“What is it,” asked Leonid, “that song?”
The humming stopped.
“Please, go on.”
She tried to start the song again, but the notes came out at random, as if she had not forgotten just that song but the whole concept of singing.
“I don’t remember it,” she said.
Leonid pulled his hand from Nadya’s lap and rested it in his own.
“Tell me about my brother,” he said.
“He’s like you. More confident, maybe, but that’s just the training. Tell me about my sister.”
“She was very little like you.”
The two of them often repeated this exchange when they were alone together. That was usually where it ended, but Nadya raised her face and looked Leonid directly in the eyes.
“What did she say to you?” asked Nadya. “I saw the video. Before she boarded the rocket, you were the last person she spoke to.”
“She said she was glad she was the one to go and not you.”
“Why would she say that?”
“She was your sister.”
“What’s a sister if you’ve barely seen each other in years?”
“She didn’t have to see you to think of you. I still think of her now, and she’s five years dead.”
Nadya stood and paced the perimeter of the room, brushing her fingertips along the rough concrete walls.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said.
“The door locks from the outside.”
“One day, then. One day let’s go for a walk.”
Bohdan, Ukraine—1950
Monday morning and the train didn’t come. The villagers idled by the tracks, kicking at fat stones cascaded down from the mountain. Usually, when the train was late, they swept stones to kill time. There were not enough, though, to warrant the effort. No one could remember the last rains, anything more than a drizzle, strong enough to shake loose even dust from the craggy face of the mountain. The green of the forest had grown less vivid. The wet scent of the firs, once filling the valley like water in a pond, had faded to nothing.
By noon, it was clear that the train would not arrive. The villagers gathered their shed coats, dusty things that hung like sheets over their shoulders, and dragged their empty carts back down the rutted dirt road to the village proper. The tops of the homes, recently shingled by a crew of Russian carpenters, rose like gray peaks above the low trees of the valley’s center. There were perhaps a dozen cottages in all, if one counted the church and the schoolhouse. Even in a village as remote as Bohdan, it was usually best not to count the church.
Leonid—then still known by his birth name—watched the empty carts parade by, wooden wheels clunking unevenly, the people that pulled them gaunt as the legs of horses. His brother, the younger Leonid, crouched in the brush on the other side of the road. They had planned to steal a sugar beet each from the carts as they rolled by, a practice tolerated by the villagers, who had themselves swiped beets from their parents like their parents from their grandparents before them. With no train, though, there was nothing on the carts to steal.
The twins should have been in lessons, but the small clapboard schoolhouse had remained empty since the teacher left with Russian soldiers some weeks before. When the teacher boarded the outbound train, she had paused on the top step, casting a long look around the valley as if she did not expect to see it again. The train chugged away, huffing out great exhalations of snow-white steam, gathering speed and distance, ascending the mountain through the pass where the steam blended with the mist and the train evaporated into the outside world. Grandmother had told the two Leonids that no one who took the train ever returned.
So for weeks there had been no school. The boys read from their tattered lesson books when Grandmother pressed them, but mostly they spent their time outside, exploring the forest or shadowing the villagers.
The swine squealed in their pens as the empty carts ricketed past, kicking up a fecund scent with short stomps of their hooves. Leonid remembered there being more animals, but that was the memory of a toddler, when everything seemed larger and of greater numbers. These animals were more like pets than livestock, spindly and with the shapes of bones visible beneath their skin. Nothing worth eating. The fattest had been sent out on the train months before. Like Grandmother said, what left on the train never returned.
Kasha, the village’s lone dog, owned by no one in particular and fed by all intermittently, emerged from behind a log pile and marched alongside the carts. She was as tall as a man’s knee, all leg and lean muscle, narrow-snouted, fur white like the steam from the train. In better times, the boys would have shared whatever food they had stolen, or the villagers would have dropped something for Kasha to eat. Still, the dog seemed happy, practically prancing as she walked. Her tail, though, hung limp behind her. Some injury, predating Leonid’s memory, had robbed the tail of its motion.
The younger Leonid caught up to the procession and helped old Mr. Yevtushenko pull one of the carts. The left wheel was lopsided and snagged in the path’s ruts once per revolution. The younger Leonid boy’s strength didn’t help much, but it was enough to keep the cart moving. The older Leonid looked for a place to help, too, but the other villagers had no trouble with their own carts. Maybe if they had been laden. He wondered why the villagers had not just left the carts at the top of the hill, so they would be there when the train eventually came. He wanted to ask, but he knew that no adult wanted the advice of a child. So he followed, not helping, saying nothing. Kasha trotted beside him.
The villagers parked the carts by the arid dirt patch that used to be a garden. They huddled as if they might unload the carts, scooping up empty space into buckets and barrows, and then carry the nothing home with them. Some of the villagers would climb into the hills and try their hand at hunting. It was not a village of hunters, though, so they rarely returned with more than a red squirrel, half exploded from the bullet that felled it. Grandmother told the twins stories of roe deer that used to fill the valley’s forests and the feasts their meat used to provide. Those stories rang more like legend than memory.
From the hills, throughout the afternoon, the hopeful sound of gunshots sometimes echoed down from the hills, little pops like hammers on wood. In later months, the sound would become more ominous, emerging as it did from the barrels of Russian rifles.
That night after the villagers went home, the two Leonids climbed atop the cold gray roof of Grandmother’s cottage, brushing aside the sere dirt deposited there by summer winds, and watched the wide crease of sky. Kasha scrambled up the berm at the back of the cottage and flopped between them. Long before they knew the stars had names already, they gave them names of their own.
Moscow, Russia—1964
Leonid and Nadya descended the frail metal staircase pushed up to the side of the Tu-124, the sound of the jets still dying down even as they disembarked. Domodedovo Airport had just opened the month before, and did not yet show the wear of a single Moscow winter. Every other runway Leonid had ever seen was crisscrossed with black lines where the cracks had been filled in, black circles demarking repaired potholes. This runway, though, was flawless gray. Domodedovo’s control tower rose like a stone slab from the tarmac, a giant’s headstone. The jet fumes smelled acrid but also sweet.
After three days in the bunker at Baikonur, Leonid and Nadya had been retrieved by Mishin and Bushuyev in a timeworn Sorokovka armored transport. The cargo bed carried a Vostok capsule, bearing scorch marks as if it had reentered the atmosphere when in reality Mishin and Bushuyev had attacked it with blowtorches. The transport carried them hundreds of kilometers across the steppe to the supposed landing site. Once there, Leonid helped Mishin and Bushuyev push the capsule off the back of the transport. It landed with a hollow thud and sank into the damp dirt. They attached a parachute and allowed the wind to billow it open. Mishin and Bushuyev radioed the rest of the recovery team, who had no part in the deception. Who believed. Hours more of waiting, followed by a trip to an airstrip another several hundred kilometers away. Leonid found some small amusement in the fact that he had to travel so far to pretend that he had traveled even farther.