Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies

Pu-239 ^Pu-239

Someone committed a simple error that, according to the plant’s blueprints, should have been impossible, and a valve was left open, a pipe ruptured, a technician was trapped in a crawlspace, and a small fire destroyed several workstations. At first the alarm was discounted: false alarms commonly rang and flashed through the plant like birds in a tropical rain forest. Once the seriousness of the accident was appreciated, the rescue crew discovered that a soft drink dispenser waiting to be sent out for repair blocked the room in which the radiation suits were kept. After moving it and entering the storage room, they learned that several of the oxygen tanks had been left uncharged. By the time they reached the lab the fire was nearly out, but smoke laced with elements from the actinide series filled the unit. Lying on his back above the ceiling, staring at the wormlike pattern of surface corrosion on the tin duct a few centimeters from his face, Timofey had inhaled the fumes for an hour and forty minutes. In that time he had tried to imagine that he was inhaling dollar bills and that once they lodged in his lungs and bone marrow they would bombard his body tissue with high-energy dimes, nickels, and quarters.

Timofey had worked in 16 nearly his entire adult life, entrusted with the bounteous, transfiguring secrets of the atom. For most of that life, he had been exhilarated by the reactor’s song of nuclear fission, the hiss of particle capture and loss. Highly valued for his ingenuity, Timofey carried in his head not only a detailed knowledge of the plant’s design, but also a precise recollection of its every repair and improvised alteration. He knew where the patches were and how well they had been executed. He knew which stated tolerances could be exceeded and by how much, which gauges ran hot, which ran slow, and which could be completely ignored. The plant managers and scientists were often forced to defer to his judgment. On these occasions a glitter of derision showed in his voice, as he tapped a finger significantly against a sheet of engineering designs and explained why there was only a single correct answer to the question.

After Timofey’s death, his colleagues recalled a dressing down he had received a few years earlier at the hands of a visiting scientist. No one remembered the details, except that she had proposed slightly altering the reaction process in order to produce a somewhat greater quantity of a certain isotope that she employed in her own research. Hovering in his stained and wrinkled white coat behind the half dozen plant officials whom she had been addressing, Timofey objected to the proposal. He said that greater quantities of the isotope would not be produced in the way she suggested and, in fact, could not be produced at all, according to well established principles of nuclear physics. Blood rushed to the woman’s square, fleshy, bulldog face. “Idiot!” she spat. “I’m Nuclear Section Secretary of the Academy of Sciences. I fucking own the established principles of nuclear physics. You’re a technician!” Those who were there recalled that Timofey tried to stand his ground, but as he began to explain the flaw in her reasoning his voice lost its resonance and he began to mumble, straying away from the main point. She cut him off, asking her audience, “Are there any other questions, any educated questions?” As it turned out, neither Timofey nor the scientist was ever proved right. The Defense Ministry rejected the proposal for reasons of economy.

Timofey’s relations with his coworkers were more comfortable, if distant, and he usually joined the others in his unit at lunch in the plant’s low-ceilinged, windowless buffet. The room rustled with murmured complaint. Timofey could hardly be counted among the most embittered of the technical workers—a point sagely observed later. All joked with stale irony about the lapses in safety and the precipitous decline in their salaries caused by inflation; these comments had become almost entirely humorless three months earlier, when management followed a flurry of assuring memos, beseeching directives, and unambiguous promises with a failure to pay them at all. No one had been paid since.

Every afternoon at four Timofey fled the compromises and incompetence of his workplace in an old Zhiguli that he had purchased precisely so that he could arrive home a half hour earlier than if he had taken the tram. Against the odds set by personality and circumstance, he had married, late in his fourth decade, an electrical engineer assigned to another unit. Now, with the attentiveness he had once offered the reactor, Timofey often sat across the kitchen table from his wife with his head cocked, listening to their spindly, asthmatic eight-year-old son, Tolya, in the next room give ruinous commands to his toy soldiers. A serious respiratory ailment similar to the boy’s kept Marina from working; disability leave had brought a pretty bloom to her soft cheeks.

The family lived on the eighth floor of a weather-stained concrete apartment tower with crumbling front steps and unlit hallways. In this rotted box lay a jewel of a two-bedroom apartment that smelled of fresh bread and meat dumplings and overlooked a birch forest. Laced with ski tracks in the winter and fragranced by grilled shashlik in the summer, home to deer, rabbits, and even gray wolves, the forest stretched well beyond their sight, all the way to the city’s double-fenced perimeter.

His colleagues thought of Marina and the boy as Timofey was pulled from the crawlspace. He was conscious, but dazed, his eyes unfocused and his face slack. Surrounded by phantoms in radiation suits, Timofey saw the unit as if for the first time: the cracked walls, the electrical cords snaking underfoot, the scratched and fogged glass over the gauges, the mold-spattered valves and pipes, the disabled equipment piled in an unused workstation, and the frayed tubing that bypassed sections of missing pipe and was kept in place by electrical tape. He staggered from the lab, took a shower, vomited twice, disposed of his clothes, and was briefly examined by a medic, who took his pulse and temperature. No one looked him in the eye. Timofey was sent home. His colleagues were surprised when he returned the next day, shrugging off the accident and saying that he had a few things to take care of before going on the “rest leave” he had been granted as a matter of course. But his smile was as wan as the moon on a midsummer night, and his hands trembled. In any case, his colleagues were too busy to chat. The clean-up was chaotically underway and the normal activities of the plant had been suspended.

Early one evening a week after the “event,” as it was known in the plant and within the appropriate ministries (it was not known anywhere else), Timofey was sitting at a café table in the bar off the lobby of a towering Brezhnevera hotel on one of the boulevards that radiated from Moscow’s nucleus. A domestically made double-breasted sports jacket the color of milk chocolate hung from his frame like wash left to dry. He was only fifty years old but, lank and stooped, his face lined by a spiderwork of dilated veins, he looked at least fifteen years older, almost a veteran of the war. His skin was as gray as wet concrete, except for the radiation erythema inflaming the skin around his eyes and nose. Coarse white hair bristled from his skull. Set close beneath white caterpillar eyebrows, his blue eyes blazed.

He was not by nature impressed by attempts to suggest luxury and comfort, and the gypsies and touts milling outside the entrance had in any case already mitigated the hotel’s grandeur. He recognized that the lounge area was meant to approximate the soaring glass and marble atria of the West, but the girders of the greenhouse roof impended two stories above his head, supported by walls of chipped concrete blocks. A line of shuttered windows ran the perimeter above the lounge, looking down upon it as if it were a factory floor. The single appealing amenity was the set of flourishing potted plants and ferns in the center of the room. As Timofey watched over a glass of unsipped vodka that had cost him a third of his remaining rubles, a fat security guard in a maroon suit flicked a cigarette butt into the plant beds and stalked away.

Timofey strained to detect the aspirates and dental fricatives of a foreign language, but the other patrons were all either Russian or “black”—that is, Caucasian. Overweight, unshaven men in lurid track suits and cheap leather jackets huddled over the stained plastic tables, blowing smoke into each other’s faces. Occasionally they looked up from their drinks and eyed the people around them. Then they fell back into negotiation. At another table, a rectangular woman in a low-cut, short black dress and black leggings scowled at a newspaper.

Directly behind Timofey, sitting alone, a young man with dark, bony features decided that this hick would be incapable of getting a girl on his own. Not that there would be too many girls around this early. He wondered if Timofey had any money and whether he could make him part with it. Certainly the mark would have enough for one of the kids in ski parkas waving down cars on the boulevard. The young man, called Shiv by his Moscow acquaintances (he had no friends), got up from his table, leaving his drink.

“First time in Moscow, my friend?”

Timofey was not taken off guard. He slowly raised his head and studied the young man standing before him. Either the man’s nose had once been broken, or his nose had never been touched and the rest of his face had been broken many times, leaving his cheeks and the arches beneath his eyes jutted askew. The youth wore a foreign blazer and a black shirt, and what looked like foreign shoes as well, a pair of black loafers. His dark, curly hair was cut long, lapping neatly against the top of his collar. Jewelry glinted from his fingers and wrists. It was impossible to imagine the existence of such a creature in 16.

Shiv didn’t care for the fearlessness in Timofey’s eyes; it suggested a profound ignorance of the world. But he pulled a chair underneath him, sat down heavily, and said in a low voice, “It’s lonely here. Would you like to meet someone?”

The mark didn’t reply, nor make any sign that he had even heard him. His jaw was clenched shut, his face blank. Shiv wondered whether he spoke Russian. He himself spoke no foreign languages and detested the capriciousness with which foreigners chose to speak their own. He added, “You’ve come to the right place. I’d be pleased to make an introduction.”

Timofey continued to stare at Shiv in a way that he should have known, if he had any sense at all, was extremely dangerous. A crazy, Shiv thought, a waste of time. But then the mark abruptly rasped, in educated, unaccented Russian, “I have something to sell.”

Shiv grinned, showing large white canines. He congratulated him, “You’re a businessman. Well, you’ve come to the right place for that too. I’m also a businessman. What is it you want to sell?”

“I can’t discuss it here.”

“All right.”

Shiv stood and Timofey tentatively followed him to a little alcove stuffed with video poker machines. They whined and yelped, devouring gambling tokens. Incandescent images of kings, queens, and knaves flickered across the young man’s face.

“No, this isn’t private enough.”

“Sure it is,” Shiv said. “More business is done here than on the Moscow Stock Exchange.”

“No.”

Shiv shrugged and headed back to his table, which the girl, in a rare display of zeal, had already cleared. His drink was gone. Shiv frowned, but knew he could make her apologize and give him another drink on the house, which would taste much better for it. He had that kind of respect, he thought.

“You’re making the biggest mistake of your life,” Timofey whispered behind him. “I’ll make you rich.”

What changed Shiv’s mind was not the promise, which these days was laden in nearly every commercial advertisement, political manifesto, and murmur of love. Rather, he discerned two vigorously competing elements within the mark’s voice. One of them was desperation, in itself an augury of profit. Yet as desperate as he was, Timofey had spoken just barely within range of Shiv’s hearing. Shiv was impressed by the guy’s self-control. Perhaps he was serious after all.

He turned back toward Timofey, who continued to stare at him in appraisal. With a barely perceptible flick of his head, Shiv motioned him toward a row of elevators bedecked with posters for travel agencies and masseuses. Timofey remained in the alcove for a long moment, trying to decide whether to follow. Shiv looked away and punched the call button. After a minute or so the elevator arrived. Timofey stepped in just as the doors were closing.

Shiv said, “If you’re jerking me around…”

The usually reliable fourth-floor dezhurnaya, the suppurating wart who watched the floor’s rooms, decided to be difficult. Shiv slipped her a five dollar bill, and she said, “More.” She returned the second fiver because it had a crease down the middle, dispelling its notional value. Shiv had been trying to pass it off for weeks and now conceded that he would be stuck with it until the day he died. The crone accepted the next bill, scowling, and even then gazed a long time into her drawer of keys, as if undecided about giving him one.

As they entered the room, Shiv pulled out a pack of Marlboros and a gold-plated lighter and leaned against a beige chipboard dresser. The room’s ponderous velvet curtains smelled of insecticide; unperturbed, a bloated fly did lazy eights around the naked bulb on the ceiling. Shiv didn’t offer the mark a cigarette. “All right,” he said, flame billowing from the lighter before he brought it to his face. “This better be worth my while.”

Timofey reached into his jacket, almost too abruptly: he didn’t notice Shiv tense and go for the dirk in his back pocket. The mark pulled out a green cardboard folder and proffered it. “Look at this.”

Shiv returned the blade. He carried four knives of varying sizes, grades, and means of employment.

“Why?”

“Just look at it.”

Shiv opened the folder. Inside was Timofey’s internal passport, plus some other documents. Shiv was not accustomed to strangers shoving their papers in his face; indeed, he knew the family names of very few people in Moscow. This guy, then, had to be a nut case, and Shiv rued the ten bucks he had given the dezhurnaya. The mark stared up through the stamped black-and-white photograph as if from under water. “Timofey Fyodorovich, pleased to meet you. So what?”

“Look at where I live: Skotoprigonyevsk-16.”

Shiv made no sign of being impressed, but for Timofey the words had the force of an incantation. The existence of the city, a scientific complex established by the military, had once been so secret that it was left undocumented on the Red Army’s own field maps. Even its name, which was meant to indicate that it lay sixteen kilometers from the original Skotoprigonyevsk, was a deception: the two cities were nearly two hundred kilometers apart. Without permission from the KGB, it had been impossible to enter or leave 16. Until two years earlier, Timofey had never been outside, not once in twenty-three years. He now realized, as he would have realized if he hadn’t been so distracted by the events of the past week, that it wasn’t enough to find a criminal. He needed someone with brains, someone who had read a newspaper in the last five years.

“Now look at the other papers. See, this is my pass to the Strategic Production Facility.”

“Comrade,” Shiv said sarcastically, “if you think I’m buying some fancy documents—”

“Listen to me. My unit’s principal task is the supply of the strategic weapons force. Our reactor produces Pu-239 as a fission by-product for manufacture into warheads. These operations have been curtailed, but the reactors must be kept functioning. Decommissioning them would be even more costly than maintaining them—and we can’t even do that properly.” Timofey’s voice fell to an angry whisper. “There have been many lapses in the administration of safety procedure.”

Timofey looked intently at Shiv, to see if he understood. But Shiv wasn’t listening; he didn’t like to be lectured and especially didn’t like to be told to read things, even identity papers. The world was full of men who knew more than Shiv did, and he hated each one of them. A murderous black cloud rose from the stained orange carpeting at his feet and occulted his vision. The more Timofey talked, the more Shiv wanted to hurt him. But at the same time, starting from the moment he heard the name Skotoprigonyevsk-16, Shiv gradually became aware that he was onto something big, bigger than anything he had ever done before. He was nudged by an incipient awareness that perhaps it was even too big for him.

In flat, clipped sentences, Timofey spoke: “There was an accident. I was contaminated. I have a wife and child, and nothing to leave them. This is why I’m here.”

“Don’t tell me about your wife and child. You can fuck them both to hell. I’m a businessman.”

For a moment, Timofey was shocked by the violence in the young man’s voice. But then he reminded himself that, in coming to Moscow for the first time in twentyfive years, he had entered a country where violence was the most stable and valuable currency. Maybe this was the right guy for the deal after all. There was no room for sentimentality.

He braced himself. “All right then. Here’s what you need to know. I have diverted a small quantity of fissile material. I’m here to sell it.”

Shiv removed his handkerchief again and savagely wiped his nose. He had a cold, Timofey observed. Acute radiation exposure severely compromised the immune system, commonly leading to fatal bacterial infection. He wondered if the hoodlum’s germs were the ones fated to kill him.

Timofey said, “Well, are you interested?”

To counteract any impression of weakness given by the handkerchief, Shiv tugged a mouthful of smoke from his cigarette.

“In what?”

“Are you listening to anything I’m saying? I have a little more than three hundred grams of weapons-grade plutonium. It can be used to make an atomic bomb. I want thirty thousand dollars for it.”

As a matter of principle, Shiv laughed. He always laughed when a mark named a price. But a chill seeped through him as far down as his testicles.

“It will fetch many times that on the market. Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea all have nuclear weapons programs, but they don’t have the technology to produce enriched fissile material. They’re desperate for it; there’s no price Saddam Hussein wouldn’t pay for an atomic bomb.”

“I don’t know anything about selling this stuff…”

“Don’t be a fool,” Timofey rasped. “Neither do I. That’s why I’ve come here. But you say you’re a businessman. You must have contacts, people with money, people who can get it out of the country.”

Shiv grunted. He was just playing for time now, to assemble his thoughts and devise a strategy. The word fool remained lodged in his gut like a spoiled piece of meat.

“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.”

“Make up your mind.”

“Where’s the stuff?”

“With me.”

A predatory light flicked on in the hoodlum’s eyes. But Timofey had expected that. He slowly unbuttoned his jacket. It fell away to reveal an invention of several hours’ work that, he realized only when he assembled it in the kitchen the day after the accident, he had been planning for years. At that moment of realization, his entire body had been flooded with a searing wonder at the dark soul that inhabited it. Now, under his arm, a steel canister no bigger than a coffee tin was attached to his left side by an impenetrably complex arrangement of belts, straps, hooks, and buckles.

“Do you see how I rigged the container?” he said. “There’s a right way of taking it off my body and many wrong ways. Take it off one of the wrong ways and the container opens and the material spills out. Are you aware of the radiological properties of plutonium and their effect on living organisms?”

Shiv almost laughed. He once knew a girl who wore something like this.

“Let me see it.”

“It’s plutonium. It has to be examined under controlled laboratory conditions. If even a microscopic amount of it lodges within your body, ionizing radiation will irreversibly damage body tissue and your cells’ nucleic material. A thousandth of a gram is fatal… I’ll put it to you more simply. Anything it touches dies. It’s like in a fairy tale.”

Shiv did indeed have business contacts, but he’d been burned about six months earlier, helping to move some Uzbek heroin that must have been worth more than a half million dollars. He had actually held the bags in his hands and pinched the powder through the plastic, marveling at the physics that transmuted such a trivial quantity of something into so much money. But once he made the arrangements and the businessmen had the stuff in their hands, they gave him only two thousand dollars for his trouble, little more than a tip. Across a table covered by a freshly stained tablecloth, the Don—his name was Voronenko, and he was from Tambov, but he insisted on being called the Don anyway, and being served spaghetti and meatballs for lunch—had grinned at the shattering disappointment on Shiv’s face. Shiv had wanted to protest, but he was frightened. Afterwards he was so angry that he gambled and whored the two grand away in a single night.

He said, “So, there was an accident. How do I know the stuff’s still good?”

“Do you know what a half-life is? The half-life of plutonium 239 is twenty-four thousand years.”

“That’s what you’re telling me…”

“You can look it up.”

“What am I, a fucking librarian? Listen, I know this game. It’s mixed with something.”

Timofey’s whole body was burning; he could feel each of his vital organs being singed by alpha radiation. For a moment he wished he could lie on one of the narrow beds in the room and nap. When he woke, perhaps he would be home. But he dared not imagine that he would wake to find that the accident had never happened. He said, “Yes, of course. The sample contains significant amounts of uranium and other plutonium isotopes, plus trace quantities of americium and gallium. But the Pu-239 content is 94.7 percent.”

“So you admit it’s not the first-quality stuff.”

“Anything greater than 93 percent is considered weapons-grade. Look, do you have somebody you can bring this to? Otherwise, we’re wasting my time.”

Shiv took out another cigarette from his jacket and tapped it against the back of his hand. Igniting the lighter, he kept his finger lingering on the gas feed. He passed the flame in front of his face so that it appeared to completely immolate the mark.

“Yeah, I do, but he’s in Perkhuskovo. It’s a fortyminute drive. I’ll take you to him.”

“I have a car. I’ll follow you.”

Shiv shook his head. “That won’t work. His dacha’s protected. You can’t go through the gate alone.”

“Forget it then. I’ll take the material someplace else.”

Shiv’s shrug of indifference was nearly sincere. The guy was too weird, the stuff was too weird. His conscience told him he was better off pimping for schoolgirls. But he said, “If you like. But for a deal like this, you’ll need to go to one godfather or another. On your own you’re not going to find someone walking around with thirty thousand dollars in his pocket. This businessman knows me, his staff knows me. I’ll go with you in your car. You can drive.”

Timofey said, “No, we each drive separately.”

The mark was unmovable. Shiv offered him a conciliatory smile.

“All right,” he said. “Maybe. I’ll call him from the lobby and try to set it up. I’m not even sure he can see us tonight.”

“It has to be tonight or there’s no deal.”

“Don’t be in such a hurry. You said the stuff lasts twenty-four thousand years, right?”

“Tell him I’m from Skotoprigonyevsk-16. Tell him it’s weapons-grade. That’s all he needs to know. Do you understand the very least bit of what I’m saying?”

The pale solar disc had dissolved in the horizonal haze long ago, but the autumn evening was still in its adolescent hours, alive to possibility. As the two cars lurched into the swirl of traffic on the Garden Ring road, Timofey could taste the unburned gasoline in the hoodlum’s exhaust. He had never before driven in so much traffic or seen so many foreign cars, or guessed that they would ever be driven so recklessly. Their rear lights flitted and spun like fireflies. At his every hesitation or deceleration the cars behind him flashed their headlights. Their drivers navigated their vehicles as if from the edges of their seats, peering over their dashboards, white-knuckled and grim, and as if they all carried three hundred grams of weapons-grade plutonium strapped to their chests. Driving among Audis and Mercedes-Benzes would have thrilled Tolya, who cut pictures of them from magazines and cherished his small collection of mismatched models. The thought of his son, a sweet and cheerful boy with orthodontic braces, and utterly, utterly innocent, stabbed at him.

The road passed beneath what Timofey recognized as Mayakovsky Square from television broadcasts of holiday marches. He knew that the vengeful, lustrating revision of Moscow’s street names in the last few years had renamed the square Triumfalnaya, though there was nothing triumphant about it, except for its big Philips billboard advertisement. Were all the advertisements on the Garden Ring posted in the Latin alphabet? Was Cyrillic no longer anything more than a folk custom? It was as if he had traveled to the capital of a country in which he had never lived.

Of course hardly any commercial advertising could be seen in 16. Since Gorbachev’s fall a halfhearted attempt had been made to obscure most of the Soviet agitprop, but it was still a Soviet city untouched by foreign retailing and foreign advertising. The few foreign goods that found their way into the city’s state-owned shops arrived dented and tattered, as if produced in Asian, European, and North American factories by demoralized Russian workers. Well, these days 16 was much less of a city. It was not uncommon to see chickens and other small livestock grazing in the gravel between the high-rises, where pensioners and unpaid workers had taken up subsistence farming. Resentment of Moscow burned in Timofey’s chest, alongside the Pu-239.

Plutonium. There was no exit for the stuff. It was as permanent and universal as original sin. Since its first synthesis in 1941 (what did Seaborg do with that magical, primeval stone of his own creation? put it in his vault? was it still there?) more than a thousand metric tons of the element had been produced. It was still being manufactured, not only in Russia, but in France and Britain as well, and it remained stockpiled in America. Nearly all of it was locked in steel containers, buried in mines, or sealed in glass—safe, safe, safe. But the very minimal fraction that wasn’t secured, the few flakes that had escaped in nuclear tests, reactor accidents, transport mishaps, thefts, and leakages, veiled the entire planet. Sometime within the next three months Timofey would die with plutonium in his body, joined in the same year by thousands of other victims in Russia and around the world. His body would be brought directly to the city crematorium, abstractly designed in jaggedly cut, pale yellow concrete so as to be vaguely “life-affirming,” where the chemistry of his skin and lungs, heart and head, would be transformed by fire and wind. In the rendering oven, the Pu-239 would oxidize and engage in wanton couplings with other substances, but it would always stay faithful to its radioactive, elemental properties. Some of it would remain in the ash plowed back to the earth; the rest would be borne aloft into the vast white skies arching above the frozen plain. Dust to dust.

Yet it would remain intangible, completely invisible, hovering elusively before us like a floater in our eyes’ vitreous humor. People get cancer all the time and almost never know why. A nucleic acid on a DNA site is knocked out of place, a chromosome sequence is deleted, an oncogene is activated. It would show up only in statistics, where it remained divorced from the lives and deaths of individuals. It was just as well, Timofey thought, that we couldn’t take in the enormity of the threat; if we did, we would be paralyzed with fear—not for ourselves, but for our children. We couldn’t wrap our minds around it; we could think of it only for a few moments and then have to turn away from it. But the accident had liberated Timofey. He could now contemplate plutonium without any difficulty at all.

And it was not only plutonium. Timofey was now exquisitely aware of the ethereal solution that washed over him every day like a warm bath: the insidiously subatomic, the swarmingly microscopic, and the multi-syllabically chemical. His body was soaked in pesticides, the liquefied remains of electrical batteries, leaded gasoline exhaust, dioxin, nitrates, toxic waste metals, dyes, and deadly viral organisms generated in untreated sewage—the entire carcinogenic and otherwise malevolent slough of the great Soviet industrial empire. Like Homo Sovieticus himself, Timofey was ending his life as a melange of damaged chromosomes, metal-laden tissue, crumbling bone, fragmented membranes, and oxygen-deprived blood. Perhaps his nation’s casual regard for the biological consequences of environmental degradation was the result of some quasi-Hegelian conviction that man lived in history, not nature. It was no wonder everyone smoked.

For a moment, as the hoodlum swung into the turning lane at the Novy Arbat, Timofey considered passing the turnoff and driving on through the night and the following day back to 16’s familiar embrace. But there was only one hundred and twenty dollars hidden in the bookcase in his apartment. It was the sum total of his family’s savings.

Now Shiv saw Timofey’s shudder of indecision in his rearview mirror; he had suspected that the mark might turn tail. If he had, Shiv would have broken from the turning lane with a shriek of tire (he savored the image) and chased him down.

In tandem the two cars crossed the bridge over the Moscow River, the brilliantly lit White House on their right nearly effervescing in the haze off the water. It was as white and polished as a tooth, having been capped recently by a squadron of Turkish workers after Yeltsin’s troops had shelled and nearly gutted it. Shiv and Timofey passed the Pizza Hut and the arch commemorating the battle against Napoleon at Borodino. They were leaving the city. Now Timofey knew he was committed. The hoodlum wouldn’t let him go. He knew this as surely as if he were sitting in the car beside him. If the world of the atom were controlled by random quantum events, then the macroscopic universe through which the two Zhigulis were piloted was purely deterministic. The canister was heavy and the straps that supported it were beginning to cut into Timofey’s back.

He could have even more easily evaded Shiv at the exit off Kutuzovsky Prospekt; then on the next road there was another turnoff, then another and another. Timofey lost count of the turns. It was like driving down a rabbit hole: he’d never find his way back. Soon they were kicking up stones on a dark country road, the only traffic. Every once and a while the Moscow River or one of its tributaries showed itself through the naked, snowless birches. A pocked and torn slice of moon bobbed and weaved across his windshield. Shiv paused, looking for the way, and then abruptly pivoted his car into a lane hardly wider than the Zhiguli itself.

Timofey followed, taking care to stay on the path. He could hear himself breathing: the sound from his lungs was muffled and wet. Gravel crunched beneath his tires and bushes scraped their nails against the car’s doors. The hood slowed even further, crossing a small bridge made of a few planks. They clattered like bones.

Timofey’s rearview mirror incandesced. Annoyed, he pushed it from his line of sight. Shiv slowed to a stop, blinked a pair of white lights in reverse, and backed up just short of Timofey’s front bumper. At the same time, Timofey felt a hard tap at his rear.

Shiv stepped from his car. Pinned against the night by the glare of headlights, the boy appeared vulnerable and very young, almost untouched by life. Timofey detected a measure of gentleness in his face, despite the lunar shadows cast across it. Shiv grimaced at the driver of the third automobile, signaling him to close his lights. He walked in front of his own car and squeezed alongside the brush to Timofey’s passenger door.

“We have to talk,” he said. “Open it.”

Timofey hesitated for a moment, but the lengthy drive had softened his resolve and confused his plan. And there was a car pressed against his rear bumper. He reached over and unlocked the door.

Shiv slid into the seat and stretched his legs. Even for short people, the Zhigulis were too goddamned small.

“We’re here?”

“Where else could we be?”

Timofey turned his head and peered into the dark, looking for the businessman’s dacha. There was nothing to see at all.

“All right, now hand over the stuff.”

“Look, let’s do this right—” Timofey began, but then comprehension darkened his face. He didn’t need to consider an escape: he understood the whole setup. Perhaps he had chosen the coward’s way out. “I see. You’re as foolish as a peasant in a fairy tale.”

Shiv opened his coat and removed from a holster in his sport jacket an oiled straight blade nearly twenty centimeters long. He turned it so that the moonlight ran its length. He looked into the mark’s face for fear. Instead he found ridicule.

Timofey said, “You’re threatening me with a knife? I have enough plutonium in my lungs to power a small city for a year, and you’re threatening me with a knife?”

Shiv placed the shaft against Timofey’s side, hard enough to leave a mark even if it were removed. Timofey acted as if he didn’t feel it. Again something dark passed before Shiv’s eyes.

“Look, this is a high-carbon steel Premium Gessl manufactured by Imperial Gessl in Frankfurt, Germany. I paid eighty bucks for it. It passes through flesh like water. Just give me the goddamned stuff.”

“No. I won’t do that,” Timofey said primly. “I want thirty thousand dollars. It’s a fair price, I think, and I won’t settle for anything less. I drove here in good faith.”

Timofey was the first man Shiv had ever killed, though he had cut a dozen others, plus two women. He wondered if it got easier each time; that’s what he had heard. In any case, this was easy enough. There wasn’t even much blood, though he was glad the mark had driven his own car after all.

Now Shiv sat alone, aware of the hiss of his lungs, and also that his armpits were wet. Well, it wasn’t every day you killed a man. But Timofey hadn’t resisted, it hadn’t been like killing a man. The knife had passed through him not as if he were water, but as if he were a ghost. Shiv sensed that he had been cheated again.

He opened and pushed away Timofey’s brown sports jacket, which even in the soundless dark nearly screamed Era of Stagnation. The canister was there, still strapped to his chest. The configuration of straps, hooks, and buckles that kept it in place taunted Shiv with its intricacy. He couldn’t follow where each strap went, or what was being buckled or snapped. To Shiv it was a labyrinth, a rat’s nest, a knot. To Timofey it had been a topographical equation, clockworks, a flowchart. “Fuck it,” Shiv said aloud. He took the Gessl and cut the thin strap above the cylinder with two quick strokes.

Already the mark’s body was cool; perhaps time was passing more quickly than Shiv realized. Or maybe it was passing much more slowly: in a single dilated instant he discerned the two cut pieces of the strap hovering at each other’s torn edge, longing to be one again. But then they flew away with a robust snap! and the entire assembly lost the tension that had kept it wrapped around Timofey’s body. The effect was so dramatic he fancied that Timofey had come alive and that he would have the opportunity to kill him again. The canister popped open—he now apprehended which two hooks and which three straps had kept it closed—and fell against the gearshift.

Powder spilled out, but not much. Shiv grabbed the canister and shoveled back some of what was on the seat, at least a few thousand dollars’ worth. He couldn’t really see the stuff, but it was warm and gritty between his fingers. He scooped in as much as he could, screwed the cylinder shut, and then dusted off his hands against his trousers. He cut away the rest of the straps, leaving them draped on Timofey’s body. He climbed from the car.

“Good work, lads.”

The two brothers, Andrei and Yegor, each stood nearly two meters tall on either side of their car, which was still parked flush against Timofey’s bumper. They were not twins, though it was often difficult to recall which was which, they were so empty of personality. Shiv, who had called them from the hotel lobby, thought of them as pure muscle. By most standards of measurement, they were of equally deficient intelligence. They spoke slowly, reasoned even more slowly, and became steadily more unreliable the further they traveled from their last glass of vodka. Nevertheless, they were useful, and they could do what they were told, or a satisfactory approximation of it.

“What do you got there?” said Yegor.

“You wouldn’t understand, believe me.”

It was then that he saw that Andrei was holding a gun at his hip, leveling it directly at him. It was some kind of pistol, and it looked ridiculously small in Andrei’s hands. Still, it was a gun. In the old days, no one had a gun, everyone fought it out with knives and brass knuckles and solid, honest fists, and pieces of lead pipe. You couldn’t get firearms. They never reached the market, and the mere possession of one made the cops dangerously angry. But this was democracy: now every moron had a gun.

“Put it away. What did you think, I was going to cut you out?”

Yegor stepped toward him, his arm outstretched. “Hand it over.”

Shiv nodded his head, as if in agreement, but he kept the canister clutched to his stomach. “All right, you’ve got the drop on me. I admit it. I’ll put it in writing if you like. They’ll be talking about this for years. But you’re not going to be able to move it on your own.”

“Why not?” said Andrei. He raised the gun with both hands. The hands trembled. For a moment, Shiv thought he could see straight down the barrel. “You think we’re stupid.”

“If you want to show me how smart you are, you’ll put down the fucking gun.”

“I don’t have to show you anything.”

“Listen, this is plutonium. Do you know what it is?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Do you know what’s it’s used for?”

“I don’t got to know. All I got to know is that people will buy it. That’s the free market.”

“Idiot! Who are you going to sell it to?”

“Private enterprise. They’ll buy it from us just like they’d buy it from you. And did you call me an idiot?”

“Listen, I’m just trying to explain to you”—Shiv thought for a moment—“the material’s radiological properties.”

Shiv was too close to be surprised, it happened too quickly. In one moment he was trying to reason with Andrei, intimidate him, and was only beginning to appreciate the seriousness of the problem, and had just observed, in a casual way, that the entire time of his life up to the moment he had stepped out of Timofey’s car seemed equal in length to the time since then, and in the next moment he was unconscious, bleeding from a large wound in his head.

“Well, fuck you,” said Andrei, or, more literally, “go to a fucked mother.” He had never shot a man before, and he was surprised and frightened by the blood, which had splattered all over Shiv’s clothes, and even on himself. He had expected that the impact of the shot would have propelled Shiv off the bridge, but it hadn’t. Shiv lay there at his feet, bleeding against the rear tire. The sound of the little gun was tremendous; it continued roaring through the woods long after Andrei had brought the weapon to his side.

Neither brother said anything for a while. In fact, they weren’t brothers, as everyone believed, but were stepbrothers, as well as in-laws, in some kind of complicated way that neither had ever figured out. From Yegor’s silence, Andrei guessed that he was angry with him for shooting Shiv. They hadn’t agreed to shoot him beforehand. But Yegor had allowed him to carry the gun, which meant Andrei had the right to make the decision. Yegor couldn’t second-guess him, Andrei resolved, his nostrils flaring.

But Yegor broke the long silence with a gasped guffaw. In the bark of his surprise lay a tremor of anxiety. “Look at this mess,” he said. “You fucking near tore off his head.”

Andrei could tell his brother was proud of him, at least a bit. He felt a surge of love.

“Well, fuck,” said Yegor, shaking his head in wonder. “It’s really a mess. How are we going to clean it up? It’s all over the car. Shit, it’s on my pants.”

“Let’s just take the stuff and leave.”

Yegor said, “Go through his pockets. He always carries a roll. I’ll check the other guy.”

“No, it’s too much blood. I’ll go through the other guy’s pockets.”

“Look, it’s like I’ve been telling you, that’s what’s wrong with this country. People don’t accept the consequences of their actions. Now, you put a hole in the guy’s head, you go through his pockets.”

Andrei scowled but quickly ran his hands through Shiv’s trousers, jacket, and coat anyway. The body stirred and something like a groan bubbled from Shiv’s bloodfilled mouth. Some of the blood trickled onto Andrei’s hand. It was disgustingly warm and viscid. He snatched his hand away and wiped it on Shiv’s jacket. Taking more care now, he reached into the inside jacket pocket and pulled out a gold-colored money clip with some rubles, about ten twenty dollar bills, a few tens, and a creased five. He slipped the clip and four or five of the twenties into his pocket and, stacking the rest on the car’s trunk, announced, “Not much, just some cash.”

Yegor emerged from the car. “There’s nothing at all on this guy, only rubles.”

Andrei doubted that. He should have pocketed all of Shiv’s money.

“I wonder what the stuff’s like,” said Yegor, taking the closed canister from Shiv’s lap.

He placed it next to the money and pulled off the top, revealing inside a coarse, silvery gray powder. Yegor grimaced. It was nothing like he had ever seen. He wet his finger, poked it into the container, and removed a fingerprint’s worth. The stuff tasted chalky.

“What did he call it?” he asked.

“Plutonium. From Bolivia, he said.”

Andrei reached in, took a pinch of the powder, and placed it on the back of his left hand. He then closed his right nostril with a finger and brought the stuff up to his face. He loved doing this. From the moment he had pulled the gun on Shiv he had felt as if he were in Chicago or Miami. He sniffed up the powder.

It burned, but not in the right way. It was as if someone—Yegor—had grabbed his nostril with a pair of hot pliers. The pain shot through his head like a nail, and he saw stars. Then he saw atoms, their nuclei surrounded by hairy penumbrae of indeterminately placed electrons. The nuclei themselves pulsed with indeterminacy, their masses slightly less than the sum of their parts. Bombarded by neutrons, the nuclei were drastically deformed. Some burst. The repulsion of two highly charged nuclear fragments released Promethean, adamantine energy, as well as excess neutrons that bounced among the other nuclei, a cascade of excitation and transformation.

“It’s crap. It’s complete crap. Crap, crap, crap!”

Enraged, Andrei hoisted the open container, brought it behind his head, and, with a grunt and a cry, hurled it far into the night sky. The canister sailed. For a moment, as it reached the top of its ascent beyond the bridge, it caught a piece of moonlight along its sides. It looked like a little crescent moon itself, in an eternal orbit above the earth, the stuff forever pluming behind it. And then it very swiftly vanished. Everything was quiet for a moment, and then there was a distant, voluptuous sound as the container plunged into the river. As the two brothers turned toward each other, one of them with a gun, everything was quiet again.

Anzhelika, 13 ^{AHЖеתИКа, 13}

Thickened by a myopia left undiagnosed, a mist gauzed the small town, rounding the forms of the low, pale concrete buildings and the naked trees. The trees’ branches were brown, smelling of color in a shadowed, variously grayed landscape. Patches of mud rose from the depths of the snow and ice. The horizon loomed, a wall only a few paces ahead. A truck drifted down the street, powered by a breeze. Otherwise, the town’s capacity for motion was lost. The smoke from a chimney froze, curled like a beckoning finger.

The girl, Anzhelika (the stress rested on the penultimate syllable), was entirely enveloped in warmth, more warmth than could have been latent within her ragged coat. The heat dampened her hair and the hollows under her arms. This odd, close nimbus, which had swelled around her in the course of the day, was composed of two envelopes, the innermost a soundless vacuum. The outer envelope had been fed on the squeal of desks swinging open on their hinges, the dull, brute clatter of shoe leather in a hallway, and the brassy din of a schoolyard. She heard the clamor only at a distance. Her own shoes, loosely wrapped in oversized galoshes, pressed silently into the tender late-winter road, leaving a precise record of the weight she brought to this world.

Little Kolya was playing with some boys in the gaping alleyway between two houses, poking a stick at something in an oily puddle. He was ten years old, the son of Aunt Olya and Uncle Fedya, who lived in the front room. Anzhelika occasionally watched over him when Aunt Olya was out, and even helped him once with his mathematics homework, though she was not good at sums at all. He had paid close, devoted attention, contemplating every question at length. Anzhelika had liked being in that room, working at Uncle Fedya’s rolltop desk alongside the dark mahogany wardrobe that had been constructed in Vilna in 1879, according to an inscription inside the mirrored door. Kolya had showed the inscription to her; it was the year of Comrade Stalin’s birth. The room smelled sweetly of the polish with which Uncle Fedya cleaned his boots.

That was last year. Yesterday she had passed Kolya playing in this same alleyway, a favorite place for the neighborhood boys, and when he saw her he had smiled, but not at her. A meteor had whistled by her right ear twenty seconds later. It landed on the ice ahead and skidded to an impact against a smaller stone, propelling it forward against some pebbles, propelling them in turn, a cascade of insults. She had walked on, hunched in her coat.

Today she expected the same rock to whistle by at exactly the same distance and velocity, and with the same melody. As she waited for it, she understood that the warmth that surrounded her had the character of an expectation, an intimate connection to something that was about to happen, born at the moment of the First Bulletin. Incomprehensible and unexplained, the bulletin had set off the ticking of a clock. The entire world heard it.

Even though the missile was never launched and she reached the door to the house unmolested, the sense of imminence never left her, it remained a warm, abiding presence through the rest of the day. She sought to capture and interrogate it, but after a hurried mental chase it eluded her around a rock and under a floorboard. The clock kept ticking.

Afternoon glided into evening, the haze imperceptibly passing into dusk and then night. Anzhelika sat on the bed in her family’s room, with her books open around a notebook in which, so close to the page her breath moistened it, she drew pencil sketches of gowned women. The sketches were minute, so as not to waste paper, but each had a label: “Nadia,” “Aleksandra Semyonovna,” “The Countess of Wallachia,” “Lyubov Orlova.” Distracted by the laden clouds gathering around her, she hardly thought of the drawings as she composed them. Anzhelika’s mother arrived from the dairy. Just before she entered the room, the girl turned the page of the notebook.

Her mother took some kolbasa and potatoes from the windowsill, prepared dinner in the kitchen, and brought it back to the room. Their table had once belonged to Anzhelika’s mother’s mother and still deserved a room a trifle larger. An inlaid stitched pattern of interlocking diamonds and rectangles ran the table’s perimeter. Anzhelika traced the clean end of her fork along the pattern, a road on which she was driving a red automobile, through open country at the edge of a high plateau.

After supper she went to the privy, an unpainted shed shrouded in fumes and resting on cinderblocks a few meters from the back of the house. There was some long-running dispute about the arrangements for cleaning it. Anzhelika hurriedly did her business in a half crouch over the hole, counting each shallow inhalation. Yet tonight she was not repelled by the odor; its extravagance nearly attracted her; there was something meaty and real about it. She wiped herself with some newspaper.

At that moment, a series of massive, earth-devouring steps came up the back path to the house. They belonged to Father. She waited until he passed and then—she thought it was important to do this tonight—she took one more half breath, trying to taste the essence of what appealed to her. She gagged on it.

Every evening when Father arrived home, after her supper, it was as if for the first time. Anzhelika had been in the privy then, four years before, a misty winter night like this one. The pounding of his boots had been immediately recognizable as a stranger’s, and was even more frightening than the privy, in whose hole, when she was nine, resided elves and bottom-grabbing demons. She had waited, shivering. Time passed and she wondered if the boots had either left through the front of the house or had never come at all. She returned to the house and stopped at the open door to the back room.

That evening her mother had been in tears. Never would Anzhelika consider the possibility that these had been tears of either relief or joy. A man had loomed in the shadows, the crevices and gnarls of his face starkly lit by the outside light. His eyes possessed a cold yellow illuminant of their own. A heavy bag, a grotesquely misshapen gray soldier’s satchel many times torn and patched, lay at her mother’s feet. Neither the man nor her mother turned in her direction.

Before that night, Anzhelika had shared the room with her mother and Aunt Lyuda. Afterwards, she slept in the kitchen. The other residents had bitterly objected to her usurpation of their common area. Threats were made. Father had replied with few words. He stood with his clenched, meaty hands on his hips, staring into the face of every opponent as if his glare could mark it. Now Anzhelika could not recall the final time she had seen Aunt Lyuda. She had simply left, a cousin had come for her. Those had been confused days and nights of agony. Sharp and sour odors had coagulated in the dark kitchen, taking fearful shapes. Anzhelika had imagined a great hand forming out of the murk.

No one ever spoke of Aunt Lyuda again. Anzhelika could hardly remember her. People were easily forgotten: like dreams their faces and the sounds of their voices were lost in the rush of daylight. Anzhelika herself would dissolve from memory no less quickly than Aunt Lyuda had.

Tonight her parents dined in silence, while Anzhelika sat among her schoolbooks on their bed. Father ate with enormous energy, tearing at his food. He was always hungry, never satiated. When he lay down his cutlery among the ruins of his meal, it was with a sour grimace, an expression of defeat. Anzhelika stared at the pages of notes that she had taken from the day’s lesson about the war. The words and fragments of phrases were only what had drifted into the range of her hearing: “national-patriotic forces,” “resolution,” “communiqué from the front,” “Voronezh,” “Hitlerite,” “by decision of the Central Committee.” She hadn’t been able to read the blackboard’s corresponding chalkmarks. The precise meanings of these words eluded her, except that she recognized them as the building blocks of a construction that, if it could ever be completed (it couldn’t be), would constitute an all-inclusive description of Comrade Stalin.

Uncle Fedya and Aunt Olya were having cutlets and soup. The aroma of their dinner entered the room as a rebuke. They ate better than Anzhelika’s family did. Her parents didn’t speak, they didn’t even look at each other as their nostril hairs twitched around the vapors emitted by Aunt Olya’s cutlets. Their anger intensified and their silence deepened. They too were listening to the somber, implacable unwinding of the gears inside the clock set off by the First Bulletin.

What made Father so frightful a figure to his family and to the other residents of the house was neither his great strength nor his angry aspect, but rather the four shrouded, silent years that had lapsed between the end of the war and his return from it. There had been no letters, and no one had notified her mother of his whereabouts nor of his imminent arrival. He never spoke about what he had done in the eight years of his absence. He hadn’t said whether he had been in prison or in a camp and if so, whose, or whether he had been free and simply reluctant to take up the reins of his previous life. Whatever the reason, when he returned it was as if he had come back from the land of the dead.

After Uncle Adik had prepared his dinner, Anzhelika swept the kitchen floor and made her pallet under the table used for cutting food. No one begrudged her the space anymore, the table was her own house, thatchedroofed and built from logs somewhere on the windscoured steppe, where she waited for Yevgeny Samoilov to come home. Sorrel soup simmered on the stove. She had used candle wax to stick onto the wall under the table small newspaper pictures of Samoilov and other actors, Vladimir Druzhnikov, Mikhail Kuznetsov, Lyubov Orlova, Deanna Durbin, and Tamara Makarova. Last summer Aunt Nina had taken her to the cinema to see Samoilov in The Boy from the Country.

But another picture luminesced within the constellation of actors arrayed on the wall, a red-tinted charcoal sketch that she had won at school as an award for good penmanship: Comrade Stalin in his marshal’s uniform. He gazed directly ahead, a few strands of gray in the dense growth of his moustache, a kind smile hidden beneath it. His eyebrows were slightly arched, an expression of punishing sternness that lay in contradiction to the warmth around his eyes.

Anzhelika went to the privy one last time that evening, carrying under her nightdress her notebook and the small sewing scissor she had stolen from her mother months before. The glow of a distant lamp seeped through the nearly parallel cracks in the privy door, illuminating a hieroglyphic that for years had refused exegesis.

She took great care, her hands sure, as she cut the page of drawings from the notebook and pulled away from the stitching the sheet that had been attached on the other side of it. Then she cut the pages into pieces, balled them up, placed them into the privy’s hole—her hand detached itself, weightless over the pit—and let them drop. Never before had this subterfuge, this paper wastage, been so thrilling; never before had she felt so shamed by it.

As she returned to the house, the heat of her body cut a luminous swathe through the night. Under the table, she examined each of the photographs, looking for evidence of wear, or for signs that either Druzhnikov or Kuznetsov had become tiresome. They hadn’t; she was newly charmed by the small rebellious sneer in the turn of Kuznetsov’s mouth. Now the feeling that had accompanied her the entire day intensified. She recognized it as warmth, as expectation, as the creepy stink of the privy, and now as something else as well, a familiar, beckoning, taunting, and sickening itch. She kissed the picture of Samoilov, felt the starch of the paper on her lips. Then she lay on her back, the underside of the table eclipsed in shadow but as visible as the unlit side of the crescent moon after dusk, the photograph above her, her right hand beginning the long rustling arc through her bedclothes.

But Comrade Stalin watched too. He drew her eyes to his. It was said that if you were in the same room with him, or even with him and tens of thousands of others in the cobblestoned vastness of Red Square, you could not resist looking into his eyes, he had that power over men and women. Scientists couldn’t explain it, the only man who could have explained it would have been Stalin himself. It was also said that those eyes could see the future.

Anzhelika’s teachers had deeply immersed her in the history of the Revolution—the roar of marching crowds, a blur of red flags, a storm of dates—but the word revolution, whispered at night in her solitude, made an entirely different impression upon her. An incandescent globe had somehow been lowered from the sky. It hovered above Russia. It revolved. She gazed directly into the ball, a solid sphere of goodness, her face warming to its radiance. The miracle was augmented by mystery: Stalin had either summoned the sphere or had stepped from it, Lenin at his side.

Stalin was as handsome as any actor, men all over the world brushed back their hair and let their mustaches grow out like his. Anzhelika dreamed of marrying him. There had been girls worthy of Stalin: the young partisan spy tortured and hung by the Nazis, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya; the Krasnodon Young Guard who had organized acts of sabotage against the Germans, Ulya Gromova; the little orphan in the song who had sent him her teddy bear. Fate had refused Anzhelika the possibility of similar acts of heroism, she was just some drab little girl living in a drab little town. Her eyes stung at the thought.

Yet at the same time, and this was the miserable secret rattling around the chambers of her heart, she was afraid of him. The fear had sprouted from something evil inside her, and she was not sure exactly what it was, but it was there and Stalin could name it. One line was never erased from Aleksandra Semyonovna’s blackboard: Although you do not know him, he knows you and is thinking of you.

Stalin knew the evil was something worse than wasting notebook paper. The real evil was something deeper, indelible and pervasive, something that lay in the under water provinces of her body. Anzhelika knew the itch was wrong, or rather, that the pleasure she derived from touching it was wrong. The itch (it wasn’t exactly an itch: it was a kind of incipience, something on the verge, a craving to be touched, a pulsing infection) would be all right if she left it alone. To silence it one night she had bit her hand. In class the next day she gazed at the mark, proof, if not of her goodness, then at least of her desire to be good.

Tonight she mumbled the bedtime words repeated by millions—Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for a happy childhood— and passed unevenly into sleep, her lips parching, her eyes fluttering open to the pictures on the wall. She woke to arrest her hand in its drifting fall. Don’t touch it, it’ll stop. But it spread through her body like water pouring into an empty vessel. Although no dreams lit the dark, her sleeping mind entered into a dialogue with the itch, which whispered entreaties and made demands, asked seemingly innocent questions and gave malicious answers. And then at last, hours deep into the night, she touched it and it was as if the liquid had turned to ice, and then as if the ice had caught fire.

She woke again, wet between her legs. Urgently she searched the bedclothes and closed her eyes in gratitude when she discovered that they weren’t damp, that she hadn’t peed. Her relief was so profound that she almost returned to sleep and would have if not for the thought that she might still wet the pallet and face terrible consequences. The warmth seized Anzhelika in an embrace under the blankets, insisting against the cold, middle-ofthe-night journey to the privy. A different entity now, more distinct but still enigmatic, the warmth suggested that there was no pressure on her bladder and no need to urinate. But Anzhelika climbed from beneath the table anyway.

The night was as cold as promised, the wetness clammy, almost reptilian, against her skin. The privy’s stink carried no attraction now. Her urine flowed in hardly a dribble, but when she wiped she sensed that she wasn’t coming clean. She returned to the house, removed her coat, shoes, and galoshes, closed the door to the kitchen, and turned on the electric light.

A little brown fish swam across the white front of her nightdress. Anzhelika nearly swooned as she made the identification: blood.

She extinguished the light at once. The realization that the stain was blood cut through the fog of her childhood. She would need to dispose of the nightdress in the privy (but it was too big, the scissor wouldn’t cut the cloth) or bury it in the rubbish tip at the end of the yard (physically possible, but her mother would miss the dress immediately).

Anzhelika returned to the pallet and lay awake, nauseated, wondering how long it would take for the wound to heal. It was freshly wet when she touched it. From the pallet, she could make out only a black oblong of sky in the window over the wash basin, most of the sky occulted by a wall alongside the next house. She watched the sky for hours, imagining stars and comets and the ticking of a clock, until the moment she perceived the first thin gray spill of daylight.

She crawled from beneath the table and washed at the basin. When her mother and the other women arrived to prepare breakfast, no one noticed that Anzhelika had already rolled her pallet and dressed. With her father in the privy and her mother in the kitchen, Anzhelika hid the stained nightdress under the linen in their dresser, putting off a decision about it until nightfall. Then she stole a large scrap of yellow cloth from her mother’s sewing kit. When it was her turn to use the privy again, she stuffed the cloth into her underwear to stanch the flow.

The cloth had belonged to a favorite, long-outgrown and long-outworn dress. As she returned through the early morning chill to the house, Anzhelika tried to smooth out the suspicious bulge in the lap of her uniform. It resisted elimination. Uncle Fedya, still unshaven, passed her in the hallway and halted. He pushed his eyeglasses up the long bridge of his nose, contemplating what was different about her. His breath that morning ascended from somewhere unspeakably deep within his body.

She turned, threw her coat over her shoulders, and rushed from the house before she would have to speak with him or anyone else.

Outside, past the front gate, she was alone again. She stood for a moment with a single foot in the street, as if caught between one place and another entirely different. Then she ventured onto the blackened ice and the fossilized imprint of a truck tire. The neighbors were already picking their way across the road that led to the dairy. They passed before her like shadows, weightless and speechless. The town’s small homes and buildings were composed of the same wan, chipped concrete as the sky.

Anzhelika arrived well before the first bell and opened her coat, checking for stains on her uniform. She entered the classroom and carefully took her place, intent on maintaining the position of the cloth between her legs, which was bunched not quite flush against her. She shifted and it squirmed slightly, like a small animal. The regard of the other girls, her enemies, as they came into the room was neither casual nor blind, but direct and knowing. Blood again: Anzhelika heard it coursing through her cheeks and ears.

The torrent deafened her. She was unaware of Aleksandra Semyonovna’s entrance until her benchmate Masha swung open her desk and rose with the class. Anzhelika stood abruptly and the cloth slipped a little. It was horrible, the blood had wadded it.

The teacher carried a pointer and immediately began poking it at a large map of the world. With long auburn hair, a bright complexion, and slim, long legs, she was the prettiest woman Anzhelika had ever known. She liked Anzhelika. Once, when the girl had volunteered the correct answer to a difficult geography question—she almost never spoke in class, unless directly called upon—Aleksandra Semyonovna had stepped behind her bench and squeezed her by the shoulders. The answer was Paris. According to Masha, Aleksandra Semyonovna had been jilted by a cavalry officer from Ufa, a lieutenant with a clipped blond moustache. Anzhelika had once thought of growing her hair long like her teacher’s, but her mother objected. She said it would get dirty and tangled.

The memory of her teacher’s caress suggested to Anzhelika that she could be an ally, but the form and even the purpose of the alliance eluded her. Gazing ahead as the lesson began, Anzhelika recalled the steppe and the house she shared with Samoilov. Aleksandra Semyonovna also lived on the steppe, in another house across the way, still pining for her cavalry officer. Anzhelika and Aleksandra would borrow eggs and cheese from each other, and sometimes each other’s dresses, and comb each other’s hair, and in summer they’d sit on the porch waiting for their lovers to ride up on horseback.

But Boris Sergeyevich arrived instead, at the door to the classroom, his youthful, unlined face bleached, his expression grim. Aleksandra Semyonovna fell silent and the class, which had been listening attentively, found a level of stillness that approached the absolute. The principal beckoned the teacher. She took a lingering look at her students before she stumbled from the room.

The children were alone. An excited murmur rose from the seats and benches, like the humming of an engine. Its heat fell upon Anzhelika’s back and the exhaust singed the hairs on her neck. The girls behind her snickered. She stared into her desk, focusing on a single scratch in the wood dashed across the grain, an imperfection less than a millimeter wide, and forced all her being into it. Drifting down the crevice, she bumped against its ragged walls and settled onto a ledge. Rapidly moving water rushed below her and foamed crimson against the rocks.

She luxuriated there in the heat fed by the springs below. Her feet dangled over the ledge. The light descending from above the desk was softened by its fall, and sound could not reach her at all. She dozed, making up for the previous night’s sleeplessness, until a shiver, Masha’s, was telegraphed through the bench.

Aleksandra Semyonovna had returned to the classroom, soaked in tears. The humming ceased abruptly. The teacher’s face appeared to have been broken in two, skewing the bones of her nose and jaw. Her pale blue eyes, framed in fear, rested for a moment on Anzhelika. She looked as if she were about to speak, but surrendered instead to a fresh, disfiguring storm of tears. The students were paralyzed by the spectacle.

Something emerged from her trembling lips that Anzhelika could not hear. A wind swept through the room, cold and fetid, carrying the gasps and moans of the children and then the children themselves. As notebooks and papers gusted against the windows and walls, Anzhelika and her classmates were lifted from their benches and borne to the general purpose room.

The boys in their year were crying as they poured into the hall alongside Anzhelika’s class, as were many of the older children. Boris Sergeyevich stood before them, tears streaming from his eyes. Anzhelika had never before seen a man cry, hardly knew it was possible. Something warm tickled the inside of her thighs. Please stop please, she prayed against the flow of his tears and her blood.

The day passed without any sense of movement. A few teachers attempted to make speeches, but most of what they said made no sense, as if the speeches were about why the sun had risen in the west, bearded, or why a cow drove the trolleybus on the left side of the street, rather than the right. Most of that day the children were not spoken to, they remained in their places, sniffling. Elsewhere grown men and women took their own lives. Others mutilated themselves to show penance. Candles were lit in churches and prayers were said in mosques and synagogues. In the Far East, political prisoners wept. Two days later, panic would seize a grieving crowd in Moscow’s Trubnaya Square and more than five hundred people would either be trampled to death or suffocated.

The schoolchildren didn’t stir in their seats, but they never expected to be dismissed. They bathed in the liquids of eternal purgatory. No bells ended the schoolday. At some undefined, unclocked moment, several children rose and filed out. Others followed, Anzhelika with them. Aleksandra Semyonovna was no longer present, but other teachers were at the door, embracing their favorite, most affected students. Outside the school, adults waited in the yard, and they too were embracing each other, talking in low tones. Not a single one was without a cigarette. As Anzhelika passed them, every chafing stride announced that the insides of her thighs were wet.

Little Kolya was with his friends again. This time the boys didn’t have a stick, but they were standing around the same oily puddle between the two houses. Anzhelika went by and they turned with her. Their faces were as dead as walls, but their little bird eyes stayed alert and predatory.

She didn’t enter the house but went right to the privy and closed the door. Reaching over her head, she fastened the hook into the bolt, forcing it deep into the eye. She opened her coat. In the gray light admitted over the top of the door, she could not determine whether the uniform was stained. She removed her coat and hung it on a nail. After hitching up her dress and dropping her underwear, she pulled on the rag. She shuddered as it slithered out of her. Thoroughly soaked, it dropped into the privy hole without returning a sound. Anzhelika tried to make out the lower portion of her body, but couldn’t. She let go of the hem of her uniform and stood there, her underpants around her ankles.

A kind of noise surrounded her now, a ringing sheath that insulated her and deadened her senses to the privy’s odors and the stickiness. She heard music, from “The Fall of Berlin”:

The song was punctuated by footsteps, recognizable by their echoing tread. They stopped and the door to the privy creaked and heaved. The little hook tugged on the screw and even in the gloom she could see the screw give. The plank to which the screw was fastened yawned away from the doorframe.

Too frightened to move, she didn’t lift her underpants. The door hook was pulled hard to the horizontal, spanning a chasm of daylight, before it fell back into place. After a moment of silence, a fist thumped twice against the door. The privy’s timbers rattled like the bones of a skeleton. She made a choked, wordless sound, signaling herself. Father left.

She would need another piece of cloth. This morning she had seen in her mother’s sewing basket a second scrap alongside the yellow cloth, a piece of her old nightdress. Why hadn’t she taken both of them? She wished she could travel back in time and steal the second piece of cloth, or better yet… further back, to prevent everything that had happened. Using what was left of the newspapers (there would be complaints), she wiped herself. Tossed off its cinderblocks, the privy was spinning now, she was sure her father would return any minute. Why was he home so early? What time was it anyway? Was her mother home? If she could get past him, she could steal what was left of the old nightdress.

She quickly pulled up her underwear and, forgetting her coat, hurried from the privy. Father wasn’t waiting on the steps. She went around to the front of the house. She stepped through the door, removed her galoshes, and shuffled through the hallway, unaware of the swelling music. Her progress carried her to the door of the front room. Uncle Fedya and Aunt Olya’s big glass doors, usually shut and curtained, had been swung open. Anzhelika stopped. Surprise carried her hands to her face.

All the adults who lived in the house were there, sitting around a circle in the failing light, listening to Uncle Fedya’s radio. They had never done that before, they disliked each other too much. Still wearing her dark blue smock from the dairy, her mother cradled her head in her hands as if it were a cabbage. In the dusk, her person seemed no more substantial than an image in an old photograph, and that is how Anzhelika would remember her. Uncle Fedya sat alongside her mother, and on the other side were arrayed Aunt Olya, Aunt Vera, Uncle Adik, and then Father, occupying the place closest to the door.

In sacred devotion to their grief, they were all perfectly still, except Father, who was clenching and unclenching his fists. The tendons rose in his arms and neck. The choir continued, Forever he is true to that vow, which he gave Lenin. Only gradually did the adults’ eyes register the child’s presence, at first with indifference. And then a few eyes widened and held their gaze. Father turned in his chair. He was red in the face, which was greasy with sweat. His eyes were raw. He too had been crying.

It was only then that Anzhelika realized that her fingertips had been wet and that now her cheeks were wet as well. She glanced to the right. Across the room, the full-length mirror of the 1879 wardrobe neatly framed her. She was betrayed in it, what was left of the day coalescing around her like a spotlight. The blood was all over, streaked brown across her face, up and down her legs, and across her bare left arm. The uniform was stained too, finally, in her lap and in a big swipe across her chest. There were even dried bits of blood caught in her hair. Her body lifted from the floor, buoyed away on a rush of sorrow. New tears flooded her face: she could taste the blood with them. She gasped for breath. The adults didn’t move.

“It was me,” she sobbed. “It’s my fault!”

Father’s blow, when it came, was like a bolt of divine lightning.

Birobidzhan ^{БИробИДЖаH}

Orbit ^ОрбИта

First, they sat for a minute. That was one of our customs of departure. They each took a seat: Yuri, Ivanovsky, Karpov, Kamanin, and the Chief Designer. There wasn’t a seat for Titov, who hunkered alongside Kamanin and stared into the floorboards. Not a word was spoken. Outside the cottage a bus raced its engine. His helmet on his lap, Yuri grinned at the Chief Designer.

The Chief Designer strained to return the smile. He dropped his gaze to the clipboard and studied his checklist and the timeline, trying to recall if there was anything they had forgotten. It was bad to return for something after you had left; if you did return, you’d have to look in a mirror and stick out your tongue. Yuri’s ventilator hummed.

“All right,” the Chief Designer said. His sigh verged on a groan. He slapped and rubbed his thighs and rose heavily to his feet. The men followed him out.

Cheers and rhythmic clapping: Yuri hadn’t expected this pool of strangers at the bottom of the steps. A pretty schoolgirl in bows and a taffeta frock rushed up, curtsied, handed him a bouquet of pink lilies, and then rushed back to hide behind her mother’s skirt. Yuri’s toothy smile warmed the mother’s wan, moonlike face. The mother smiled shyly, casting her eyes at her feet. There were perhaps no more than thirty onlookers—approved military personnel and their families—but it seemed like half the world. Later we would throng Red Square. Yuri strode to the bus. The Chief Designer mounted the steps ahead of him and took the ventilator, which was the size and weight of a small suitcase, as Yuri climbed aboard. The crowd cheered again and he gave the thumbs-up sign.

The bus took off and passed the infirmary, across the way from the cottage. Its curtains were parted, but he couldn’t see through the morning glare upon the windows. No matter. He didn’t wonder when or if he would see the infirmary again.

Nearly everyone at the base knew of the launch. Scores of us lined the road, waving flags and hoisting banners that, because of military regulations, were circumspect in their exhortations: “Manufacturing Unit Wishes You the Best!” “Good Luck on Your Journey, Comrade!” and, simply, “Go!” A detachment of redscarved Pioneer-scouts waited by the gate to the launch compound, some so stricken by his approach they could do nothing but stare. At the window in the passing bus, Yuri jerked a thumb and offered a smile whose recollection would illuminate the darkest nights of their lives. He blew kisses to the girls.

Wreathed in venting gases, the R-7 rocket and its support assembly were the only objects on the horizon. As the bus drew near, Klaxons sounded.

The bus stopped a few dozen meters from the elevator that would carry him to the Vostok capsule cabin. At the elevator waited Leonov and Popovich, as well as more than a dozen technicians and workers, most of whom he recognized. Some carried flowers and flags, others clipboards and hand tools. Yuri descended from the bus, holding his helmet in one hand and the ventilator in the other. The air smelled of kerosene.

“Wait a minute,” he said to the Chief Designer.

Yuri walked along the side of the bus to the back wheels, noting the gentle contours of the tarmac. He carefully placed the ventilator and his helmet on a nearly microscopic rise. Turning to the side of the bus, Yuri unzipped his flight suit. The Chief Designer, Ivanovsky, and Karpov, and behind them the technicians, watched attentively as he unfolded his prick from the suit. This wasn’t on the timeline. Yuri placed his hands on his hips. The stream’s arc intersected with one of the bus’s tires, blackening a wedge of it. The urine burned. He gave his prick a last squeeze and a shake, and the burning sensation returned and intensified. As steam rose off the tire’s mud-caked treads, Yuri wondered whether he was taking into space a dose of the clap.

It was not anxiety that had kept him awake the night before, nor on any other night. The medics had taped the sensors to his body and then there had been a dinner in the cottage, with a big meat pirog, followed by a last round of toasts. The Chief Designer tried to speak a few words but was overcome by emotion and in the end simply embraced him. Afterwards, Yuri lay in his cot, unable to sleep, confidence surging through him, something in his blood.

Yuri’s confidence existed as a discrete phenomenon, virtually capable of being sized and weighed. His superb physical condition and quick wits had been proven by the most rigorous battery of tests ever undergone by free men. He had been whirled, dropped, scorched, frozen, blasted by sound, left on his own in the dark and the quiet, examined by psychiatrists, and interrogated by commissars. Blind and deaf in the sensory deprivation tank—which in fact had been rife with sour organic odors—Yuri had drifted weightless in a realm of thought. It was then that he had first articulated to himself his awareness of his strength, his imperturbability and his dominating desire to be first.

The Chief Designer hadn’t known what he was looking for in the candidate-cosmonauts, his sokoliki, his little falcons. The rigors of space flight were mostly hypothetical, yet as the selection process continued and new tests were formulated and new considerations taken into account, the Chief Designer became convinced that he was approaching the definition of the space traveler’s essential nature: physically fit, yes; cool-headed, of course; superior lung capacity, yes; height, no more than 167 centimeters, given the dimensions of the capsule; claustrophobic, no—paradoxically in the void of space claustrophobia would be fatal; agile, yes; and confident, yes, absolutely, and it was not only the presence of this confidence that was vital, but its source. It could not derive from loving parents, kind teachers, or achievements on the fields of sport or battle; it had to be something integral to the man, fused with his being.

For months the Chief Designer had postponed his decision. Each candidate was further probed, physically shaken and emotionally manipulated, so that the extraneous bits of his character were flaked off, leaving his naked self. He ran through fields of snow. He jumped from planes. He confessed his secrets. Yuri, Titov, Leonov, Popovich, and Grigoriev felt themselves being remade. They sensed, long before their actual selection, their own elevation as men of the future, spacemen.

The entire enterprise had been nearly destroyed by failure and tragedy. An R-16 ICBM had blown up on its launch pad the previous October, killing Marshal Nedelin, the head of the strategic rocket forces, and 164 other officers, scientists, and technicians. The launch pad had been wrecked. Khrushchev had been furious.

The space program had survived only through the heroism of the Chief Designer, and behind him a corps of workers and technicians, and behind them the entire workers’ state, all of us. Look at what we were about to accomplish: sixteen years after the end of a cataclysmic war, forty-four years after deposing a regime steeped in reaction and ignorance, our nation was about to send a man into space. This was not because we were smarter than anyone else; rather, we had organized ourselves to draw the best from each other, from each according to his ability. Yuri’s flight would make the definitive argument for socialism. By breaking the chains of gravity, man was about to embark on a new stage of his evolution, a step made possible only by the transformation of society. Within a day, the whole world would know it.

Yuri could not bear to lie in bed awake, not that night.

He pulled on his trousers, shirt, boots, and flight jacket and then stepped from his room, past Titov’s, and out onto the porch, gently shutting the door behind him. At the railing he peered into the oceanic dark. The only sounds belonged to the Kazakh wind. A scatter of stars effervesced behind a haze—high-altitude clouds, nothing serious. At ground level, electric lights burned at the edges and corners of a few nearby structures, almost all of them constructed in the past two years.

The air was cold, and he zipped his jacket. Absentmindedly—and this was perhaps his only absentminded habit—he searched his jacket pockets before recalling that he had finished his cigarettes while Dr. Marshak was writing her final medical report. His hands lightly grasped the railing. The launch pad was in Sector K, too distant to be seen, but the lights around it shimmered on the eastern horizon like the aurora borealis or the first drops of milk in a cup of coffee.

The thought of his last cigarette redirected his attention toward the infirmary, about 200 meters across the scrub. Its white clapboard showed gray and ghostly in the dark. At one of its corners a red light winked. He gazed at the electric bulb and his sense of anticipation became tumescent. Tomorrow: space. Across the darkened American sky, he’d be a light himself. He had always known he would be the first, it was a matter of wanting it badly enough. Already he felt consumed by expectation, pride and, and…

A smile crossed his face. Desire. He winked back at the electric bulb.

Descending from the porch, he found the ground hardened from the cold. A few frozen twigs snapped, but otherwise his passage across the empty field was without weight or sound. He was not afraid, he never was.

Deliberately overshooting the infirmary’s entrance, he set an elliptical trajectory around the building, past the surgery. Most of the windows were draped or shuttered, but through them drifted soft romantic music from a radio or a phonograph. A radio, he decided, detecting the echoing signature of skip-distance reception.

Beneath his returning arc, behind one of these windows, lay the infirmary’s single resident patient, Grigoriev. A victim of the R-16 blast, with burns over 90 percent of his body, he was too ill to move and too ill to recover. Grigoriev had been a candidate-cosmonaut, among the most promising in the nimbus of candidates below Yuri. Yuri respectfully tipped his head as he passed the window of what he believed to be the patient’s room.

He came to a large undraped window at the end of a hallway. Its polished wood floor reflected a yellow streak of light. He paused there a moment before moving on to the next window. Its blinds didn’t reach all the way to the bottom of the frame. The room was unlit save for the indirect glow reflected from the hallway, like earthshine softening the lunar night. Something stirred in the room and left it. He glimpsed a nurse’s white uniform, but couldn’t determine to which nurse it belonged. Several were on duty at any given time. He had seen only the girl’s back.

Gradually he apprehended a storeroom: cardboard boxes, a shelf of beakers and tubing, and a wall lined by folded linen. With eyes that a famous song would someday say were as keen as a hunting dog’s, he noticed that the side of the window sat unevenly against the frame, not fully in its embrace.

Grinning, he pushed against it and swung the window open on its hinges. He heard footsteps and pulled away. Someone came into the storeroom. Standing among the sparse weeds outside the infirmary, his back to the clapboard, Yuri couldn’t guess what she was doing, only that her hands were too full to turn on the light. He gazed across an unplowed field and felt a rising, accelerating excitement. He heard the nurse step away again, humming along to the radio music: “What Moves My Heart So.” He turned just as her ankle disappeared around the door. By its slender, sinewy musculature, the ankle declared itself to be Tania’s. In a single, effortless motion, as if he were already weightless, Yuri lifted himself up and through the window.

Tania returned a minute later, contemplation sharpening the features of her petite, triangular face. From deep within the storeroom’s shadows, where Yuri lurked like an undersea creature, her olive complexion seemed even more oriental, her eyelids even flatter. And everything about her face was in perfect proportion, almost isoscelean. Yuri never failed to be astounded by the totally anonymous beauties harbored in these remote Soviet provinces.

With a languor redolent of the Tatar centuries, she placed some folded towels on a pile of linen and reached for something on a shelf above her head. For an extended moment the line of her body, from the balls of her feet through the flex of her ankles and the sweep of her legs, buttocks, and back, was a perfect curve, a single quadratic running through the dark. Yuri waited until she returned to earth before he stepped from the shadows.

The nurse gasped and clutched a spool of bandages to her chest. Another spool dropped soundlessly to the floor. The discomposure of her expression was like the shattering of crystal, which in the spectacle of its disintegration revealed new aspects of its intrinsic beauty.

“Lieutenant!”

He raised a finger to his lips, approached, and then laid the finger against hers.

She recoiled as if struck.

“We must be quiet,” he whispered.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded. Her almond-shaped eyes were as dark as the sun was bright. “What do you want?”

“Tania, Taniatchka, relax. I’ve just come for a little visit. Shhhh.”

“How did you get in here?”

“Shhhh,” he said, placing his finger again on his lips and then, very gently, on hers. This time she didn’t pull away. Heat radiated from the translucent labial flesh. He hadn’t been wrong: her single, shyly appraising glance the other day and a slightly lingering touch this evening when she applied the telemetry strip had told him all that he had needed to know.

“Listen, I’m leaving Baikonur tomorrow. In the most extraordinary way. Shhh. Don’t speak, Tania. Let’s not speak at all.”

He removed his finger from her lips and then returned it, pressing more firmly. She kissed it, almost reflexively, but not quite reflexively.

“But what are you doing here?”

He put his arms around her small body, slightly lifting her. The embrace was gentle, the power of his arms merely implied.

“I’ve come to say good-bye.”

A giggle escaped. “Here?”

He ran his hands up her sides. Her body shivered beneath them. It was just a meter or so to the soft wall of linen. With sure, insistent pressure, he danced her back. Her eyes misted and her resistance slowly deliquesced, until the moment her bare calves scraped against the towels. Then she froze and slid from his grasp.

She whispered, “Are you crazy?”

“The doctors say no. I’ve been tested.”

“We can’t do this.”

“Why not?”

“In the storeroom? Yuri, I can’t. For God’s sake, you can’t!”

“I can.”

“Marshak’s here!” she hissed.

Yuri was taken aback, at least momentarily.

“This late?”

“All night. It’s because of the launch. She’s in her office.”

Tania moved away, but his hands reached out and touched her wrist. His hands didn’t close, it wasn’t a grab, but she couldn’t bear to move away. And, besides, his foot was against the door.

“Well,” Yuri said. “Then you surely can’t go. Look what I’ve risked coming here.”

In the stiffening of her facial expression and the clearing of her eyes, he witnessed the physiological consequences of her blood running cold. Yuri himself was not unnerved by the contemplation of the risk, even though it was a little like talking about a plane crash before a flight. For the hundredth time he recalled the moment a few hours earlier when, hunched over the electrical leads, Tania had worked on his chest and the top of her uniform had opened and fallen away, an act of delicious sabotage. Her brassiere had been loose and ill fitting, nearly spilling her breasts, each as round as a planet.

His arms now encircled her again. He pressed his body hard against hers and felt her yield.

A buzzer went off. Although submerged in their kiss, Yuri recognized the low, rasping moan at once: the booster rocket’s first stage release indicator. He picked his head up and again heard the signal, down the hall. This buzzer and the one for his rocket had clearly been supplied by the same military contractor in Chelyabinsk.

“I have to go,” Tania said breathlessly.

“Where?”

“That’s Grigoriev, he wants something. I’m on duty.”

“Come back, I’ll wait.”

“Yuri. I can’t.”

“You can,” he said calmly. “I’ll be here.”

She made a hopeless little grimace and fled out the door.

A shimmer of domestic perfume remained. He assumed the perfume was domestic—where would she get foreign perfume?—and resolved to send her a bottle of French perfume from Moscow, after his flight, if he remembered.

He rested against the towels and revisited the feeling of her body in his arms and the taste of her lips and tongue. Then he entertained the conceit that the storeroom was the Vostok capsule itself, poised to plunge into the tender blue of the sky. He paced the room, which was illuminated only by the stray outside light, and imagined himself floating weightless to the ceiling, imagined himself pressed against the linen as he accelerated away from the earth, and finally, again, imagined himself pressed against Tania.

Marshak was still in the infirmary. Yuri knew that he should return to the cottage before his absence there or his presence here was discovered, but it didn’t seem right, not after getting this far. It would have done violence to his nature.

Sergei Pavlovich Korolev had been arrested early in the morning of June 27, 1938. Precisely one month later, fulfilling a prosecutorial norm, he confessed to “subversion in a new field of technology” and was sentenced to ten years of hard labor. In the unbroken sub-zero temperatures of a Kolyma gold mine, he worked without adequate clothing, food, or shelter. Most of his teeth fell out and a fractured jaw, incurred during his interrogation, failed to mend properly.

Five months after his arrival in Kolyma, he was summoned back to Moscow for a rehearing of his case, but no transportation was provided. A truck driver took him the 150 kilometers to Magadan, demanding his sweater as fare. In Magadan, Korolev learned that the port was already frozen and that he had missed the last boat of the season. Living in rough, makeshift shelters, he worked as a laborer and shoe repairer to keep himself alive through the remainder of the winter. He finally managed to sail to Vladivostok, terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, but on the journey from there back to Moscow he became disoriented and was no longer able to stem the blood flowing from his mouth. He had scurvy. With deep bruises pooling beneath the soft surfaces of his swollen body, like the lava seas that had once congealed beneath the skin of the moon, he was taken off the train at Khabarovsk.

Outside the station he lay for hours on a cold stone bench, spitting teeth and blood. At some point in the early morning, two militiamen checked his documentation, assuring themselves that he had a travel warrant into the netherworld, and they left him alone. Korolev closed his eyes but didn’t sleep. And then after a long while he became aware that his carrion body was being sniffed. It was not an entirely unpleasant sensation: there was a kind of warmth attached to the scrutiny. Through his muddlement he discerned that these were not staccato canine inspirations, as he might have expected, derelict in this remote province, but something much more considered.

When Korolev opened his eyes, the deeply creviced face of an old man in a ratty fur cap occupied his field of view. The man’s Asiatic features were surmounted by a large, bulbous Russian nose, from which grew many thick, dirty hairs. But the whites of his eyes were absolutely clear, like two mechanical instruments that Korolev might have worked on in another life. For a long time the old man gazed into his face, in judgment, thought Korolev, who had been denied a trial in Moscow. And then the old man roughly lifted him by the arms and pulled him from the bench to a thin, leafless tree rising off a berm alongside the train station.

The old man deposited him there, his back against the birch, his face opposite the sun that had just crested over the morning haze into an empty sky.

Korolev did not know for how long he was abandoned, but it was long enough for him to become intensely aware of the heat of the sun that fell upon his closed eyelids and face and dried the blood that had soaked into his beard. The sun was a star, less than two hundred million kilometers away, almost close enough to touch. The solar radiation suffused through his tissue. After a winter in which he had witnessed a human death nearly every day, in which his own death had seemed to hover before him just beyond the fog of his breath, the solar heat was a promise redeemed. And it was now, with his eyes still shut, that an idea began to incubate. The idea was nothing grand, nothing ostensibly scientific. It had something to do with an awareness of his determination that was encased within his soft, battered self like a shard of granite.

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.

“What are you, a Hun?” Zinia said, faking contempt. “Are you going to carry away our most beautiful girl on horseback? Are we civilized people? Are we Russians? There are a few niceties and proprieties to observe.”

“Zinia, please. I have to get back to the cottage.”

“Go then. We won’t stop you.”

Tania’s demurral, Grigoriev’s buzzer, Zinia’s prank: these were all signs that he should return to the cottage now. It was not like Yuri to resist portents and omens. But it was one thing to crawl into a window, another thing entirely to crawl out of it, especially in front of these girls. And Ludmilla’s embrace had only quickened his appetite.

“Where is she?”

Zinia grimaced. “We have a few questions for you.”

“For God’s sake, Marshak’s going to find me! They’ll fly Titov!”

Zinia took a notebook from her pocket. Ludmilla and the other girl sniggered. They gazed upon him with feverish eyes.

“What is the significance of this date? 18 September 1939.”

These prenuptial questions were another custom, one of our traditions. How we loved our customs, how we drew a skein of folk belief, tradition and superstition around the most prosaic events of our lives. We would never give them up.

“Tania’s day of birth?”

“That was too easy. What does this number represent? One hundred fifty-six.”

“Her height,” Yuri replied. “In centimeters.”

“Forty-eight?”

“Um, her weight, in kilos.”

“Two thousand and sixty-four.”

“Zinia, I don’t know. Just tell me where she is!”

Zinia had a laugh as frothy as steamed milk. “Look how he’s dying for it! Girls, have you ever seen anything so pathetic? It’s the distance from Baikonur to the village of Kozino, in versts.”

Yuri smiled at this. We had stopped using versts before the Revolution.

“What’s Kozino?” Yuri asked.

“The place where Tania was born, lieutenant! One should know, after such a long courtship… You must pay vykup.” Literally: ransom money. It was the custom to pay a token sum for every incorrectly answered question.

“I’m not carrying a single kopeck.”

“Then what kind of lover are you?”

“Honestly, girls. Where I’m going, there’s not a thing to buy.”

“Just like Tyuratum.” That was the name of the old Kazakh town outside the cosmodrome. “Has space been collectivized too? Well, go away then.”

Yuri briefly flushed at Zinia’s political brazenness. “But I have something. A kiss for each of you.”

Zinia snorted. “A kiss! He thinks his kiss is better than money.” She grabbed at his trousers. “It’s going to take more than a kiss.”

He pulled away. “It’s all I can give.”

Zinia said, “All right then. Me first. You call that a kiss? And how do you kiss your mother?”

Yuri grinned. “Wait a minute, I have some questions for you, some numbers to identify. Eight kilometers per second. Three hundred twenty-seven kilometers. One hour forty-eight minutes.”

Now it was Zinia’s turn to color. Her expression became serious. The smiles on the faces of the other nurses also faded, though not the shine in their eyes. Zinia said, “Lieutenant, I can only guess at what they mean. I’m sorry, we’re not cleared for this technical information.”

He nodded soberly. “Better not guess then. Here’s one last number, another date: April 12, 1961. I believe you won’t forget it.”

Zinia said softly, “There’s a girl in Room 3 who’s hoping to circle April 11 on her calendar.”

“Is Marshak in her office?”

“She should be. She said she would take a nap.”

Yuri kissed Zinia again, once on each cheek, and tenderly embraced her. Then he kissed Ludmilla and the other nurse. These were chaste, serious kisses; not romantic, almost religious. A new sense of the following day descended upon them, as if the shuttered storeroom had been lit by the dawn. Yuri turned away and opened the door. In the hallway he stopped to listen. The infirmary was still, as soundless as space promised to be. Room 3 was down the hall, away from Grigoriev’s.

Yuri had seen the Chief Designer’s plans for a spacecraft of the future, a vessel whose great domed living and research quarters would be separated from its nuclear power supply by a long cylindrical axis. The infirmary now offered itself as a model for something similar, a primitive space station, dim, silent, and remote. His softsoled shoes were drawn to the floor of the hallway not by gravity, but by the infirmary’s centrifugal spin through the void. And why not? A man of the future, he would take the girls into the future with him.

Hurtling in the direction of the day after, he turned the corner and nearly collided with another swiftly moving object, in a white lab coat, moving toward the day before. It was Marshak. Yuri hadn’t heard her approach.

Several moments passed, her heels clattering, before Marshak fully recovered from the near impact. She was a tall woman well into middle age, with sallow skin offset by brassy red-brown hair. Her plastic, yellow-tinted eyeglasses were perched halfway down the bridge of her nose. She scowled as she identified him in the murk.

Yuri’s testicles retracted. He set to work concocting a reason for his presence in the infirmary: the need to stretch his legs, a minor headache… He had been in worse scrapes before. This would take some doing, but Marshak would want to believe him.

“Poor Grigoriev…” he began.

“Lieutenant,” she snapped. “Hurry. Where have you been? Come, come.”

She spun on her heels and scurried back down the hallway. For a moment, Yuri wondered whether she had really seen him or was somehow sleepwalking. He decided against pretending to be a dream. He followed her past the door to Room 3, which was closed, but Yuri sensed life—throbbing and abundant—beyond it.

They entered Marshak’s office, a small, wallpapered room with a metal desk, a medicine cabinet, a white plaster bust of Lenin worn almost to featurelessness, and, in a shadowed corner, an examination table. A short, stocky man lay on the table with his shirt off and his eyes wide open.

Yuri cried, “Sergei Pavlovich!”

The face of the Chief Designer, as much of a military secret as his name, was paler than Yuri had ever seen it. It was a handsome, frail face, easily betrayed by suffering. A smile now fluttered weakly across it.

“Yuri,” he whispered.

In alarm, Yuri looked away, at Marshak.

She shook her head. “It’s just angina. I’ve given him a sedative, but he has to calm himself. He’s brought it on through excessive worry.” The Chief Designer tried to make a self-deprecating chuckle, but it came out as a faint moan. “Lieutenant, he asked for you, that’s why I called the cottage. When you couldn’t be found, he became panicked. I thought he would have another attack. And I don’t know where my useless staff has gone to…”

“Don’t worry,” Yuri said to the Chief Designer. “Please.”

“He’s had some kind of premonition. He caught himself whistling indoors. A bird tapped on his window. He passed a woman carrying an empty bucket. He stumbled with his left foot. He discovered that he was wearing one of his socks inside out. Now he wants to call off the flight.”

Yuri bit his lip and reached for the Chief Designer’s shoulder. The skin was clammy and gave off a sweet, nicotine smell. He smoked several packs a day, the most popular brand. It was named after the White Sea Canal, which had been dug by political prisoners.

“No, you can’t call off the flight.”

“I’ve been given too much responsibility,” the Chief Designer rasped. “I can’t accept it, not with my health. It’s not just your life, Khrushchev says the future of the Soviet Union depends on it, socialism, world peace… Khrushchev’s a madman. He’s obsessed by Kennedy. He doesn’t care about space or rockets or science, only about Kennedy. He says we have to fuck Kennedy… He calls me nearly every day, sometimes twice a day… sometimes only to tell me that we have to fuck Kennedy… He expects daily, even hourly progress reports, he considers every stuck valve an act of sabotage. He makes threats, terrible threats. But there’s too much to do, we’re going too fast. We still don’t know why the R-16 blew up or what are the effects of zero gravity upon human physiology. How about cosmic radiation? Or micro-meteorites? Will the retro-rockets fire? We need more tests. We have to send up more dogs.”

“I won’t let a dog fly my spaceship.”

“Who do we think we are?” the Chief Designer asked, closing his eyes. “Is man really destined to leave the earth? Now? How can that be? Have we evolved that far? We’ve barely descended from the apes. We still fight wars and behave unspeakably toward each other. Are we going to take our failings into the heavens with us? What good will that do? We’re not ready for it. Our children won’t be ready either, I’m afraid. Perhaps their children… A generation that hasn’t known war…”

“Please, comrade, calm yourself.” Marshak took his wrist and timed his pulse.

Yuri pulled a stool over to the table and kneeled on it, bringing his face close to the Chief Designer’s. The Chief Designer’s eyes were wet and unfocused, their pupils indistinct. Yuri gripped the Chief Designer’s other hand as hard as was possible without hurting him.

“Look at me, Sergei Pavlovich. We are ready. You’ve told me so. You’ve proven it to me.”

Yuri then spoke for the next quarter of an hour, in a voice as measured as the feed of a fuel line. He recalled everything that the Chief Designer had told him. The need to explore the unknown was intrinsic to human nature. Space flight was the next logical development in human history, as inevitable as anything set down into print by Marx or Lenin. Titov would fly next, then the others, followed by multicrew spacecraft, space rendezvous and docking maneuvers, and eventually a permanent orbiting station, a stepping-stone to the moon and the planets. Kosmograd-1 was already on the design table, orbiting the earth sixteen times a day. Hundreds of cosmonauts would live and work there; women, too. Children would be born in space and soon a way of life would be established there upon completely scientific principles. Perhaps it was only in space that a true communist society could exist, floating free of terrestrial compromise, its economy as finely regulated as its air and water supplies.

Great vessels would ply the spacelanes between the earth and the moon. Man would settle Mars, colonize the moons around Jupiter, explore and exploit Saturn’s satellite Titan. And then the stars would beckon. Man would encounter extraterrestrial civilizations raised by creatures of outlandish biology and aspect, yet their societies would also be subject to the laws of history. Perhaps the extraterrestrials had already reached the final stage of their development. Indeed, because the human race was still comparatively young, living in a universe many times older than itself, it was only logical to assume the technological and social superiority of the extraterrestrials. They would have already abolished economic exploitation, class, national chauvinism, superstition, neurosis, and perversion. There would be much for mankind to learn. But by then mankind would have evolved so far as to be almost unrecognizable to the people of the mid-twentieth century.

“And, Sergei Pavlovich, we shall take the first step, together, tomorrow morning.”

The Chief Designer didn’t respond. He closed his eyes again.

Marshak kept her eyes trained on her watch. Finally, she said, “That’s better. The sedative’s taking effect. He must sleep, that’s most important.”

Yuri nodded. Marshak studied him for a moment. Her expression was soft and distracted.

“You should sleep, too. You have less than six hours. Have you seen the timeline?”

“All right,” he said. “Good night then.”

As he turned to go, Marshak rushed at him. For a moment, Yuri believed that the doctor was about to strike him, that she was the CIA assassin of whom the KGB had warned. Her body, solid and unyielding, slammed against his before he could defend himself. In his gut he received a presentiment of weightlessness. Then she buried her head in his chest through his open flight jacket. She held him for a long time, her body quaking.

“Thank God,” Marshak said at last, lifting her tearstreaked face to him. “Thank God it’s you he chose. Go to her now. She’s in the next room.”

In the next room the drapes were parted and half of Tania’s body was silvered by the moon, like an airplane fuselage on a runway. She stood by the window in an open white robe. In the sharp relief of the moonlight, the illuminated curves and spheres of her figure were disconnected by vast occulted regions, positives and negatives, pros and cons, truths and lies. Her lips, the visible portions seeming to hover in space, trembled and then he himself was seized in a passion of anticipation. He took the remainder of the steps toward her. Tentatively, she reached for his hands, gently clasped them, and even more gently carried them to between her breasts. Her body was warm. Let’s go, she whispered.

In the future, every male cosmonaut would urinate on the side of the bus that brought him to the launch pad: Titov, Leonov, Komarov, Romanenko, Tsibliyev… It would become one of our customs. Yuri zipped up and joined the Chief Designer. Some of the Chief Designer’s color had returned. He was still anxious but appeared to be relieved and even surprised that the morning had come. He again gazed at the checklist, studying it as if it contained the secrets of the inner workings of the universe.

They walked to the elevator. At the foot of the open elevator shaft, about twenty flight technicians greeted Yuri with sustained applause. It echoed like the sound of buckshot on the flats around the launch complex. Yuri shook their hands and accepted more bouquets. He cleared his throat and then spoke in a quiet, passionate voice, drawing the workers to him. He thanked them, told them they were embarking together on a great adventure. “Right now, all my life seems to be one wonderful instant,” he said, looking at the notes the Chief Designer had composed on the bus. “Everything I have ever done, everything I have ever experienced, was for the sake of this minute.”

The elevator began the first stage of his ascent into space. Although the cabin rose no more quickly than an ordinary Moscow lift, he soon felt himself enter the rarefied, light-soaked regions of the sky. Beyond the passing red girders that supported the launch gantry, the cleared countryside spread out like a huge plate. It was hard to believe that there was even more to the world than this. At the top of the shaft, in the clean room adjacent to the open hatch of the Vostok capsule, more technicians awaited him, their faces luminous. He deposited his bouquets in a line of vases that had been left there for him. After some preliminary tests on his suit, he was helped into the spacecraft. Leads were hooked into the radio and telemetry jacks. This was followed by repeated radio checks with the Chief Designer, code-named Dawn. Yuri was code-named Cedar. The Chief Designer was the last person he saw as the hatch was shut. Music was piped in to relax him, the song he had heard the night before, “What Moves My Heart So.” All was quiet as the Chief Designer, now watching the rocket through a periscope inside the launch control bunker, announced by radio their passage through the checklist. He asked Yuri again how he was feeling and how well did he hear him. Yuri said he was feeling fine, he heard him fine. The start key was put in position. The blow valves were opened and then the fuel valves. The cables to the Vostok dropped away. Yuri said he was ready. He reported hearing the valves working. At precisely seven minutes past the hour, the Chief Designer gave the order for ignition. “Let’s go!” Yuri cried. That too, would be repeated by each of the men and women who were to follow, another of our customs of departure.

Budyonnovsk ^{БуДеHHOВСК}

Salt СолЬ

In a certain city lived a certain merchant with three sons: the first was Fyodor, the second Vassily, and the third Ivan. The merchant gave his first two sons great ships with which to seek their fortunes. The first son, Fyodor, went off to the forests of the north and brought back lumber that the city’s wealthy used to build fine homes and palaces, and they paid him handsomely. The second son, Vassily, went off to the mountains of the south and brought back coal that the city’s multitudes used to heat their homes and shops, and they paid him handsomely as well.

The merchant didn’t expect much from his third son, Ivan, who was not quite right in the head, so he gave him a flimsy vessel made from rotten beams and planks.

With this ship Ivan sailed to the Thrice-Ten Lands, where he came upon a beautiful white mountain embraced by mist. He touched the mountain and brought his finger to his lips. The mountain was made entirely of salt, good Russian salt. Ivan ordered his men to load his ship with as much as it would carry, and they sailed until they reached a distant kingdom. There he presented himself and a thimble of salt to the king, telling the king that it was good Russian salt, and that he would be pleased to sell him as much of it as he liked.

The king had never heard of salt. He sniffed it suspiciously and declared that it was nothing but white sand. He sent Ivan away. Puzzled, Ivan wandered through the palace until he reached the king’s kitchens, where he witnessed the cooks preparing a meal without the use of salt. When their backs were turned, Ivan opened the pots and tasted the food. It was so bland it was nearly inedible. He withdrew the thimble from his cloak and liberally sprinkled the salt into the pots.

Later that evening the king was served his dinner. At the very moment in which he placed the first morsel in his mouth, a fearful tremor rippled across his face. His queen, grand vizier, and counselors at his side became very still, unable to take a breath. He was a much loved king. As if under a sorcerer’s compulsion, the king slowly chewed the morsel. At last he swallowed it and contemplated the swallow and the effects upon his person.

“Delicious,” he murmured at last, taking pleasure in the way the word’s syllables caressed his tongue and the roof and sides of his mouth.

He consumed the remainder of his meal with a passionate intensity that his courtiers had never witnessed before. They shook their heads in wonder. The king summoned his cooks, who told him that they had prepared his food just as they had in the past and could not explain its change in taste. Then an assistant recalled having seen Ivan loitering around the kitchen earlier that day. Ivan was brought to the king and freely confessed that he had added salt to the king’s food. “But salt, what is it?” the king asked.

“Sire,” Ivan replied, “salt is a rare substance collected in the tears of the Firebird on the morn of Michaelmas. A small quantity quickens the appetite, invigorates the palate, and excavates from each element of food its true and unalloyed flavor. Unsalted food is merely the shadow cast by real food. As the first grains of salted food touch the tip of the tongue, a man’s salivary glands contract in an exquisite spasm. Can you not feel the ache? The released liquor dissolves each morsel and molecule. In this coupling, the goodness inherent in the food is transferred to our bodies. Salt is the essential ingredient to our lifeblood, to our health, and to our good fortune. It comes from a faraway place, by great difficulty. I have an entire ship of it.”

The king took one last bite from his dish, closing his eyes to shut out the distractions of the court. When he finished, he said, “Then name your price.”

Ivan trembled at his own audacity. “An equal measure of gold, sire.”

The king clapped his hands. “Done,” he cried.

The transaction was completed before dawn. Throughout the night, as torches burned on the pier, the king’s men carried crates of gold ingots and doubloons to Ivan’s ship, to be weighed against similar crates filled with salt that were unloaded by Ivan’s men. In the garish, oily light of the lamps, Ivan stood alongside the king’s grand vizier, who ensured the preciseness of the exchange. Dawn broke with Ivan’s ship low in the water. The king himself arrived to wish Ivan farewell.

The ship sailed for neither a long time nor a short time and was then becalmed on the desert sea. Below deck, sealed within the mossy saltwater damp, Ivan took the dampness into his lungs in shallow, pained breaths. The boards cried out as the ocean thudded against the ship’s hull. Rats skittered overhead, swishing their tails. Sightless in his unlit bunk, he asked himself, am I traveling in a ship, the idea of a ship, or the word for a ship?

Above the deck the righteous sun never moved; through the endless day it remained directly overhead. Ivan leaned over the rail. In the haze, no horizon was visible to separate the atmospheric realm from the watery one. The sea and sky melted into a single pale blue gauze that only barely hid what was behind it. The ship’s hull strained against the gauze, close to tearing through to the truth of things.

The gold seemed to swell in the heat, and the holds were close to bursting. Indeed, one of the cases had broken, letting loose a spill of ducats. For a long time Ivan squatted by the case and passed the gold from one hand to another, trying to feel the weight of its inner substance.

He had once looked upon the gold with pride, eager to show it to his father and brothers, but that pride had now dimmed to a memory. Upon inspection (he was constantly inspecting it, rummaging through the holds, ordering cases brought into the sunlight, tapping a spoon against the ingots), the gold appeared to have taken on a strange, overbright luster, even an odor that was something like licorice. Yet it was steadfastly inert, stupid in its inertness.

Where resided the virtue in gold? It had little practical use, except for fashioning jewelry, which itself had no intrinsic value but only an arbitrary, assigned value based on ephemeral fashion. The metal had a symbolic use, of course, in trade, in which it took on a value for which men would labor, cheat, debase themselves, and even make war. But this value was also arbitrary, established by unspoken consensus or through some kind of mass hallucination.

Gold was minted into money. In trade men confused money with the items for which it paid, as if the former could somehow absorb the qualities of the latter, which could then be transported in their purses. Money was a khitraya mekhanika, a deceitful mechanism, invented by foreigners and Jews.

Wickedness roamed the world. Weathervanes perched atop church crosses, confounding the most profoundly spiritual with the most ludicrously prosaic. Clocks imprisoned time in symbolic walls of hours and minutes. Instrumental music mocked the godly harmonics of the human voice. Representational art depicted Our Savior with full-blooded lips, heaving breasts and sinewy muscles, a carnal being. By making Jesus human, the artists denied His divinity; by denying His divinity, they denied His actuality, making Him yet another symbol with an assigned value.

Ivan had gone through life believing that a great secret, composed of a vast number of small secrets, had been kept from him and that only he, of all the world’s men, was the victim of this conspiracy. The secret had to do with what was real and what was not. For example, was the conventional sequence of the cardinal numbers—one, two, three, four, etc.—their natural order, or a humanly contrived one?

He saw that men earned their livelihoods through the manipulation of intangibles, mostly figures in ledgers and words in books. They talked to each other in a kind of code, about indentures, stock prices, and warrants. They performed transactions after which they announced themselves satisfied and walked away from the table with nothing added to their pockets. The conspirators knew that there was a falseness at the bottom of their dealings, but they would not concede it to Ivan.

Ivan thought he knew what the real world was: it was a desyatina of land, a pud of wheat, an arshin of fabric. You could break your teeth on the real world, but now, out on a sea as still as glass, he had come to wonder if the land, the wheat, and the fabric were symbols themselves, a chimerical overlay for another world that was even more real.

Ivan paced along the deck of the ship, where the sailors drank vodka and played chess. The men were using the various gold coins that had scattered from the storerooms not for stakes, but as game pieces. They refused to recognize the gold’s assigned worth. For them the coins had been transformed into the ranks of chivalry, another arbitrary designation. Ivan recalled that in his early-morning departure from the city, the king had stood at the edge of the pier and stretched his arm in farewell. As he had done so, a wan smile had become visible, a watermark just beneath the surface of his face.

Ivan now ordered his men to reverse course, back to the king’s city. At once the wind picked up and the sails billowed and grew taut.

They soon reached their destination. Ivan docked his ship in a hidden lagoon and entered the city in disguise. But was this the same city from which he had departed? Its air was suffused with a strange, mellow glow. In his absence, the city’s streets had been paved, the homes that lined the streets had been enlarged and more elaborately ornamented, and the dress of the city’s inhabitants had become refined.

He stopped at an inn and ordered an expensive meal in its gay and bright dining room. The food arrived well salted, perfectly prepared. Ivan sourly noted that the cooks of this kingdom not only used his good Russian salt, but they used it in ways unknown to the cooks of his own land. At every table there were men and women eating and drinking their fill.

Ivan questioned the innkeeper.

“Has your dining hall always been so successful?”

“No sir, it has been so only since we introduced the rare spice salt to our dishes. Despite our high prices, every night we turn away patrons for lack of tables.”

“Are you the only innkeeper in the city?”

“No,” the innkeeper acknowledged. “The others are also using salt in their food.”

“But certainly if you prosper, it must be at their expense.”

“No, they too have few empty places in their halls.”

“How is that possible? How can there be an increased number of patrons dining out at increased cost? How do they afford their meals?”

The innkeeper shrugged. “When we first introduced salt into our cuisine, it was an immediate success, but we all had to work harder to afford it. The increased competition closed some unprofitable businesses; people were forced to change their way of working and doing business. In doing so we have become more prosperous. I’ve bought myself a small coach, which I had never before dreamed of possessing. And there at the next table is the coachmaker.”

“If you prosper and he prospers, then who suffers?”

The innkeeper smiled ruefully. “Not everyone can afford to eat salt, sir. There is poverty, more individual cases of poverty than we are accustomed to. But it is quite evident that our land, taken in its entirety, is much wealthier than before.”

“Has this kingdom made war on another and looted its riches?”

“No, we are at peace.”

“But,” Ivan asked, “if the wealth has not come from the purses of the poor, nor from the coffers of the vanquished, from where has it come? Perhaps you have cheated some innocent traveler?”

“We have made it ourselves, sir.”

“That is not possible,” Ivan replied. “Wealth is a fixed thing, declared to be equal to such-and-such amount of gold. One man can win, rob, or earn another’s gold, but the sum of the gold held by the two men stays constant. That is simple physics.”

Ivan paid his bill and left, sure of his argument and of the fact that he had been grievously swindled.

Ivan went to his men and gave them great quantities of beer and wine. “The king has turned my salt to gold, and I shall return the favor. Drink up, my comrades.”

That night while the kingdom slept, Ivan and his men left their ship in its moorings and silently stole through the city, their bladders full. They broke into all the places where salt was stored. They either urinated on the salt or in some other ways befouled it. On Ivan’s instructions, only a single thimble of the good Russian salt was saved. It was spirited away under his cloak.

In the morning, an alarm was raised and the pirates found. A terrible battle ensued in which the city was destroyed and Ivan’s ship was sunk, plunging his gold into the murky depths of the lagoon. The king’s army cornered Ivan and his men on a bluff overlooking the water and beyond that the ruined, smoking streets of the city, whose people had suddenly been impoverished.

As the king and his men advanced, Ivan removed the thimble of salt from his cloak and held it above the lagoon. The king ordered his men to stop.

“Behold,” said Ivan, “this is what’s left of your salt. By the iron laws of economics, here is the wealth of your kingdom coalesced into a single thimble. This is the sum of your dreams and ambitions, your scheming and manipulations. Take one more step and it will be lost forever.”

In exchange for the remaining salt, the king agreed to spare Ivan’s life. But with his ship sunk, Ivan could not return home. Nor could he recover his gold. He wondered whether he had made another bad transaction, rendering his life equal to a thimble of salt.

After neither a short time nor a long time, another traveler arrived in the kingdom. Upon learning of Ivan’s predicament, he offered to organize the men and equipment to lift the gold from the lagoon’s floor, even though Ivan was now penniless. The stranger asked only for half the gold that would be recovered.

If Ivan had not been held back by his men, he would have killed the stranger. It was, after all, Ivan’s gold. Why should a stranger, this vulture, get any piece of it at all? The king tried to persuade Ivan to change his mind, saying that he would get no use from the gold as long as it was trapped under water. “On the contrary,” Ivan replied. “It’s as safe there as it would be in a vault.”

Despite Ivan’s rebuff, the traveler did not leave the city, but employed local artisans to draw up plans for the ship’s salvage and to construct the necessary equipment. The traveler financed this by selling to speculators shares of his nonexistent share of Ivan’s gold, a swindle that infuriated Ivan, especially because it was accomplished so openly. By some evil wizardry, founded on the chance that Ivan would someday change his mind, the city returned to prosperity. Meanwhile, the traveler and his emissaries plied Ivan with gifts and favors, seeking permission to raise his ship.

Ivan’s resolve remained firm until the morning he spied the king’s beautiful daughter spinning a length of golden thread. He decided to perpetuate a swindle of his own. He offered his gold to the king, who believed it could still be recovered, even though it was long out of sight beneath the lagoon’s burgeoning layers of silt, drifting down into the underworld of memory and longing, a mere concept of a symbol. In exchange Ivan asked to marry the princess, as well as for a good, fast ship.

The king clapped his hands. “Done,” he cried.

That night there was a wedding banquet, attended by the king’s court and nobility. Jugglers, acrobats, and dancing bears provided merriment. The guests feasted on savory dishes prepared with the last thimbleful of good Russian salt. Toast after toast was raised to Ivan’s health and good fortune. At dawn Ivan and his bride set sail for home.

The ship sailed for neither a long time nor a short time and was then becalmed on the desert sea. The princess, wearing a white cotton tunic, sat at the prow of the ship. Her eyes were as bright as the word incandescent and her lips were as red as the idea of red. She stared at the endless sea, her profile etched against the sky. Her hair was the color of gold.

The princess was beautiful, it was said. Ivan had tasted the salt on her skin at the nape of her neck. But what did her beauty consist of? A certain vividness to her features, an unblemished skin, a posture that conformed to banal notions of aristocratic birth, a particular shine to her hair? These qualities meant nothing beyond themselves. A pair of lustrous eyes did not denote passion but was something strictly physiological, arising from the eyes’ pigmentation and the flow of moisture from their tear ducts. It had no practical consequence. And perhaps her hair was not really the color of gold; one might just as easily have called it yellow. A woman declared to be beautiful was only a symbol of real beauty, which itself remained imperceptible to human vision.

Her attractive features were as transitory as they were arbitrary. Her supposed beauty was fading at that very moment, as it had been fading since the night of the wedding banquet. Soon she would be drained, transformed into an empty symbol like a coin declared counterfeit. The memory of the banquet’s great festiveness instilled in Ivan an equivalent amount of regret and bitterness. He recalled the king’s parting smile.

Ivan now ordered his men to reverse course, back to the king’s city. At once the wind picked up and the sails billowed and grew taut.