First Cosmic Velocity

by Zach Powers

  Nadya walked down the hill. The man leaning on the car watched her. It was probably rare that the village received visitors, especially attractive female ones. But the man’s look was not a leer, his brows arched in curiosity. Then he looked at Kasha as if noticing her for the first time. His elbow slipped off the hood. He stumbled forward a few steps.

  “Kasha,” he whispered.

  Kasha’s ears perked up.

  “Is it you, Kasha?”

  She looked at the man for a long moment, nudging up to Leonid’s leg. Then her tail broke into a wide wag, and she scampered to the man’s feet. He bent down and scratched her as if she were his own dog greeting him after a long trip away, stroking from her head to her rump, following the curl of her tail with his hand as it arced up and over her back.

  “But no,” said the man. “You’re Kasha but you’re not. Her tail always hung limp.”

  This man knew Kasha’s mother, the original Kasha. He was a villager who survived. Leonid tried to recognize him, searching his face for a feature that matched one in his memory. The faces he remembered were blurry at best. The man looked up at Leonid, and the two inspected each other, faint recognition growing into certainty. The man spoke first.

  He said Leonid’s brother’s real name, the one he had been born with before Tsiolkovski named them both Leonid.

  Leonid felt himself smile. “Close, Mykola.”

  Mykola said Leonid’s real name.

  “I didn’t expect to see you,” said Leonid. “I didn’t expect to see anyone.”

  “And yet you still returned.”

  Hearing Mykola say it suddenly made it real. Leonid was home. He felt the valley around him, a swirling sensation, as if he were caught in a whirlpool that drained to the valley’s lowest point. Or he was the lowest point, the trees in orbit around him. He felt release, too, an old throbbing pain finally relieved, a pain he could only now identify by its absence.

  Leonid pointed at the dog. “Meet Kasha, the daughter of the original.”

  “She looks just the same! Except for the tail, of course.” Mykola sat back in the dirt and pulled Kasha onto his lap. His face, what could be seen of it behind the beard, lit up like a child’s. “And the original Kasha?”

  “She grew old, Mykola. She might have been old already when you knew her. We never knew her age.”

  “Her life was good, though, yes?” He tickled Kasha behind the ears.

  “Very. She was loved and loved in return.” Leonid’s voice choked off at the end. It seemed he was still not immune to the topic of loss.

  “Good. I hadn’t thought about her much in recent years. I used to wonder often, though.”

  Kasha hopped off Mykola’s lap and trotted after Nadya. The two of them wandered through the brush at the edge of the road, Nadya picking leaves from saplings. There were no saplings in the village of Leonid’s memory.

  “And you, Mykola?” asked Leonid. “How’ve you been?”

  “Things got better not long after you and your brother left. The train started coming again, bringing supplies. Then the rains returned. We were able to grow our own food. People had babies again. A few people even moved here from outside the village. Apparently, there were places worse off.” Mykola rose and brushed the dirt from the back of his pants. “But how about you? You were the only ones to escape. What did you do?”

  They did not know him here, not the adult version. The news of the space race, it seemed, declined to make the long trek to the valley. Mykola the boy had not understood the things Tsiolkovksi had said, and Mykola the man seemed not to remember them.

  “I’m a soldier,” said Leonid.

  “I thought so,” said Mykola. “There’s something about your posture. It’s the same as the men who returned from the war.”

  “I’m not sure if that’s due to being a soldier or to coming home after a long time away.”

  “And your brother?”

  “He is . . .”

  “I’m sorry.” Mykola strode forward and pulled Leonid into an embrace. He had grown a fat belly in the years Leonid had been away. It was hard to imagine anyone in the village being fat. Leonid wrapped one arm around Mykola’s back.

  “God, it’s good to see you,” said Mykola. “Sometimes you don’t know what you miss until you see it again.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE HEART of the village was at once exactly as Leonid remembered and entirely different. The tree still grew in the center of the main square, and near it rose the gravestones, plus new ones he supposed. Which one was Oksana’s? He could not remember where it had been placed. No one had carved her name at the time. Did anyone come later to name the nameless? Even stillborn babies deserved that much, a name itself a sort of monument.

  The arrangement of cottages was the same as in Leonid’s memory, but almost all of them looked rebuilt. The old style of construction, hand-hewn panels and roofs pinched into jagged peaks, had been replaced with manufactured boards and fresh black shingling. Glass windows filled the holes that had once been covered by shutters alone. Instead of dirt, the main path through the village was packed with crushed white stone that shifted beneath Leonid’s feet with every step. The gravelly sound bothered Leonid, as if he was walking on bones.

  Villagers moved around like actors on a stage, miming the actions they were actually performing. Leonid had not seen a water pump since he left the village. He had not needed firewood for just as long. There was always someone to wash his clothes for him, prepare his meals. Indoor plumbing. The village was like stepping into the forgotten part of history, a collection of the little tasks that would never be included in textbooks, but that for almost everyone who had ever lived made up the bulk of their existence. Wars, after all, were the exception. Like the launching of rockets.

  One question had plagued Leonid the whole time he waited with Mykola by the station, during the short ride down the mountain, and now as they walked. The words of the question felt too heavy. His Ukrainian had stopped developing when he left the village. He worried that he spoke it now only at the level of a child. The question required some small degree of eloquence, an arrangement of words that would give weight to it, endow it with the proper seriousness, respect. He forced himself to ask the question, but it came out as only a single word.

  “Grandmother?”

  Mykola stopped walking. The gravel crunched beneath his feet.

  “She lived for many years after you left,” said Mykola. “When the train started coming again, she met it every time, even when her knees started to ache. She never complained about that, but anyone watching could see the way she favored them. She also never explained why she met the train, but anyone with a heart knew. She was hoping her boys would return. And you did!”

  “Too late.”

  “I visited her every day.”

  “Thank you.”

  “She wasn’t sad. She missed you, but she was absolutely convinced that things were better for you outside the valley, even after conditions here improved.”

  They caught up with Nadya at the far side of the village. She crouched by the side of the stone path and pinched a fallen fir needle between her thumb and finger. Leonid introduced her. Nadya dropped the needle and stood.

  “Forgive me for wandering off,” she said. “I’ve spent my whole life in cities, inside buildings. This place is like another planet. I get lost in places like this. The Chief . . . my uncle once said I have the heart of an explorer. That’s why . . . that’s why he always favored me over the others.”

  Leonid wasn’t sure if Mykola would understand Nadya’s Russian, but he turned to Leonid and spoke in Russian himself. “I’m an uncle now! My first nephew was born just last month. By marriage, of course. I didn’t have any siblings. I guess I should start by saying I’m married. There’s too much history you’ve missed to share all at once.�
�

  “Married!” said Leonid. “Who is she?”

  “Lesya. You knew her, but she was only five or six when you left. Oksana’s little sister.”

  “Of course I remember her, though I can’t recall her face.”

  “I doubt the face is much at all like the one you would remember, anyway.” He turned back to Nadya. “So, you like our valley?”

  “It’s glorious. I could imagine living here. Not that I ever plan to settle. The only life I’ve ever known is one of motion. I could linger here, though, most definitely.”

  Ahead of them, the path diverted to the right, and then curved back behind an outcropping of trees. On the other side was the plot of land where Leonid and his brother had lived with Grandmother. When he left, the trees were dry and bare, the cottage visible at a glance. Now the green grew so thick that it was as if nothing at all existed on the other side.

  “Is it still there?” asked Leonid, pointing through the woods.

  “It is. One of the few that hasn’t been rebuilt. And it’s occupied. I believe you know who lives there.”

  Leonid tried to think of who from the village might still be alive. One of the other children? He barely remembered them. Sometimes he could not remember if a particular childhood friend had lived or died. For years he had dreams about people from the village dying. Some were dead before he left, others not. Sometimes he believed the dreams more than his memory.

  “To be honest,” said Mykola, “I haven’t seen him in so long, he might have finally died.”

  “I’m familiar with that feeling.” Leonid started down the trail.

  “Wait, don’t you want to know who it is?”

  “I’ll know soon enough.”

  Kasha flashed by. Instead of following the path, she entered the woods, dodging around trees like obstacles on a course. Her mother, the other Kasha, had once done the same. Only this Kasha’s tail, always curled up and over, let Leonid tell the two apart. Nadya followed the dog into the woods, brushing her fingertips across the bark of the trees as she passed.

  By the time Leonid and Mykola rounded the bend, Kasha and Nadya had already passed through the woods to the other side and sat together in a patch of high grasses. Beyond them, Grandmother’s cottage. Leonid did not recognize it at first, even though it was in the right place and was the right shape and could be none other than the home he had known. He had never expected to see it again, and he could not overcome his expectations so quickly. Finally, it was the pile of firewood beside the front door that convinced him. Knowing that the wood was still stacked in the same spot gave him a feeling of permanence more profound than the unchanging cottage behind it.

  “Is it as you remember?” asked Mykola.

  “The firewood, yes,” said Leonid. “We never had glass windows.”

  “They still have your kitchen table. I remember it being old even before you left.”

  Leonid crouched and scratched Kasha behind her ears. A bird sang in a tree. Another bird, more distant, replied. He scanned the canopy. No birds in sight, but a squirrel tightroped down a thin branch and leapt to another limb. Leonid had to search deep into his memory to recall a time when there were squirrels in the valley. Kasha followed the motion of the squirrel with her eyes.

  “Does any of this seem familiar, girl?” he said. “Your mother lived here, in these woods and in this cottage. This valley’s in your blood.”

  He rose and headed straight for the cottage’s front door. It looked new, but he realized that the door was one thing he had taken for granted. It would always be there to seal them off from the outside, and as long as that was the case, why worry with looking at it?

  Nadya rose and followed him, and Mykola eyed her, how one might inspect an old friend’s new wife. Let Mykola think what he wanted. Leonid had learned from Ignatius that the best lies were the ones you let other people assume for themselves.

  Leonid knocked on the door. An old woman answered. At first, Leonid thought it was Grandmother, but this woman looked nothing like her except in age and wrinkles. Grandmother was dead. Mykola had said Leonid would know who lived in the cottage, but this woman, even after staring at her, he did not recognize at all. She was far too old to have been one of the other children, too old even to be most of the adults Leonid had known. She did not speak, and Leonid realized she inspected him in the same way he inspected her. She smiled.

  “Konstantin,” she shouted back into the cottage in Russian, “you have visitors.”

  A voice, airy but with an echo of former power, responded from inside. “I have no business with any of those inbred villagers.”

  “They’re not from the village.”

  “No one outside the village knows I’m here.”

  She smiled apologetically at Nadya. “I suspect they didn’t come here intending to find you.”

  “Why must you always speak in riddles, woman?”

  “Come in,” said the woman. “I’m Varvara.”

  “Thank you,” said Leonid. “I’m—”

  She interrupted him. “Oh, I know. At least I have a fifty percent chance of guessing correctly.”

  Mykola was right. It was Grandmother’s old table still sitting in the same spot in the center of the room. A strange place for the table, sort of in the way of everything, but Leonid had never questioned its placement as a boy. At the table sat an old man. The word old did not do him justice. He seemed merely a skeleton clothed in skin a size too large. He wore glasses, though his eyes were clouded completely over. What was left of his hair was dry and wiry. He held the hollowed-out horn of some large animal to his ear.

  “Who is it?” asked the man.

  “Old friends,” said Varvara, speaking loudly, aiming her face directly at the open end of the horn.

  “When have we had friends?” said the old man.

  “I have many friends.”

  “Only because you stoop to socialize with the villagers. They won’t even have a place as sewage workers in the new Utopia.”

  Varvara shrugged at Leonid and Nadya, and gave another apologetic smile, this time to Mykola, who still stood in the doorway.

  “I saw that,” said the old man.

  So he was not as blind as Leonid assumed.

  “I didn’t try to hide it,” said Varvara.

  “Well, come here already,” said the old man. “I can’t make out faces far away.”

  Leonid walked to the table and sat in the chair opposite him. Nadya took the third chair. There had once been a fourth, but Leonid did not see it anywhere in the cottage.

  “Tsiolkovski,” she said.

  Leonid gripped the lip of the table with both hands. His fingernails cut into the wood. Nadya set her hand on Leonid’s.

  “So you know my name. Who doesn’t? Knowing my name means nothing.”

  The corners of the man’s eyes drooped even farther and the dour frown had been set in wrinkles as if in stone, but Nadya was right. This man was Tsiolkovski.

  “How are you alive?” The question escaped Leonid’s mouth before he could think better of it.

  Tsiolkovski laughed in an unkind way. “I have good blood. Good blood is what’s important. And you, who are you?”

  “I’m Leonid.” The name he had used most of his life tasted bitter in his mouth.

  “I don’t know a Leonid.”

  “In fact you know two, and you gave each of us our name.”

  Tsiolkovski leaned forward. His eyes were so white all over that Leonid doubted again that the man could see at all.

  “So it’s you,” said Tsiolkovski. “And who’s that with you, Nadya? All I can see is a halo of yellow. I assume that’s your hair, Nadya.”

  “It is,” said Nadya.

  “And in the doorway, all I see is a silhouette. Mars? Valentina? Yuri?”

  “I’m Mykola from the village.
”

  “Get out,” said Tsiolkovski.

  “He’s a friend,” said Leonid.

  “Get out!” screamed Tsiolkovski. “I won’t have his kind of filth in my very own house.”

  “It was my home before you came here.” It might still have been his home if Tsiolkovski had not come in the first place. Leonid’s brother might still be alive. Or they might both have starved. What was worse, the possibility of death or its certainty? Regardless, this man was culpable. If the Chief Designer had been Leonid’s brother’s executioner, then Tsiolkovski was the judge who handed down the sentence. Leonid resisted the urge to drag the man from Grandmother’s chair and toss him out the door.

  “It’s all right, Leonid,” said Mykola. “We don’t visit him for a reason. I’ll wait outside.”

  He stepped backward out of the doorway. Kasha yipped.

  “And an animal! I’d hoped he would train you all better than this. Bringing that man and an animal to my house. Of all the absurdities. He probably has you eating with your bare hands. That . . .” Tsiolkovski spoke a name Leonid had never heard before.

  “Who are you talking about?” asked Leonid.

  “Surely he’s still Chief Designer. He was a good man. He could never go into space, of course, what with his balding. He was balding even then.”

  Leonid felt embarrassed that he had never stopped to consider that the Chief Designer might have a name.

  “Cosmonauts can’t be bald?” asked Leonid. Tsiolkovski’s hair clung to his liver-spotted scalp only in wisps.

  “There can be no genetic inferiority in space. When we colonize Mars, only the fittest can go. You and Nadya, you’d be fine breeding stock. As much as the process of breeding is repulsive, it’s necessary for now. Until we can find another way. Imagine the children you two would have! Leonid, you were my first choice. I don’t know why the Chief Designer saved you until last. You’re not balding, are you?”

  “Not that I know of.” Leonid’s anger ebbed. This man was but a cracked shell of the old Tsiolkovski. He was like a child. A bitter one lacking innocence, but a child nonetheless.