The World Goes On

by László Krasznahorkai

  Wonderful. Fantastic mood. Ready for takeoff.

  At which point Korolev yelled into the microphone: first stage, middle stage, final stage! Lift off! Go! to which the mischievous Gagarin only said:

  Поехали

  in other words, to put it loosely, but aiming for the essence: “Well, we’re off,” and this time too there was in that sentence the same, that usual, dear impudence on Gagarin’s part, but there was also the fact that he was preparing, with the others, to strike it big; accordingly he was impudent, but impudent in an uplifting way, and the others felt it too, they felt it in his voice across the crackling loudspeaker that something big was in the air, and the big thing in the air was Gagarin and the others—although all of them were aware that today Soviet Science was taking a dizzying step forward in the history of Mankind, all of them were thinking about that, it fired them up, although something else could have been firing them up as well, because this was about something much, much larger: namely that Man had entered into an unparalleled, dizzying adventure, stupefying in its consequences, in the context of the History of Mankind; or at the very least upon the first stage of this adventure, namely the rocket carrying him roared, and with a continuous blast manifesting itself in sounds never heard before, the Vostok 1 lifted off from the Kazakh desert, from the Earth, and beneath him the spacecraft roared, and the Vostok lifted off ever faster and ever faster, and everything beneath him, beside him, above him, and in him too, was shaking, and within a couple of minutes Gagarin reached the speed of Delta-v—ten kilometers per second—and in contrast to what Kamanyin noted in his diary, he was quickly on the verge of unconsciousness from the insane acceleration, so that the conversation between Earth and Vostok, namely between Zarya and Kedr, which until then could be described as undisturbed, was halted for a few seconds: his face contorted, Gagarin tried to survive until the thrust lessened, until the pressure on his body—more than five-g—abated, and the Vostok 1 reached the desired speed, so that he could overcome the gravitational pressure and the drag; and for that he needed to reach, in the Vostok 1, a certain number of km. per sec., and then finally at 6:17 Universal Coordinated Time, that is 9:17 Moscow time, he reached the point where he could reassure Korolev that

  The spaceship is functioning normally. I see the Earth through the Vzor. All is according to plan;

  but of course, at that moment he could not have seen the Earth directly through the Vzor: he only could have seen it later on through one of the three windows placed around the height of his head, but right now, and generally speaking, above the clear hemisphere of the Earth, this Vzor—an optical device in the shape of a half sphere placed at his feet—aided him, as it always showed, in symbolizing the Earth, where the Vostok was at that particular moment, that is as a kind of clever little navigational mechanism, using the rays of the sun by means of eight mirrors, it always clearly conveyed to Gagarin where he was at that moment in relation to the Earth, but let’s not dwell on this, because now we’re going to dwell on how it all began among the most horrifying circumstances possible, because it began with various kinds of animals being launched into space, hence conveying the following information about space: if anyone at all would be able to remain alive in it, thus obliging the being in question to penetrate into space (the whole thing beginning in parallel to the development of rocket technology, in the course of which sometime in 1947 someone had the idea that maybe living beings could be sent up there too, and not just spaceships), in all likelihood these first living beings were fruit flies, launched into space by the Americans on a V2 rocket, and the primary goal of this launch was to examine how the so-called living being could endure so-called space, but of course these attempts in the ’40s and the ’50s were uncertain, entailing certain sacrifice, because it was not really possible to regard these living creatures launched into space as anything else but sacrifices, as in the beginning the poor wretches hardly survived, this is also demonstrated, for example, by the Americans’ “Albert operations,” where five monkeys named Albert were sent into space five times, one after the other, but all five perished in the end, killed, for the most part, by the impact: and then on September 20, 1951, a monkey named Yorick survived the trip, and only a few hours after his return, he died from the removal of an infected electrode—people began to speak of success, but to put it delicately, success was still a long way off, because until that point untold animals still had to perish, we don’t even know exactly how many died, it’s only certain that there were very many; in the first place, concerning the Soviets, it was customary for them not to speak of the death of animals launched into space if they could avoid it, which they couldn’t always manage, of course—namely, not to speak about it—and so there they are: Ryzhik, Lisa, Albina, Pchyolka, Mushka, and who even knows how many stray dogs from Moscow died before the famous Laika came along, Laika, hailed by the Soviets as a great hero, and that wasn’t the problem, of course Laika was a great hero, but she didn’t become that in the way that the official version told it—because while Laika wasn’t expected to survive anyway, there wasn’t even a landing unit in the spaceship, according to the official version, she survived seven days up there until they put her to sleep with a quickly acting poison—actually the reality was much more ruthless, namely: due to the presumed failure of a heat shield the dog was already suffering in the moments following the launch, maybe in the fifth or the seventh minute, as she couldn’t withstand the trauma, more than 41 degrees instead of the normative value of 20° C, simply put: she died a torturous death from overheating, or according to others she was just burned alive, and so this poor little carrion circled around in space one hundred and sixty some-odd days, after the almost instantaneous death by torture occurring on November 3, 1957, until the entire spaceship burned up upon returning to the earth—but one thing is certain: Korolev and his crew would have swallowed the fictitious poison meant for Laika themselves in order for people to be able to withstand existence in space, and that came about too, and now there was just this one big jump in 1961, when, after so much suffering and sacrifice in the Kremlin, it seemed that the time had come in Tyuratam to shoot off a human being—namely one of us—into space, and they did fire one of us off, less than four years after Laika: Gagarin in his spacesuit climbed the steps of the silo, got into the Vostok, positioned himself in the spaceship cabin, then they strapped him in, equipped him, checked him, and in the end shut the cabin door on him, and that had to be the most frightening moment—when for the first time in history the door of a spaceship was closed on a man—and there he was alone face-to-face with what I want too, but of course don’t really need, and I won’t rush ahead too much, because the situation is such that there were antecedents, indeed how should I put it, there was a horrific quantity of antecedents, and I would really have to write all these down if it were possible: every, but every single antecedent—because nothing ever happens without antecedents, actually everything is just an antecedent, that’s how it is: as if everything were just always preparing for something else that came before, as if it were preparing for something, but at the same time, and in an appalling manner, as if preparing without any final cumulative goal, so that everything is just a continually dying spark, and I don’t mean to say that everything is just the past, but rather I am saying that everything is always striving toward a future which can never occur, what no longer exists strives toward what does not yet exist, and if we wanted to put it humorously, we could think that there really is something like a future or a past in reality too, but I don’t want to put it humorously, in no way do I think that would be the case, as in my opinion this whole thing with the past and the future is just a kind of characteristic misunderstanding, a misunderstanding of everything that we call the world and about which—speaking in all seriousness—nothing can even be said beyond the fact that in addition to antecedents there are merely consequences, but not occurring in time; I’ve spoken about this innumerable times to Dr. Heym, but to no
avail, because Dr. Heym is not the type of person to prick up his ears on hearing such things, he doesn’t prick up his ears for anything, a person can say anything to him, and he just hangs his particularly enormous head, he is used to people around him saying idiotic things, and all the while that huge head of his just droops down, because for him every conversation is just a symptom of something, he would never believe that, at least in my case, there is an immediate relevance to what I’m saying, no, not Dr. Heym, he just sits there and he pretends to be listening attentively, but he neither approves nor refutes, he just lets people speak, this is the natural order of things, for sure this is what he’s thinking: just let them speak, let them go on talking, they can do whatever they want, the injections will be jabbed into them, the pills will be shoved down their throats: with me it’s just Rivotril, and that’s it, as far as he’s concerned it’s all taken care of, I talk to him every Wednesday starting at nine a.m., but nothing, he doesn’t even budge—I’m not just talking about anything, though, I just think many times he’s really not there, but it’s not that he’s not paying attention, because if I were to say to him what’s going on with you, Shitbrain—I tried it once—he immediately says: May I ask to whom or what you are referring? so you can’t just pump him full of lead because he notices, even when he’s not really there, once he hears Shitbrain he immediately wakes up, but if, for example, somebody talks to him about antecedents, or about the past and the future, then nothing, not a single wrinkle quivers on his forehead, but then exactly who am I supposed to tell this to apart from him—there’s no point trying with anyone else, because everyone else here is sick, really, although I really don’t speak of this willingly, because then it would be as if I were sick too, accordingly I just talk to him, I talk to him and I talk, of course I don’t tell him everything, but again why not, as something should always start from the beginning, I tell him, for example—when the name of Korolev or Kamanyin or Keldysh comes up—that this was the great trio in this affair, and it’s because of them that you have to know everything about this a person could possibly know: how the impossible became possible, and yet at the same time it’s pretty difficult because with the Soviets the whole thing was so classified that anyone who is involved with this can only recognize certain fragments, and even with these fragments he can’t be too certain of what he’s come across because the secretiveness in space travel was really insane during the Cold War, so that it’s even difficult to imagine, as the facts concerning the chief protagonists, let’s say, reached the public only in completely falsified form, and by that I mean that we only know with certainty what the protagonists’ names were, but to really pick out what they were doing, and how it all came together so that a human being could be hoisted into space is horrendously difficult, because any information that was public was false, and what wasn’t public was secret, and what was secret was obscure, that’s where the matter stands, and that’s where it will remain, but standing nonetheless—as the nurse István always says, only when he’s capable of speaking, he’s the most idiotic one here, that’s for sure, I say that to Dr. Heym, and Dr. Heym says aren’t you putting that a little sharply, so I take my words back immediately and I continue, saying that what is really strange is that it’s not as if there was any lack of material, as, for example, almost all of them wrote their autobiographies, Gagarin was the first one, of course, but Korolev and Kamanyin followed with theirs, and then the academician Keldysh tried to insert himself into world history, then a younger second cousin of Gagarin’s showed up with a book that was pure conspiracy theory, and I could go on, I tell him—of course, these are all just fairy tales, how could it be otherwise: scribbled lies, mawkishly composed, then written and rewritten thousands and thousands of times, revised, copied out, then rewritten again, revised and then copied out, but if we want to know at least something about the antecedents, and about the Great Journey itself, we don’t have anything else, so we have to read these accounts over and over, almost as many times as they did—the nameless secret police officers, the dear officers and the dear little officers who were standing right BEHIND the Gagarins, the Korolevs, the Kamanyins, the Keldyshes, the nephews, and the second nephews—how should I put it, they did what they had to do so that these writings would never be a documentation of space travel in any real sense of the word but mere forgeries of history, forgeries of events, and it’s not enough to say that “this is the most squalid aspect of the whole thing,” because immediately it must be stated that this squalor was NECESSARY, well, let’s not exaggerate here, Dr. Heym interrupts me, and then I don’t even feel like telling him anymore about where I stand with this matter, and now I only write this here into my own notebook: that without this squalor, without this falsification of history and events, the gigantic fact of history coming to pass would have never emerged, and it brought this forth, just as it brought forth my own life, this Hollywood, as we are called in the village, indicating that—and it’s true—that the only people who end up here in the Exceptional Old People’s Home are those whose nests are well feathered, and well, why deny it, everyone here has or, more precisely, had a pretty well-feathered nest, because when you move here, every single resident leaves the whole of his significant property to the Institute, as did I, just like the others, there was a big pile of this and that, and now there’s nothing, I used to have a lot, but now I don’t even have a cursed penny, I gave it all to Dr. Heym so that every Wednesday starting at nine a.m. he can droop that horrifically enormous head while he listens to me, and I let my brain hang down while I listen to nurse István, this isn’t a lunatic asylum as the villagers claim, officially speaking it’s nothing like that, and even if there is something to that rumor, it’s because besides me almost everyone here is an idiot; Hollywood, well, yes, and the fact that we’re shut in here, and that you can only step out of the door if you have an official Pass to Leave signed by Dr. Heym, as I do, I don’t care about anything else, but going out is of vital necessity for me, and that’s why I insist upon it, and there have been no particular obstacles, and even despite the regular doses of Rivotril I haven’t become an idiot like everyone else here, along with that accursed István, who hounds me so he can talk to me, but he has no idea what he wants, he comes after me, I can feel him already, I don’t even have to look around, he’s watching sneakily to see when he can pounce on me so he can say something, but for a while he just whimpers and doesn’t say anything, he stands in front of me, not looking into my eyes, but he looks off to the side flatly beside me, then just hemming and hawing he starts muttering: there’s something I want to tell you because you are an educated person, but he just hems and haws all kinds of gobbledygook, and then: you are an educated person, and already when I hear things like that, how should I put it, I DEFINITIVELY shudder, and there is no liberation from this shuddering, I am one single shuddering if I think about this István, I feel dread as dark as the depths of a police boot: he comes after me, clearing his throat, and says, I’m telling you, I want to talk to you because you are an educated person, and you will understand, and then comes all this gobbledygook about the moon, I am not joking, this István is always trying to say something about the moon, that he has discovered the secret of its halo, this is no joke, he’s been trying to tell me this for years, but he always gets confused, or more precisely it’s not just that he gets confused, but that he starts off from this confusion, because this confusion is right there at the beginning of his words, he can’t even speak properly; it’s possible that Dr. Heym hired him because he’s even more idiotic than the patients he takes care of, well, whatever, Hollywood, István, Dr. Heym, I’ve been living here maybe six years already, I don’t keep count, I don’t care how long it’s been or how long is left, nothing remains now, that’s my present situation, it is very clear to me, what’s the point of lying to myself, I don’t even have a single day left: my life is over, The End, no more, but by this I don’t mean to say it’s as if it had any meaning before, because it didn’t,
just as it’s never possible for life to have any meaning, and so for me there was none before, and there will be none later, and if I say now there’s not too much sense to it, and it doesn’t mean anything, I mean the days go by one after the other, I do my research, I read, I examine archives, I listen to recordings, I watch recordings, and actually not too long ago when the first snow fell, I even succeeded in personally questioning one of the participants who was pretty close to the key to all this, and if I say pretty close, I mean that I’m talking about someone who—even if in the most diaphanous sense—was affected by this while not noticing anything at all, like when a swallow takes a nosedive behind a person’s back, and shoo! by the time person has turned around it’s gone already, well something like that could have happened with a certain General Tihamér Jászi, because he was the one whom I was able to get to a few weeks ago, it was so easy, like child’s play, I was prepared for it to take months, but one telephone call was enough, because to my great surprise he said: fine, come on over, and I said to myself, fine, so I’m going, and already I was sitting in his apartment, I’m a retired general, he corrected me jokingly, when I addressed him as General, and we began to address each other informally right away, he was good-hearted, decidedly friendly, so that I wondered how this Jászi became a soldier, and I hoped that my surprise didn’t show on my face, because the general was decidedly friendly, direct, good-natured and ready to help, a kindly old UNCLE, or rather UNCLE TIHI, and it was he who was the closest in understanding everything that happened with Gagarin, and so I said to him: Mr. General, does it ever strike you that we know almost nothing about that period of Gagarin’s life following his one single trip in space, and then his world tour, we know nothing about what happened to him after his great triumphal tour—but of course we do, he became the director of the training center in Star City, he snapped back with some visible confusion—but the answer came too quickly, too mechanically, and it was almost that that made me notice that there was something not right with his answer, the left eyelid of the general was trembling a little, and from that left eyelid I immediately perceived: there’s a problem here, indeed, when I put the question to him, I largely already knew what the answer would have to be, I am often like that, I picked up this habit from my earlier activities, let’s call them that, activities, I got used to explaining a certain phenomenon in such a way that I would be posing a question, to which I myself would provide the answer with razor-edge precision, actually at such times I don’t even ask, I’m just helping out with the question, so that the audience, in my former popular science lectures—which used to weigh heavily upon my soul, although in general they don’t anymore—would understand what I’m talking about, and so it was as I sat next to this good-natured soldier, whose wife was almost immediately extending a platter through the softly opening door, and on this platter everything was arranged in exactly two nice parallel lines, with two shots of Unicum, two glasses of water, two small bowls of salty hazelnuts, and finally on two little plates, a few pieces—no doubt equal in number—of so-called ROPI, or breadsticks, so there in front of us were the glasses, the bowls, the platter, and the Unicum: I think, the general said very good-naturedly, I think I’m the oldest, so hello, let’s not be formal, and he already had raised his shot glass, and we were already using the informal address, well, as you know, this is what is known about Gagarin: we know he was in Star City, then there at the end there was that horrific accident, well, I said at this point, and I tried to bring him back to an analysis of the beginnings, and this was successful too, but while I was listening to the information about the beginnings, I was occupied in my thoughts trying to figure out if my new-found friend, this dear UNCLE TIHI, actually knew something about what had happened, after all, I thought, he was the highest-level commissioner for so-called Hungarian space travel; warmed up by the Unicum, I looked at his dear face, and after a while I said to myself, no, UNCLE TIHI doesn’t know anything about what I’m interested in, he knows nothing about what happened with Gagarin AFTER—and at this point I cannot write with my pen in big enough letters this AFTER, because when I began this whole thing, there came a time when I realized something wasn’t right here, for days on end I shook my head, I turned over the materials in my possession again and again, and it began to seem that we know not only very little, but in essence nothing at all, about Gagarin AFTER, there’s the training base directorship, then at the end there’s the official version of the accident and innumerable unofficial versions, in other words rubbish, guesswork, fairy tales, as to why he came crashing down, as to what was really going on with the test flight on March 27, 1968, with the—as they called it—piece-of-cake practice assignment, at 10:31 he’s still there, but by 10:32 he’s gone, in one split second Gagarin had disappeared from the picture, there were huge problems with these MiG-15s, because although, in the early ’60s, they were already out of use as supersonic military fighter jets, they were still considered to be serviceable for practice flights, in part for pilots in training wishing to fly real military aircraft to practice maneuvers in them, and in part for cosmonauts to “maintain their flying practice”—and this is already in and of itself strange enough: on the one hand, the heroes of the nation, and on the other these scrapped supersonic pieces of junk, because these MiG-15s were pieces of junk: if a person takes a closer look at them, the fuselages were too short, and it was this original weakness that made them unreliable, so that after a while, accordingly from the beginning of the ’60s, they were as a matter of fact not good for anything, but it was precisely the cosmonauts that had to fly in them—who ever saw anything like this? well, whatever, it doesn’t exactly pertain to the subject, in any event, Gagarin was sitting in the first seat, ready for maneuvers, and his companion, Seryogin, was in the other seat, and at 10:31 Gagarin informed the control tower in a calm voice that they had finished the maneuvers and they were returning to the base, at 10:32, however, they were already out of the picture, and of course, due to the reticent Brezhnevian report, and Brezhnevian reticence in general, no human being could ever believe this, and so the rumors containing every possible explanation spread like wildfire: they were shot down by the KGB, they weren’t even in the plane, and every kind of muddle, some hyena of a journalist pressured a poor second cousin into revealing something sensational, saying it had all been arranged by the KGB, and now what I’m about to write may seem surprising, but it could have been anything at all, that’s what I say, that IT DOESN’T MATTER what happened, IT DOESN’T MATTER what happened with those MiG-15s, and IT DOESN’T MATTER what happened to Gagarin, because the main thing is that Gagarin had to die BY ANY MEANS POSSIBLE, and the miracle is that he was able to delay the event for seven years, that event which of course shook the entire world, but most profoundly it shook the Soviet Union, people wept openly everywhere in the homeland upon hearing the news of his death, Gagarin was the kind of hero the loss of whom nobody was prepared to withstand, because while I have to say here that the people hadn’t even the slightest idea of what had really happened, they had no idea of what had led to this point, it was, however, unavoidable, Gagarin had to disappear for good, and of course the way in which he had died—one of the nation’s, indeed one of the world’s greatest heroes perishing in the course of such a simple test flight—was inconceivable, I understood this, but then I began to preoccupy myself with what happened to Gagarin after the Great Event, and I found almost nothing, it began to look suspicious to me, and I researched some more and I came upon some documents showing Gagarin’s life after 1961 or 1962 in a completely different light, namely these documents began to show me a person who was hardly scornful of vodka before his journey around the world, but this was nothing in comparison to what he did afterward, following his Great Triumphal Tour: from that point on he began to drink VERY MUCH, and DIFFERENTLY than before, during his amusements, after the Great Journey, it was no longer drinking for fun—in vain did they try to eliminate from every single document the slightest sign that Ga
garin was drinking like a dog—they couldn’t hide it from me, I immediately seized upon this when between two facts something was missing, that was exactly what made me suspicious, something wasn’t there that should have been there, it’s difficult to pull the wool over my eyes, I would’ve made a good spy or a cryptologist, but the main thing is, well, that I found traces, mainly I found them because it was obvious at one point that certain things were missing, although I have to say that later on I was even amazed at myself—or I would be at anyone else following Gagarin’s path even a little bit—that it didn’t leap out at me immediately that these documents were silent, to put it very simply there isn’t one stinking word about what happened with Gagarin after the Great Flight and the Triumphal Tour that followed, and why—I put the question to myself—well, why aren’t we allowed to know what he did, there were still seven years left to go in his life, seven years is a long time, and essentially we know nothing; Uncle Tihi said, well, he was the director of the training base, then he attended the Flight Science Academy, is there so much to chew over in that, he says, why wouldn’t it just be—now that it’s all finished—that in those times any information associated with space travel was completely classified well, that’s why, said Uncle Tihi to me—and these Uncle Tihis always said this to everyone, to anyone, to the world, if they were asked about it—he says, well, what else is there to know about this Yuri Alekseyevitch Gagarin, while it is also true that in reality when he smiled at the world, the story of this Yuri Alekseyevitch came to a halt in people’s heads, and he said yes, people, believe your eyes, because I am the First Person, and that was it, that was what the world wanted to know, finished, that was enough, no more, this world didn’t care about anything else, all over the world they knew the story of this Yuri Alekseyevitch, they placed that smiling face beneath the soldier’s cap into their brains, they packed it away into the vitrine, if I may put it that way, with the sliding glass closed shut and a lace doily on top—but as for Yuri Alekseyevitch himself there was just one small problem, because although the Great Journey really was the high point of his life—what else could it have been?—in a strange way, his Great Story didn’t come to an end with this Great Journey, it BEGAN, but I don’t know what’s going on with me, sometimes I rush ahead too much, sometimes, like now, I double back too quickly, it’s always like this with stories, I’ve noticed they’re already ended, and I don’t even know for how long it’s been like this, in other words in this modern age, or this more-than-modern age there is always a problem with these stories, I’m always being shown some story, well, it isn’t one, or it never was one, or it only has a beginning, or what comes after the beginning, and moreover, even if at one time or another it could have been a story, every one is the same anyway, there’s nothing new under the sun, as they said in the olden days, well, I don’t agree with the idea that there are no stories, there are only stories, there are billions of stories, a thousand billion, a gazillion trillion stories, I won’t go on, but to say that there are no stories, well we are only made of stories, but another question altogether is that we simply cannot find the MIDDLE of the stories, we always talk about how, well, here are the antecedents, and all these antecedents are going to lead to a story, and then we say here are the consequences of the story, and they enumerate, they enumerate the innumerable everything that comes after, but the middle part—namely the story itself—isn’t there, the kernel, the essence, namely, we lose the story itself while it is clearer than day that we live among ten billion trillion stories, it is however indisputable that when we try to pronounce this essence, when we try to present, conceive, to bring the kernel of our story to the consciousness of anyone by whatever method, in general our endeavors don’t meet with success, either because we remain detailing the antecedents at length, or we lose ourselves in a detailed explanation of the consequences, and I’ve even noticed with respect to myself that there is a problem in this regard, so that I need to constrain myself as well, I know—fine, enough of this haste to present the antecedents, and enough of what came after them, so there’s no need for this damned confusion, so let’s stick with those MiG-15s, let’s have a look—that’s what I did, at least, as I sank even deeper into the documents—I was, by that time, well known in many places: in the Ervin Szabó Library, in the Széchenyi Library, in the Military History Library, in the Space Travel Office, indeed even in the Flight Science Library, I no longer had to say who I was or what I wanted, they already piled up for me what was mine, while noting: this might be of interest to you, they carried various materials to me, as no one else was interested in these materials anymore, and they were happy to bring them out; although usually librarians aren’t like that, librarians hate libraries, and when we ask for something from them we in fact cause them horrific pain, because these people, confined to their own misery, spend their entire life just carrying things out of the storeroom, and that is something that could really make a person sad, I can’t even imagine it myself, somebody is always coming along, there they are standing in front of you, they hand you something written on the library call card, then you have to go into the storeroom, you have to find what this person wants—this in and of itself must be detestable: a librarian is forced to confront the fact that somebody is interested in something, here almost everyone burrowing over to their counters is unworthy of having something brought to them, so that no matter where librarians may cast their gaze in the storeroom, nearly every book solicits hatred, because they begin to suspect that at one point yet another unworthy individual will walk into the library and without further ado say to them: bring me this, please, and they will have to bring it, well, that’s clearly enough to drive a person insane, and it’s clear that librarians would go insane if there didn’t occur every once in a while one of those rare cases when a great mind WORTHY of a library and the librarian in question asks for something, this is what librarians like, because then they experience the library, the work being requested on the reader’s card, the stumbling around in the storeroom, and finally the bringing of the desired work into the light of day in order to give it to someone who is WORTHY, they see it all in a completely different light; cases as these, however—and this can be seen in the eyes of a librarian—occur maybe, maybe, maybe three times in a lifetime, a visit to the counter by a so-called worthy reader, so that in general the atmosphere in one of these big libraries is like that of a morgue, with only repressed hatred and repressed insubordination—but in my case and this whole Gagarin affair, at least until now I have only encountered the fullest of good intentions, the librarians and the archivists and the museum workers and other such experts gladly bring me everything I need, clearly they believe that I am an imbecile, but that rare kind of imbecile who somehow solicits a sympathetic response from his surroundings, well, maybe because of this, or maybe because of something else—who can understand the soul of librarians and that mournful existence of theirs—they brought the materials to me, and it was as if these materials had been previously filtered somehow, because they all began to point in one direction, so that I began to sink further and further down, and this happened even last week, while I was in the depths of these materials, actually having reached the lowest point there so as to begin my journey upward again like some deep-sea diver, because, yes, something had taken me there, something that I had to examine yet again, in other words: what do we know about these MiG pilots . . . because I didn’t understand how it was possible that in a military environment such as this, where everything is supervised a thousand times over, that this supervisory structure could allow a drunk or hungover Gagarin to take off without any further ado—in other words, for a long time I thought that the essence of the secret resided in the fact that Yuri Alexeyevitch had become an incurable alcoholic, and well, with someone like that it’s no big surprise if after he lifted off it ended in tragedy, I realized this just one week ago when I understood that this is the part of the whole Gagarin story that doesn’t make sense, when all the same I fe
lt that this Gagarin disappeared from the picture precisely because they couldn’t manage him anymore, in vain they pleaded with him: don’t drink, little brother, the eyes of the entire Soviet Union and the world are on you now, they’re watching you drink yourself into the ground, but he just drank and drank, and they couldn’t control him, what else could they have done, I thought to myself just a week ago, other than make the hero of the Soviet Union and the world disappear from the Soviet Union and the world—and for a long time I didn’t even find as much as one photograph from his last years, and when I did there was just that one photograph, the so-called last photograph which merely strengthened my suspicion that my train of thought was going in the right direction, because there can be no doubt that what was going on here was complete senility, I looked at Gagarin, and I saw in this photograph a completely distorted, bloated-looking figure smiling crazily, with a rough cross-shaped lesion on his left eyelid—the only problem was that it was right beneath a pilot’s helmet, and another problem was that this helmet formed part of a pilot’s uniform with parachute straps, and a further problem was that the person wearing all of this was visibly sitting INSIDE an airplane with the parachute and straps attached to his body, this was impossible, I stared at the photograph, chilled to the bone: this could not be Gagarin, it was, however Gagarin who was just then doing up the strap to his pilot’s helmet beneath his chin, and with this senile grin!—I was stupefied, and I even told Dr. Heym about it this past Wednesday, not as if I would’ve hoped this would be interesting to him, but I told him—because I couldn’t really keep it just to myself, and because I believed that I had come upon something, of course I’d come upon something, and this was one of the cleverest tricks of the whole thing, contrived exactly so that you would never realize the truth—somehow this picture turns up, and for a while you’re satisfied with it, but only because it seems certain that people would be satisfied with this so-called open secret, leaving aside, of course, any further investigations, and suspicion would die out—well, suspicion died out in me too, but not forever, only for a few days (and well, how could it not have?) but I felt during those few days like anyone else, I think, anyone else attempting to solve something, I too had “solved” what happened, I “came upon it,” here, in the Unhappy Nursing Home, Where Everyone Awaits Only Death, I came upon the fact that Gagarin, as a hopeless alcoholic, was ever more isolated or even directly shut away from the world, and this last possibility is the more likely one, he lived for almost seven years more, and then they let him take off, and of course he plunged to earth immediately, because something happened while he was descending—now of course it doesn’t matter if he had been confused by some roaming fighter pilot, or if he pointed the nose of the plane upward suddenly to avoid a flock of birds, it doesn’t matter because the speed with which the plane was flying (it was already close to the ground) in that last fraction of a second in his last report was so great that any sudden movement would send him plunging to the ground—as happened in all likelihood, according to hearsay the nose of the plane crashed into the ground at a depth of three meters, supposedly they found more of Seryogi than of Gagarin but never mind, this is insignificant, in fact the entire matter of the immediate cause and circumstances of his death loses its significance if one thinks about what led up to this point, Dr. Heym asked me about this on Wednesday: what on Earth was I up to now, because it seemed even to him that I had stopped my researches, because earlier he had seen me feverishly investigating for months on end, spending ever more time in Budapest, continually traveling, coming and going, completely galvanized, and that’s how it was because until the beginning of last week, I was completely galvanized, because I sensed a trace and I immediately started after it, and it seemed that finally I had reached that trace and suddenly everything changed, and then at the beginning of last week I suddenly stopped, I quit my researches, because something new had come up in this entire Gagarin affair, so that on Wednesday Dr. Heym asked me: what’s going on with you, before you were always fidgeting, and coming and going, you were completely galvanized, and yet now, once again there you are sitting as in the old days, well, yes, I answered, for a few days I really had been sitting there in the same place, just like the old days, sitting once again in the far right-hand window of the sitting room by “my window,” as nurse István confidentially calls it, and from where—as I did before this whole Gagarin affair began—I can look, at the farthest possible distance from nurse István and these other idiots, I look down from the heights here on the sixth floor, and it’s good like this, I look down, just like the old days, sometimes not even coming down for meals; and of course I just avoided answering Dr. Heym, who repeated: but you were always going somewhere, you came and went, you were completely galvanized, what happened to you, what the hell is going on, of course I didn’t tell him what was going on, I changed the subject, and I did well to do so because it’s none of his business, nothing of this whole story is any of that big-headed Dr. Heym’s business, it was Wednesday, and somehow I talked to him, then came Thursday, and now today it’s Friday, I’m sitting in the window, and I’m thinking, as I look down, about how I should describe this precisely: it wasn’t as if I picked up a new trace last weekend, but suddenly there it was in front of me just as now, here before me, is the complete face of the truth, I didn’t seek it out, but the solution presented itself to me, and here it is, and now I have nothing more to do, I’m not going to say a word about this to Dr. Heym or to anyone else, there aren’t going to be any lectures—because Dr. Heym is sure of it, he’s urging me to give a lecture about this “matter,” namely about Hungarian space travel, because I told him that’s why I’m interested in this, that’s why I come and go, why I fidget, and why I’m completely galvanized, so as to uncover the real story of Hungarian space travel; Dr. Heym, to be completely precise, wants me to present a lecture for him—FOR HIM!!!—as part of his weekly program for the Institute: a nice little talk, that’s how he put it, and clearly he was satisfied, he just drooped, as always, that enormously large head of his, and he just kept on saying very good, very good, so at last you’ll give a nice little talk based on all this material, a nice little talk, he used these words more than once, I just looked at him, wondering why he wasn’t thinking that I was going to break his neck now, I saved it for later though, namely to break his neck just for that, but really how could this shrink with this enormous head begin to think that I was really going to give a talk for him—although to a certain extent it was reassuring to realize that he really didn’t know anything about me, if he considered my participation in his cultural program to be a possibility, me in his cultural program!—until that point I had never stepped up, and I’m not going to, either, but he takes it as a given; well, of course I’m not interested in what he’s imagining or what he wants, because nothing like that figures in my plans, as for appearances onstage, Dr. Heym, they are finished once and for all, I will only sit by “my window” as in the days of old and scribble some more into this notebook, and sometimes, as I turn over all the pages in this notebook, it comes to me that everything that I jotted down here isn’t so bad, not so lacking in interest, maybe it’s better if something has to remain after me . . . if it isn’t going to be a fountain pen, a wristwatch, slippers, a dressing gown and such items, then let it be THIS, I will give it, for example, to nurse István—oh no, chills are running down my spine, anyone but nurse István—but then who should I give it to, this is no easy question, the best thing would be to destroy it after all, because there’s still nurse István, well, I turned back to the first pages and I thought—I’m thinking about it now too—about how far away already that moment is when for the first time, in that general yesterday, the notion began to form within me that I want to leave the Earth; I’ve never even spoken about this before, because in the end I wish to betray my plans to no one, although to confess the truth I’m not planning anything, there is no plan, beyond scribbling a few more sentences here, maybe I’ll write down
what I came upon, maybe not, I don’t know yet, in any event I’ll just sit here and look out from the sixth-floor window a bit, I’ll still exercise my memory a bit, recalling that turn of events a few days ago, because it was a turn of events, that is indisputable, for I felt that there was something in this alcoholic version that wasn’t right, and so I kept on researching, actually I was researching in my head, I researched and I reflected intensely, and I was convinced that now everything was virtually in my hands, everything was in my possession, I thought—which in general is all that a person can really wish for—it’s all up to me now, on my ability to think, on my brain, if it can hold out long enough, if it can focus on the essence long enough, so that I knew—this is what I mean to say—I needed thought in order to realize where a new suspicion could lead me, because I came upon it suddenly, and that day was in fact yesterday, and not that symbolic general yesterday of which I spoke earlier, it was, factually, yesterday, or well, who the hell knows—does it matter?—if it wasn’t yesterday then it was the day before yesterday, it doesn’t matter, the main thing is that as soon as I came upon this, I immediately wrote it down here in this notebook, for which, otherwise, I expend much energy trying to devise newer and newer hiding places, mainly from nurse István, because according to my own personal hypotheses, if something happened to me, he is the one who would comb through the entire Institution looking for it, because he has already betrayed countless times with his stares how interested he is in this notebook—well, no, but still, him?! I don’t know—and yet I did find a very good hiding place, although I’m not sure that it’s the best, perhaps the best is if I just keep it with myself at all times as I’ve done up till now; until now it’s been well hidden in the lining of my long coat, respectively, in the evenings, in the inner pocket of my dressing gown, which I always keep beneath my head, originally I sewed in the pockets to keep money, but since that time I also keep my notebook there, so why should I change anything now? yes, it will stay there, in one of the pockets, but I’ll see, because I really don’t think that if something happened to me anyone apart from nurse István would be interested in this notebook, nobody is thinking about it, I think, although of course I should really destroy it, yes, this is an excellent option, later on, if the day comes, I will destroy it, and the day will come, it’s not far off, it’s almost here, I think, because as I say, there came a point and I understood what had happened, but for this, of course, it is necessary to know the antecedents and the consequences, and of course I knew those as well, there’s no doubt of that, because it was on the basis of these that I realized what was going on here, namely that there had been a tiny error in my methodology, an error which we all make frequently when we want to get at the essence, the kernel, the central point of a story, and we do not attend adequately to these well-known antecedents and consequences in our possession, we just want to get at this essence, this kernel, this central point in haste, fine, I said, it’s abundantly clear, I want to get at the essence, and let’s say I made a mistake, on the other hand nothing is lost, because I am still in possession of those certain antecedents and consequences, so let’s try this again—and I began to think, I began to run it all through my brain, so that, well, those antecedents and those consequences could run properly through this brain again and again and again—and then suddenly like lightning, it cleaved through my brain, really, like that swallow taking a nosedive behind your back, only that in this case it wasn’t behind my back, it’s as if something were swooping across my brain, because this brain, or this swooping, indicated that earlier on, something had happened on high, up there in orbit, during those one hundred and eight minutes, that’s what this lightning flash of a swallow plunging down said to my brain: that the essence of the story, the kernel, the central point is that up there in those one hundred and eight minutes, when Gagarin, as the First Man, ended up there with the Vostok—up there in space (said the plunging swallow to the brain), there and then something must have happened to him, and at that point I got stuck, and so I just began to browse through the American materials mechanically, I had a special folder for this, indeed, to be precise I had several, but I just rooted around in the sentences written by a certain astronaut named Michael Massimino when he gave one of his renowned lectures at MIT on October 28, 2009, and then from these printed sentences one of them jumped out at me, and it was the one where this Massimino, who moreover is a sheer giant, looked out through the window of the International Space Station, and he saw the Earth, and he said: I felt like I was almost looking at a secret . . . That humans weren’t supposed to see this. This is not anything you’re supposed to see. It’s too beautiful, well, and then what? I recall that I was thinking about this, or something like that, and I dug around some more in these sentences, then I began to comb through a thrown-together pile of pictures of the Earth, in a different folder, taken by another American, a certain Ed Lu, photos of the Earth taken in the same way from on board the ISS, I rifled through these photographs, but these sentences of Massimino just kept ringing in my head, they wouldn’t leave my brain, especially the part about how humans weren’t supposed to see this, and maybe there are some people who recognize the feeling when a person’s body is flooded with heat because they just realized something all of a sudden, or because something unexpectedly happened to them, well, then this plunging with the swallow, or vice versa, came over me again, and I felt that my body flooded with heat, and already I knew what had happened, I understood everything, I realized why Gagarin had disappeared, because I realized what had happened to him up there when for the first time he saw the Earth from one of the windows of the Vostok, and he said: ochen’ krasivoye, I understood that he, the First Person among us, not only saw the Earth from space, but as I realized, he too had understood something, a millennial secret, and when he returned, he was clearly silent about it for a while, he didn’t know how to begin, and as usually happens, a little time went by, so that it wasn’t immediately following his return, but maybe about a year later, and then he began with only his most inner circle of friends, but they most likely thought it was the expression of some kind of poetic enthusiasm, and in the general euphoria they didn’t really notice, and the next time Gagarin mentioned it, they had to react somehow, so they all just waved it away, the devoted wife, Valya, and his parents all just waved it away, because what else could they have done hearing such strange things, they just looked at each other, then they told him what beautiful thoughts he was expressing, and they truly hoped that they were capable of understanding them, but they also thought that he, Gagarin, would be far better off packing all of this off to hell, and so it could have gone on like this, as well as in the next two or three conversations following, in his most intimate circles, only that Gagarin could not be calmed down and he might have thought, oh, my dear wife, my dear father and mother, they are simple people, and I am only disturbing them with thoughts of such far-reaching import, and so he took the next step, and he went on and unburdened himself to Korolev, of course, taking all precautions to ensure that no one could hear them, he said what he had to say to the great man: first, that up there he had not only seen the Earth, but he had seen that Paradise of which every book of old speaks, and the first time it happened Korolev could have thought that Gagarin was still under the influence of the experience, or that he was Under the Influence in general, and that a poet was now speaking through him, fine, he stopped him, fine, Yuri Alekseyevitch, you need to take a little rest now, and he said things like that, and I think that for the first time Gagarin started to be a little afraid, because it was at that point that he suspected that what he knew now about the Earth would be very difficult to convey, and maybe it enraged him a little bit as well, and he might have repeated in his most military manner, saying: listen here, Comrade Korolev, you don’t understand, I really saw Paradise, and Paradise is the Earth, and clearly Korolev first just smiled, and nodded, fine, fine, Yurka, that’s enough already, you have a nice rest, we have more than enough w
ork, I’d like to send you up there again so you could see your paradise again, you go have a nice little rest now and then we’ll pick up where we left off, but nothing came of it, because all around Gagarin things began to turn serious, mainly because Gagarin’s Triumphal Tour through the various nations of the Earth had ended, and he had returned to the routine of a cosmonaut’s daily life; and after Korolev he started going to Kamanyin, and after Kamanyin he went to Keldysh, and after Keldysh he went to Petrov, and after Petrov he went to the Party leadership, and if neither Korolev nor Kamanyin nor Keldysh nor Petrov had taken him seriously, it is completely clear that the Party leadership did not take him seriously, the sole difference being that those people, being farther away from Gagarin, had even less sympathy for his “analysis,” and they conveyed to him in one way or another that he should leave the production of theory for the academicians and the great scholars of Moscow; he should continue his studies diligently at the Cosmonaut Academy and occupy himself only and exclusively with practical questions, for that was his field, and that is what Korolev and the Party had entrusted to him, so that after a while it had to become clear even to Gagarin that everyone considered what he was saying to be mere idiocy, or in the very best of cases: nobody believed a single word he was saying, nobody, but nobody believed him, and this clearly filled him with immeasurable bitterness, and in this state of nerves he had to pour his heart out, more specifically he had to pour his heart out ever more frequently, namely to pour out one’s heart and not drink vodka at the same time, well, that is inconceivable for a Russian soul, so it could’ve happened that Gagarin began to drink regularly for this reason, or for reasons of heredity, and he began to slide down this slope with horrific speed—in the first years, though, it still wasn’t possible to completely write him off, for he still was the First Person in Space, the Hero of the Cosmos, the Symbol of Human Knowledge, and so on, so they let him continue his so-called research at the Academy, and then he also had his own assignment in Star City, but it became farcical and, speaking among themselves, along with his ever more obstinate insistence on his own decidedly anti-Leninist theories, it became ever more evident that they were never going to let him get anywhere near space travel, and they didn’t let him get anywhere near it, so that after a few years he would have had to comprehend something that he would never be able to resign himself to, namely: that they would never let him fly again, especially after the Komarov tragedy, in other words, he who desired ever more hysterically to see, from up there that . . . that Paradise would never see anything from up there ever again, and clearly he lived his days in wretched drunkenness, and clearly a great shadow was now cast over him, and in this great shadow his family life could have fallen into ruin, there was Valentina Ivanovna, there were Galya and Lenoshka, but he just drank and drank until he passed out, and all the while he spoke and spoke and he said and he said what he had to say to whomever happened to turn up in his path, from Tyitov to the cleaning staff of Star City, so that finally they would understand that what he was saying was nothing bad, so that they would understand already that what he was talking about only meant the greatest possible good for all of humanity, because what he had to say was that there really is a Paradise, and all of the sacred books—which until now had not been meaningful to him—all over the world they speak of something like this, and this doesn’t even have any kind of mystical content, because the millennial belief that there was a Paradise, that there is a Paradise, and that there will be a Paradise completely corresponds to reality, and the pages of the sacred books should be turned over differently now, because all of them, just imagine, that every single sacred book IS LIKE THIS, and because of this, religions should be treated differently, because in reality they mean something else than what we, the Soviet Communists, thought about them, and what he had to say—he leaned in closer to the people backing away from the stench of vodka—could make every single person on this Earth happy, and make them happy he must—if they would only finally let him speak, and if they would only finally understand how vitally important it was for him to finally announce on the radio to all the people of the Earth that the end has come, the end of the old world, and a new era greets them with the simple truth, altogether comprised of three words, that actually ALL IS TRUE, the message of the Bible is true, the message of Buddha is true, the message of the Koran is true, the message of all of the temples is true, and even the smallest sect, in its own idiotic way, is true, it’s just that UNTIL NOW we haven’t understood these messages, that’s how I imagine him saying it, even if not word-for-word, I imagine it like this, and in the same way one can imagine the Soviet comrades with the Hero reeking of vodka in front of them, the Hero demanding ever more insistently to finally be allowed to speak to the public, because he wants to say to the world, to all of humanity, he wants to tell them what he saw up there, and then finally peace shall be upon the world, because if every single person can understand this, then every opposition, every hatred, every war will lose all of its meaning, and the era of general peace will dawn, well, this was pretty much enough, during the Cold War, among the fossilized Soviets, for them not to let Gagarin address even a small audience, so that even if he had to give some kind of address very infrequently, or if he had to pronounce some speech, then they made him vow on the book of Party members—this is how I imagine it, but it must have been so—not to mention THAT THING, and after a while not only did they not let him speak—because they couldn’t trust him to keep his word—but of course they withdrew him from space travel, and of course the time had to come quickly when he was just a marionette, both in Star City and in Soviet space research, a vodka-reeking marionette, with his bloated head, his face disfigured by this or that wound, who, in accordance with the customs of the time, had to be hidden away in one or another lunatic asylum in order to get his nerves or his organism into order, and of course neither his nerves nor his organism were put into order, but they didn’t keep him in there for too long all the same, they let him out again and again, back to Star City or to some other training position, but he no longer was in the first row, nor even the second row, and not even in the third row, but in the very last row, from where his voice could no longer even be heard; Korolev and his crew and all of his comrades-in-arms and his friends, who all knew so well this formerly sweet peasant boy, this brave hero, this inimitable, charming person, whom they had once loved so much, simply could no longer allow Gagarin anywhere near the public, and he himself clearly was becoming ever more enraged by this repudiation, fully incomprehensible to him, he felt himself to be impotent, he was simply unable to conceive what was wrong in what he was saying; that impenetrable environment, whether hostile or lenient, was incomprehensible to him, and it began to separate him from everything and everyone once and for all, so that at the very end he couldn’t think of anything else, only of Paradise, and he could have repeated this to his older brother Valentin, who visited him in his last year, 1968, in order to talk some sense into him, but to no avail, because he, Gagarin, just kept repeating that even if they were to tear him apart he still wouldn’t be able to say anything else: that’s why they put him aside, that’s why he couldn’t fly, that’s why he was withdrawn from space travel, that’s why they put him out to pasture, and you know why, Gagarin said to Valentin, because wherever I look, I see only this: Paradise—wherever I am, it’s not just in my mind, but I SEE IT continually while I’m talking, God knows what they think of me, that I’m naïve, that I’m a simpleton, that I’m a child, anything rather than understanding that Paradise REALLY exists, and that it is nothing other than our own Earth, you understand, my dear brother, this Earth, our own Mother Earth . . . and he began to weep like a child, he flung himself onto the table, and he wept, and this is obviously how it went with his drinking pals, with his wife, indeed—if they let him anywhere near them—with Galya and Lenoshka, so that they would not look upon human life as before, no, because humanity would come to know something through him, and because of this e
very evil upon the Earth would become completely meaningless; there sat a man enveloped in the stench of vodka, the hero of the Soviet Union and of the world for all time to come, a man who was being driven mad by the fact that nobody believed what he was saying, he was completely alone, the world had split into two: there was Paradise, of which he was the only resident, while in the world, with humanity suspecting nothing, knowing nothing of this great situation, simply continuing on with life as normal, as if nothing in this heaven-sent world had happened with the Great Journey and the Great Discovery, the world just kept going on like before, and this is what Gagarin’s nervous system couldn’t bear, and this nervous system destroyed his organism too, in the last days he could no longer bear being alive, this became completely clear to me, he could bear it only with vodka, only in complete drunkenness, and he became so alone: and if anyone was undeserving of this, it was this man—what a bitter consolation that here I am now and I can write everything down into this notebook, because on the one hand, I am most likely going to destroy it, so that no one will ever be able to read it, on the other hand it’s useless for me to be here, it was useless for me to come, and it was useless for me to understand the great secret, it can no longer be of help to little brother Yuri Alexeyevitch, because in any event the best thing for him to do was to die, so that this could come to pass—it doesn’t matter why—that humans weren’t supposed to see this: in any event it’s because of this, and the deeper meaning of this sentence that I will finish with the thought that IT IS SO, BUT IT IS NOT FATED: I understood that, and I understand it in this moment too, and in every single moment to follow, so that it is time to finish this affair, I have no desire to wait and see what will occur of its own accord, it cannot be otherwise, as my researches and my discovery have deprived me of that which I thought would give me strength, although if I’d known I wouldn’t have begun—the whole thing started off so nicely, it was still summer, with scorching heat, was it July? August? it no longer matters, I sat by “my window,” and I thought about how I wanted to leave the Earth, and now this day has come, this day of December 29, 2010, it’s damned cold outside, and I can’t conclude this notebook in the same way that I began, saying that I want to leave the Earth, only that I wanted out—so that I’ve taken care of everything with Dr. Heym and his cervical vertebrae, and I’ve taken care of everything with István, and this notebook too (if it’s necessary for something to remain after me, let it be this rather than anything else), then, as I don’t want to spend a single day here, and since I already know that leaving the Earth won’t work from “my usual window”—that is, for me to open the window, step outside, push myself off, and there you have it, up I go—instead, after I’ve finished with everything (and I’ll still give my notebook to nurse István), then I’ll open up the window here on the sixth floor, I’ll stand on the windowsill and push myself off, because whatever doesn’t go up with all certainty goes down. Because from the sixth floor to Paradise: the time has come.