Her translations include Gong Ji-young’s Our Happy Times (Short Books, 2014) and Shin Kyung-sook’s I’ll Be Right There (Other Press, 2014). She teaches at Ewha Womans University.
JAE WON CHUNG was born in Seoul and lives in New York.
SELECTED DALKEY ARCHIVE TITLES
MICHAL AJVAZ, The Golden Age.
The Other City.
PIERRE ALBERT-BIROT, Grabinoulor.
YUZ ALESHKOVSKY, Kangaroo.
FELIPE ALFAU, Chromos.
Locos.
JOE AMATO, Samuel Taylor’s Last Night.
IVAN NGELO, The Celebration.
The Tower of Glass.
ANTÓNIO LOBO ANTUNES, Knowledge of Hell.
The Splendor of Portugal.
ALAIN ARIAS-MISSON, Theatre of Incest.
JOHN ASHBERY & JAMES SCHUYLER, A Nest of Ninnies.
ROBERT ASHLEY, Perfect Lives.
GABRIELA AVIGUR-ROTEM, Heatwave and Crazy Birds.
DJUNA BARNES, Ladies Almanack.
Ryder.
JOHN BARTH, Letters.
Sabbatical.
DONALD BARTHELME, The King.
Paradise.
SVETISLAV BASARA, Chinese Letter.
MIQUEL BAUÇÀ, The Siege in the Room.
RENÉ BELLETTO, Dying.
MAREK BIENCZYK, Transparency.
ANDREI BITOV, Pushkin House.
ANDREJ BLATNIK, You Do Understand.
Law of Desire.
LOUIS PAUL BOON, Chapel Road.
My Little War.
Summer in Termuren.
ROGER BOYLAN, Killoyle.
IGNÁCIO DE LOYOLA BRANDÃO, Anonymous Celebrity.
Zero.
BONNIE BREMSER, Troia: Mexican Memoirs.
CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE, Amalgamemnon.
BRIGID BROPHY, In Transit.
The Prancing Novelist.
GERALD L. BRUNS, Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language.
GABRIELLE BURTON, Heartbreak Hotel.
MICHEL BUTOR, Degrees.
Mobile.
G. CABRERA INFANTE, Infante’s Inferno.
Three Trapped Tigers.
JULIETA CAMPOS, The Fear of Losing
Eurydice.
ANNE CARSON, Eros the Bittersweet.
ORLY CASTEL-BLOOM, Dolly City.
LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE, North.
Conversations with Professor Y.
London Bridge.
MARIE CHAIX, The Laurels of Lake Constance.
HUGO CHARTERIS, The Tide Is Right.
ERIC CHEVILLARD, Demolishing Nisard.
The Author and Me.
&
nbsp; MARC CHOLODENKO, Mordechai Schamz.
JOSHUA COHEN, Witz.
EMILY HOLMES COLEMAN, The Shutter of Snow.
ERIC CHEVILLARD, The Author and Me.
ROBERT COOVER, A Night at the Movies.
STANLEY CRAWFORD, Log of the S.S.
The Mrs Unguentine.
Some Instructions to My Wife.
RENÉ CREVEL, Putting My Foot in It.
RALPH CUSACK, Cadenza.
NICHOLAS DELBANCO, Sherbrookes.
The Count of Concord.
NIGEL DENNIS, Cards of Identity.
PETER DIMOCK, A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family.
ARIEL DORFMAN, Konfidenz.
COLEMAN DOWELL, Island People.
Too Much Flesh and Jabez.
ARKADII DRAGOMOSHCHENKO, Dust.
RIKKI DUCORNET, Phosphor in Dreamland.
The Complete Butcher’s Tales.
The Jade Cabinet.
The Fountains of Neptune.
WILLIAM EASTLAKE, The Bamboo Bed.
Castle Keep.
Lyric of the Circle Heart.
JEAN ECHENOZ, Chopin’s Move.
STANLEY ELKIN, A Bad Man.
Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers.
The Dick Gibson Show.
The Franchiser.
The Living End.
Mrs. Ted Bliss.
FRANÇOIS EMMANUEL, Invitation to a Voyage.
PAUL EMOND, The Dance of a Sham.
SALVADOR ESPRIU, Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth.
LESLIE A. FIEDLER, Love and Death in the American Novel.
JUAN FILLOY, Op Oloop.