At first Vasilisa is reticent to talk about herself, but Roth draws her out. Her parents were academics: her mother a mathematician, her father a philosopher. She had earned her medical degree and then a doctorate in orbital mechanics at a very young age and been selected for the space program by one of the leading members of the Science Academy.
“You wanted to be a flight surgeon,” says Roth.
“Ah, no, no,” says Vasilisa. “From the time I am a child, I want to be a cosmonaut. But although I have my degree in space medicine, enter training, learn to pilot high-performance aircraft, achieve mastery at parachute school, it is not possible for me to fly in space. It is true that we Russians have sent only four doctors into space in forty years of flight, but still I might have had chance to fly to Mir or International Space Station except for one fact. This is that I cannot urinate—is this the right word, Mr. Roth?—I cannot urinate on wheel of bus.”
Roth looks at her, trying to divine the joke.
Vasilisa makes the graceful shrugging gesture with her hands again. “This is true. It is a metaphor, but true. You see, when cosmonauts fly in space, to Mir, in Soyuz, on any mission, there is a big send-off—is this the right word? Yes? A big send-off outside the hangar where they get into their space suits. A general makes speeches. Technicians and reporters cheer. Then the astronauts board the transfer bus for the ride to the launch pad.”
“Yes,” says Roth, “I think it works pretty much the same at Cape Canaveral, minus the general’s speeches.”
Vasilisa nods. “Well, after the big ceremony, the reporters and VIPs jump into one bus and drive to launch pad to have more celebration when cosmonauts arrive, but the cosmonauts’ transfer bus, it stops halfway and all cosmonauts step out and piss—this is correct vulgar slang for urinate, yes? They all fumble in space suits and then piss on right rear tire of bus.”
“Why?” asks Roth. The Tu-134 is banking over the Aral Sea and beginning its descent toward Baikonur. “Some sort of superstition?”
“Yes, precisely,” says Vasilisa. “Our annointed saint of space, Yuri Gagarin, did this back in 1961 before world’s first orbital flight, and all cosmonauts must do same before launch.”
“But there have been female cosmonauts.”
Vasilisa makes that graceful gesture with her hands. “Yes. There have been three Russian women in space—Valentina Tereshkova in 1963, Svetlana Savitskaya who flew twice to the Salyut station in the 1980s, Elena Kondakova who was flight engineer on Mir in 1994 and who flew later on your shuttle.”
“Three women in more than forty years,” says Roth. “I wonder how many women we Americans have launched…”
“Thirty-two,” Vasilisa says quickly. “Including Eileen Collins, who commanded the shuttle. No Russian woman has ever been command pilot on mission. Tereshkova, the first, was sent up in space so that she could be…bred, I think is right word…with male cosmonaut so Soviet space officials could see the effects of cosmic radiation on offspring. She could not even fly an airplane, much less a spacecraft. She was just biological payload.”
“But the other two Russian women must have played a more active role,” says Roth, smiling despite himself.
Vasilisa smiles sadly. “Have you, perhaps, read Valentin Lebedev’s book, Diary of a Cosmonaut? Lebedev was commander of 1982 mission to Salyut space station where Svetlana Savitskaya was flight engineer.”
“Ah, no,” says Roth, still smiling. “That book is on my nightstand, but I haven’t got to it yet.”
Vasilisa nods, missing Roth’s mild attempt at irony. “Commander Lebedev wrote—‘After a communication session we invited Flight Engineer Savitskaya to the heavily laden table. We gave Sveta a blue floral print apron and told her, “‘Look, Sveta, even though you are a pilot and cosmonaut, you are still a woman first. Would you please do us the honor of being our hostess tonight?’”
“Ouch,” says Roth.
“What does this mean,” says Vasilisa. “‘Ouch’?”
“It means something is painful.”
She nods. “Perhaps I am sounding too much like American feminist. What would American female astronaut do if American male astronaut gave her a floral print apron in space shuttle or space station?”
“Punch him in the nose,” says Roth.
“In zero-gravity, this punch would be…an interesting problem in Newtonian action-reaction ballistics,” says Vasilisa. “But yes, this is a difference between American and Russian women. We Russian women do not like feminism so much here. But then we Russian women also do not fly so much in space here.”
“What about this last woman cosmonaut you mentioned—Kondakova? You say she went to Mir.”
“Yes,” says Vasilisa. “After she was Flight Director Valery Rumin’s secretary and then his wife.”
“Ouch.”
“This ouch, it is a very useful word,” notes Vasilisa.
Roth nods and rubs his tired eyes. The Tu-134 pilot is announcing in laconic Russian that tray tables and seatbacks should be in a full, upright position. Or so Roth guesses. For all he knows, the pilot might be announcing that both wings have just fallen off. To Vasilisa he says, “You’re saying that there’s a sexist Old Boy Network here that made it impossible for you to become a cosmonaut.”
“Yes,” says Vasilisa, pulling her hair back over her right ear in a gesture that Roth is beginning to grow familiar with. “I am saying that about Old Boy Network. All cosmonauts are old boys. And I am also saying that I wish I could urinate on tire of bus while wearing space suit.”
BAIKONUR Space City and launch center—Vasilisa explains that the worker’s city adjoining the missile base is still called Leninsk by most Russians despite its official renaming and that the actual Baikonur was a farming village more than a hundred and fifty kilometers northeast, a typical Cold War ruse by Khrushchev, Vasilisa explains further, to tell the world that the USSR was building a rocket base on the outskirts of Baikonur and then go nowhere near Baikonur. Pre-spy-satellite strategy of misdirection from 1955.
Roth’s first impression is that whatever their names are, both base and city are cold, desolate places, unsheltered by trees or hills from the wind that blows across a thousand kilometers of steppe. The city itself seems strangely empty, its apartment buildings dark, its streets largely devoid of traffic. When Roth comments on the brownish-red powder that is blowing across vacant lots with the spindrift, Vasilisa explains that this is dust blown from the frozen shores of the Aral Sea, dust rife with the pesticide that has killed the sea and its life.
“The inhabitants and workers of Leninsk think that the dust is killing them and their children,” she says.
“Is it?” asks Roth.
“I think, yes.”
The launch center itself strikes Roth as much more of a military base than had been his impression of the Kennedy Space Center during his one visit there years before. Actually, the Cape Canaveral complex had made Roth think more of Disney World—a tourist attraction complete with audio-animatronic mannequins standing in for long-departed flight controllers in some of the rebuilt blockhouses—than of a serious spaceport. Baikonur is no-nonsense and real enough, but it is also depressing in a frozen, ninth-circle-of-hell sort of way.
Guards escort them from the well-guarded gate to a Russian major’s office. The major shakes Roth’s hand, speaks rapidly to Vasilisa in Russian—Roth discovers that the officer speaks no English—and then conducts them down to an unheated sedan and they take a whirlwind tour of the complex. An enlisted man drives. The major sits up front and continues a running narrative which Roth—sitting in the back with Vasilisa—hears only fragments of in translation. There are many statistics and at first Roth attempts to make notes in his little notebook, but he can’t keep up—the major does not pause for questions—and eventually Roth puts away the notebook and watches the progession of hangars, administrative buildings, grim barracks, and aging launch pads with cracking concrete and rusted metal gantries. Roth is surprised to see piles
of junk—space junk—piled here and there in empty lots between the buildings and alongside the streets: old fuel tanks, payload shrouds, and large rocket sections that Vasilisa explains were stages of the old N-1 moon rockets. Even the rail lines that run to the cracked-concrete launch aprons are coated with a thick layer of rust.
They pull up to a building which Vasilisa tells him is the Hotel Cosmonaut where the Mir and Salyut crews used to stay immediately before a flight. The car parks, the enlisted man holds the door, and they walk into the building behind the major in his forest-green military greatcoat. Cold wind whistles through the cracks around the windows in the empty lounge on the first floor. The major shows them a medical center that reminds Roth of the little infirmary he’d spent a week recovering from diphtheria in at Harvard too many decades ago. Finally they reach a second-floor lounge that seems to be their destination. The walls are covered with photographs of serious men with five-o’clock shadow—cosmonauts all, Vasilisa explains—but it is not the photographs that the major has brought them here to see.
Both sides of the door, from floor to ceiling, are covered with signatures in felt-tip pen. Roth stares at the Cyrillic scrawls and tries to look interested. The major speaks in reverent tones. Vasilisa translates some of the cosmonaut names. Roth has never heard of any of them, but he dutifully lifts his little digital camera, snaps a few pictures, and nods. The major also nods, they return to the car, drive to the administration building, and the tour is over.
The enlisted man is driving them to the gate when Vasilisa says, “Would you like to see anything else? As a TsUP administrator I am allowed to show you a few things on the base. What do you need to see, Mr. Roth? Norman?”
“A philosopher, I think,” says Roth.
Vasilisa looks at him quizzically. “A philosopher?”
“I’m trying to understand the reasons behind all this,” says Roth, sweeping his hand toward the complex of pads, hangars, engineering centers, railroads, runways, snowy fields, and dormitories. “Not the space-race reasons. Not the national reasons. Not even the cosmonauts’ reasons—but the human reasons. I think I’ll need a philosopher even to come close to understanding.”
“A philosopher,” repeats Vasilisa. Then she smiles.
THE old man is in his seventies, Roth thinks, and he lives in a single supply room in the basement of a bunker under the shattered concrete of an abandoned launch pad.
The room is windowless and heated by a jury-rigged kerosene heater that also serves as the old man’s stove. There are hundreds of books lining the walls. A section of fuel tank has been hammered into a table; the chairs are modified cosmonaut couches from old Soyuz capsules; a radio cobbled together from spare electronic parts sits on a metal workbench and plays classical music.
The old man’s face and arms have been badly burned, one ear is shapeless and he has no hair except for the gray stubble on his scarred cheeks, but the scar tissue is old and integrated into the wrinkles and lines of age. He is missing more teeth than he has kept, but he smiles repeatedly during introductions and while pouring vodka for his guests.
The old man’s name is Viktor but Vasilisa—whom he refers to as his “Firebird princess” while patting her cheeks—explains that for decades he has been known as Nichevo. Roth is surprised by the nickname because he remembers this word from his visit to the Soviet Union almost twenty years earlier; meaning, literally, “nothing,” nichevo summed up a national attitude then that suggested “never mind” and “there’s nothing to be done” and “leave me alone.” The day that Roth had shown up at the airport years ago to fly home he’d found that there were no flights leaving that afternoon. The ticket agency and airline and the Writers’ Union had issued him a ticket for the wrong day. “Nichevo” had been the only comment from the airline people.
Now this elderly Nichevo pours vodka for all three of them. Roth has been ordered by his heart surgeon to avoid all alcohol, but he knows that seemingly every social interaction in Russia is lubricated by vodka, so he drinks two glasses before the conversation can start.
The old man’s voice is thick, fluid, gentle, and Vasilisa’s soft, simultaneous translation becomes part of the warm glow from the kerosene heater and the vodka:
“You wonder perhaps about these scars,” says Nichevo, holding up his welted hands to touch his face and neck and melted ear. “I received these a few hundred meters from here in October of 1960. I was thirty-two years old and working for the glory of the rodina under the leadership of Premiere Khrushchev and under the command of Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin and through the brilliance of Chief Designer Korolev.
“Today I am a janitor…no, less than a janitor, a scavenger and scrapmonger for Energia…but then I was a sergeant in the Rocket Forces and a technician. It was a glorious time…no, do not smile, my darling Vasilisa…it was a glorious time. Does your American writer friend know our phrase Nasha lusche? ‘Ours is the best.’ Well, ours was the best then, it is true. We were the first to launch an Earth satellite in 1957. The first to send a probe around the moon and to photograph the mysterious back side, yes? The first to orbit a dog. The first to orbit a man. The first to orbit a woman. The first to land on Mars. The first to land on Venus. The first to walk in space. The first to put up a space station—the old Salyut stations, before Mir, my darling—and the first to keep a manned presence in space for months, for years!
“But the scars. Yes, I promised to tell of the scars.
“It was October, 1960, and the Chief Designer had produced a huge rocket—a monster of a rocket—that was designed to go to Mars, to take a payload to Mars, to send a piece of the USSR to Mars, even before a man had ever flown in Earth orbit. Liquid fuel. Many stages. Huge motors. The VIPs arrived from the Politburo and from the Red Army. The countdown was exciting, as all countdowns are…seven, six, five, four, three, two, one…and then…nothing.
“The rocket did not ignite. The Chief Designer conferred with the engineers. The engineers conferred with the technicians. The technicians conferred with God. It was decided by the generals that the rocket was safe but that it must be defueled and broken down and the problem fixed and prepared later for launch.
“The conscripts and the technicians refused to return to the pad. I did not refuse, but my peers refused. They thought the rocket would blow up during the tricky defueling. I thought they were cowards. So did the Chief Designer and the generals. To show that it was safe, Marshal Nedelin ordered that folding chairs be set up on the launch pad itself, in the shadow of the Mars rocket. The Marshal himself, along with his fellow generals and rocket engineers and administrators—all but the Chief Designer who was too busy—went and sat in the folding chairs by the fins of the tall rocket. It was my job to ferry the van back and forth from the blockhouse, bringing these dozens of important people to the pad so that the technicians and workers would see that there was no danger and return to their job. Which they did. The ground crew returned to their pumps and to their stations and to their work, defueling the gigantic rocket, pumping the nitrous oxide and hypergolic fuels into holding tanks.
“It exploded, of course. If you Americans had had the spy satellites above us then that you have today, you would have thought an atomic bomb had gone off. Marshal Nedelin and the generals and 160 others died instantly, vaporized, reduced to something less than ashes, lifted into the atmosphere like fire, like plasma, like smoke, like a vapor of souls.
“I was less than half a kilometer away, driving a van, driving toward the rocket, carrying the last gaggle of VIPs to their folding chairs, to their death chairs at the pad. The explosion drove the glass of the windshield into my face and then melted the glass and blew the bus off the access road into a holding pond and then vaporized much of the water of the pond into steam and melted the tires and killed most of the people on my bus.”
Nichevo smiles, showing his few remaining teeth, and pours more vodka for them all. They drink. He continues:
“But six months later, my darling Vasilisa,
in April of 1961, we launched Comrade Gagarin into space from a pad still burned by that blast and we have never looked back—we have had human beings in space, or waiting to go into space, ever since that April day.
“Now, darling Vasilisa, your American friend looks like un maladietz—‘a good boy.’”
Roth smiles at being called a boy.
“Tell him that we may now talk dusha-dushe,” adds Nichevo.
Because Vasilisa has not interpreted the phrase, Roth asks her to clarify it.
She tucks her hair behind her ear in that gesture Roth has grown to love. “Dusha-dushe,” she says, “means heart to heart. We also sometimes say po-dusham—soul to soul.”
Nichevo nods and smiles and pours them each another glass of vodka.
ROTH is calmly drunk on the flight back to Moscow. He looks at Vasilisa illuminated by moonlight through the aircraft window and he thinks about what the old man had said.
His question to Nichevo had been: “Why do humans go up there? What’s waiting for us in space? Other than greed, glory, adventure and nationalism, why go?”
Vasilisa had interpreted slowly, carefully, obviously taking care in transferring the meaning of Roth’s question.
Nichevo had nodded and poured more vodka.
“All the reasons we go are not the reason we must go,” said the old man. “Things are ending here. We must go.”
“What is ending here?” asked Roth, worried that the old man would give him some nonsense about the Earth’s environment being used up, of humans having to find a new planet. Bullshit like that.
Nichevo had shrugged with his hands in a motion not dissimilar from Vasilisa’s.
“We came from the sea to the land but have been stranded on land for too long. We dream of the sea. We have memories of our new sea, of floating, of true freedom, of who we were before we were exiled to dust. We are ready to return to the sea.”
“To the sea?” repeated Roth, wondering if the old man was more drunk than he looked. Or senile.