When the fire went out, Ishtar had taken with her all the knowledge she possessed.
Nourah spent only a few years with her adoptive father. The king’s envoy died of consumption when she was ten. He had made her feel at home as best he could, but Nourah never stopped longing for her past. Every night, she rocked herself to sleep reciting the rules her grandmother had taught her. Nourah buried the man she had spent half her life with and rode her horse back to where they first met.
She bred horses in Quwê, as her mother had done before her. She met a man, had a child of her own. Nourah looked at the infant and knew that she was more than a mother. She was the eleventh. The eleventh of what, she did not know for certain, but she was part of something larger than herself. She was one and many, and neither she nor her daughter would ever be alone. Nourah spent her nights studying the sky. She lived a quiet life, careful not to draw attention to herself. When her daughter was of age, Nourah gave her all that she had to give: the necklace her mother had left her, and a handful of rules that had guided her home when she was lost and alone.
ACT VI
51
Death of an Angel
She’s gone. I still feel it. It’s hard to describe. It’s not… It’s not anything. Just nothing where there once was something. I never heard her, but she was there. Her little heart thumping in the background, always, like the refrigerator motor. One of a thousand sounds you don’t notice until they’re gone. It’s quiet now. Deafening silence.
I thought I was dying. I was. I was bleeding out. I can’t say that I wanted to die, but I had… accepted it. Everything went dark, and I waited. For something, anything. I never believed in the afterlife, that my soul would somehow outlive my body, but part of me expected something more. Maybe my life flashing before my eyes would have been enough. I don’t know, but I really wanted it. It wasn’t for me. I wanted there to be more for her. My child never lived. I wanted death to be… worthwhile, somehow. I remember being angry about it. I welcomed death and it disappointed me.
They sent two men down with ropes to get me. They patched me up as best they could, then drove me to the nearest city with a decent hospital. It was three hours away, enough time for Korolev to learn about what happened and call Mother. He said I’d lost a lot of blood and he needed to know my blood type. Korolev saved me. In the shape I was in, a transfusion would have killed me. Mother told him I had a rare hereditary condition and she was the only one I could get blood from. He told the hospital to wait and had her flown in. I can still see Mother’s face when I woke up in that hospital bed. I asked if Billie knew and she didn’t answer. That’s when it hit me. They had my blood. The room was covered in it. Mother had already set it up. A body from the morgue. A fire. Don’t leave a trace. I died that night, in fucking Kazakhstan. We were on a plane by morning.
Now… Now I just hurt. My insides are still throbbing. I feel pain when I sit or stand. Regular pain, I can handle. I’ve felt it before. A knife wound, a broken toe. That pain is familiar. The other pain is the one I can’t stand. I keep touching myself. I feel my stomach without thinking and I remember that she’s gone.
I lost a husband. Korolev went to my funeral, said his goodbyes to a closed casket. He buried me. I lost my work. We were so close, I could almost touch it. There are so many things we could have done with Stalin out of the way. Moscow hadn’t changed, really, but the air was filled with such promise. Hope is a powerful thing, and it’s beautiful to watch. I won’t see it. I lost that, too.
I lost Billie. I’ll never see her face again, never watch her staring at me with that… undecided look. She said she didn’t know what to make of me, but it ran both ways. I think that’s what I miss the most, the uncertainty, the eternal discovery. I miss those brief moments of understanding, glimpses of the unknown. I miss me with her, our noses getting in the way, the way our bodies interlocked, the contrast of our skin. Do we truly care for people, for their empirical selves, or do we care for how we experience them? Is this a universal question or is this also about me? Whatever it is, I want more. I want to run my finger down her spine again. I want to bury my face in her hair and hide in that warm darkness for a long minute. It felt like the safest place on Earth…. I want to know how she got that scar. She wouldn’t say.
I don’t know why but I keep thinking she’d like California. It’s warm, for starters. Billie never liked the cold. I don’t think she’d ever seen the ocean. To me, LA feels… unreal. Everything is bright and colorful. I feel… so gray.
I hurt of anger. I should be sad—I am—but mostly I’m angry. I’m mad at myself, mad at the whole world. There’s so much anger it feels like I’m drowning, and I can’t stop it. I can’t make it end. I’m here. It happened. I can’t change any of it even if I can’t bear another minute of my own existence. I’m helpless, impotent.
I’m not the only one hurting. Mother won’t say but I know she took it hard. She feels responsible. She shouldn’t. She warned me that evil was coming. I chose not to listen. This is all on me.
Back in Moscow, there were these crooked houses across from Billie’s. They were old—both were built at the turn of the eighteenth century. Whoever owned them clearly didn’t have the money or the will to fix them, and they were slowly falling apart. Their foundations were sinking, and both houses would have collapsed, should have, really, if not for the fact that they were leaning on each other in just the right way. Billie said they had been like that for decades. That is what we are, Mother and I, two broken things in a complete state of disrepair, leaning on one another. We keep each other alive. For now that will have to be enough.
52
Little Bitty Pretty One
Life magazine, October 21, 1957
A glittering metallic pinpoint of light streaking across the predawn sky last week gave the U.S. its first look at Soviet Russia’s great feat, the artificial moon Sputnik. After the satellite’s first hundred or so orbital trips around Earth. Americans were settling into uneasy familiarity with the unarguable fact that Russia’s moon was passing over them four to six times a day. In fact, there were three satellites girding Earth—Sputnik, a section of the launching rocket, and its nose cone. The famous “beep beep” from Sputnik’s radio turned into a steadier squeal for varying periods. Scientists and lay spotters went sleepless to track the little satellite’s travels with all the equipment they had or could throw together.
All the tracking fervor and growing familiarity with Sputnik did nothing to soothe Americans’ shock at the original announcement of the Soviet breakthrough into space. It was becoming all too apparent Russian scientists are as good as any in the world—or better….
…Russia promised shortly to launch a second satellite twice as big as Sputnik. Even without this, Americans knew that for a long time they would have ample reminder of Soviet scientific excellence whirling through their previously inviolate sky.
—I can see it, Mia! How did you do this?
—How did I do what?
—Make it visible?