“Tania?” he whispered.
A giggle was brutally repressed.
He whispered her name again. After a long pause one of the girls, Ludmilla, came near. She moved tentatively, reaching out to the room’s fixtures for guidance. She couldn’t see in the dark. He rotated his body in apposition to hers.
“Yes,” she replied in a toneless whisper, pressing against him.
He whispered Tania’s name again and kissed Ludmilla, who was nearly a head taller than Tania. Another titter rattled around the corner of the storeroom as Yuri prolonged the kiss, grinding against her. The charade wouldn’t last much longer. His hands gently but swiftly probed as much as they could, acquiring a full tactile picture of her legs, breasts, and buttocks.
Ludmilla hadn’t expected all this, it was a bit too much, and she was almost pulling away, but not quite. Her mouth tasted minty, as if it had just dissolved a sweet. She was a long and angular girl, not as soft a ride as the others perhaps, but very much all right.
Someone passed behind them, on the way to the light switch. Yuri’s right hand squeezed hard between Ludmilla’s legs and she gasped just as the room was flooded with light and hilarity. The two other nurses, chief nurse Zinia and the one whose name he didn’t know, were laughing, laughing, laughing and trying to smother their laughter in piles of tears-and-mascarastained linen.
“Shhh,” Ludmilla said. She laughed too, a kind of dry, weighted heave that Yuri recognized as forced. Her face had gone blotchy. “Marshak will hear us.”
Yuri smirked and feigned embarrassment. He had quickly disengaged himself from the nurse and acted as if he were still blinded by light and surprise. But he didn’t want to amuse them so much that their laughter would escape the storeroom.
“The false bride,” he conceded. This was one of our customs, to present the bridegroom with an obvious impostor before the ceremony. Yuri knew it well. Only four years earlier, on the day of his marriage to Valya, he had entered a room where her twelve-year-old sister had waited in a white veil, much to the witnesses’ amusement. When he removed the veil, the poor girl had suddenly spouted tears. The pretense had been too exciting and had brushed too close to her secret: she loved him too.
Now he said, “What have you done with Tania?”
The nurses responded with every possible expression of stifled amusement. They snorted, snickered, covered their faces, held their sides, and fell against each other. Yuri studied their involuntary contortions; in the future he would become a connoisseur of such lovely, revealing disfigurement.
Only Ludmilla held herself back. She was a country girl perhaps no more than eighteen years of age, with a head of thick, copper red curls and a wide, round face that had still not lost its flush.
“What are you, a Hun?” Zinia said, faking contempt. “Are you going to carry away our most beautiful girl on horseback? Are we civilized people? Are we Russians? There are a few niceties and proprieties to observe.”
“Zinia, please. I have to get back to the cottage.”
“Go then. We won’t stop you.”
Tania’s demurral, Grigoriev’s buzzer, Zinia’s prank: these were all signs that he should return to the cottage now. It was not like Yuri to resist portents and omens. But it was one thing to crawl into a window, another thing entirely to crawl out of it, especially in front of these girls. And Ludmilla’s embrace had only quickened his appetite.
“Where is she?”
Zinia grimaced. “We have a few questions for you.”
“For God’s sake, Marshak’s going to find me! They’ll fly Titov!”
Zinia took a notebook from her pocket. Ludmilla and the other girl sniggered. They gazed upon him with feverish eyes.
“What is the significance of this date? 18 September 1939.”
These prenuptial questions were another custom, one of our traditions. How we loved our customs, how we drew a skein of folk belief, tradition and superstition around the most prosaic events of our lives. We would never give them up.
“Tania’s day of birth?”
“That was too easy. What does this number represent? One hundred fifty-six.”
“Her height,” Yuri replied. “In centimeters.”
“Forty-eight?”
“Um, her weight, in kilos.”
“Two thousand and sixty-four.”
“Zinia, I don’t know. Just tell me where she is!”
Zinia had a laugh as frothy as steamed milk. “Look how he’s dying for it! Girls, have you ever seen anything so pathetic? It’s the distance from Baikonur to the village of Kozino, in versts.”
Yuri smiled at this. We had stopped using versts before the Revolution.
“What’s Kozino?” Yuri asked.
“The place where Tania was born, lieutenant! One should know, after such a long courtship… You must pay vykup.” Literally: ransom money. It was the custom to pay a token sum for every incorrectly answered question.
“I’m not carrying a single kopeck.”
“Then what kind of lover are you?”
“Honestly, girls. Where I’m going, there’s not a thing to buy.”
“Just like Tyuratum.” That was the name of the old Kazakh town outside the cosmodrome. “Has space been collectivized too? Well, go away then.”
Yuri briefly flushed at Zinia’s political brazenness. “But I have something. A kiss for each of you.”
Zinia snorted. “A kiss! He thinks his kiss is better than money.” She grabbed at his trousers. “It’s going to take more than a kiss.”
He pulled away. “It’s all I can give.”
Zinia said, “All right then. Me first. You call that a kiss? And how do you kiss your mother?”
Yuri grinned. “Wait a minute, I have some questions for you, some numbers to identify. Eight kilometers per second. Three hundred twenty-seven kilometers. One hour forty-eight minutes.”
Now it was Zinia’s turn to color. Her expression became serious. The smiles on the faces of the other nurses also faded, though not the shine in their eyes. Zinia said, “Lieutenant, I can only guess at what they mean. I’m sorry, we’re not cleared for this technical information.”
He nodded soberly. “Better not guess then. Here’s one last number, another date: April 12, 1961. I believe you won’t forget it.”
Zinia said softly, “There’s a girl in Room 3 who’s hoping to circle April 11 on her calendar.”
“Is Marshak in her office?”
“She should be. She said she would take a nap.”
Yuri kissed Zinia again, once on each cheek, and tenderly embraced her. Then he kissed Ludmilla and the other nurse. These were chaste, serious kisses; not romantic, almost religious. A new sense of the following day descended upon them, as if the shuttered storeroom had been lit by the dawn. Yuri turned away and opened the door. In the hallway he stopped to listen. The infirmary was still, as soundless as space promised to be. Room 3 was down the hall, away from Grigoriev’s.
Yuri had seen the Chief Designer’s plans for a spacecraft of the future, a vessel whose great domed living and research quarters would be separated from its nuclear power supply by a long cylindrical axis. The infirmary now offered itself as a model for something similar, a primitive space station, dim, silent, and remote. His softsoled shoes were drawn to the floor of the hallway not by gravity, but by the infirmary’s centrifugal spin through the void. And why not? A man of the future, he would take the girls into the future with him.