PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (15 page)

When he opened his eyes again, a butterfly was dancing in front of them, orange and violet, in a spastic, unballistic flight. It was a gash of color against the anticolor landscape: the black-spotted scraps of melting snow, the concrete buildings weeping dull brown rust at their joints, stones and pieces of rotten timber strewn among prehistoric construction debris, a freight car whose sides had been eaten away by decades of neglect, a smashed toy balsa airplane abandoned in the mud, the mud bubbling gray and oily, the weeds poking out of the mud in rashes, the trash littered around a bin at the edge of a wall. But the butterfly flew above it all, improbably alive. Korolev stared until it dwindled out of sight. He was, in the end, a romantic fellow; we are a romantic people.

And then for the first time in days he truly slept, the kind of sleep we pursue and capture in our dry, strawmattressed beds, amid the babylike gurgles of steam heat. No dreams visited him as he reclined with his back to the tree.

He awoke with a start hours later, the sun still hard in his face, but now there was a man’s finger in his ruined mouth. It was a thick finger, strong and coarse. The old man was stooping before him, a brown earthen pot clutched to his ragged coat. He removed his finger, dipped it in the pot and pushed it back into Korolev’s mouth.

As he ran his finger along Korolev’s gums, Korolev realized that he no longer possessed teeth. But the firm press against his bleeding, open gums didn’t hurt.

“This is
kolba,”
the man said, with a high, almost girlish voice. “You will live.”

Korolev submitted to the old man’s ministrations,
too weak to repel them. The taste of the ointment was similar to garlic’s, which was not unwelcome after a week in which he had tasted nothing but blood. Korolev closed his eyes again to shade them from the glare of the sun. A warm washcloth gently massaged his face and beard. He kept his eyes shut a moment longer. When he opened them, the man was gone.

The bleeding had stopped and Korolev now felt well enough to stand. He staggered off and later that day found a doss in a small barrackslike dormitory at the edge of the city. He stayed there for a week, near the stove, resting and making notes on scraps of paper. In that single week, he recalled and improved six designs that he had worked on before his arrest. While other souls in transit bustled around him, Korolev considered the technical problems inherent in flight above the earth’s atmosphere, particularly involving the ascent trajectory and in-flight guidance. He became convinced that human flight beyond the exosphere was possible, even inevitable, even obligatory. He jotted notes on the lift requirements for an expedition to the surface of the moon. Alongside a rough diagram of the launch vehicle, he wrote the word
go!

Then he realized that these sketches were either currently state secrets or would be in the future. If they were found on his person, he would be further incriminated. He burned them in the stove when no one was looking; then he dreaded that someone had been looking, or would somehow recover the embers. He spit over his shoulder, the first time he had done so since childhood. There was surprising, unshameful comfort to be found
in this act, at least momentarily. The evil that worked on our lives, producing the world’s actual, quotidian brutality, was something magical; to spit or to cross oneself was to pretend to a magic of one’s own.

Korolev resumed his journey across the continent. When he finally reached Moscow, his case was reopened and his sentence was reduced, to eight years. Just as he was about to be returned to the Far East, the engineer Andrei Tupolev intervened and had him transferred to the
sharashka
on Ulitsa Radio, the prison-laboratory in which Tupolev and other aviation engineers were incarcerated on political charges no less vague than his.

He spent the war in the Tupolev
sharashka,
the Special Design Bureau of the 4th Special Department of the NKVD, which was eventually moved to Omsk and the Caucasus as the Nazis advanced across Soviet territory. First assigned to the wing design of the Tu-2 light bomber, Korolev then worked on the liquid-fueled rocket boosters for the Petlyakov-2 dive bomber, the auxiliary rocket engines for the Lavochkin-5 fighter plane, the D-1 shortrange ballistic rocket, and the D-2 winged guided missile. His mouth was fitted for dentures, but his heart remained weak, his complexion pallid. After the war, although not yet officially rehabilitated, he was allowed to establish a plant in the small town of Podlipki outside Moscow. It was there that, identified in the Soviet press only as the Chief Designer, Korolev developed the R-7. It was the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile.

 

Yuri had been tested for patience; there had been a battery of clever, sneaky, potentially humiliating tests that
he had passed easily and for which he had dissembled his contempt. But he had also been tested for his alacrity and decisiveness. He decided now that Tania had been gone long enough, he would fetch her back.

Opening the door, he peered through the sliver of light and oriented himself within the infirmary. A long well-scrubbed hall stretched before him, its lights dimly, greenishly fluorescent. The shorter hall was to his right. He recalled his passage around the outside of the building. Marshak’s office would be on the other side of the infirmary, virtually diagonal to the storeroom. If so, then Grigoriev’s room was on this side, down the long hall.

Yuri followed his deduction, padding lightly. The first room was dark, uninhabited, as was the second. A cold radiance emanated from the next-to-last room. He furtively glanced in.

Tania wasn’t there. Grigoriev lay in the hospital bed as he had for the past six months, nearly his entire body and head bandaged. The switch to the buzzer was gripped by his right hand, which was unbandaged and immaculate. It was a muscular hand with neatly trimmed nails. It existed in disjointed, mocking opposition to the body. Yuri wondered if Grigoriev always held the switch. And then he frowned. Why hadn’t Tania returned to the storeroom? Yuri stepped through the doorway.

First, he felt tremendous elation. Grigoriev was lying there, not him. It could have been him, but he had been in the air that day, training in a Mig-19. Second was the sweet, pungent odor of disinfectant. Never had Yuri perceived such a perfectly disinfecting scent. His body was cleansed just inhaling it. Although the odor was nothing
like Gzhatsk, it evoked his hometown and the quiet, shrubbery-lined lane that passed behind the house and meandered to school. He recalled the apple and cherry trees and the bushes thick with gooseberries and currants. The odor of the disinfectant was the chemical distillation of Russia, lush and confident, marching ahead to the future.

Yuri wondered whether Grigoriev was aware of his presence and whether he should speak. The patient gripped the buzzer switch with the vitality of someone not only awake, but finely attuned to his surroundings.

“Hey,” Yuri said. He paused. He felt moved to speak. “It’s me. Just thought I’d drop by.”

There was no stirring in the bed, no acknowledgment.

“Yes, tomorrow’s liftoff. Didn’t they tell you? No?” Yuri chuckled. “Perhaps you no longer have clearance.”

He dropped onto a wooden chair by the bed and slid it closer. He spoke in a low voice.

“I don’t want you to think I’m anxious about the flight. That’s not why I’m not sleeping. The R-7’s good, so is the spaceship, they’ve been tested. I’m perfectly confident. Honestly, I’m just wandering around tonight, looking for a little action. You know Tania, the one who was just here? Exquisite, really. It’s too bad you can’t see the nurses. They’ve picked them well. I’m sorry for you, pal. But what can I do? I’ve got to live my life, you’ve got to live yours. Look, I’ll give it to her good. Just like you would have, if you had the chance. So figure I’m doing it on your behalf. Really, I am.” Yuri laughed. “I’m going to make love to her for the whole cosmonaut corps, for all mankind!”

Yuri stood, vaguely dissatisfied with his speech. Tomorrow he would be obliged to make another one, to the launch crew assembled at the base of the rocket. He’d need to ask the Chief Designer to write it. He wandered over to the window and looked through the blinds. The sky had cleared and Virgo, the Virgin, was visible in the south.

The buzzer sounded, Yuri started. He turned and glowered at the patient, in dismay at Grigoriev’s betrayal. They had been through much together: the tests, the training, a survival course in the Urals. Now Grigoriev had slightly raised the switch in his direction, as if he were firing at Yuri with it.

But the gun’s retort was not a single, insistent razz. Grigoriev was squeezing the switch to produce a series of short and long pulses. Yuri recognized the letters of the telegraphic alphabet:
Go.
Grigoriev was telling him to leave? Because his visit was unwelcome? Or was the imperative a warning?

Some kind of quick, surreptitious commotion made itself evident in the corridor, a womanish commotion. There were whispers. A door slammed, alarmingly. Yuri’s expression didn’t change. It wouldn’t be held too much against him if he had left the pilots’ cottage to say a few last words to Grigoriev—the visit might even be incorporated in his legend—but he preferred not to get caught at all. And he still had to find Tania.

Grigoriev repeated the sequence.
Go!
Now Yuri took it as an encouragement.

“See you later,” he said.

As he exited Grigoriev’s hospital room, footsteps approached around the corner. They didn’t belong to Tania. They were too heavy. The shoes’ heels tapped hard against the wood, their dot-dot-dash spelling Marshak. Yuri scurried in the opposite direction, back down the corridor.

He reentered the storeroom, closed the door, and discerned at once that the blinds had been drawn, immersing the room in a dark more viscid than before. Alert as a wild animal, he paused and considered the significance of the closed blinds. Either Tania had closed them or someone else had. He kept his body very still, sniffing, listening hard, and waiting for his pupils to dilate.

Perfume. Not Tania’s. He waited for his night vision to soak up the stray quanta still loose in the room and careening against the linen and the glassware. In the corner where he had hidden earlier, someone else now concealed himself, huddling against a pillar of towels. No, herself. Indeed, two or three women pressed against each other in the corner, given away by the whites of their eyes. Zinia? Maybe also the tall, long-haired nurse he liked. Was her name Ludmilla? The third shade he didn’t recognize at all, except to exclude her from the possibility of being Tania.

He did not look directly at the nurses, pretending not to see them. He was unsure of the situation, but guessed that it required a display of limitation. Most of the psychological tests had been like that. Although it was easy to calculate the correct answers to the questions and perform the desired behavior, you had to show that the answers and behavior weren’t calculated. The Chief Designer
had been looking for a degree of openheartedness and sincerity that would indisputably distinguish the New Man. Yuri had reasoned that his own openheartedness and sincerity would be incriminated by a too-evident manifestation of self-knowledge.

“Tania?” he whispered.

A giggle was brutally repressed.

He whispered her name again. After a long pause one of the girls, Ludmilla, came near. She moved tentatively, reaching out to the room’s fixtures for guidance. She couldn’t see in the dark. He rotated his body in apposition to hers.

“Yes,” she replied in a toneless whisper, pressing against him.

He whispered Tania’s name again and kissed Ludmilla, who was nearly a head taller than Tania. Another titter rattled around the corner of the storeroom as Yuri prolonged the kiss, grinding against her. The charade wouldn’t last much longer. His hands gently but swiftly probed as much as they could, acquiring a full tactile picture of her legs, breasts, and buttocks.

Ludmilla hadn’t expected all this, it was a bit too much, and she was almost pulling away, but not quite. Her mouth tasted minty, as if it had just dissolved a sweet. She was a long and angular girl, not as soft a ride as the others perhaps, but very much all right.

Someone passed behind them, on the way to the light switch. Yuri’s right hand squeezed hard between Ludmilla’s legs and she gasped just as the room was flooded with light and hilarity. The two other nurses, chief nurse Zinia and the one whose name he didn’t
know, were laughing, laughing, laughing and trying to smother their laughter in piles of tears-and-mascarastained linen.

“Shhh,” Ludmilla said. She laughed too, a kind of dry, weighted heave that Yuri recognized as forced. Her face had gone blotchy. “Marshak will hear us.”

Yuri smirked and feigned embarrassment. He had quickly disengaged himself from the nurse and acted as if he were still blinded by light and surprise. But he didn’t want to amuse them so much that their laughter would escape the storeroom.

“The false bride,” he conceded. This was one of our customs, to present the bridegroom with an obvious impostor before the ceremony. Yuri knew it well. Only four years earlier, on the day of his marriage to Valya, he had entered a room where her twelve-year-old sister had waited in a white veil, much to the witnesses’ amusement. When he removed the veil, the poor girl had suddenly spouted tears. The pretense had been too exciting and had brushed too close to her secret: she loved him too.

Now he said, “What have you done with Tania?”

The nurses responded with every possible expression of stifled amusement. They snorted, snickered, covered their faces, held their sides, and fell against each other. Yuri studied their involuntary contortions; in the future he would become a connoisseur of such lovely, revealing disfigurement.

Only Ludmilla held herself back. She was a country girl perhaps no more than eighteen years of age, with a head of thick, copper red curls and a wide, round face that had still not lost its flush.