In 1931, when construction of the first Soviet rocket-glider commenced, Elena seriously considered applying to the S. Ordzhonikidze Moscow Aviation Institute. She could have done anything; she was good at becoming part of the collective. That must have been why she kept dreaming that in every room there was a big black telephone which buzzed when she walked by. She’d saved last year’s newspaper about the Seventh All-Union Glider Rally, when S. M. Korolev’s “Red Star” glider proved capable of spectacular acrobatics; Elena imagined falling in love with Korolev. In 1934, when she was having her affair with Shostakovich, Roman Karmen stood young and handsome in a flier’s suit and a warm beret, everything buttoned up around his throat as, holding up a snow-white camera, he filmed the flier W. S. Molokov, Hero of the Soviet Union, who was also young and handsome but covered up, wearing a thick round fur cap so you couldn’t really tell who either of them were; Molokov had goggles pushed up against his hat, and Karmen didn’t; it was when she saw that photograph of Karmen that Elena fell in love with him. By then our first liquid-propellant rocket, a rather small one, had succeeded in leaving the launching rig. It would soon be superseded by a rocket as tall as the spire of the Fortress of Peter and Paul! Elena read all about it in Izvestiya. And just when she had definitively resolved to marry Roman Karmen, she received a card from Vera Ivanova, who would not get expelled from the Komsomol until 1937, a year after Elena, who as she opened it remembered the mud on Vera’s shoes as Vera leaned forward naked in the chair with her long, beloved, slightly greasy hair falling over her eyes, shadow in her cleavage, shadow between her legs.
Elena would most certainly have been there, gazing up through the flags and streamers, when the AHT-20 “Maxim Gorki” plane flew overhead in 1935, but that was when we locked her away. I remember when we arrested her; I was there, and she stood before us with her eyes half-closed like the blacked-out headlights of a tramcar in wartime; that was when I knew that this was her “intimate look,” that Shostakovich and Vera and Lina and those other boys and girls alike in love with her, always throwing rockets, they’d all seen this; this made me crazy; it was right then that I fell in love with her; I became another of her victims.
Squares of Red Army men marched along the base of a wall of airplanes whose propellers had all been oriented perfectly parallel to the ground, but Elena wasn’t there; she was with us.
I repeat: What did Elena really look like? Not like a Rodchenko angel at all, not any more than she resembled the KPIR-3 glider of 1925: wings like squared-off banana fronds, a skeletal body of hollow triangles. In her own interest, I freely confess to altering certain details of her appearance throughout this book. For instance, Elena Konstantinovskaya was blonde, and it was as a blonde that Shostakovich, the protagonist of these stories, would certainly have thought of her, but to me, and what I say goes, she will always be the darkhaired woman, or, if you prefer, the woman with the dark, dark hair.
In 1930, People’s Commissar Voroshilov was present at the maiden voyage of the TB-5 bomber, but Elena was too young. (Her Komsomol report for that year reports her as being extremely proficient in sharpshooting and first aid—two skills which would serve her well in Spain.) How happy she would have been to watch the takeoff of the TB-5! I’ll write her in if I care to; I’ll give her a front row spot in front of what they still liked to call the cosmodrome. Can’t I be allowed my amusements? After all, the great aviator V. Chkalov was grounded for prankishly flying under a bridge in Leningrad.
In proof of my deservingness, let me remind you that I never touched Elena Konstantinovskaya. I never even introduced myself, not even when I arrested her.—Vera Ivanova was another matter.—So it’s not from personal experience but from personal observation that I can so accurately describe the way that Elena could be so distant and angry with those who loved her, so sweet to win back those who were slipping away. I didn’t lean on Roman Karmen, nor even on that bastard Shostakovich until Elena had definitively moved on. From 1953 on I resisted checking up on her more than once a week, no matter how tempted I felt. (I remember on one winter morning in Leningrad watching her flicker between each of the eight white columns, formerly yellow, of the Smolny Institute.) When she died in 1975, I respectfully refrained from attending her funeral. Establishing that code of behavior for myself didn’t require me to own a degree in rocket science (an endeavor of great importance to our Soviet land, and accordingly always supported by Marshal M. N. Tukhachevsky). As a matter of fact, most rocket scientists end up being traitors. I wish it weren’t that way. But since it is, why not imagine that there’s one loyal rocket scientist? And who would that be but Elena Konstantinovskaya, who is pure and perfect and good? Shall I make her an astrophysicist right now? Don’t tell me I don’t have the nerve! Why, if I felt like it, I could anoint her with those crimson rhomboids which we find exclusively on the shoulders of our Red Army commanders!
B. N. Yuriev was the very first to construct a rigid theoretical proof that helicopter flight was possible. What could you do to me if I corrected history so that the name of that theoretician became E. E. Konstantinovskaya? At the very least, can’t I place her within one of those blue and green Soviet biplanes which used to be all the time buzzing in the slipstream above our heads?
I know everything, I really do. I could tell you precisely which two of Akhmatova’s lines it was that Vera Ivanova murmured in Elena’s ear on that last day by the riverbank when she understood that it was truly over between her and Elena. I’ve read Elena’s diary (which is now in our archive) and I’m more aware than she ever was, thanks not only to the gift of distance but also to my own professional training, why she dreamed what she did the night after she first met Shostakovich. These temptations I’m likewise proof against; surely you’re not interested in biochemical accidents of personality. But another of her dreams I’ll report to you, because it was a dream that all of us had in those years, thanks to the deteriorating international situation, which resulted inevitably from the struggle between capitalists to devour the hugest profits. Over and over, Elena Konstantinovskaya woke up sweating from a dream she hated almost as much as her dream of the black telephone; she dreamed of a long finned bomb slowly flying through darkness above a glowing pyramid. ‣
MAIDEN VOYAGE
What child is there that lives, as I did, midway between Reality and Fairy-land, that does not long sometimes to leave altogether the familiar world and set off in search of new and fabulous realms?
The telephone rang. Then it was agreed: Krakow to us, Lwow to them, Warsaw to us, Brest-Litovsk to them. That was how we established the Ribbentrop-Molotov Line.—Not another inch! the sleepwalker shouted into the heavy black mouthpiece, but that obedient buzz of assent might have concealed something. He longed to smash open the telephone’s bakelite shell and peer within, but dreaded what he might find. Never mind; he’d win with commands and arguments.
He told the telephone: Get somebody over here with the order of battle.
Trudl, he said to his favorite secretary, would you be so good as to bring me that white Barbarossa folder? Thank you, child.