Public Loneliness: Yuri Gagarin's Circumlunar Flight (13 page)

“Cedar, this is Dawn-2. Confirm
you are rotating again.”

“Dawn-2, there is a little
wobble, but it’s as good as it can be. Thank you much.”

“Thank you, Yura.”

Soon it is the dinner period. I
eat halfheartedly.

I close the working porthole
cover and place the temporary paper shield over the other. I can shut out the
sun but cannot turn off my mind.

The sheer number of technical
issues on this mission seems to defy all logic and probability. The problems with
the stellar alignment telescope, and the unnecessary waste of propellant
because of it. The S5.53 failing. The problem with the stuck thruster that
caused us to consume most of the rest of the propellant.

When you are awake, your thoughts
are ordered and rational, logical and smooth like glass. But in the night the
clear glass shatters and everything is sharp and strange and chaotic.

•••

I find my mind wandering back to
Komarov, to the launch that had been scheduled for late April.

There had been problems
developing the Union. Everyone knows it is the craft of the future—even my moon
ship is derived from it—but it was not quite ready back then. The unmanned test
craft had failed.

It seemed they were planning on
launching anyway. But there was a technical report detailing ongoing issues
with the craft that needed to be resolved. Was I influenced by what Vysotsky
had said about the state? Was it some other factor, some defiance that had been
growing in me? I do not know. But I saw to it that the right people saw this
report. Never mind how—I made sure that the State Commission didn’t
rubber-stamp the approval for Komarov’s mission. Instead they decided on an
additional test flight—during which the parachutes failed, necessitating a
redesign of the parachute compartments.

Given these disruptions, and
given the desire to do something undeniably more spectacular than Gemini, the
circumlunar flight became more and more appealing. But I cannot help thinking
that I made some enemies during all of this.

In my rational mind, I know these
thoughts don’t make sense. People are not quite that evil in real life, only in
the movies. And Komarov saw to it that they executed the solar rotation burn
very competently. Still there is that nagging thought: would anyone be happy if
I don’t come back?

•••

Usually I look at the hammer and
sickle and see it as it’s supposed to be: a symbol of the revolution. Workers
and peasants united. And yet the two can be understood differently.

You probably haven’t heard of
Nelyubov. I won’t go into details, but suffice it to say he was an alcoholic,
and he disgraced himself. And after his night of disaster, and before they sent
him off, he described the hammer and sickle in this negative sense. He said:
The state has to cut you down to size, and it has to hammer you into line.

As deputy chief of cosmonaut
training, I had to do my share of hammering. But usually the discipline fell to
Kamanin. And while Nelyubov got the worst of it, none of us has entirely
avoided our time beneath the hammer.

During one of my goodwill trips
to Paris, back in 1965 or so, I’d been given a beautiful sports car, a red
Matra. It was an exquisite ride, a jet on wheels, and I enjoyed it immensely.

On one boring day back at the
training center, Blondie and I started talking about it over lunch. He wanted
to see what it could do, so I took him for a ride. When the guard opened the
gate, we tore off, ripping down the back roads, raising rooster tails of dust.
As usual for us, we got into a heated discussion; we were headed down the road
at a good 160 kilometers an hour, and I took my hands from the wheel to make an
emphatic point. And his eyes—oh, the look in his eyes! It was a couple seconds
before he realized I was steering with my knees. I pointed—got you!—and put my
hands back on the wheel.

It was a while before I could
talk, I was laughing so hard. When we finally stopped at the next crossroads, I
told him: “You should see your face! You went white!”

He shook his head, chuckling now
at last. “And you were red, you were laughing so hard.”

“Better red than dead,” I said: a
little slogan, something I had heard a while before.

We were still laughing on the way
back through the gate at Star City. The guard saluted but did not make eye
contact with me. When we made it back to the office, I found out why.

“Yuri, your car is…attracting
attention,” Kamanin said.

“Attention from whom. The
guards?”

“I ordered them to keep an eye
out. I got a phone call last week about it from Suslov. From Suslov!” (He was
agitated—Suslov was and is, of course, a Politburo member; this was not long
after Khruschev’s fall, and everyone knew Suslov had Brezhnev’s ear.) “There
were photographs of you in the Western papers.”

“He shouldn’t have been reading
them,” I pointed out.

Kamanin glared.

“It’s the only way I get to fly
these days,” I added.

“Yuri, you know how these things
appear. Word gets around. We all know we’re in a…privileged place. But only by
virtue of the great things we’re doing. So we don’t want to be flashy about
it.”

“Suslov…” I seethed. “They’re
bureaucrats. We, you and I, have risked our lives for the state.”

“For the state, or for yourself?”
he asked. “Look, Yuri, you’re a good party member, by and large. You need to be
a little less flashy. The car’s…bright. Very noticeable.”

“We’re living simply here. They
offered to build us dachas. Brezhnev himself offered dachas for the whole
communist corps. I turned him down so we could live communally, in apartments.”

“A dacha is quiet and out of the
way, at least. This…”

“Are you ordering me to get rid
of it? It might be bad for morale…if we don’t get to do anything extra, what
are we risking our lives for?”

“You don’t have to get rid of it.
Just…paint it, perhaps.”

“So you’re saying my car’s too
red. It’s too red, so it isn’t red enough. And if it was less red, then it
would be more red.”

“If it was less red, you would
look more red,” Kamanin pointed out.

“Very well, I’ll have it painted
black. I’m sorry if I put you in a bad spot.”

“I knew you’d understand,”
Kamanin said, at last.

This was but one episode in an
ongoing conversation of sorts between us—a discussion that had started when I’d
made my flight. We were both Heroes of the Soviet Union. (He was, in fact, the
very first, while my medal was stamped with the rather humbling number 11575, a
simple reminder of how many had done so much for the state during the Great
Patriotic War.) He, too, had been famous—a daring Arctic air rescue, a truly
brave feat of aviation at a time before the war when the Soviet Union desperately
needed its heroes, its Kamanins and Stakhanovs.

And it occurred to me afterwards
that the state really didn’t know what to do with me. Khrushchev had fallen,
and I was associated with Khrushchev, but they could not get rid of all of
yesterday’s heroes. I’d been put on a lot of posters. The imagery of my flight
had become central to the state’s sense of self: the imagery of progress, of
undeniable accomplishment.

Surely you have seen these
images! (I, myself, did not see them until later.) The tremendous concrete
basin, like something from Stalin’s wet dreams. The steel support arms falling
away and the R-7 rising, standing steady on a pillar of fire. The massive
concrete pit now filling with flame. The shot down at the rocket’s shadow
moving away from the launch pad. A dark dart, a shadow ship sailing smoothly
across the steppe, with a heatwave wake trailing behind. Then from orbit: a
blurry television image. My black-and-white eyes. Smile hidden by the
spacesuit’s neck ring.

And of course, the reception in
Moscow. My flapping shoelace as I walked across the tarmac to report to
Khrushchev. Then, the motorcade. Me riding up front with Khrushchev, and
Korolev a few cars behind us, unheralded and anonymous. The solid red mass of
Lenin’s tomb. Then: standing up there. Smiling and waving. Innocent. Everyone
has seen these things, and so have I. But to them they are real, and to me they
are just shadows of what I saw.

As I said before, there were
posters in the crowd, gigantic posters of Lenin, and posters of me, just as
large.

Image is, of course, important,
but only to a point. When you look at a poster, do you stop and think what it
conceals? For surely a poster’s a way of saying: “Look at this! Don’t look at
whatever’s behind this, look at this!” Does it matter what’s behind it?
Perhaps. If the poster’s attached to a cement wall, the poster’s incidental,
and you can replace it as needed. But if the backing is rotting, worm-eaten
wood, the poster may be the only thing holding it together. At some point,
that’s a lot to ask of a poster.

And some said I didn’t deserve
the attention, that I, after all, hadn’t done anything to compare with the
heroes of the Great Patriotic War. (Surely this is one of the defining facts of
20
^th
century life—if you were an adult in the second half of the
century, you must hear endlessly from those who were adults in the first half
about how good you have it, how you don’t know what it’s like to endure
hardship. As if my family didn’t endure the German occupation! As if I didn’t
see my own brother hung before my eyes to within an inch of his life!)

These were all just whispers. But
I knew I would be a fool if I didn’t at least pay attention to them. Especially
after that talk with Kamanin. I sent the car to the garage to be painted, and
soon it was October, and it seemed wise to leave it inside all winter and let
the various storms blow over.

Soon afterwards, in early 1966,
there was a retrospective on state television on the fifth anniversary of my
flight, April 12
^th
, which is now of course called Cosmonautics Day.
Valya insisted I watch it at home with the girls, and I couldn’t help but
notice everything had been edited, shortened, changed. Virtually every shot of
Khrushchev had been taken out; it was as if I’d gone into space of my own accord,
a spontaneous ascension into the heavens, the glorification of one man as
representative of the people. No mention of Khrushchev at all.

He is not dead, of course. Such
things happened under Stalin; people were erased from the official photographs
as they fell out of favor, and it always meant they were dead. (Such things
have even happened recently! Bondarenko, for instance, was removed from some
photographs after his death, which has helped feed the absurd rumors about lost
cosmonauts. I don’t know if I’ll have a chance to tell you about Bondarenko.
Suffice it to say it was a tragic story, an absurd little catastrophe that did
not bring credit to anyone involved.) Khrushchev has been edited out, but he is
simply on house arrest. So the state is not so cruel any more. But clearly even
Khrushchev is dispensable.

And despite all the attention
I’ve gotten, I know that everyone is, in the end, dispensable. Even me. Even
you. If you drop dead tomorrow, those around you may mourn, but they will get
along without you.

But I’d already made up my mind,
after that talk with Kamanin, that I wouldn’t give them reason to carry on
without me. As much as I hate to say it, it was an incentive: to cut back on
the drinking, to get my head down and work, to find a way back up here.

•••

In the night, time passes
strangely.

With the interior lights off and
the shades in place, the only light is the soft glow of the panel, the
pushbuttons and the gauges and the voltmeter.

Before East-1, one of the
automated test flights had oriented itself improperly before it fired its
retrorockets. It was supposed to turn itself so the engine was facing in the
direction of the orbital sunrise, just as my flight would do some months later.
But it did the opposite, and instead of causing the orbit to decay, the
retrorocket pushed it into a higher orbit. It did not fall back to earth until
1965.

If I miss the atmosphere, I will
end up in an elliptical orbit. We may exhaust the reentry thrusters to try and
lower the low point of the orbit. There is no clear place where the atmosphere
ends and space begins, but if we bring the low point low enough, atmospheric
drag will eventually bring me down.

I wonder, briefly, how long my
ordeal will last. Then I remind myself: it is pointless to speculate on such
matters.

I find myself thinking of
Maresyev flying over a sea of trees, the undulating green of a vast forest.
Then shot down, stranded in those woods, hobbling on shattered feet for 18 days
until he reached Soviet lines. (And afterwards, of course, learning to dance on
wooden feet so he could convince the doctors he was fit enough to fly.)

I think, too, of the old man in
Hemingway’s book, far out in the blue sea, battling the giant fish, hands cut
and bleeding, and no one there to help him. I reread it recently and now
various phrases are floating through my mind. One about how the old man took
his suffering as it came. And the old man’s assessment of the fish: his fight
has no panic in it. And another about the old man, when he was in the midst of
his ordeal: he tried not to think, but only to endure.

•••

On January 12, 1966, Blondie and
I went to Sergei Pavlovich’s house to celebrate his fifty-ninth birthday.

We came bearing a bronze statue, a
heavy sculpture of a man ascending towards the heavens. Every member of the
cosmonaut corps had signed it, and there was a plaque at its base that said:
TO
THE STARS
.

It was quite a task wrestling
that statue out of my car and up to his apartment—it weighed 50 kilograms! The
walks were icy, and we were slipping and sliding and swearing; Blondie even
tore a button from his overcoat.