Ignatius led him back to his room and instructed him to take a shower. As he undressed, he found a slip of paper in the inside pocket of his uniform jacket. The paper was folded into a perfect square. He spread the creases and tried to read what was on the inside. He could not make it out until he realized it was in Ukrainian, not Russian. A street address in Odessa. The bottom was signed in neither Ukrainian nor Russian, but English. Hope to see you soon! —Your Friends from America.
Star City, Russia—1964
Nadya and Leonid were scheduled to arrive back in Star City within the next few hours. It was the longest Nadya had been away since touring with Mars four years ago, and the Chief Designer was surprised each time he realized she was not around. Over the past five years, rarely had a day gone by that the Chief Designer did not stumble across her, always in the unlikeliest of locations. She would be leaning in the hallway when he emerged from the wash, or pushing a broom around the training room, which was already swept several times a week by the custodians, or walking one of the dogs out of a sterile lab, where even people, who shed considerably less, were required to wear smocks and caps. Whenever they went to Baikonur for a launch, it took hours of convincing before she would leave Star City without Kasha in tow. The Chief Designer wondered what would happen without the dogs, if Nadya would just wander away.
But no, she was coming back. That strange woman whom he had practically raised since childhood. He tried not to admit the relief he’d felt when it was her sister and not her who launched, but…
No, no. All the cosmonauts were like his children. He admitted to himself, usually only in the enveloping dark of night, that he had cared less for the surviving twins. He had spent limited time with them, left their minimal training to Mishin and Bushuyev. The surviving twins had not sacrificed themselves for the cause. But he could not blame them. They were all victims, and of the Chief Designer’s own crimes. In his most honest moments, he knew what held him back with the twins, even if he could not always admit it. They were living reminders of his failures.
That was what now held him back with dear Nadya, the Nadya who survived. He lacked faith in his own endeavor. Faith, he thought. He ground his artificial teeth. Any store of faith he once possessed had rotted right out of him. Years and years ago, when rocketry was at most a pastime and a hope and ultimately a fall. Faith was an old concept, anyway.
The Chief Designer stepped out of his office and found not Nadya but Giorgi in the hallway, dragging a sofa. The young cosmonaut greeted the Chief Designer loudly, then returned to his task.
“Do you need help?” asked the Chief Designer.
Giorgi paused in his efforts. “I can manage, sir. Is there anything I can help you with? You seem concerned.”
The Chief Designer smiled. Besides the other Nadya, Giorgi was the only one who ever noticed his moods. At least the subtler ones.
“No, Giorgi, I’m fine. Or I one day will be.”
Giorgi proffered a jaunty salute. “I promise that today will be a good day, sir. I’ll see you at the party.”
He crouched, grabbing the arm of the sofa, and backward shuffle-walked down the hall with the sofa in tow. He sang a song, “Kalinka,” as he went.
GIORGI BUSTLED from room to room around the dormitory, hanging makeshift decorations from the exposed pipework that ran along the ceilings. For ribbons, he had salvaged the straps from old harnesses, the ones once used to simulate weightlessness, before Mars, on the second mission, told the engineers that dangling from wires was nothing like being weightless at all. Giorgi borrowed the yellow seatbelts from the centrifuge and shredded to strips a piece of silver insulation that the Chief Designer did not have the heart to tell him cost thousands of rubles. Giorgi cut up an old Soviet flag, weather-beaten and faded from crimson to pink. After he was done decorating, only white napkins remained in the commissary, the favored blues stolen, sliced, and suspended from the frame around the front doors.
The staff arrived in the mess hall only to discover that lunch had not been prepared. In addition to commandeering the napkins, Giorgi had sent the cooks home in order to claim the kitchen as his own. He prepared dozens of slabs of gingerbread in the Tula style, some filled with jam and others condensed milk. Any hungry engineer who grabbed for one was met on the knuckles with the backside of Giorgi’s spoon. For later, he said, and sent them to the pantry for bread and whatever else they might be able to eat with it.
In the common room, he set each table with several bottles of vodka from Mars’s stash. Giorgi had not seen Mars in several days, so the vodka was technically stolen, but Giorgi would pay for it and apologize. No one ever stayed mad at him for long. Every glass he could find in all of Star City surrounded the vodka bottles, like each table was a sprawling crystal palace with a Babelian spire in the middle. He poured himself two swallows and flipped the glass to his mouth, tossing the liquid straight to the back of his throat.
His guitar and balalaika were leaning in the corner, already tuned, waiting to be plucked up and strummed for vodka-soaked sing-alongs. The balalaika, a contrabass, was comically large, taller on end than Giorgi, the triangular body more than half that wide. For a laugh, Giorgi would hide behind it so all that could be seen were his arms, as if the instrument played itself.
Giorgi had been painting a new mural on the back wall of the common area, an idealized spacescape with the long curve of Earth in the lower left corner. Above it, as in the training room, the faces of the first five cosmonauts were rendered with stunning detail. Stunning not just for their likenesses to the actual people, but for the fact that Giorgi had painted each of them from memory. The paint of Leonid’s face still glinted with the last traces of wetness. There was a space to the right of the portraits large enough for another. Mishin, or was it Bushuyev, had joked that Giorgi was saving room for himself. But that space was now filled with the first lines of a poem Giorgi was writing, painted in elegant calligraphy:
The first black stroke of the next line was painted, but did not offer a hint as to what letter it would become.
The door to the common room creaked open, and Mars squeezed through the smallest possible gap that would allow him entry. His skin, already dark by Russian standards, seemed swaddled in ashy shadow. Under his eyes, squinting, the color faded to deep purple. Each of his steps was barely more than a stumble. He took in the glass- and-bottle-filled tables and threw up his arms.
“Here it is!” he said. “Dammit, Giorgi, can’t you ask before you take?”
“Can you not hide yourself away when I seek to ask you something?”
Mars dropped his arms. From the nearest table he selected the tallest glass and filled it almost to the rim with vodka.
He said, “At least you didn’t take the Scotch.”