New fields had opened for the great powers to battle over; for machines, it towered in the rarefied flight paths of missiles, high above men and airplanes; for men, it lay in space, and Yefgenii Yeremin played no part in any of it.
He let the cold take him.
When the widow came looking for him, only his head, shoulder and hip poked out of the snow. “Yefgenii!” She shook him. She could feel how stiff his body was, how cold. “Yefgenii!” His hands were livid, his nose, his lips. “YEFGENII!”
He moaned.
She tried to drag him to his feet. She held him up but he fell again.
“Leave me,” he said.
She dragged him up again, calling for help. “Let’s get you inside,” she said.
“Let me die.”
People came out of one of the houses, men in uniform, coming to help.
He fell again. He lay there crying, with the widow clinging to him and men barking out orders to get him inside, to get him in front of the fire.
THE WIDOW NURSED HIM over the next few days. She brought him hot food and hot drinks, she massaged his hands and feet. The tips of his fingers and toes and the tip of his nose were gray from frostbite that would either recede or turn gangrenous.
She kept a fire burning day and night in the little bedroom they shared. His face turned pink and sweat glistened on the high dome of his forehead, but he said little and his eyes were pale and empty when she looked into them.
The door to the room hung ajar. One morning it creaked as it swung open a little more. Two tiny faces peered through the gap, one’s eyes at the level of the doorknob, the boy’s, and the other’s, the girl’s, a head higher. Yefgenii turned his pale empty gaze toward them. The widow turned and shooed them; they defied her, which was just like them, but they said nothing, which wasn’t.
Because the Americans had been beaten, President John Kennedy appealed to Congress for the United States to commit itself to landing a man on the Moon before the end of the decade. To many the proposal seemed ludicrous, of spending vast sums of money on an endeavor carrying so little prospect of success. But then that was the reason to target the Moon: a goal so far beyond current technical capabilities that it gave the United States a fighting chance of overtaking the Soviets.
The widow kept Yefgenii warm, she kept him well fed. Some days she went without so he would have extra to eat. He watched her with blank eyes. “You could say thank you,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said.
He watched her go about her routine. She’d gained weight, lost what looks she’d had. She rubbed warmth into his fingers and toes. She massaged the stiffness at the base of his back. She laughed that if his willy had been affected she would be happy to massage that too.
He found himself laughing in return. He stroked her hair. She peered down at him, surprised by the gesture. He kissed her.
She gazed back at him, a spark of youth and beauty returning to her eyes. He knew now he’d been wrong all these years to suppose she was one of any number of women who would’ve fulfilled his expectations of a wife. No other would’ve been so devoted, no other would have been so faithful. If you were a romantic, you would call these criteria “love.”
In the mornings, the children would sneak into their bed. They snuggled with their mother but, now that he wasn’t leaving before dawn for the flight lines, they found him there too. The girl would bounce on his chest. The boy would bury his face in the pillow when he looked at him. He would tickle them and they’d laugh. He’d tickle them and they’d cry. They wouldn’t want to kiss him. They’d want to smother him in kisses. He was discovering these strange creatures of little parts, of soft chubby flesh, of big eyes and unpredictable behavior.
His strength returned. He walked about the base but there was little for him to do. He had no hobbies or interests. He was not a reader of books. Because of the frostbite in his hands, he wasn’t suitable for a desk job.
That summer the wall was built to divide Berlin. Cold War tensions accelerated the Arms Race. On a large wasteland to the south of Franz Josef Land, named Novaya Zemlya, the Soviet Union detonated a 100-megaton hydrogen bomb. It was named the Tsar Bomba, the King of Bombs, and for fear of its strength it was detonated at half yield.
They saw the flash on Graham Bell. Seconds later, they felt the ground tremble. The explosion was nearly four thousand times more powerful than the one that had devastated Hiroshima; it was the biggest explosion recorded on Earth barring natural cataclysms such as the meteorite impact that obliterated the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs had ruled the planet for more than a hundred million years and the nuclear arsenals of man contained energy on a par with that which had made them extinct.
Yefgenii watched the mushroom cloud ascend. If men destroyed man, this would be their closing vision, the endpaper of history.
He turned inside. Photographs stood in frames all around the little house. He’d hardly noticed them, these pictures of the widow, the children, some of him in uniform. If one day he was gone from their lives, this would be all that remained. The children would gaze at pictures of this man, they might remember a moment between them and not know for sure if it was a dream or a reality; over time even that memory might be lost.
One day the widow asked him, “Why did you do it?”
He lay on his side. He spent many hours like that, awake on the bed in the middle of the day, or slumped in an armchair, his face blank, his mind empty. After she said it, he wanted to roll away from her but she clasped his elbow and held him still.
“Why did you do it?” she said. “Why did you want to leave me a widow, leave your children without a father?”
She slapped his head, surprising herself with the suddenness of the action. He stared at her, mute, his eyes the eyes of a dumb animal. She struck him again and again about the head and back and shoulders.
“Six years we’ve lived here! Six years. Other families suffer for one, they can tell their children next winter won’t be so cold, it won’t be so dark, because daddy will be posted somewhere nice, but what can I tell our children, what can I tell myself? We’ll be here for the rest of our lives!”
She hit him one last time, but sadness and despair weakened her anger. She said, “Your wife loves you. Your children love you. We’re the only warmth you’ve got.”
That night, after she’d put the children to bed, they ate supper together at the table in the communal room that served as kitchen, diner and lounge. From time to time the little house trembled under jets passing overhead on routine night patrols.
“You could take the children somewhere else,” he said. “You could live somewhere warmer. I would send you money, what money you needed. Perhaps you and the children would be happier without me.”
A spoonful of stew was about to pass her lips. She held it in midair.
“Who knows how long they’ll keep me here? Maybe till the end.”
Steam rose off the spoonful of stew. “The end?”
He hunched his shoulders. He peered down into the bowl between his elbows. “I don’t expect my life to have a happy ending.”
She said, “Nor do I, Yefgenii Mikhailovich,” and of course that was the reason he’d married her.
He’d regressed to a man who steps into a bath and displaces no water. Yet he’d found a part of existence hitherto obscure to him. The widow cooked the next supper. The boy travelled under furniture, always pursuing a ball, or being pursued by one. The girl loved to draw. She would hunch at the table, with her fine blonde hair fringing her eyes, choosing colours from a fistful of pencils. He’d come close to leaving their lives, and now, for the first time, he feared what it would mean if they left his.