by Zach Powers
“You’re the first to know.” The Chief Designer felt the coldness in his own voice and forced himself to soften it. “Mishin or Bushuyev should have the old training regimen, if it’s no longer contained in your own files.”
“Yes, Chief Designer. Thank you.”
All the dogs barked goodbyes as the Chief Designer left the kennel, all except Kasha, sweet, sweet Kasha, who regarded him with the concern of a mother, an expression both worried and proud. “She’s just a dog,” he spoke to himself, but he knew it was only half of an argument and not a belief.
London, England—1964
Leonid felt weighted down. As if the wool coat of the uniform had not been heavy enough, now it was festooned with such an assortment of medals and ribbons as he had never seen before. The Order of the Hero of the Soviet Union. The Order of the Hero of Socialist Labor. Pilot Cosmonaut of the USSR. Many more medals he could not name and a dozen ribbons of similar anonymity. Even the ones he knew he often mixed up. Long ago, his boyhood slouch had been trained out of him, but he felt bent forward by the weight of the symbols on his chest. The medals tinked together as he walked into Earls Court. Beside him, dressed in the same clownish regalia, Nadya inspected the far corners of the room, oblivious to the hundreds of reporters gathered there.
They had been to so many cities on the tour that Leonid often forgot which crowd in particular he was addressing. First it had been what seemed like every city in all of Eastern Europe: Minsk, Tbilisi, Riga, Tallinn, Budapest, Warsaw, Prague, Sofia, Bucharest, even tiny Tirana. Then they crossed the imaginary line to the West: Rome, Paris, and now London. He had learned a little English as part of his training. This would be the first time since they left the East that he understood what anybody was saying to him without Ignatius providing translation.
From outside, Earls Court was a massive structure, and it seemed somehow even larger on the inside, soaring ceilings and broad spaces broken up only by widespread columns and the freestanding walls that divided the exhibitions. The Soviet exhibition presented a caricature of Russia, as if everyone worked on a communal farm or built rockets. The whole rest of society was absent. A nation of farmers and scientists. Suspended from the ceiling in the center of the exhibition was a large device, supposedly the Vostok capsule, but instead of the simple orb of the actual Vostok, this one was done up as much as Leonid’s uniform. Giant fins swooped toward the back of the conical ship. Convoluted antennae sprouted from all over like saplings. The surface was so shiny Leonid was sure it had to be plated in silver. A crimson hammer and sickle took up one whole side of the fuselage.
Leonid was greeted by British dignitaries, including the Queen and a boy he assumed to be a prince. The boy almost gaped at Leonid, and only stepped forward with a gentle shove from the Queen. Leonid knelt and shook the boy’s hand, a small thing like the paw of an animal. The boy grinned, revealing a row of lopsided teeth. Leonid smiled back, and a camera flashed. He stood, saluted the Queen, and made his way to the dais in the center of the room, directly under the fake Vostok.
There were about two hundred reporters crowding the dais, as Leonid estimated it. Before the tour, he had never been around so many people all at once. If someone had told him that there were tens of thousands in attendance at his first appearances, he would have believed them. Any number more than a handful seemed to him countless. Now, though, after dozens of such events, he was beginning to recognize the size of a crowd for what it was. Afterward, Ignatius would always give him an estimate, then jot it down in a notebook she kept in a pocket of her leather jacket. Leonid’s estimates usually aligned with hers.
He stepped to the cluster of microphones atop the podium and addressed the crowd in halting English. His arm lifted into a wave without him having to think about it.
“Greetings from outer space to our friends in Great Britain.”
Dozens of cameras flashed, but he hardly noticed them anymore.
The usual barrage of questions followed: What does weightlessness feel like? What does Earth look like from space? Were you scared? On to the more specific questions. Can you describe the launch process? How do you navigate the capsule? What is the next mission? When can we expect the next launch? Who is the next cosmonaut?
Leonid gave all the rehearsed answers, Ignatius helping with the English when he got stuck on a word. The same answers he had given to reporters across the whole continent. The words felt even more meaningless in a language not his own.
The questions petered out, like the drops of rain at the end of a storm. Leonid recalled watching Nadya’s press conference in London years ago. He had huddled around the small television in the barracks with the other twins at Star City. The questions to her came in torrents that seemed like they would never cease. She answered in clipped, awkward phrases, always in Russian. An interpreter, standing so close to Nadya that she held equal share of the podium, translated every question and translated back every answer. Leonid did not know why Nadya would not answer in English. She had always spoken it much better than him. It would not be until her return to Star City that Leonid found out that she was not the Nadya he had known, but her twin, trained to pilot Vostok 1, not to answer questions from foreign press. Leonid still felt guilty that he had not known right away.
A reporter in the third row asked a question, but Leonid had not been paying attention.
“Could you repeat, please?” he asked.
“What does it feel like to be a hero, not just to your own country but to the world?”
“I am no more hero than any Russian worker.”
That was the rehearsed line. Ignatius, standing just to his side, smiled.
Leonid continued, “And I am less hero than some.”
He looked at Nadya, standing by the dais, still looking around the hall at the many wonders of the Soviet Union, tractors and plows and spaceships, toiling workers with insane grins stretched wide across their plastic mannequin faces. Ignatius pulled him by the shoulder away from the podium, and offered a quick thanks to the press. As they moved toward the exit, Ignatius leaned close and whispered, “A fine improvisation, comrade,” but she did not sound like she meant it.
* * *
• • •
THEY TOURED LONDON followed by a cadre of photographers. The color of the sky reminded Leonid of winter in Star City, but it was not cold at all. It smelled different, too. Passing the Thames, salt and brine wafted with the mist. Leonid had only first seen the sea the previous week, and now here was that smell again. It was a smell like catching the sunset back in his home village, when it fell right in the V of the valley, as if the light funneled directly to the core of the Earth.
Sometimes the photographers would ask Nadya and Leonid to stop in front of a landmark. The cosmonauts posed, backs bolt-upright, chins slightly raised, Leonid flashing his smile. Nadya would try to pull her face into a shape other than a scowl. The picture snapped; they moved on.
Leonid did not recognize any of the places where they took photos, though he found many of them beautiful, the architecture a far cry from the Soviet utilitarianism of Star City. Things here felt old, as if wandering the city was actually touring a memory. In the Eastern nations, tours had always focused on factories and modern museums. Here, though, and in Paris and Rome, every other building they paused to inspect was a church, some small and old and others massive and older still, surfaces adorned with angels and saints, swathes of stone interspersed with colorful windows depicting even more angels and more saints. Back in his home village, the church had been made of old stacked logs and capped by a thatched roof, later shingled by a team of Soviet carpenters. The only decoration was two branches left over from the church’s construction, tied together in the shape of a cross and hung over the unraised altar. Over time, the crosspiece had gone aslant, slipping halfway through the binding. The shape that remained was more mystic rune than crucifix, but no one ever thought to repair it. Pr
obably by now the twine had rotted to nothing, leaving just a vertical stick nailed to the wall.
The front of Leonid’s thighs throbbed with dull fatigue. The sidewalk they followed sloped up, not much, just enough to make the change in elevation known. They stepped from the narrow lane into a paved expanse on the other side of which soared an ornate, domed church, far larger than any place they had visited so far.
The tour guide led them alongside the church, explaining in English what it was and its history. Leonid listened just closely enough to pick up the name of the place, St. Paul’s, and that a cathedral was a special sort of church, he assumed like a sobor, though it looked nothing like St. Basil’s. They passed into the church through an entrance on the side of the building, through a narrow hallway that forced them to progress in single file, and then an open space burst before them. The ceilings vaulted high above, domes and panels painted with massive renderings of biblical scenes, columns and arches gilded. There was no flat space to be found, no inch free from image, but instead of feeling crowded, the ceiling soared higher and higher, the figures painted there as far away as the faintest pinprick of a star. Leonid wished he had visited this place before he had to describe outer space in interviews. This sensation, he was sure, was as close as he would ever come to understanding what his brother had experienced in orbit.
He sat down on a bare wooden seat near the altar while the rest of the tour group moved toward the nave. The photographers snapped a few photos of Leonid from a distance, and then hurried on. Nadya was still their favorite subject, even though she never smiled for the camera.
A man emerged from one of the cathedral’s many corners and stopped to stare at Leonid. The man wore a black jacket over a dark red shirt with a Roman collar. This was a priest, Leonid realized, even though the vestments were different from the only other priest Leonid had ever known, back in the village, before the priest was taken away.
Leonid looked up at the ceiling again, scanning his eyes slowly across every surface as if reading sentences in a book. When he looked back down, the priest was still staring. Leonid made direct eye contact and felt the heat of a blush on his neck and cheeks, and then the weight of the cap still on his head. He had forgotten to remove it when they entered. He snatched it off, fumbling the brim in his fingers. The cap slipped free and fell to the checkerboard floor, landing on the gold button on its side, pinging out a sound that resonated through the whole cathedral. The priest grinned, an expression that squeezed his ample cheeks into a series of folds.
Tugging down the bottom of his jacket, the priest slid sideways into the narrow space between the chair rows and shuffled toward Leonid, taking a seat right next to him.
“I am sorry for my hat,” said Leonid.
“Oh, you speak English?” said the priest.
“Some.”
“Don’t worry about the hat. We have so many tourists come through here, we would exhaust ourselves trying to remind everyone who forgot to remove their hats before entering. Anyway, I should apologize to you for staring. I’m particularly fascinated by space exploration. The Americans, I was fortunate to meet them when they came to London. It was arranged in advance, but I never expected to see a Soviet in a church.” The priest slapped his thigh. “I can’t believe it! Stumbling across a cosmonaut just sitting by my altar.”
“Not only me,” said Leonid. He flicked his thumb toward the nave, where the rest of the tour group stood in a semicircle around the guide. Nadya lingered several steps away, staring off in a direction opposite from everyone else. “The first human in space admires your church also.”
The priest’s face went agape, but he quickly composed it. The man was older than Leonid had first thought, fine lines like shatter marks at every place where his face creased. These were smoothed somewhat by the ampleness of the priest’s flesh, rounding the hard edges of age. His eyes were like those of a child, still able to find wonder, still seeking it.
“Can . . . can I meet her?” asked the priest.
“I will introduce you,” said Leonid.
The priest turned from Nadya and gazed up at a mosaic above the altar, depicting a man even Leonid knew enough to recognize as Jesus.
“Before that, can I ask you a question?” asked the priest. “I’ve been curious about it. It’s said that everyone in Russia is atheist. Can there really be a whole nation without God?”
“You are priest, yes? I know of confession. I tell you this, you must keep it secret, yes?”
“I’m the Bishop of London, so yes, a priest.”
Leonid started to jump to his feet, to follow the protocol for meeting a foreign dignitary, protocol that had been drilled into him for years. He jammed his shin hard against the chair in front him and fell back into his seat, wincing. The Bishop gripped the sleeve of Leonid’s uniform.
“No need for formalities, son,” said the Bishop.
Leonid rubbed his shin, sure that he could feel the lump of a bruise already forming.
“And we have no formal confession in our church,” continued the Bishop, “but I can promise, man-to-man, that I won’t share what you speak.”
Leonid made himself sit upright, ignoring the pain that still shot through his leg.
“Church is dangerous,” he said.
The Bishop laughed, a hearty guffaw that seemed out of place in the sanctuary. Several nearby tourists looked over, and kept looking, talking too loudly among themselves about the strange pair in the seats, the priest and the soldier. They did not seem to recognize either of them. The farther west Leonid traveled, the fewer people knew of him, and he found this was not something he minded.
“All the churches closed,” said Leonid to the Bishop. “The buildings were destroyed or used for other things. In my city, the old church was used to store food. Very cool inside, yes? Good for . . .”
“Preserving?” offered the Bishop.
“Yes! People do not worship with no churches, but some still believe. It was not just buildings. Fewer young people. But old people still believe. They believed for too long just to stop.”
“And you?”
“I think it would feel nice to believe.”
“But you don’t?”
“It would also feel terrible.”
“Why is that?”
Leonid patted his shin where he had banged it. “I hit my leg on many things already.”
Leonid smiled, and not the practiced smile he used for photographs, but a natural one, like sometimes happened when he took Kasha out into the grassy quad to play when the weather was actually warm. This priest, no, this bishop, was full of warmth, like a father, or how Leonid imagined a father should be. How, in his earliest memories, Leonid remembered the man who was his father, a large figure with the face of his brother, but an older version of that face. And when Tsiolkovski used to visit, more like a grandfather than a father, but still. Leonid always felt that without a figure with the rank of father, he was missing something, missing this warm sensation he felt now, a rush that spread from his chest to his face and upturned the corners of his mouth.
The Bishop smiled back, but stared into Leonid’s eyes as if waiting for more, as if the joke were not a real answer. And Leonid knew that it was not. Ignatius had trained him to dodge real questions with humor. When the truth could not be revealed, the only option was charm. Leonid stopped smiling.
“If I feel I want to believe,” said Leonid, “then to believe would make me feel right. God is not important then, just the sensation I get from choosing to believe. Is this not bad . . .”
“Logic?”
“Yes, logic. This is bad logic, yes?”
“Faith is based on feelings for so many people, and so many people trust feelings. As if feelings were a thing, something you could pick up, like a smooth, white stone in the black dirt by a roadway. But science has shown us what feelings are. Chemicals in the b
rain. It feels good to believe, so people believe. It feels good to pray, so people pray. When someone says they feel God in their hearts, what they actually feel is a chemical in their brain.”
“Are you sure you are Bishop?”
“I have the outfit and everything.” The Bishop tugged at his collar. “My point is not that faith is bad, but that faith based only on emotion leads to an ignorant kind of faith. There is a term in English, blind faith. Too many people let the fact that belief feels right mean that it absolutely is right, but that kind of belief is what led to every terrible thing ever done in the name of religion. Crusades and pogroms and inquisitions.
“These people had faith without doubt. But doubt is strength, and not just for the individual, but for Christianity. Nothing here on Earth is perfect, not even a church. It’s our duty to God to try to be more perfect each day, to make the church more perfect each day. If we assume that we’re right, that we must be right and can’t be wrong, then it becomes impossible to improve. Feelings of belief must be coupled with a logical consideration of the faith. Feelings alone are not enough.”
“I have never seen a logical reason for faith,” said Leonid. “I am sorry. I do not mean to offend.”
“No, no. This is just the kind of conversation that I think should happen more often. Of course, a priest in the pulpit can’t tell his congregation to doubt everything he tells them, but we need more dialogue like this. You’re not wrong. The Bible is full of miracles, but when was the last time you witnessed one? But look who I’m talking to.” The Bishop made an exaggerated motion of tapping his forehead. “You’re a man who has traveled to the heavens themselves. A miracle, if there ever was one. But with blind faith, we never would have done it. Humanity would remain stuck to the ground. In both the literal and metaphorical sense. Do you know metaphor?”
“I do not know the word.”
“Flying in space is literal. Ascending to heaven is a metaphor.”
