by Zach Powers
“Who do you think you’re talking to, then?”
“You’re up here with me.”
“Where the weather is always nice.”
“I miss the rain.”
“As do I.”
“You should go outside.”
“And you probably should not.”
“I’m no longer sure of that.”
* * *
• • •
BY THE TIME the Chief Designer made it to Star City—forty kilometers that took two hours through the endless construction on Route 103, lined with massive wheeled machines of indeterminate purposes that never seemed to move from their places on the side of the road—the effects of so much travel were catching up with him. The last few kilometers he caught only in glimpses, when his eyes startled open from the bumps on the unfinished blacktop.
Like at RKK Energia, the Chief Designer had the reserved parking space closest to the front door of Star City’s main building. Here, the lot was paved and painted with lines, in far better shape than the road that led to it. The car made a spurting noise as the driver shut off the engine. The Chief Designer exited the car and walked to the door.
Inside he was met immediately by Mishin and Bushuyev. They had a knack for always being around when he needed them. Did they wait by the door the whole time he was away? Did one of them watch out a window for the approach of his car? Was there an underling somewhere tasked with keeping tabs on the Chief Designer at all times? Some sort of intercom system that could warn Mishin and Bushuyev of his approach? Did they, in the moment just before he opened the door, skid to a halt at the end of the dead sprint that brought them there?
“Let’s see the dogs,” said the Chief Designer.
“There’s a problem,” said Mishin or Bushuyev.
“What is it?”
“Actually, there are two problems,” said one of them.
“Several, maybe,” said the other.
“Out with it,” said the Chief Designer.
“We’re not sure which to tell you first.”
“If you don’t tell me something soon, the only problem you will have is looking for new jobs.”
“The heat shield.”
“What about it?”
“We just received the test results.”
The Chief Designer did not know how the data had arrived before him. He would have to discuss the route with his driver. Obviously, there was a faster way to get from the factory to Star City.
“I was there,” said the Chief Designer. “The results were optimal.”
“Yes, yes. The General Designer’s heat shield performed brilliantly.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The materials. We have the asbestos. We’d been experimenting with that ourselves. But the phenolic resin. The factory didn’t produce enough before they shut down operations.”
“The factory closed?”
“It was converted to process dairy.”
“Thank god we’ll all have enough cheese. How much resin were you able to get?”
“We can make one shield, but only if we perform no more tests. A new factory is scheduled to open within the year, but it would be the first state project to ever be completed on time if it did.”
“There are two launches just months away. Even if the factory opened on time, it would be too late.”
Mishin and Bushuyev exchanged a glance. “We might have a solution. The docking clamp.”
“What about it?”
“With both capsules in orbit at the same time, one could dock with the other . . .”
“And the cosmonaut could then bring the dogs aboard the capsule with the heat shield. Yes, that just might work.” The Chief Designer found himself fully awake now, almost bursting with energy. “This will be an even greater accomplishment than we planned. Two ships docking in space! You, comrades, are geniuses.”
“About the dogs,” said Mishin or Bushuyev.
“Yes, yes. What about them?” His mind raced, cycling through all the considerations that this new project required.
“Kasha is gone.”
“What do you mean gone?” He would need to assign additional engineers to the docking project. There had been problems getting a good seal. Sometimes he cursed the Vostok’s spherical shape. So practical and so simple, but it made it hard to attach things to the outside.
“Nadya and Leonid took her.”
“Took her where?” But the one capsule would not have to return to Earth, so maintaining balance for reentry was not required and the docking apparatus could be attached permanently to the door.
“They didn’t return with us from Ukraine.”
“They’re with Ignatius?” The other ship, though, would need some sort of detachable clamp. Mishin and Bushuyev had been working on one. They would not have suggested the idea if they did not think it would work. Neither was much for taking risks.
“They left on their own. It’s unclear where they might have gone.”
“Surely Ignatius knows. She would never let the two of them out of her sight.”
“We saw them leave, and Ignatius wasn’t with them.”
“Are you telling me they ran away?” He imagined the docking clamp releasing from a capsule and tumbling away through open space.
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t try to stop them?” The Chief Designer’s voice inched up in volume with each word, the hard syllables coming gravelly from the back of his throat.
“We tried.”
He shouted, “But you failed!”
Mishin took a half step forward and spoke the Chief Designer’s name. “You of all people should possess the capacity to forgive a failure.”
The Chief Designer’s scar throbbed.
“Why would they leave me?” he asked.
“The reasons should be obvious,” said Mishin or Bushuyev. “The real question, the one that should comfort you, is why did they stay for so long?”
The Chief Designer would have liked to weep. He felt the sorrow, yes, like cold in his bones, but part of him already looked for a solution. The mission was ready. He would allow sadness later. Always later. What he needed now was a pilot and a dog.
Kharkiv, Ukraine—1964
Leonid and Nadya had made it to the station in Kharkiv too late to catch the train he had originally intended, the one Ignatius had marked on the map. It would have carried them to Kiev, and there in the throngs of the city they could have disappeared. At least Leonid assumed that was Ignatius’s plan. At least that much of her plan was his plan, too. But while Nadya was a trained pilot and he had been taught the basics, neither turned out to be much as navigators. First, it took them more than an hour to find a store where they could purchase new clothes. They changed in the store, and left their uniforms behind. Leonid regretted abandoning his medals, not because he felt he had earned them, but because they were not his to do with as he pleased. The medals belonged to his brother.
Leonid took the map and the money and the note from the Americans, and transferred them to the pocket of his new pants. The fabric was too stiff, sharp folds that prodded him when he climbed back into the car.
If it was possible to make every wrong turn on the way to the station, they had done it. Lefts instead of rights, missed turns, street names that had no corresponding mark on the map. It was only by luck that they discovered the station. Out of nowhere, its shallow brown dome sprung into view, and just the top of the sign that identified it. The building looked more like a church than a station, except of course for the trains.
Leonid ran inside to buy tickets while Nadya found a place to park the car, but it was already an hour too late. The attendant, shuffling a stack of unused tickets as if it were a deck of cards, told him they would have to wait until tomorrow. The attendant stared hard at Leonid’
s face.
“You look like . . .”
“I get that a lot lately,” said Leonid in Ukrainian, and hurried away.
A large map, taller than Leonid and twice as wide as that, hung on the wall opposite the ticket counter. The map had been glued directly to the plaster, paper curling out at the corners. It seemed to show every rail line in the whole country, even a few stations in southern Russia. There were many more here than on the map Ignatius had given him, marked in red like veins. Or was it arteries that carried red blood and veins blue? Giorgi would have known. A train chugged by on the other side of the wall.
He scanned the map of his home country and was saddened to recognize so few of the place names. What had he ever really known of it except the valley? Were there still people he knew there? Did they have newspapers or television? Had they seen his face? If they had, did anyone recognize him? There were no pictures of him from when he was a boy. Well, many were taken when he first came to Star City, but he declined to ever look at them. He did not know if his appearance now bore any resemblance to the boy he once was.
There, in the tiniest font imaginable, tucked in the middle of darker greens that meant mountains, he saw one name he knew. Bohdan, the hero of Ukraine. He tried to remember Grandmother’s stories. She repeated them so often he should have known them by heart. But he only remembered a few. The hero, like the town that bore his name, had faded to near nothing.
At the bottom of the map, abutting the Black Sea, where Bohdan Khmelnytsky had oared for the Ottomans, sat Odessa. Leonid knew nothing about the city except the name. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out the note from the Americans, folded into a square, fraying at the edges and ripping along the creases. He opened the paper gently using his fingertips and reread the note: Hope to see you soon! —Your Friends from America. Could he escape to America? He knew even less about America than he did about Odessa. Defecting was not the escape Ignatius had intended, but no matter how grateful Leonid might have been for her unexpected assistance, he still did not consider her a friend. To her he owed nothing. To Nadya, though . . .
He followed one red line on the map east from Odessa. It marked a jagged path to Kharkiv, to the very station where he stood. He had planned to go to Kiev because it seemed like the best place to start, but it turned out he could get to where he was going directly. Leonid returned to the ticket counter and bought two tickets to Odessa. The train left in less than an hour.
“You can’t get to Kiev from there,” said the attendant. “At least not easily.”
“The destination doesn’t matter much.”
But it did. For the first time he felt where he was going mattered. Nadya came in, Kasha trotting unleashed beside her. Nadya gazed up, inspecting the architecture in a disinterested way. The paint on the underside of the dome was flaking off, revealing an older version of the same color underneath.
“Tomorrow, we’ll be on the other side of the country,” Leonid told her.
“And then on to the other side of Earth. If we keep at it, I might finally complete my orbit, after all.”
Nadya took Leonid by the hand and led him to the platform. They had an easier time finding the train than they had finding the station.
Bohdan, Ukraine—1964
The train churned upward into the hills, aiming for the higher peaks that it would never reach. Leonid started to recognize the landscape even though he had seen it before only once. Still, this type of tree—Giorgi would have known the name—was the same as in the forests he knew as a boy. One could recognize a forest without recognizing it in particular.
The sound of the train, a sound he had grown used to in his recent travels, came here in a richer timbre, echoing back upon itself so that each thump was actually a chorus of many. It reminded him of the hopeful, fearful sensation the arrival of the train made when he was a boy. The sound would crest the hill long before the train itself. Like trumpets heralding the arrival of a tsar.
The angle of the climb steepened, pressing Leonid back into the seat, a milder version of the centrifuge at Star City. The seat’s padding had been compressed to nothing, just old leather over wooden slats. He had to shift every few minutes to relieve the pressure on one side of his back or the other. He had given up trying to find a comfortable position for his buttocks. The slats underneath pinched and shifted no matter the angle. Beside him, Nadya looked out the window, never moving. He could see the reflection of her open eyes in the glass or he would have thought she was asleep. Kasha, curled on the floor in front of them, slept soundly.
There was no one else in the car with them. Maybe no one else on the whole train, if three cars and an engine could actually be called a train. The only other person they had seen was the conductor, a Kazakh or a Turkman, who did not understand Russian or did an excellent job of pretending not to. The sweaty scent of previous passengers mucked the air.
The train car leveled and then pitched forward. There had been several small descents to interrupt the generally upward progress, but this one was steeper. The view on either side was hemmed in by forest, the distant mountains disappearing like a grand illusion. The sound of the engine hushed and the brakes wailed. The car shuddered for several seconds before settling into a smooth deceleration.
Their stay in Odessa had not extended beyond the train station. On a large map like the one in Kharkiv, Leonid had again seen the name of his home village, Bohdan, this time printed larger, with the red line of a railway leading right to it. He had bought tickets before he even realized what he was doing. America would still be there in a week.
Nadya had not commented when he told her about the detour, as if this new plan had been established from the start. She simply nodded. Leonid worried that he had taken the place of those who had commanded every aspect of her whole life, that he was no better than the Chief Designer. But Leonid would make it up to her. Once they escaped.
Kasha, for her part, dashed aboard the train without prompting, as if she knew it would take her to her roots. It was the little dog’s excitement that made the journey real to Leonid. He was going home, assuming the village still existed, that a single villager had survived the famine, that the old huts still stood, else the green of the valley had grown up over them or the rain had never returned and the valley was now nothing but dust.
Leonid’s skin pricked with gooseflesh. He wanted to turn around and leave. He would sprint to the engine and force the conductor to reverse the train, to pull them out of the valley. He had barely escaped with his life, and only then because of his brother. If he had not been a twin, he would have stayed and died with the rest of them. He sometimes imagined the villagers still alive and waiting for him. More often, though, he imagined their tombstones, jagged rocks with names chiseled there by untrained hands. What would he say to Grandmother? But no, she was most certainly dead. Was she? He realized he had never known her age. He thought of her as old because grandparents were old, when she might have been little older than the Chief Designer was now.
The thought of the Chief Designer gave him another pause. That passed quickly, though. In all his fantasies of returning home, of which there had been more than he had admitted to himself, his brother was with him. The Chief Designer had taken that from him, stripping him of hope and innocence and family and . . . the list could go on.
Leonid looked at Nadya. She touched the window with her fingertips, as if caressing the trees beyond. Or was it her reflection she saw, and in it the face of her sister?
A bolt of silence, and then the train leapt to a stop. The empty seats rattled. Kasha slid forward several inches, sticking out a paw to steady herself without opening her eyes. Nadya stood, maneuvered around Leonid’s knees, and headed for the exit. Leonid followed, snapping his fingers for Kasha. The dog popped to her feet, bouncing along as if she needed no transition between asleep and awake. His arm started a reflexive wave as he exited the train, but there w
as no one there to greet them.
The station had been rebuilt. Not that the structure was any larger, but instead of the tumbling wooden shed, now it was made of metal. Leonid could not call the shed new. It had been there long enough to grow red spots of rust. The door did not line up with the lopsided frame.
From down the hill came a rumble, a small truck motoring up the path from the village. Leonid recalled the slow walks to the station when he was a boy, but the truck had almost arrived already. An older man drove, and several teenagers sat in the open back, prodding each other and laughing. The truck pulled up alongside the freight car and the teenagers hopped off. Whiffs of exhaust twined with the green-tinged mountain air.
One of the teenagers slung open the freight car’s sliding door, and the others hopped inside. The older man, who on second glance was younger than Leonid had first assumed, stepped out of the truck and leaned on the hood, instructing the teens from time to time on where to set the boxes and sacks they lugged from the train.
Kasha took a few cautious steps away from the platform, sniffing at the air. She darted over to a kalyna by the side of the road, nosing, then licking the berries.
“No,” said Leonid. He remembered the berries’ bitter taste, and also how sick they had once made the original Kasha when she ate just a few.
The man by the truck inspected Leonid up and down. The man’s beard was thick and showed flecks of white. His bushy eyebrows cast shadows that hid his eyes, making it impossible to tell exactly where the man was looking. He made a deliberate act of spitting on the ground. Leonid realized he had said no in Russian.
Instead of eating the berries, Kasha shoved her rump into the kalyna’s branches and peed. The urine splashed loudly against the dry bed of leaves. Two sacks, thrown by the teens in the freight car, thumped to the ground. Kasha finished and scampered back to Leonid’s side, twitching her head in every direction, taking quick sniffs. She had never smelled mountains before. Leonid had almost forgotten how different the scent was from the choked air around Moscow.
