"We were testing the first stage. We had built a test pad: a fixed part, and part that rotated on it. The missile was attached to the movable portion. We were ready to ignite, when I saw a cloud of mist at the pad. We were way behind schedule. Khrushchev himself, we were told, had an interest in this test. He needed to threaten the Americans with our might, and no one was to know that we had no missiles. Your John Kennedy complained about how many missiles the Russians had, and how badly the Americans had done under Eisenhower. Fantastic nonsense. I suppose we would have laughed if we had not been so busy trying to make sure he was right. He won his election, for all the good it did him. Is that democracy, that you get to choose your lies? We had to take the lies we were issued.
"Condensation meant a leak, which meant a delay in the test, which meant ... we did not want to discover what it meant. I went out to the pad. It was a night test, no one was seeing me. It was a liquid oxygen leak, a small one. The repair would take at least a day, but ... I unzipped, and I pissed on the leaky joint. It froze into ice and plugged the leak. It held until ignition, and the test went off well. That was how we did things at that time."
He took the lawnmower back. A short while later I heard it start up. The bastard. Did he think he could charm Mrs. Melmar by doing her lawn? A few hours later he came back, as glum as when he went, and put the mower away without cleaning it off. And he'd left a few stray lines of grass uncut. I snuck over and trimmed them later, with hand shears. It's no wonder you don't see many Russians in lawn care.
* * * *
Vassily avidly watched the Apollo coverage—with pleasure at the accomplishment, but with sadness too. Because he was watching for something else. Something that never came.
All that year, the Soviets were trying to launch the complex, thirty-engined N-1, which was to be their lunar launch vehicle. And, because of inadequate static testing, because of the fact that every piece of it was essentially a one-off, because they had to hurry, it kept blowing up only seconds after liftoff. No TV commentator ever mentioned what was going on at what they would have called Baikonur.
Vassily tried to convince himself that if only Korolev had lived, a Russian might still have ended up walking on a dusty surface not too different from the dusty steppes of central Kazakhstan, but I don't think he ever succeeded.
* * * *
Years later, while traveling on business, I found Kolya Mishkin at his retirement home in Sarasota. A simple phone call, and he invited me over. His wife, Kumiko, somehow pegged me as Russian, and served me a variety of foods preserved by smoking, salting, and fermentation, along with vodka in ornate shot glasses. Kolya told me a few things about Vassily that I never learned while he lived with us. He and Vassily were no longer in touch. I could tell this hurt him.
Vassily had had a wife named Irina who was a physician in the Red Army and was taken prisoner by the Germans at Vyazma, in 1941, along with half a million of her comrades. She never came back. Presumably she died in one of those open-air cattle pens the Germans kept Soviet POWs in, regarding them as barely human. Kolya said she might well have come back, only to be rearrested by the NKVD, as all ex-POWs were, being of suspect loyalty, and shipped to a Soviet camp, to die there.
Vassily and Irina never had children.
Vassily was arrested in 1938 after other members of his aircraft design team, already in custody, cited his name as a saboteur. One of their test aircraft had recently crashed on takeoff and damaged a wing. He was in the middle of dinner with Irina. They had been married for five months. They never saw each other again.
Vassily lost his teeth in the gold-mining camps of Kolyma. He'd had one of them, a molar, which he kept in a jar when he lived with us, along with a gallstone (not his, but not an interesting story either), a rubber lizard, and a valve from the fuel line of a German V-2 rocket he'd picked up at the testing site in Blizna, Poland.
He worked with three of the colleagues who had betrayed him in various space projects in the years after the war. One of them even ended up running a design bureau. Vassily never brought up what had happened, and neither did they. Two of them he liked and continued to drink with, and one of them, the bureau chief, he feuded with, but none of that had anything to do with 1938. It would have made no more sense for him to be angry or vengeful about that than it would have been to react to something they had done to him in a dream.
Kolya, Vassily, and Irina had all been school friends. After a few vodkas, Kolya revealed that he had once been interested in Irina as well. But he was assigned to the hydroelectric project at Bratsk before an understanding could be reached, and she married Vassily two days after her father, an officer, was arrested, in the Red Army purges that followed the execution of Field Marshal Tukhachevsky in 1937.
Every year, Kolya lit a candle on Irina's birthday, even though Russians only learned to care about birthdays after coming to America. I was able to tell him that, at least once, Vassily had done the same.
After a glance at his wife, who smiled permission, Kolya went into his study and returned with the woman's portrait Vassily had done. It was Irina. Vassily had had no photographs of her, and so had done it from memory. He'd given it to Kolya as a present during his visit. Kolya had tried to give it back, but Vassily refused, saying he could draw another one.
Neither Kolya nor I thought he'd ever drawn another one.
* * * *
One day, near the end of the summer, Vassily disappeared.
So, to the wonder of the entire neighborhood, did Mrs. Melmar. Her youngest was now at Penn State, and it might have been that she now saw no reason to stick around.
The idea that they had disappeared together took a long time to be accepted.
My mother packed up a few things that Vassily had forgotten, but did not tell Papa what address she was sending them to. That led to the worst fight they had ever had. They got over that, but have never seemed as happy with each other since.
The next tenant was a sad man with a face like a frog who said he was writing a history of the twentieth century. I don't know if he ever finished it, but he lived there until long after I went to college. The room is now empty.
Vassily did not leave anything for me. Not a book, not a note, nothing. He just walked out and left, exactly as if I was a kid he really didn't have much interest in.
* * * *
I think about Vassily every time our makeshift space shuttle blows up, killing a handful of astronauts, or, more optimistically, whenever an elegant space probe flies past the uncut diamond of a moon. He would have admired those smooth gadgets, so unmakeshift, so unmanned, so ... unSoviet. The space shuttle, a thalidomide version of the proud spaceships that once flew in our imagination, is completely Soviet.
The Soviets themselves thought it even more Soviet than it actually was. When the thing was announced, they analyzed the costs. It made no sense. Any number of expendable launch vehicles would have been cheaper for the missions the thing could possibly perform. And Americans, after all, love to throw things away. What were they really up to?
Then they saw its trajectory: a military payload lofted into orbit from Vandenberg could reenter and hit central Russia in three and a half minutes. A Polaris missile launched from a boomer off Kamchatka in a first strike would take at least ten.
So that's how they managed to understand the shuttle: as a weapon. For once their economic analysis made perfect sense, but they still reached the wrong conclusion. They dropped the rest of their space program and developed their own shuttle, the Buran. It flew only once, then sat in a warehouse at Tyuratam until a fire destroyed it, along with whatever was left of the program Vassily gave so many years of his life to.
I see the shuttle has tile problems again. Every time someone drops a paperclip, it has tile problems. I'd love to talk that over with Vassily, but he can't possibly still be alive.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Rumple What? by Nancy Springer
After spending 46-59ths of her life in Penn
sylvania, Nancy Springer now lives in a hangar at a remarkably rural airfield a few miles south of Alabama, where she is learning a great deal about aircraft and alligators. Her daily life is in marked contrast to that of the protagonist of her current series, which is set in 1890s London and features Enola Holmes, daredevil embarrassment to her much older brother, the famous Sherlock. Her new story for us (her first in far too long) is a new look at a classic fairy tale.
To take first the point of view of the miller's daughter, her father is just the sort of consummate jackass who would brag to the king that his girl can spin straw into gold. So when she is unceremoniously escorted to a shed full of straw, locked in there with a spinning wheel, and told to do her thing or die, she weeps—but not pathetically, as the tale would have it; rather, she howls with rage. No matter how dire her fear, no miller's daughter has ever been able to weep the dewy, snot-free tears of a damsel in distress; our wench bawls with messy, grimacing fury, all the more so because crying is not what she wants to do. It is one of the Seven Most Unfair Fates of the female condition that when you really want to thunder, threaten revenge, scare your asinine father and his new crony the king shitless, what happens? You goddamn cry.
Even so, when the shed door opens and the most peculiar little man comes in, she does not seize the opportunity to thump someone smaller than she, for quite sensibly she wonders what the hell is going on. The king locked the door himself. By what power did this dwarf, who is too short to reach the handle, open it? And what does he want? The miller's daughter has heard some nasty rumors about what really went on with Snow White. Perversely, because there is now clear and present danger, her weeping ceases. Wiping her face and blowing her nose upon her apron, she tries to study the visitor, but through her traumatized eyes she can see only that he is sharp, all points, including his face. Pointy nose, steeple brows, wishbone chin, skinny birdy arms and fingers, chicken legs in velvet trousers tailored to fit. Peaked velvet cap, curling feather. Probably never went heigh-ho off to work in his life.
"What's the matter?” he wants to know. His voice is thin and pointy too, like a needle.
She replies very politely, in case he might be somebody, “Thank you for asking. It's my allergies. I'm horribly allergic to dusty places, straw, stables, that sort of thing.” This happens to be true, making her whole rotten day even rottener.
"What will you give me if I spin the straw into gold for the king?” Of course he knows all about it; otherwise, why would he be there?
The miller's daughter offers, “Um, my necklace?” and is puzzled when he accepts that commonplace string of beads without further bargaining. As he spins all the straw, quite quickly, into gold, she feels relieved, naturally, that she need not die in the morning, but also apprehensive, for there's no getting around it: she's dealing with the supernatural, and has not yet paid a sufficient price. Even as she thanks the little man effusively for saving her butt, even as he takes his leave, she is hoping she will never see him again, yet has a miserable feeling that she will. These things happen in threes.
Bingo. She doesn't even get to go home for her second-best necklace before the greedy king, with the inevitable death threat, sticks her into another, bigger shed full of straw. At nightfall, sure enough, just like a mucus machine she starts weeping—this time with tears appropriately wretched, due to her allergies plus the fact that, while she does not miss her father, she does miss breakfast, lunch, and supper—and right on cue, the little man shows up.
She gives him her ring—again, the cheapest of baubles, yet once more he accepts without demur. Once more, not unkindly, he sets to work. He is an odd sort of midget, thinks the miller's daughter as she watches, maybe not a dwarf after all, too slender, more like one of the pixies, but lacking their beauty, perhaps an elf ... with a face like a wedge of cheese? No, he seems to fit no known category of little people, but it hardly matters, so long as he spins straw into gold.
Which he does. She is saved. But oh, no, day three, huge shed this time, huge pile of straw once more, death if she fails. Only this third time the king, that total oinker, adds that if he doesn't kill her, he will marry her, as if this were supposed to be an inducement?
So this time, when the little man shows up, the miller's daughter is weeping wearily, for no matter what happens, she's out of luck. When he asks what she'll give him to spin the straw into gold, she replies, “I have nothing left,” which is, of course, not true. She could offer him the oldest of incentives, quite expects him to request same, and really doesn't care, although she supposes that, for the dubious sake of survival, she will—
So she is totally taken off guard when, instead of bargaining for the pleasures of her body, he says, “Oh, that's okay. Just promise me your firstborn child."
She is astonished; what on Earth does the little man want with a baby, all that noise and filth? But of course she agrees; who wouldn't? A firstborn child, which might or might not happen sometime down the road, is the merest abstraction when one is a teenager faced with death at sunrise.
* * * *
To take now the little man's point of view: Eureka! The baby! This is the prize he has sought all along, caring nothing for the baubles, the necklace, the ring, and as for the girl herself—yes, indeed, she is quite appealing in her peasant-wench way, and he knows she is desperate enough to let him embrace her, but within his strong, solitary mind he also knows that such intimacy would provide only the most temporary of respite from his terrible loneliness.
For he is uniquely alone. It is one of the Seven Egregious Unfairnesses of his life that he is out of place even among supernatural manifestations. He is neither dwarf to delve in the Earth with other dwarves, nor pixie to dance in the moonlit mushroom-ring with other pixies, nor elf, sprite, fetch, bogy, nixie, leprechaun, brownie, or any sort of acceptable faery-goblin. And his is a situation most unjust, for, while giants sometimes live alone because of their grisly habits, and ogres because they are odious, the singular little man has committed only kindness, namely, the spinning of straw into gold.
Yet he could save the miller's daughter's life a thousand times and she would still give him the same wary look, like a barn cat. Because she is an ordinary person, and he is not. In the minds of those who consider themselves normal, who are normal, otherness is suspect. Deformity (being auger-nosed, chicken-limbed, and only three feet tall) signifies evil. Doing impossible things means the devil's help, reason for fear.
But the baby will know none of this! Never will the baby look at him with misgiving; the baby will not only accept him, but love him! No baby can help but love, completely and helplessly and forever after, the one who nurtures it. And nurture it he will, as well as any mother; he will give it magical milk to drink, and what are a few soiled diapers to a being with the power to spin straw into gold? He will provide well for the child. And once he has possession of it, and especially once it grows a bit and can talk with him, he will be no longer a misfit, alone, but he will belong to a clan of two.
Now he must wait for the miller's daughter to give birth, that is all. And even if it takes a few years—which seems unlikely, given the buxom bloom of that girl—but even if she has the sagacity to delay the inevitable, the singular little man will pass the time in patience, as he has already passed many, many years, tens of hundreds of years.
* * * *
To the king, who scarcely deserves a viewpoint, it's about time something went right. One of the Seven Most Unfair Grievances on his rather limited mind is that he had no choice what to do with his life, no options other than to be king after his old man croaked, yet he never got to be a Handsome Prince (he is an oinker in face as well as in heart) and therefore he never found a Beautiful Princess willing to be his bride. Or a Fair Lady. Or any female the least bit suitable to wed His Exalted Highness. Now he's a middle-aged Majesty with an ale belly, up to his triple chin in debt for doublets and hose and ermine codpieces and all the other ridiculous, expensive trappings of his regal job, and with vassals
grumbling that he needs to provide an heir, and—and lo and behold, here the dumbass miller puts him onto a reasonably attractive girl who goes and makes him rich.
The king does not care about being loved. He does not feel alone in the world; there are plenty more like him, heading up nations and corporations. He considers that he can be very happy with gold to pay the bills, plus a wench with whom to rumple the bed sheets. Why not marry her? While she lacks the sort of pedigree that is usually required, she shows every promise of being quite fertile—almost certain to pop out an heir—and then there are the financial considerations. If he needs more money, he can always threaten again to kill her.
Not that he really thinks she has spun straw into gold. No, if he believed that, he wouldn't touch her; what if she could turn other things into something elses? But the king doesn't worry, because he knows about the little man. He is no fool; he has his spies, his guards, his people keeping watch. He figures that whatever she—the miller's daughter; even though he is going to marry her, the king can't recall her name—whatever she gave the little man doesn't count because of the minuscule size involved, and absolutely can be overlooked in the light reflected from a pile of gold.
And if the little man comes back into the picture, well, it depends whether he, the king—who does not deserve a name either—whether he wants more gold at the time, or would rather take the freaky bastard, who has been described to him as twig thin and no more than three feet tall, and whack him in half with one blow of his sword.
FSF, March 2008 Page 3
