“Yuri. I can’t.”
“You can,” he said calmly. “I’ll be here.”
She made a hopeless little grimace and fled out the door.
A shimmer of domestic perfume remained. He assumed the perfume was domestic—where would she get foreign perfume?—and resolved to send her a bottle of French perfume from Moscow, after his flight, if he remembered.
He rested against the towels and revisited the feeling of her body in his arms and the taste of her lips and tongue. Then he entertained the conceit that the storeroom was the Vostok capsule itself, poised to plunge into the tender blue of the sky. He paced the room, which was illuminated only by the stray outside light, and imagined himself floating weightless to the ceiling, imagined himself pressed against the linen as he accelerated away from the earth, and finally, again, imagined himself pressed against Tania.
Marshak was still in the infirmary. Yuri knew that he should return to the cottage before his absence there or his presence here was discovered, but it didn’t seem right, not after getting this far. It would have done violence to his nature.
Sergei Pavlovich Korolev had been arrested early in the morning of June 27, 1938. Precisely one month later, fulfilling a prosecutorial norm, he confessed to “subversion in a new field of technology” and was sentenced to ten years of hard labor. In the unbroken sub-zero temperatures of a Kolyma gold mine, he worked without adequate clothing, food, or shelter. Most of his teeth fell out and a fractured jaw, incurred during his interrogation, failed to mend properly.
Five months after his arrival in Kolyma, he was summoned back to Moscow for a rehearing of his case, but no transportation was provided. A truck driver took him the 150 kilometers to Magadan, demanding his sweater as fare. In Magadan, Korolev learned that the port was already frozen and that he had missed the last boat of the season. Living in rough, makeshift shelters, he worked as a laborer and shoe repairer to keep himself alive through the remainder of the winter. He finally managed to sail to Vladivostok, terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, but on the journey from there back to Moscow he became disoriented and was no longer able to stem the blood flowing from his mouth. He had scurvy. With deep bruises pooling beneath the soft surfaces of his swollen body, like the lava seas that had once congealed beneath the skin of the moon, he was taken off the train at Khabarovsk.
Outside the station he lay for hours on a cold stone bench, spitting teeth and blood. At some point in the early morning, two militiamen checked his documentation, assuring themselves that he had a travel warrant into the netherworld, and they left him alone. Korolev closed his eyes but didn’t sleep. And then after a long while he became aware that his carrion body was being sniffed. It was not an entirely unpleasant sensation: there was a kind of warmth attached to the scrutiny. Through his muddlement he discerned that these were not staccato canine inspirations, as he might have expected, derelict in this remote province, but something much more considered.
When Korolev opened his eyes, the deeply creviced face of an old man in a ratty fur cap occupied his field of view. The man’s Asiatic features were surmounted by a large, bulbous Russian nose, from which grew many thick, dirty hairs. But the whites of his eyes were absolutely clear, like two mechanical instruments that Korolev might have worked on in another life. For a long time the old man gazed into his face, in judgment, thought Korolev, who had been denied a trial in Moscow. And then the old man roughly lifted him by the arms and pulled him from the bench to a thin, leafless tree rising off a berm alongside the train station.
The old man deposited him there, his back against the birch, his face opposite the sun that had just crested over the morning haze into an empty sky.
Korolev did not know for how long he was abandoned, but it was long enough for him to become intensely aware of the heat of the sun that fell upon his closed eyelids and face and dried the blood that had soaked into his beard. The sun was a star, less than two hundred million kilometers away, almost close enough to touch. The solar radiation suffused through his tissue. After a winter in which he had witnessed a human death nearly every day, in which his own death had seemed to hover before him just beyond the fog of his breath, the solar heat was a promise redeemed. And it was now, with his eyes still shut, that an idea began to incubate. The idea was nothing grand, nothing ostensibly scientific. It had something to do with an awareness of his determination that was encased within his soft, battered self like a shard of granite.
When he opened his eyes again, a butterfly was dancing in front of them, orange and violet, in a spastic, unballistic flight. It was a gash of color against the anticolor landscape: the black-spotted scraps of melting snow, the concrete buildings weeping dull brown rust at their joints, stones and pieces of rotten timber strewn among prehistoric construction debris, a freight car whose sides had been eaten away by decades of neglect, a smashed toy balsa airplane abandoned in the mud, the mud bubbling gray and oily, the weeds poking out of the mud in rashes, the trash littered around a bin at the edge of a wall. But the butterfly flew above it all, improbably alive. Korolev stared until it dwindled out of sight. He was, in the end, a romantic fellow; we are a romantic people.
And then for the first time in days he truly slept, the kind of sleep we pursue and capture in our dry, strawmattressed beds, amid the babylike gurgles of steam heat. No dreams visited him as he reclined with his back to the tree.
He awoke with a start hours later, the sun still hard in his face, but now there was a man’s finger in his ruined mouth. It was a thick finger, strong and coarse. The old man was stooping before him, a brown earthen pot clutched to his ragged coat. He removed his finger, dipped it in the pot and pushed it back into Korolev’s mouth.
As he ran his finger along Korolev’s gums, Korolev realized that he no longer possessed teeth. But the firm press against his bleeding, open gums didn’t hurt.
“This is kolba,” the man said, with a high, almost girlish voice. “You will live.”
Korolev submitted to the old man’s ministrations, too weak to repel them. The taste of the ointment was similar to garlic’s, which was not unwelcome after a week in which he had tasted nothing but blood. Korolev closed his eyes again to shade them from the glare of the sun. A warm washcloth gently massaged his face and beard. He kept his eyes shut a moment longer. When he opened them, the man was gone.
The bleeding had stopped and Korolev now felt well enough to stand. He staggered off and later that day found a doss in a small barrackslike dormitory at the edge of the city. He stayed there for a week, near the stove, resting and making notes on scraps of paper. In that single week, he recalled and improved six designs that he had worked on before his arrest. While other souls in transit bustled around him, Korolev considered the technical problems inherent in flight above the earth’s atmosphere, particularly involving the ascent trajectory and in-flight guidance. He became convinced that human flight beyond the exosphere was possible, even inevitable, even obligatory. He jotted notes on the lift requirements for an expedition to the surface of the moon. Alongside a rough diagram of the launch vehicle, he wrote the word go!
Then he realized that these sketches were either currently state secrets or would be in the future. If they were found on his person, he would be further incriminated. He burned them in the stove when no one was looking; then he dreaded that someone had been looking, or would somehow recover the embers. He spit over his shoulder, the first time he had done so since childhood. There was surprising, unshameful comfort to be found in this act, at least momentarily. The evil that worked on our lives, producing the world’s actual, quotidian brutality, was something magical; to spit or to cross oneself was to pretend to a magic of one’s own.