15 June 1963 Afternoon
That first night when the male and female candidates were brought together, I just stood there with my eyes closed, immersed in the different voices. Ponomaryova, an engineer and city girl with some of the starved attractiveness of the old cinema stars, carried on about how much she admired the children of peasants, who got by without adults, the adults laboring in the fields all day while the children became the emperors and explorers of their own world.
I fit in poorly from the very beginning. “Let's go to the cinema!” the other women would say when we had a free moment. “I can't,” I'd tell them. But I wanted to so much I could have cried. Why did I do such things? It was hard to watch how much less they came to like me than each other. They were the sort of people who always had stories to tell because something was always happening to them. They looked at me like I was a horse in a stall. Soon we became so petty we stopped handing each other cups during afternoon tea.
And even so, Solovyova had befriended me. We'd taken walks. We found an overgrown pond we christened the Night Witches' Hideout.
But during the mixed gatherings we were more diffident, and I gravitated to Bykovsky He'd traveled on foreign expeditions and told stories about tropical forests and typhoons. We took our own walks around the grounds. “Did they tell you about city boys, down on the farm?” Ponomaryova asked one night as we lay in our bunks. Solovyova was turned to the wall. The other women simpered. I answered with a joke, telling myself my conscience was clear. But the truth was that a new reality was coming into being for me. Waking up each morning I felt an astonishing absence of emptiness, something I hadn't gotten used to. He was becoming a pressing concern, always present somewhere. Early one morning I gazed at Solovyova's sleeping hand trailing on the floor like a vine and remembered him remarking that he loved my dozing because it seemed such a self-aware form of sleep. And I thought I had to have this love so I'd no longer be so endlessly alone. I could feel it making me new.
After Gagarin's flight, the Kremlin had been flooded with letters from women asking to be considered for spaceflight. Soviet women believed they belonged with men in this greatest of all adventures. Because of the ejection requirements, only those who belonged to parachute clubs were part of the initial selection, after which there was further screening for medical fitness, age, size, and weight. Interviews then took that pool from fifty-eight to five. Those who flew would become heroes. Those who didn't would remain unknown.
We were told to inform our families that we'd been selected for a special parachuting team. We were tested for exposure to vibration, noise, pressure, extremes of temperature, and long-term isolation. Various tests exposed various weaknesses. Yerkina was eliminated during an isolation test when she removed her boots and ate only two helpings of rations in three days. Ponomaryova, who'd been so pleased to be the only pilot and engineer, reacted badly to the centrifuge. She complained afterward that we might as well have passenger cosmonauts, since the individual was the insignificant recipient of the collective's work. Sour grapes. I did everything that was asked of me, keeping an eye on Bykovsky advancing through the men's ranks beside me. “Look at the level of your absorption!” Solovyova exclaimed at one point. “It's like a warped version of intellectual activity.” I tried to emulate the way he applied his mind to his business, refusing to dwell on the relentless instants that were bearing everything away. Separations were like return visits from nearby desolation, the way my father's death would come to me some minutes after I awoke, even years after it happened. Was something good or bad news? It began to depend on how it influenced my seeing Bykovsky.
“You know, soon we'll never see one another again,” Solovyova said from the bathroom, apropos of my distress. She pointed out that our menstrual cycles had fallen into synchrony, which happened at times when women lived together. I told her that I felt ready to accept whatever lay ahead. She threw up her hands and left the room.
15 June 1963 Night
Meeting with the Command Staff followed by dinner. Koro-lyov seemed well pleased with what he calls my preternatural calm. Kamanin remarked upon my appetite. Poor Solovyova: all through the meal I could see her thinking, If I spill the beans about her, maybe then I could go … But of course she can't. Perhaps none of us could. We've all long since understood that the only accepted way to compete was to outpace one another in cooperation and teamwork.
The R-7 has already begun its departure from the main assembly shed. It runs the length of its hydraulic platform, which is mounted on a rail car. Korolyov is dawdling alongside it in the dark like a nervous suitor. It's nosing along extremely slowly to minimize the vibration damage. Maintenance personnel poke at it, fussing and adjusting. Around dawn it will be brought upright on the pad, the service towers raised, the umbilical connections joined.
There's no question of sleep, though again we're each trying not to move. Solovyova lies on her back, gazing upward in the moonlight as if the ceiling were an affliction.
When I was twelve I told my father I was bored, and he answered, “I hate people who always say, ‘I'm bored!’” “Well, you'll never hear me say it again,” I told him. And he never did. I took long walks. I spent afternoons jumping over the runoff from storm drains. On dark winter mornings I left for school early, my steps resounding softly in the empty hallways. It was the usual sort of district schooclass="underline" pitiful academic standards, teachers with ungrammatical speech, fistfights between classes. But I preferred it to home. I was beginning to register that I shared many attributes with regular people. Two spirits wrestled inside me: one was the girl who wanted only to please, while the other sought to dedicate her life to something larger. Why couldn't I be someone else? Why shouldn't I imagine myself contented? I resolved to train to become someone I would like. On my thirteenth birthday I told my mother that I would probably become an arctic explorer, and she answered that she always found my conceited-ness appealing.
Korolyov like a boy on a first date appeared with flowers and a folded typescript a few minutes before we were scheduled to turn out our lights. Solovyova had just finished her toilet.
“Is this our pep talk, Chief?” she teased. Korolyov smiled to himself, riffling his typescript. “It's an inspirational talk from the Chief Designer himself,” he said. We sat, and he stood at the foot of our beds and read what he'd prepared. We were both touched by his awkwardness and care. He reminded us that this was why we had foregone marriage and children. He reminded us that he had asked us to be morally prepared for spaceflight. When it came to this kind of endeavor, woe to the egoists and hedonists, he said. For there was no one so frail and defenseless.
We both waited. “What a strange, strange country we live in,” Solovyova remarked. He chose not to respond before going on: this was not so much a culmination as a beginning, he said. He wouldn't sleep a wink tonight, but he was sure that we would. “Thank you, Chief,” Solovyova answered.