He flew patrols through cloud and wind while supply ships and the vessels of the Northern Fleet trailed frothy white wakes. He spoke little to the other men. He followed orders. He flew the MiG to the best of his ability. From time to time came alerts and the interceptors were launched. So far it was Cold War brinkmanship, not the heat of battle. To the north, banks of cloud blanketed the Pole like a ridge of white mountains, and one day soon the overlying sky would fill with slow-rising lines of silver wings.
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union fired Sputnik 1 into orbit. The news came through to Graham Bell the next day. The men toasted its success in the bar that night. Yefgenii raised his glass like the other men. He swallowed his shot of vodka.
The next winter, a second child was born, a boy this time, but Yefgenii felt remote from the event. A space existed between him and other people.
One year was the normal tour of duty in the Arctic, one year or at most two, but after three and a half years, Yefgenii received orders in the spring of 1959 that he remain in Franz Josef Land for the remainder of his flying career. This was his exile, yet he clung to a fragile hope. One day the American bombers would cross the ice in earnest and Ivan the Terrible would rise again.
Having been beaten by Sputnik, the United States declared its intention to send the first man into space. In April they selected a group of seven test pilots to begin training for spaceflight. Among them were John Glenn, Gus Grissom and Wally Schirra; they’d been distinguished supporting players in Korea but now they were the heroic stars of the Space Race. The Americans called them “astronauts” — star voyagers. Magazines carried their life stories. They appeared on television. In interviews some of them referred to God as if he really existed.
But the Soviets had more powerful and reliable rockets. Recruitment teams were already travelling out from Moscow. In utmost secrecy they toured VVS bases across the Soviet Union in search of pilots with the talent and courage to venture into space. No one came to Graham Bell.
Yefgenii flew long, lonely patrols. Afterwards, he stowed his kit in his locker and hung his helmet on the rack. He took the base bus home. A light glowed in the little redbrick house, snow matted the roof, and icicles glistened off the gutters. In the sitting room, the widow nursed their infant son, while their daughter lay sleeping in the bedroom. This was his life. This was him now.
THE SEASONS CYCLED. Ice moved in great shifts up and down the islands. Snows fell and melted. Yefgenii changed too, the face becoming gaunter, the forehead higher, and so did the world. Both nations had missiles now, not only capable of carrying a bomb from aircraft to target, but rockets that could carry nuclear warheads over oceans and across continents. They were building enough ICBMs to destroy every major city in their enemy’s homeland, enough to destroy civilization. If war came, the missiles would soar high over Franz Josef Land. The fighters were redundant; the job of air defense lay in the gloom of radar stations and SAM silos.
Two bomber squadrons were removed from Nagurskoye, a fighter squadron from Graham Bell. The crew rooms were airier, the streets and schools quieter. Empty cabins were pulled down, others were left to rot.
Yefgenii remained, of course. He feared he’d be kept here even if there was only one aircraft, only one man. He looked to the north, the cap of ice and cloud shrouding the curve of the earth like a ridge of white mountains. He longed for a sky filled with metal, but he knew the American bombers would never rise, Ivan the Terrible would never rise again.
That winter, the winter of 1960–1961, the darkness fell fast. The aurora’s spectral lights shimmered on the cloud tops and on the gleaming metal of his wings and the clear plastic of his visor. His blue eyes swam behind a flickering cascade of reds, greens and blues.
Icicles glistened on the gutters of the redbrick house. Snow blanketed its roof. The house smelled of cooking. He shook snowflakes off his coat and slapped them off his hat. The widow stood at the stove. The boy slept in the bedroom. As Yefgenii pulled off his boots, the girl told him her news. Yefgenii smiled. Anything that wasn’t flying struck him as unimportant, but he indulged her. The widow took the girl to bed. Yefgenii kissed her as she went and then he sat at the small wooden table in the single downstairs room while a meat stew bubbled on the stove.
When the widow returned she said, “She keeps asking about the dog.”
“What dog?”
“The one in space. What’s this one called?”
“Chernushka.”
“We were so sad about Laika, but this one will come back, won’t it? That’s what I told her, anyway.”
Soviet rockets were carrying dogs into space; the Americans sent chimps. Soon it would be a man. Both nations proclaimed the man would be theirs. The winner would secure the advantage of the military high ground; they would also lay claim to the superior ideology; and the man himself would be renowned for the remainder of human history, longer than there’d be countries.
The widow put out two bowls and ladled the stew into them. Steam rose from the surface. He stirred the liquid. They sent dogs into space. He felt lower than a dog. “This is good stew,” he said. “Just what I needed,” he said.
Yuri Gagarin flew into space aboard Vostok 1 on April 12th. Crammed inside a capsule too small for a man of average size, he made one orbit of the earth then landed near the city of Saratov, on the Volga. Premier Nikita Khrushchev himself greeted Gagarin when he returned to Moscow. They stood along with leading Party members atop Lenin’s Mausoleum while the crowd in Red Square cheered in jubilation.
At Graham Bell that day, Yefgenii Yeremin didn’t fly. The whole country was celebrating the victory over the Americans. Yefgenii admired Gagarin’s valor, admired the qualities he must’ve had in order to win selection ahead of all the other cosmonauts.
He drank toasts with the other men. They were young, they were full of vigor. Many of them wanted to apply for the space program. It was a new world, and theirs. Yefgenii felt aged beyond his years. The cold and emptiness of the Arctic had bit by bit desiccated the life out of him. He swallowed vodka and studied his reflection floating in the veneer of the bar top.
He shambled home, alone, drunk.
Snow fell in clumps and the wind drove it in his eyes. It stuck in his hair and lashes, stung his cheeks, beaded his hat and coat. He was turning white, becoming a ghost that stumbled along the empty streets at the edge of the base, bent against the wind. The wind pushed him to a standstill. Snow blinded him. He threw off his hat and coat. He opened his arms to the wind. He challenged it to drain him to a husk and blow him away. The wind here was strong enough to knock a man over. Yefgenii’s boots slipped on the snow as he struggled to stay upright. A gust caught him off balance and he tumbled.
The falling snow began to cover him. The wind heaped it against him in a mounting drift. He felt ice biting through his skin. However courageous Gagarin was, however dedicated and resolute he was, however intelligent and personable and handsome he was, a VVS pilot with no combat experience who was so short he needed to sit on a pillow to see out of the cockpit of a MiG-15 had become the first man in space. In less than two hours of flying Yuri Alexeievich Gagarin had become the greatest of all Heroes of the Soviet Union. He’d even been promoted during the flight, not one rank but two, going up a starshii-leitenant and coming down a major. Yuri Gagarin’s single victory over the Americans counted for more than all of Yefgenii Yeremin’s put together. Soon the Americans would be going up too, already rich and famous, some of them men who’d flown over Korea and achieved so much less there than he had.