Like You'd Understand, Anyway

Eros 7

14 June 1963 Morning

Though we've been in this cottage for only a day, I got up at first light and set about a housecleaning. Solovyova is still depressed and lay on her bed like a corpse while I worked. When I finished I left. In the chilly air the sun warmed my arms and long blue shadows crossed the roadside weeds and gravel. I walked through the pines to our little river and sat with my toes in the mud. Bream and sturgeon explored the stones on the bottom, flicking their fins.

We are in Kazakhstan, 370 kilometers northeast of a town called Baikonur. Solovyova and I are in one cottage and Korolyov himself is in the other. The cottages were requisitioned for Yuri Gagarin's flight and have been used ever since. Their original owners came by with flowers when we arrived, in honor of our undertaking. The cottage fronts are covered with creepers and face the pine forest. Behind and above them looms the launchpad in all its concrete immensity. It's a kilometer away but looks as if it could be touched with an outstretched hand. The sides of the blast pit resemble the face of a dam. The command bunker alongside is a squat hedgehog with jagged steel spars spiking from its super-hardened roof at all angles, so a malfunctioning first stage falling atop it would break up, thereby diffusing the focus of the blast.

Diary! You are a historic document: my name is Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, and I was born in the Yaroslavl Raion, and I am twenty-four years old, and by 12:30 Moscow time the day after tomorrow I will have put on my orange spacesuit and climbed into my own spacecraft, the Vostok 6, to rendezvous with a fellow cosmonaut, Senior Lieutenant Valery Fyodorovich Bykov-sky, 150 miles above the Earth. I will become, then, the tenth person, the sixth Russian, and the first woman in space.

But I have more reason to be unable to sit still, as if electrified by joy: the mind that has laid me open to awe and gratitude — the man for whom I'd give whatever I have to give — is already fulfilling his dream, orbiting above us in Vostok 5. And I am going to join him.

Technically, of course, that's incorrect. Our mission will be the first step in developing our country's capabilities for orbital rendezvous. Twice daily, during the parabolas of our orbits, we'll approach to within less than two kilometers of each other. But two kilometers is very close. At that range his capsule will be the size of a dried pea at arm's length. Two kilometers, given the slight imprecision of the trajectories, is as near as they dare bring us. As Korolyov put it, the achievement of two cosmonauts orbiting simultaneously would be compromised if they were to kill each other.

Even so, we'll be in space together. In other words, as Solov-yova pointed out before she fell asleep last night, the combined efforts of the most diligent minds in the Soviet Union — some one hundred thirty bureaus and thirty factories, employing over seven thousand scientists, designers, and engineers — have come together for however many years of labor in order to indulge my sordid and criminally irresponsible obsession with a Hero of the Soviet Union who bears a spotless reputation. “So that's the best they could do for you: two kilometers?” she asked, reaching to turn off the light.

Bykovsky is married, though he told me he hasn't touched his wife in years.

The plan was to make dual use of the second stage of this group mission to put the first woman in space. And after everything— the written examinations and the centrifuge, the parachute jumps and the pressure chamber, the psychological prodding and poking and the endless humiliations of the medical testing — Solovyova was judged top of the list. But Korolyov was concerned about her unsteady morals. It was felt she gave improper replies in the final interviews. When asked what she wanted from life, she said she wanted everything that it could offer. She maintained that a woman could smoke and still remain decent. She was unapolo-getic for having traveled unescorted into town.

When asked what I wanted, I said I wished to support the Komsomol and the Communist Party. I took no trips to town. I do not smoke.

In the end, there were advantages to favoring a farm girl over a teacher's daughter. I was a girl from the backwoods— the way Gagarin and Premier Khrushchev were boys from the backwoods — and our country was telling the world that even we could achieve at the highest level. “The meek shall inherit the earth,” Solovyova said when the other women sought to console her after the news had been released.

“When have you managed this grand passion?” she wanted to know last night, when I confided in her. “Where have you managed it?” She used “grand passion” with an unpleasant emphasis.

The truth is that he hasn't entirely committed to my feelings for him. A week ago we managed for ourselves an hour or so alone by plunging off the trails on a recreational hike, during which we kissed, in the darkness, as though all of our sharing would be accomplished by that alone. I had before those kisses kissed only two other boys: those memories a little keepsake-box of reticence and disappointment. But there in the forest we came together like an immersion, oceanic in its possibilities. The branches above showered us with cold drops shaken off at the breeze. Around his mouth he smelled of sun and beach, with an edge of herbs.

He was shorter but seemed older, and parted his hair on the side in the German manner. He expressed himself so well in our first meeting that I kept glancing at him as though I were doing something wrong. This was the first gathering of the finalists. We'd been asked to mark on mimeographs of a map where our relatives were located. I'd been holding mine upside down, causing the other women to laugh. “I guess you won't be navigating,” one of them scoffed. But he said with a smile that his was illegible too, and that these were poor mimeographs. And I thought he was kind. And that I wanted some of that kindness inside me.

He's not wildly good-looking. He hoards his green vegetables, whether from superstition or trauma, he won't say. Solovyova thinks his hands are too small. She has a man's hands, like mine.

14 June 1963 Afternoon

Solovyova napping again. In the morning we spent two hours reviewing checklists and two playing badminton for physical conditioning. The badminton was filmed for posterity. Solovyova worked up a sheen of sweat on her golden forearms. Every time she hit a winner she would smack her lips like someone enjoying a sweet. Korolyov watched like a proud father. Afterward he sat with us in the shade. He called us his little swallows. He singled out Solovyova for special praise, reminding her that it was harder to be the backup than the primary pilot. I could detect her inner refusal to tear up.

During our academic examinations all of the finalists scored in the excellent category except me. Korolyov attributed this to my having been too nervous. It was decided that since I would have done better otherwise, there was no need to retest me. On May 14, Solovyova and I were rated Most Ready to Fly, and a week later the selections were announced. We stood before the panel and then she turned to shake my hand. She had a way of inspecting me that reminded me of auctions. She had the characteristics that give Tartar women their reputation for beauty, especially the hair. I asked why she looked sad and she answered so they could hear, “I'm not sad, but serious, as always.”

If I've occasionally taken first place in life's races, it's only because of my oxlike perseverance. I've always had to labor at tasks, reiterating them. On school tests, teachers forced me to stop writing, the classroom long since emptied. Eventually I developed the philosophy that everyone could be of use. I grew proud of my diligence. And before Bykovsky, I would have cited calmness as my other virtue.

14 June 1963 Evening

When I was eight, three daredevils risked their lives in a balloon that ascended to a height of 20.8 kilometers. They radioed their achievement, then began their descent. Nothing more was heard from them, though a day later shattered remnants of the gondola were retrieved, along with some body parts, which were described as unrecognizable. I remember my mother's indignation that such a detail would be reported. I remember spending the rest of the day in our chicken coop playing with a small stuffed bear. I remember thinking of them so far up and alone, the slipstream an ocean's roar, the cold an unprecedented affliction. Their bodies coming apart at such unbelievable speeds. My nights were filled with impressions of an inescapable and implacable landscape rushing up at me. Where did I get such images? I never discovered. But at eighteen I was allowed to join a nearby parachute club, and when told that I'd handled my first jump with poise, I answered, “Well, I've been jumping all my life.”

“He's a bit of a turnip, isn't he?” Solovyova asked the other day. Bykovsky was consulting a tractor manual while his mates horsed about with a rugby ball. But he appeals to me because of his intelligence: I observe him closely and still feel only occasionally able to predict his next move. Which is rare for me. Also, we're both very good with slide rules.

14 June 1963 Late Night

This evening the movie was Vostok 1. The actor who played Gagarin was especially good. Once we were bedded down for the night, it again fell to me to make conversation, Solovyova having turned to the wall and pulled the summer blanket to her ears. I noted to her that I didn't feel even mildly anxious. Was that normal, did she think? She didn't know what was normal, she answered. Korolyov looked in to wish us good night. “And good luck,” she reminded him. Oh, in five years the state'll be subsidizing vacations in space, he told her.

We've been told that strain gauges have been placed under our mattresses to record the quality of our sleep. Wires trail from our bunks to a hole in the wall leading to instruments in a little shed outside the cottage. So we concentrate on lying still. Even now our roles could reverse. A hint of upset in our “sleep” and the doctors could declare the other candidate better rested and more fit for duty. It might come down to who rolls over fewer times during the night.

Her hip under the blanket is a snowy hill in the electric light from outside. Her hair is a glossy cascade. Two hours have passed like this. Who knows what she's been thinking? I've been thinking, Soon, I'll be with him and not with him. I've been controlling hours of agitation.

Feelings are unruly. You tell them one thing and they tell you something else. When I was young and read about immaturity in books, I never encountered myself, but when I read about grownups, I did. That always left me pleased. Now I seem incapable of contemplation. I'll think the agitation has ended but then from somewhere hope will stir, swelling until it dominates my chest, like that moment when a level ski encounters an unexpectedly steep drop: it's joy, but joy attenuated with dread.

Sometimes I think it's the sacred duty of every mother to devote her life to her child in order to avoid producing strange isolates like me.

I call him Hawk. He calls me Seagull. Both have been accepted as the call signs for our flights. The mission patch for Vostok 5 features two rockets streaking up at a diagonal, side by side.

15 June 1963 Morning

The doctors woke us at 05:30, as they will tomorrow. They wanted to know how we slept. “As you taught us,” Solovyova told them. We were fed concentrated calories and vitamins in a dark brown paste followed by a breakfast of meat puree, black currant jam, and black coffee, and then attended another meeting of the Flight Committee on the contingency plans for emergency recovery. There is no realistic chance of our survival if we land at sea. However, plans must be made. Two carrier groups as well as four Tu-114s would be required to make recovery feasible. These are not available.

We were eager to hear how Bykovsky's mission was progressing. We were told that all was well and that we'd be able to listen in on transmissions in an hour. I asked if I might peek in before then. Kamanin responded that I should worry less about Vostok 5 and more about my own mission.

“Eros 7, Vostok 5,” Solovyova whispered to me in response, as though relating a football score.

15 June 1963 Morning

The mission calls for the use of a three-stage R-7 rocket that can lift a mass of 4.6 tons into a circular orbit at 155 miles altitude, though my altitude will probably be slightly less. The descent and instrument modules together are only 4.4 meters long; the little sphere of the descent module, only 2.3 meters in diameter, its size limited by the available volume inside the launch shroud. Two minutes into my flight, the strap-on boosters will shut down and separate by the firing of their explosive bolts. The nose shroud will open a minute later, exposing the Vostok. The second stage will continue to burn until it too is depleted and falls away. Then the third will do the same until I've achieved orbit. The spherical shape of the descent module, chosen for its stability, has its center of mass aft so that, protected by its ablative coating, it will assume the correct orientation during reentry, descending along a ballistic trajectory. “In other words, like a bullet, with no attitude control,” Solovyova clarified during one of our classroom sessions. Another of those indiscretions that probably counted so decisively against her.

Soft-landing such a mass would have required an enormous parachute and retro-rocket system — a problem considered too time-consuming, given the race with the Americans — so the designers settled on an ejection system initiated by inertial and barometric sensors. Before Gagarin, no one had ever ejected at that altitude or speed. In the event of a trajectory deviation, the ejection could be activated sooner, though no one knew what the result would be. Sputnik 3 with its two dogs reentered the atmosphere after retrofire at an incorrect angle and burned up. The audio monitors recorded the dogs' cries before the transmission went to static.

We've had to ignore whispers of other disasters, some of them enormous. Bondarenko burned alive in the isolation chamber. A premature ignition of the R-7 that annihilated the launch gantry. Even we knew that mostly what our rockets did, in the early days, was blow up.

So you see, Diary: lovesickness has crowded none of the responsibilities, or apprehensions, from my mind.

15 June 1963 Afternoon

A practice press conference. We're told we both gave incorrect answers about our appetite. Earlier we observed Bykovsky via television. He made no motion while sleeping. “Look at him,” I murmured, and even Solovyova was alarmed by my tone. She said all she could make out was his helmet.

Apparently there'd been consternation that they'd kept from us: on orbit 23 he was to communicate with Earth, but no transmissions were received. The Central Committee had been frantic. When he finally did respond, they asked why he'd been silent. He told them he'd had nothing to say. They're still angry.

During our last private moment together I reminded him that when we returned a new life would begin for us, as celebrities and representatives of the Soviet system. His mind was on his launch vehicle. He handled my arms like they were attitude control handgrips. Gagarin and Titov, I told him, dreaming, had been such big stars, afterward; they'd done whatever they dared. We were in a maintenance room of an electrical substation in the basement of the gantry supports. There was nowhere to sit. He entered each of our kisses dutifully, but gave himself over to them once they were initiated. I felt a wash of sadness each time. “Do you want to touch me?” I asked him. “I am touching you,” he told me. But then we heard the heavy jingling of wrenches on someone's utility belt down the hall, and we were out of time.

15 June 1963 Afternoon

That first night when the male and female candidates were brought together, I just stood there with my eyes closed, immersed in the different voices. Ponomaryova, an engineer and city girl with some of the starved attractiveness of the old cinema stars, carried on about how much she admired the children of peasants, who got by without adults, the adults laboring in the fields all day while the children became the emperors and explorers of their own world.

I fit in poorly from the very beginning. “Let's go to the cinema!” the other women would say when we had a free moment. “I can't,” I'd tell them. But I wanted to so much I could have cried. Why did I do such things? It was hard to watch how much less they came to like me than each other. They were the sort of people who always had stories to tell because something was always happening to them. They looked at me like I was a horse in a stall. Soon we became so petty we stopped handing each other cups during afternoon tea.

And even so, Solovyova had befriended me. We'd taken walks. We found an overgrown pond we christened the Night Witches' Hideout.

But during the mixed gatherings we were more diffident, and I gravitated to Bykovsky He'd traveled on foreign expeditions and told stories about tropical forests and typhoons. We took our own walks around the grounds. “Did they tell you about city boys, down on the farm?” Ponomaryova asked one night as we lay in our bunks. Solovyova was turned to the wall. The other women simpered. I answered with a joke, telling myself my conscience was clear. But the truth was that a new reality was coming into being for me. Waking up each morning I felt an astonishing absence of emptiness, something I hadn't gotten used to. He was becoming a pressing concern, always present somewhere. Early one morning I gazed at Solovyova's sleeping hand trailing on the floor like a vine and remembered him remarking that he loved my dozing because it seemed such a self-aware form of sleep. And I thought I had to have this love so I'd no longer be so endlessly alone. I could feel it making me new.

After Gagarin's flight, the Kremlin had been flooded with letters from women asking to be considered for spaceflight. Soviet women believed they belonged with men in this greatest of all adventures. Because of the ejection requirements, only those who belonged to parachute clubs were part of the initial selection, after which there was further screening for medical fitness, age, size, and weight. Interviews then took that pool from fifty-eight to five. Those who flew would become heroes. Those who didn't would remain unknown.

We were told to inform our families that we'd been selected for a special parachuting team. We were tested for exposure to vibration, noise, pressure, extremes of temperature, and long-term isolation. Various tests exposed various weaknesses. Yerkina was eliminated during an isolation test when she removed her boots and ate only two helpings of rations in three days. Ponomaryova, who'd been so pleased to be the only pilot and engineer, reacted badly to the centrifuge. She complained afterward that we might as well have passenger cosmonauts, since the individual was the insignificant recipient of the collective's work. Sour grapes. I did everything that was asked of me, keeping an eye on Bykovsky advancing through the men's ranks beside me. “Look at the level of your absorption!” Solovyova exclaimed at one point. “It's like a warped version of intellectual activity.” I tried to emulate the way he applied his mind to his business, refusing to dwell on the relentless instants that were bearing everything away. Separations were like return visits from nearby desolation, the way my father's death would come to me some minutes after I awoke, even years after it happened. Was something good or bad news? It began to depend on how it influenced my seeing Bykovsky.

“You know, soon we'll never see one another again,” Solovyova said from the bathroom, apropos of my distress. She pointed out that our menstrual cycles had fallen into synchrony, which happened at times when women lived together. I told her that I felt ready to accept whatever lay ahead. She threw up her hands and left the room.

15 June 1963 Night

Meeting with the Command Staff followed by dinner. Koro-lyov seemed well pleased with what he calls my preternatural calm. Kamanin remarked upon my appetite. Poor Solovyova: all through the meal I could see her thinking, If I spill the beans about her, maybe then I could go … But of course she can't. Perhaps none of us could. We've all long since understood that the only accepted way to compete was to outpace one another in cooperation and teamwork.

The R-7 has already begun its departure from the main assembly shed. It runs the length of its hydraulic platform, which is mounted on a rail car. Korolyov is dawdling alongside it in the dark like a nervous suitor. It's nosing along extremely slowly to minimize the vibration damage. Maintenance personnel poke at it, fussing and adjusting. Around dawn it will be brought upright on the pad, the service towers raised, the umbilical connections joined.

There's no question of sleep, though again we're each trying not to move. Solovyova lies on her back, gazing upward in the moonlight as if the ceiling were an affliction.

When I was twelve I told my father I was bored, and he answered, “I hate people who always say, ‘I'm bored!’” “Well, you'll never hear me say it again,” I told him. And he never did. I took long walks. I spent afternoons jumping over the runoff from storm drains. On dark winter mornings I left for school early, my steps resounding softly in the empty hallways. It was the usual sort of district school: pitiful academic standards, teachers with ungrammatical speech, fistfights between classes. But I preferred it to home. I was beginning to register that I shared many attributes with regular people. Two spirits wrestled inside me: one was the girl who wanted only to please, while the other sought to dedicate her life to something larger. Why couldn't I be someone else? Why shouldn't I imagine myself contented? I resolved to train to become someone I would like. On my thirteenth birthday I told my mother that I would probably become an arctic explorer, and she answered that she always found my conceited-ness appealing.

Korolyov like a boy on a first date appeared with flowers and a folded typescript a few minutes before we were scheduled to turn out our lights. Solovyova had just finished her toilet.

“Is this our pep talk, Chief?” she teased. Korolyov smiled to himself, riffling his typescript. “It's an inspirational talk from the Chief Designer himself,” he said. We sat, and he stood at the foot of our beds and read what he'd prepared. We were both touched by his awkwardness and care. He reminded us that this was why we had foregone marriage and children. He reminded us that he had asked us to be morally prepared for spaceflight. When it came to this kind of endeavor, woe to the egoists and hedonists, he said. For there was no one so frail and defenseless.

We both waited. “What a strange, strange country we live in,” Solovyova remarked. He chose not to respond before going on: this was not so much a culmination as a beginning, he said. He wouldn't sleep a wink tonight, but he was sure that we would. “Thank you, Chief,” Solovyova answered.

“I guess I'm finished,” he said. “That's the bed Gagarin slept in,” he added on the way out, indicating mine.

“I know,” Solovyova said. “I told her she should have it.”

He turned out the light and left. He'd been rescued from the gulag during the war and put to work in Tupolev's prisoner design bureau, where he'd become a favorite of Khrushchev's for his designs of intercontinental ballistic missiles. But his dream had been spaceflight, and he loved quoting Tsiolkovsky's dictum that the Earth was the cradle of mankind, but one didn't live in the cradle forever.

We could hear him moving about in the other cottage. “He'll be a wreck by tomorrow,” I offered, but Solovyova chose not to answer.

During our night in the maintenance room I had told Bykovsky between kisses that I wanted him to see my old farm— the far corners overrun with prickly gooseberry bushes and the pond where one could jab a stick at the green epidermis of algae and watch an aperture of black water open and close. The creek with its boulders and the dark yawning overhangs. “What a good idea,” he murmured, distracted. I'd found his mouth again, remembering a malicious-looking goat roped to a peg, and being entrusted as a very small girl with a bucket of warm, foamy milk, my father watching me negotiate it as best I could over a steep and muddy track.

16 June 1963 Morning

The doctors knocked on our door at 07:00 and inquired how we'd slept. “As always,” Solovyova answered. I was having trouble finding my voice. They supervised calisthenics before breakfast, then performed a final preflight medical check and administered an enema. Next, we stood around shirtless while they glued sensor pads to our torsos. These same doctors would also be analyzing our voice communications for signs of fatigue and stress. As always, we found their attentions unpleasant but did not want to be the sort of person who if offered an apple would complain about its size.

Technicians helped us into our spacesuits and held out paper for me to sign. One even presented his work pass. Helmets on, visors open, we boarded the bus, a matching pair of cosmonauts: me with all the luck, and Solovyova with none. We sat together in the otherwise empty seats. When the bus pulled up at the gantry's base, we peered at the infinitely high tower and cavernous flame trench. Finally Solovyova said, “I wish you all good fortune,” her voice breaking. According to tradition, one should kiss the departing traveler three times on alternate cheeks. We banged against one another with our helmets, then rose and left the bus.

There we were greeted by Korolyov and Kamanin and the Central Committee. “I'm miserable that I can't be up there with you today,” Korolyov said, smiling. He had tears in his eyes.

“Someday we'll fly together to Mars,” I told him. We hugged, and I shook hands with the rest of the Committee.

“Everyone's crying today,” Kamanin observed.

“That's it, then,” Korolyov said. Solovyova climbed back onto the bus, and I stepped up into the gantry lift. I could see her staring through the passenger window in the other direction. Then the lift doors closed and up I went.

When they opened there was blinding sun and horizon all around me. The tiny circular hatch of the Vostok and two technicians broke up the view. I tottered forward. Several kilometers away in the bright sun, some blue spruces surrounded a small white crypt with a gold cupola.

The technicians waited patiently. When I was ready, they hefted my shoulders and I swung my legs over the rim of the hatch and squeezed into the ejection seat. Then they hauled at my straps and connected the life support systems.

I checked my suit pressure and communications line. Through the latter they were piping in American jazz. Above me I could hear the hatch being manhandled into position and the screw-down bolts secured. A palm-sized mirror sewn into the sleeve of my suit allowed me to check its progress. On my right was the radio set, telegraph key and attitude control; on my left, the retro sequence switch panel.

The music stopped, and Korolyov said in my earpiece, “Fifteen minutes.” I sealed my gloves and pulled down my visor. The music didn't resume.

I sat. My orbital plane would differ from Bykovsky's by 30 degrees, so we'd approach for only a few minutes twice during each orbit. But during our encounter on the opposite side of the world, we could talk, unmonitored. He'd been in space for forty-five hours. I tried to compose my first words to him but imagined instead Solovyova on her sad trip back to the observation bunker to strip off her suit.

Korolyov announced a delay. I leaned my head back inside my helmet. He said it had to do with a problem with the telemetry. He estimated it at forty minutes, and asked if I wanted the music again. I told him no. I removed my gloves and pulled my notepad from my toiletries box and recorded the above.

17 June 1963 Night

The pen, attached by twine, drifts away when I stop to think, only to be reeled back time after time.

I have now been in space thirty-three hours. Thirty-three hours ago, following the delay, Korolyov announced launch key to go position; air purging; idle run; ignition. There was the helicopter whine of the pumps injecting fuel into the combustion chambers and the engines firing up. The rocket shook and caterwauled as the mechanisms adjusted to their inconceivable stresses, and when the gantry's hold-down arms disconnected, I felt a jolt and heard Korolyov report on the ascent. “How are you?” he asked. “How are you?” I asked him back. I was squashed into my seat, shaking like someone on an apple cart, and found it difficult to talk. There was a sharp drop in the g-load as the booster shut down, shoving me forward against my straps, then a bump as it dropped away, the noise resuming with the g-load. When the third stage shut down and fell away, I felt the weightlessness as a buoyancy in my muscles, as if nothing took any effort at all.

The vibrations stopped. The capsule was a marketplace of fans and pumps. It was rotating gently, and through the porthole came a shock of indigo, replaced just as quickly with an ardent black. Tereshkova, I thought. You're in outer space.

I saw the sun. Clouds. Islands and a coastline. The light blue of the horizon was violet at the edge of its curve. Beyond that were stars. When the sun appeared again, the illumination was so intense I had to turn away.

“Hello, Seagull,” Bykovsky called. I leaned forward against my straps and looked out the porthole, as though he were waving.

“Hello, Hawk,” I answered. Stars wheeled across my line of vision.

“Did you ask something?” Korolyov wanted to know. He'd heard my weeping. “No,” I told him.

Kamanin announced to us both that our greetings were being broadcast around the world. Someone right now was running to my parents' farm to tell them that their little Valentina had just appeared on the television.

We exchanged pleasantries. We told everyone how we were doing. Within minutes we were transferred to Petropavlovsk on Siberia's coast, and then soon after that we swept out over the Pacific and into the vast shadow of the half of Earth that was asleep. Transmissions from below flickered and buzzed and went dead. The fans and pumps were still whirring all around me.

“I've unsnapped,” Bykovsky finally said. “Try it. It's wonderful.”

“I'm here,” I told him. My capsule rotated through two full revolutions. We had only seventeen minutes of privacy on this orbit. “I'm here,” I repeated. My earpiece hissed again for a count of fifteen.

“Hello,” he finally said, and even in that one word I could hear the forbearance.

What had I expected? I wasn't sure. I still wasn't sure. We hurtled through our planet's shadow. “This is Seagull,” I told him, more plaintively than I wished to.

“The slightest push sends you in the opposite direction,” he reported, adding that he'd now been unstrapped for nearly ninety minutes.

“Do you have nausea?” he asked.

“Do I have nausea?” I said.

“Where are you?” I said.

There was a series of clicks in my ear. “I'm performing one of my procedures,” he said.

When I was a small girl, one of my evening chores was retrieving the goat that strayed to browse the garden between two tumbledown houses that frightened me. Each night, my father would say, “Oh, I'll go with you.” And then, when I waited: “Go! I'm not going.” And every single time, I'd say to myself as I went, Stupid: you took the bait. But next time you'll be smarter.

“I'm doing my stretching exercises,” Bykovsky informed me, and then his responsibilities absorbed his attention for the rest of the time we were in shadow, and I made no further attempt to distract him.

Our code phrases for communicating our condition, given that the Americans were listening, were as follows: a report of “feeling excellent” signified all was well; “feeling good” conveyed there was some concern; and “feeling satisfactory” meant that the mission might need to be terminated.

“How are you, Seagull?” Korolyov said once radio contact was reestablished. The sun broke around the bottom of the world like the arc from a welder's torch.

“I'm feeling satisfactory,” I reported.

“You're what?” he said. “Say again, Seagull?”

But I chose not to answer. There were frantic attempts to reestablish contact.

“Hawk, Hawk, please contact Seagull,” Korolyov urged, spinning toward me so far below.

“Seagull, this is Hawk,” Bykovsky said after a moment. “Is everything excellent?”

“How are your experiments?” I answered. My gloves seemed steady on the switches before me.

“I think something may be wrong with her receiver, or she may have selected the wrong channel,” he told Korolyov.

He also reported periodically that he was continuing to pay close attention to his physical regimen. In that same period of time I failed to activate my biological experiments, failed to participate in my medical experiments, and failed to keep an official log, writing for myself instead. Solovyova tried to raise me, and when she did I reached for my radio but then eased my hand back. My helmet chafed my shoulders. I wished I had toothpaste. I was supposed to photograph the solar corona but the film cassette stuck in the camera and I cracked the inner window with the lens attempting to remove the cartridge.

“Seagull, are you there?” Korolyov pleaded.

“I think she's asleep,” Bykovsky finally told him.

18 June 1963 Night

The second-day crisis was that I failed to perform a major goal of the mission: manual control of the spacecraft. Korolyov was frightened that I would be lost should the automatic reentry system fail. Nikolayev and then Gagarin himself were brought in to instruct me from the ground. Gagarin was a gentleman about it. There are two guidance systems for establishing orientation for retrofire: one uses an automatic solar bearing, and the other is manual and visual. My task was to hold the Yzor orientation viewport level with the Earth's horizon for fifteen minutes, but it refused to stop bouncing and slipped out of my crosshairs. “There it goes again,” I'd say with equanimity, while below they tried to keep the exasperation out of their responses. My eyes filled with tears and just like that the tears went away.

I had meat mixed with sorrel or oats, and prunes and processed cheese for dinner. The bread was too dry.

19 June 1963 Night

A few minutes ago I passed the lights of Rio within the blackness of Brazil. This morning I was successfully talked through the manual control by Nikolayev. I remember him as a smug and unpleasant person with jowls and the darkest razor stubble I've ever seen. Everyone is much relieved below. They're bringing me back early.

I've often considered what kind of first impression I make. I assume that I initially evoke a measure of intrigue before people get to understand me and become repulsed.

In my most recent exchanges with Bykovsky, I feel as though I've been able to detect with great precision brutality and remorse tinged with diffidence and pity. Some I haven't had the heart to report, even here. None of this should surprise me. Only my loneliness now generates fear. Otherwise I'm an uninteresting and aching surface.

During that first party for the cosmonaut finalists, I found Bykovsky and Ponomaryova holding hands as they touched an exposed wire in her portable radio set. “Come on, you try it,” they said.

1 August 1964

What else, that day, did I not do? I still remember. I failed to signal the correct working of the solar orientation system. I remained silent throughout reentry. I did not report retrofire or the separation of the capsule. I was told there was quite the panic down below throughout all of this. I focused instead on the roaring sound of the hot air, the bacon-in-the-pan sound of the thermal cladding in the reentry inferno, and the jouncing which was like a springless cart being galloped down a rutted gully. Then outside the charred porthole I saw white sky and the hatch over my helmet blew away like I'd been shelled and the ejection rockets thundered in a blur of daylight and I saw the burned capsule falling away below as I was separated from my seat.

Against regulations, I opened my visor and looked up, and was struck in the face by a piece of metal. I saw a river and some haystacks. I saw a rail line, with a locomotive. I saw small figures running to where I would land.

At the press conference we faced one hundred and three correspondents. Bykovsky had landed two orbits later. I was asked about the stitches in my face. I told the correspondents that we were proud of what our country had accomplished. I said that I'd felt no fear. Three different correspondents asked if I'd been lonely, and I answered that I'd known my loved ones were even closer than everyone thought, watching me fly. I told them that, descending on my parachute, I'd sung “My Country Hears, My Country Knows.” There were ten questions for me for every one for Bykovsky. At one point I turned to him and joked, “Oh, were you up there, too?” and occasioned a roar of laughter. I learned later that Khrushchev had been delighted with my performance.

This was before the contests with the doctors and the interviews with Korolyov — all devastated disappointment — and the honors, ending with our tour of Bulgaria, Mongolia, Italy, Switzerland, Mexico, Ghana, and Indonesia. Bykovsky asked that his wife be allowed to accompany us, but Kamanin rejected the request. It was before I received the news of my arranged marriage to Niko-layev, considered the cosmonauts' most eligible bachelor; before the first state wedding in Soviet history, presided over by Khrushchev himself; before the birth, just a few months later, of my little Alyona, a girl who provided proof that space travel interfered with neither love nor fertility.

Of course my diary had been found and read immediately upon my return. But before we were separated forever, Seagull and Hawk were allowed their one trip together around the world, chaperoned by the KGB. We had already separated — we had separated in space — but we still had our walks. On one we traversed a rough track overgrown with honeysuckle and mayweed, leaving our pursuers behind. A wolfhound, very meek and companionable, had attached herself to us. It was entirely quiet except for her panting and the calls of the KGB. We lay with our heads thrown back. Bykovsky mentioned Solovyova, who'd asked him to contact me when her letters had returned to her unopened. “Why was that, do you suppose?” he asked, when I refused comment. “Though it's none of my business,” he added. We talked about how we'd learned about sex. According to my high school friend, it took an hour, and if a couple did it for two hours, they had twins. We kissed for the last time. I asked if he would remove my virginity, and after some reassurances, he did.

I remember how much I'd loved the new teacher who'd arrived to teach physics after the war. He was a gangly and sweet man who could float pins on water and make electricity by combing his hair, which had gone prematurely white. He was so happy we were happy. We were happy because we were grasping those simple things that seemed miraculous. We were happy because at such moments we no longer belonged to only ourselves, but were beginning to experience what other people could see and feel. We were reminded that those sorts of feelings were so brief that it was as if their beginnings touched their ends. And even then I was given a glimpse of how I'd always turn my back to what was offered; how I'd never fully grasp, flailing, at whatever charities the world was able to dispense; how what I thought was my reach was really only my attempt to dismiss, to expel, or to disavow.