We can feel our hearts in their bony cages. We're about to enroll them in the academy of chaos and self-command. We're about to lead them to that world in which their sons and brothers are dead and gone. Lost and always there. And they're about to form for us that jury in which each man reads his own future: home and hearth, or no home and hearth. Pain, or release from pain.
Eros 7
14 June 1963 Morning
Though we've been in this cottage for only a day, I got up at first light and set about a housecleaning. Solovyova is still depressed and lay on her bed like a corpse while I worked. When I finished I left. In the chilly air the sun warmed my arms and long blue shadows crossed the roadside weeds and gravel. I walked through the pines to our little river and sat with my toes in the mud. Bream and sturgeon explored the stones on the bottom, flicking their fins.
We are in Kazakhstan, 370 kilometers northeast of a town called Baikonur. Solovyova and I are in one cottage and Korolyov himself is in the other. The cottages were requisitioned for Yuri Gagarin's flight and have been used ever since. Their original owners came by with flowers when we arrived, in honor of our undertaking. The cottage fronts are covered with creepers and face the pine forest. Behind and above them looms the launchpad in all its concrete immensity. It's a kilometer away but looks as if it could be touched with an outstretched hand. The sides of the blast pit resemble the face of a dam. The command bunker alongside is a squat hedgehog with jagged steel spars spiking from its super-hardened roof at all angles, so a malfunctioning first stage falling atop it would break up, thereby diffusing the focus of the blast.
Diary! You are a historic document: my name is Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, and I was born in the Yaroslavl Raion, and I am twenty-four years old, and by 12:30 Moscow time the day after tomorrow I will have put on my orange spacesuit and climbed into my own spacecraft, the Vostok 6, to rendezvous with a fellow cosmonaut, Senior Lieutenant Valery Fyodorovich Bykov-sky, 150 miles above the Earth. I will become, then, the tenth person, the sixth Russian, and the first woman in space.
But I have more reason to be unable to sit still, as if electrified by joy: the mind that has laid me open to awe and gratitude — the man for whom I'd give whatever I have to give — is already fulfilling his dream, orbiting above us in Vostok 5. And I am going to join him.
Technically, of course, that's incorrect. Our mission will be the first step in developing our country's capabilities for orbital rendezvous. Twice daily, during the parabolas of our orbits, we'll approach to within less than two kilometers of each other. But two kilometers is very close. At that range his capsule will be the size of a dried pea at arm's length. Two kilometers, given the slight imprecision of the trajectories, is as near as they dare bring us. As Korolyov put it, the achievement of two cosmonauts orbiting simultaneously would be compromised if they were to kill each other.
Even so, we'll be in space together. In other words, as Solov-yova pointed out before she fell asleep last night, the combined efforts of the most diligent minds in the Soviet Union — some one hundred thirty bureaus and thirty factories, employing over seven thousand scientists, designers, and engineers — have come together for however many years of labor in order to indulge my sordid and criminally irresponsible obsession with a Hero of the Soviet Union who bears a spotless reputation. “So that's the best they could do for you: two kilometers?” she asked, reaching to turn off the light.
Bykovsky is married, though he told me he hasn't touched his wife in years.
The plan was to make dual use of the second stage of this group mission to put the first woman in space. And after everything— the written examinations and the centrifuge, the parachute jumps and the pressure chamber, the psychological prodding and poking and the endless humiliations of the medical testing — Solovyova was judged top of the list. But Korolyov was concerned about her unsteady morals. It was felt she gave improper replies in the final interviews. When asked what she wanted from life, she said she wanted everything that it could offer. She maintained that a woman could smoke and still remain decent. She was unapolo-getic for having traveled unescorted into town.
When asked what I wanted, I said I wished to support the Komsomol and the Communist Party. I took no trips to town. I do not smoke.
In the end, there were advantages to favoring a farm girl over a teacher's daughter. I was a girl from the backwoods— the way Gagarin and Premier Khrushchev were boys from the backwoods — and our country was telling the world that even we could achieve at the highest level. “The meek shall inherit the earth,” Solovyova said when the other women sought to console her after the news had been released.
“When have you managed this grand passion?” she wanted to know last night, when I confided in her. “Where have you managed it?” She used “grand passion” with an unpleasant emphasis.
The truth is that he hasn't entirely committed to my feelings for him. A week ago we managed for ourselves an hour or so alone by plunging off the trails on a recreational hike, during which we kissed, in the darkness, as though all of our sharing would be accomplished by that alone. I had before those kisses kissed only two other boys: those memories a little keepsake-box of reticence and disappointment. But there in the forest we came together like an immersion, oceanic in its possibilities. The branches above showered us with cold drops shaken off at the breeze. Around his mouth he smelled of sun and beach, with an edge of herbs.
He was shorter but seemed older, and parted his hair on the side in the German manner. He expressed himself so well in our first meeting that I kept glancing at him as though I were doing something wrong. This was the first gathering of the finalists. We'd been asked to mark on mimeographs of a map where our relatives were located. I'd been holding mine upside down, causing the other women to laugh. “I guess you won't be navigating,” one of them scoffed. But he said with a smile that his was illegible too, and that these were poor mimeographs. And I thought he was kind. And that I wanted some of that kindness inside me.
He's not wildly good-looking. He hoards his green vegetables, whether from superstition or trauma, he won't say. Solovyova thinks his hands are too small. She has a man's hands, like mine.
14 June 1963 Afternoon
Solovyova napping again. In the morning we spent two hours reviewing checklists and two playing badminton for physical conditioning. The badminton was filmed for posterity. Solovyova worked up a sheen of sweat on her golden forearms. Every time she hit a winner she would smack her lips like someone enjoying a sweet. Korolyov watched like a proud father. Afterward he sat with us in the shade. He called us his little swallows. He singled out Solovyova for special praise, reminding her that it was harder to be the backup than the primary pilot. I could detect her inner refusal to tear up.
During our academic examinations all of the finalists scored in the excellent category except me. Korolyov attributed this to my having been too nervous. It was decided that since I would have done better otherwise, there was no need to retest me. On May 14, Solovyova and I were rated Most Ready to Fly, and a week later the selections were announced. We stood before the panel and then she turned to shake my hand. She had a way of inspecting me that reminded me of auctions. She had the characteristics that give Tartar women their reputation for beauty, especially the hair. I asked why she looked sad and she answered so they could hear, “I'm not sad, but serious, as always.”