Nichevo raised a hand palm up toward the roof of his bunker. “The greater sea. The true ocean of the cosmos. The childhood of man is ended here…the small nations, the small wars, the small hatreds, the small dictators, the small freedoms…all ended.”
Nichevo smiled. “There will be nations and wars and hatreds and dictators and freedoms there…up there…but larger. Much larger. Everything will be greater when our species enters this new sea, never to return.”
“What do you mean ‘we have memories’?” asked Roth. “How can we have memories of a place most of us have never been? Will never be?”
“The cosmos, the universe of no gravity beyond our slim, heavy shoal of stone, is the true rodina,” said Nichevo, not smiling now. “The real Motherland. The USSR is a sad memory, but our rodina lives within us. Just as the memory of the rodina of the cosmos persists—we dream of floating in the womb, of our mother’s heartbeat surrounding us, of the freedom before birth and perhaps after death. Our species waits to swim in this new sea.”
Nichevo gestured upward again.
“It is all there, this new sea, the ocean cosmos. A few have crossed the beach of flame and terror and swum in it…a few have drowned on the way to it or upon the return from it…but most have returned safely. Safe but mute. We have sent no poets. No artists. No philosophers.” He smiled again. “No…scrapmongers.” The smile faded. “But we must feed our seas.”
“Feed our seas?” asked Vasilisa, translating her question for Roth.
“Feed our seas,” repeated the old man. “When the first man and woman of our race is buried in this new sea of the cosmos, then we can say that we have come home, home to our new rodina.”
They had thanked him, Vasilisa had hugged him, and they moved to the corridor of the bunker, late for their flight home. Roth himself thanked the old man repeatedly, using the little Russian he knew.
“It is nothing,” said the old man, waving good-bye with his burned and scarred fingers. “Nichevo.”
“I know who you remind me of now,” Roth tells Vasilisa the next morning at breakfast.
That night his chest had pained him from the travel and vodka and tension and he had awakened from a dream, gasping and reaching for his nitroglycerine tablets, wondering if this was the hour when his heart would stop forever. It had not. But in the shock of his awakening, he had remembered his dream, his dream-memory, and in the morning he tells it to Vasilisa.
WHEN Norman Roth is eleven years old, his family rents—as they had rented every summer since his birth—a small cottage on the quiet side of Long Island. It is a middle-class Jewish summer community and the boy has always played alone there in the surf, but this year the neighboring cottage had been rented by a new family—the Klugmans—and they have a twelve-year-old girl.
Normally young Norman would ignore a girl, but none of the other guys are around here on the island and he is lonely, so he spends his days with her—with Sarah—at first grudgingly and then with the anticipation of real friendship.
Boy and girl, just on the cusp of puberty for her, a few years away for him, playing together in faded swimsuits and shorts, swimming together, bicycling together, hunting shells together, sailing together on the small Sunbird boat Norman’s father lets them use, going to movies at the small village theater together, drawing in empty boathouses together on rainy days, lying in the dunes and watching the stars together on the nights the sky is clear. The swimming raft twenty meters out from the beach is their meeting place and their clubhouse and their summer home together.
By the middle of August, with the school year looming like a dark cloud just rising above the horizon, Norman and Sarah are inseparable.
On the beach that last night before both families head back to their respective cities, their disparate neighborhoods, their different and separate schools, Sarah takes Norman’s hands in hers and they kneel together on the cool sand. The moon is full above the lighthouse. The surf makes soft lapping noises. The cowbells on small boats and the deeper bells on channel buoys ring and clank to the shifting of the waves.
She kisses him. He is so surprised that he can only stare. She takes his face in her wave-cool hands and kisses him again.
Serious, not laughing, she stands and wiggles out of her sun-faded swimsuit. She turns—the twin stripes of white skin across her shoulder blades and backside glowing palely in the moonlight—and wades into the water and swims out toward the raft.
The boy hesitates only a second before standing and pulling off his swimsuit. The moon paints the uninterrupted smoothness of his skin. He swims to the raft.
Aboard the gently bobbing raft, they lie on their backs, feet in opposite directions, the crowns of their wet heads touching. As if floating above, the man, in memory, can see the nude boy and girl—he more child than she—her breast buds pale swellings in the moonlight, the glaring absence of her groin dusted with dark stipple.
The two do not talk for some time. Then the girl raises both arms, bends back her hands blindly, like a ballerina gesturing. The boy raises his arms over his own head, his eyes on the moon, and his fingers find hers and interlock.
“Next summer,” she says, her voice barely audible above the surf.
“Next summer,” he promises.
“MR. Roth,” says Vasilisa at breakfast. “You are a romantic.”
“If you have read my novels, or heard about my three ex-wives,” says Roth, “you would know that I am not.”
“I have read your novels,” says Vasilisa. She smiles slightly. “And I have heard stories of your three ex-wives.” After a moment she says, “If this childhood story were Russian, it would not have a happy ending.”
“It does not,” promises Roth.
He tells her about the boy’s winter—the children have not exchanged addresses, have not promised to write, have decided to keep their friendship for the summer and the beach and the water—and he tells her about the months of waiting, the literally painful expectation that built to near insanity in the weeks and then days before the families were both scheduled to return to their summer cottages on the island.
The boy races to the Klugman cottage the minute he is released from the family station wagon. He pounds on the screen door. A strange woman comes to the door—not Sarah’s mother.
“Ah, the Klugmans,” says the woman. “They gave us their summer lease for this place. They had a tragedy this winter and will not be coming back to the cottage. Their daughter died of pneumonia.”
“Very Russian,” says Vasilisa. “But why do I remind you of this girl? Do I look like her?”
“Not at all,” says Roth.
“Do I speak like her?”
“No.”
“Is it that you imagine that Sarah would have become a doctor if she had lived? Or would have wanted to be a cosmonaut?”
“No. I don’t know.” Roth raises his hands in what he realizes is a clumsy imitation of Vasilisa’s graceful shrug gesture.
When he sets his hand back on the breakfast table, Vasilisa reaches across and sets her hand on top of his.
“Then I understand,” she says.
ON the day before the big New Year’s Eve party, two days before Roth’s scheduled departure, they are driven an hour northeast of Moscow to the TsPK—the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, home of the cosmonaut corps—which everyone at TsUP and NASA calls Star City.
“Norman,” says Vasilisa as they leave the main highway and drive through a thick forest of pine and birch on an empty two-lane road, “I have read your books. They are very dark. One of our reviewers called your last book ‘a Kabballa about death.’ Perhaps that darkness is why your fiction has always been popular in Russia.”
Roth laughs softly. “Maybe they like the books because they’re the life-statement of an atheist, Dr. Ivanova. I’m a Jew, but I’m an atheist. The novels are a scream at the heart of an insensate universe, nothing more.”
Vasilisa shakes her head. “The Soviet regime might have allowed them
to be published because of the atheist sentiment, but they are more popular now than ever and Russia stinks of incense these days.”
Roth laughs again. “You’re not accusing me of being a closet sentimentalist, are you, Vasilisa? Or of harboring a hidden spirituality?”
“Sentimentalist, no. Spirituality, I think, yes.”
Roth only shakes his head and looks past the driver as they approach the main gate of Star City.
PAST the guards and through the tall, silver gate, the forest continues and then opens onto a city square watched over by a large statue of Gagarin. Beyond the square, there rises a cluster of curiously American-looking townhouses—Vasilisa says that the American-looking townhouses are, indeed, American, built to house the astronauts who trained here for Mir—and then they pass a humpbacked building holding the world’s largest centrifuge, glimpse the Avenue of Heroes (a strangely modest greenway, white with snow today, with no statues) and pull up to the Cosmonaut Museum.
Vasilisa points out parked cars with government plates with numbers from 1 to 125, indicating both the official numbers of their cosmonaut owners and the order in which that cosmonaut flew into space.
The driver holds the door while Roth and Vasilisa move quickly through the snow and into the dim museum, where they check their coats, glance up at a large mural of Yuri Gagarin, and climb a flight of stairs to the main Gagarin exhibit where a bust of the dead cosmonaut seems to stand guard over well-dusted cases of memorabilia. Vasilisa translates the various placards and captions, explaining that the last series of items had been taken from the wreckage of his aircraft on the day he had died, during a routine training mission, in March of 1968, seven years after his 108-minute orbital flight. Roth can see a burned photograph of Chief Designer Korolev, Gagarin’s burned wallet that had carried the photo, the cosmonaut’s singed driver’s license, even a vial of dirt and ashes from the wreckage.
“Don’t you think this is all a bit ghoulish?” asks Roth.
“I do not know this word, Norman—what is ‘ghoulish’?”
“Never mind.”
They move down the hall to a case holding the jumpsuits and photographs of the first three cosmonauts to live aboard the first Soviet space station—Salyut—in 1971.
“Salyut means ‘salute,’ doesn’t it?” asks Roth.
“Precisely.”
“Who or what was the Salyut station saluting?”
“Yuri Gagarin, of course.”
Vasilisa reads the inscription next to the men’s photographs. Cosmonauts Georgi Dobrovolskiy’s, Vladislav Volkov’s, and Viktor Patsayev’s mission to Salyut had been wildly successful, their zero-gravity exploits and good humor broadcast to the Russian people every night via television. Their reentry into the atmosphere seemed uneventful, their landing on the Russian steppe according to plan except for an unexplained failure in radio communication. But when the recovery crews opened their capsule, all three cosmonauts were dead. A valve had broken during reentry, their air had rushed into space, and all three men had asphyxiated in their couches.
“We have fed our seas,” says Vasilisa.
Roth shakes his head. “I think Nichevo meant that we must leave our dead there, in space, before the new sea is truly fed.”
“Perhaps.”
Beyond this exhibit is what appears to be an ordinary office but is actually a precise replica of Yuri Gagarin’s office, just as he left it on the morning of his fateful flight on March 27, 1968. The hands of the clock are stopped at 10:31, the moment of impact. His day calendar lies open on his desk. Letters and memos lie unfinished.
Vasilisa points to the desk. “Each cosmonaut or crew of cosmonauts signs his name in that large brown book on the day of their flight into space,” she says softly, whispering in this hallowed space. “Even our cosmonauts who fly to the International Space Station.”
Roth glances at her. Vasilisa’s eyes are brimming as she looks at the book. She catches him looking at her. “You think that I am sentimental, yes?”
“No,” says Roth. “Spiritual.”
ROTH dreams that he is aboard the International Space Station, floating in dim light. Another astronaut, a man, is sleeping, rigged in some sort of thin sleeping bag contraption that holds him seemingly upright, arms protruding and floating in front of him, wrists bent, fingers moving like seaweed in a current.
Roth is surprised how loud the ventilator fan is, how stark and functional and sharp-edged the interior of this module of the station is. The air smells vaguely of ozone and sweat and machine oil. He finds that he can move silently by kicking off some solid object and he floats head-first without even raising his arms, moving through a hatch into an adjoining module. There is a porthole here and Roth floats over to it and looks out. The Earth hangs above him, beyond the dark exclamation mark of a solar panel.
The station is approaching the sunrise terminator. The limb of the planet sharpens in a crescent of brilliant sunlight. For a second, Roth can see the thin line of atmosphere itself illuminated like a backlighted, inverted miniscus, then the sun clears the curve of the world and ignites thousands of cloud tops above a dark sea.
Suddenly Roth realizes that he is having trouble breathing. The air is too thin. Whirling in microgravity, he realizes that he can hear a constant and ominous hissing, rising in pitch but descending in volume as the air thins further. The air is rushing out of the station module.
Gasping, Roth spins in space but he has pushed away from the bulkhead, is too far from anything solid, and he can only pinwheel his arms and legs without effect, tumbling in the thinning air and unable to swim his way to safety.
ROTH awakes at the touch of a cool hand on his bare chest. He blinks away the after-images of the dream and looks around the hotel room. It is dark except for slivers of moonlight coming between the heavy curtains. Vasilisa, dressed only in Roth’s extra pair of blue pajamas, sits on the edge of the bed, a stethoscope around her neck, her hand on Roth’s chest.
“What?” He tries to sit up but she pushes him back with her surprisingly strong fingers.
The stethoscope is cold against his chest. Vasilisa sets the instrument on the nightstand but touches his chest again, running two fingers along the large cross-shaped scar on his bare chest, then reaching down to feel the long scar on his left leg where they had taken a vein during his last surgery.
“Do you remember dinner?” she says very softly. The clock says 3:28.
“No,” whispers Roth, but then he does. They had been having a late dinner in the National dining room when the chest pains started. He had fumbled for his nitroglycerine tablet, held it under his tongue, but the usual instant relief had not come. Roth dimly remembers her helping him out of the cavernous dining room, holding him upright in the elevator, opening the door to his room for him, and then…confused images…the cool prick of a needle, a dim recollection of her slipping between the sheets next to him. “Ah, Christ,” says Roth. “This isn’t the way I would have chosen for us to go to bed together.”
Vasilisa smiles and buttons his pajama shirt. “Nor I, Norman. I had considered transporting you to hospital, but I am sure this was just a severe episode of angina, not another heart attack. Your heart sounds good, your blood pressure stabilized, your pulse has been strong.” She lifts the sheets and blanket and slips in next to him again. “I think you woke because you were having a nightmare.”
He turns to look at her in the moonlight. “Just a dream.” Then he remembers the terrible hiss of the oxygen rushing out of the space station. “A nightmare,” he acknowledges. He looks at the glowing clock face again.
“It is New Year’s Eve,” whispers Vasilisa. “You know, I think, how important the holiday is in Russia—a combination of your Christmas and New Year’s and other holidays as well.”
“Yes.”
“You remember I said that my parents were academics—a philosopher and a research mathematician?”
“Yes.”
“But like most Russians, they were supe
rstitious. My mother taught me the old custom of putting three slips of paper under my pillow on New Year’s Eve. One would read—Good Year. One would read—Bad Year. The last would read—Medium Year. After midnight, I would reach under the pillow and draw one.”
Roth smiles at this. He reaches across her to pick up the small notebook on the nightstand and his silver pen. The last filled page of the notebook is covered with notes about Gagarin’s office. He takes an empty page, tears it into three strips, and writes on the first scrap—Year with Vasilisa; on the second strip—Year without Vasilisa; the third he leaves blank.
“You tempt fate, Norman.”
Roth folds the three scraps and puts them under the pillow they now share. “You are superstitious, Dr. Ivanova.” He kisses her very slowly.
When the kiss is finished, she pulls her head back just far enough to be able to focus on his face. “No,” she whispers. “Spiritual. And sentimental.”
THE New Year’s Eve party is at cosmonaut Viktor Afanasiev’s dacha outside of Moscow. Vasilisa explains that Afanasiev was the last commander of a regular Mir crew and that he had been the man who literally switched off the station’s lights on August 28, 1999.
“Viktor is a friend of mine,” she says. “He tells me that he has had strange dreams since Mir deorbited.”
“What kind of dreams?” asks Roth.
Vasilisa opens her hands. “Dreams of encountering the Mir station underwater, as if it was the Titanic or some other sunken ship from the past. Sometimes, Viktor says, he dreams that he sees the faces of dead people he has known looking out from Mir.”
Roth, who has never told her of his own dream, can only turn and stare at her as they drive down the narrow road through the trees and the snow.
Roth and Vasilisa arrive early, five P.M., but it is already dark and dozens of people are already there. Even though tables inside the spacious, beautifully decorated dacha are groaning with food—kielbasa, cheeses, vegetables and dip, slivers of fish, heaps of caviar, various zakuski—hors d’oeuvres that leave no need for entrees—soups, salads, and strips of beef, all surrounded by countless bottles of vodka and champagne—Roth and Vasilisa find the cosmonaut host and friends outside by the barbecue, ignoring the temperature that Roth estimates to be at least ten degrees below zero Fahrenheit, grilling shashlyk—mutton shish kebabs—telling jokes, laughing in the cold air and drinking vodka.