In the future, every male cosmonaut would urinate on the side of the bus that brought him to the launch pad: Titov, Leonov, Komarov, Romanenko, Tsibliyev… It would become one of our customs. Yuri zipped up and joined the Chief Designer. Some of the Chief Designer’s color had returned. He was still anxious but appeared to be relieved and even surprised that the morning had come. He again gazed at the checklist, studying it as if it contained the secrets of the inner workings of the universe.
They walked to the elevator. At the foot of the open elevator shaft, about twenty flight technicians greeted Yuri with sustained applause. It echoed like the sound of buckshot on the flats around the launch complex. Yuri shook their hands and accepted more bouquets. He cleared his throat and then spoke in a quiet, passionate voice, drawing the workers to him. He thanked them, told them they were embarking together on a great adventure. “Right now, all my life seems to be one wonderful instant,” he said, looking at the notes the Chief Designer had composed on the bus. “Everything I have ever done, everything I have ever experienced, was for the sake of this minute.”
The elevator began the first stage of his ascent into space. Although the cabin rose no more quickly than an ordinary Moscow lift, he soon felt himself enter the rarefied, light-soaked regions of the sky. Beyond the passing red girders that supported the launch gantry, the cleared countryside spread out like a huge plate. It was hard to believe that there was even more to the world than this. At the top of the shaft, in the clean room adjacent to the open hatch of the Vostok capsule, more technicians awaited him, their faces luminous. He deposited his bouquets in a line of vases that had been left there for him. After some preliminary tests on his suit, he was helped into the spacecraft. Leads were hooked into the radio and telemetry jacks. This was followed by repeated radio checks with the Chief Designer, code-named Dawn. Yuri was code-named Cedar. The Chief Designer was the last person he saw as the hatch was shut. Music was piped in to relax him, the song he had heard the night before, “What Moves My Heart So.” All was quiet as the Chief Designer, now watching the rocket through a periscope inside the launch control bunker, announced by radio their passage through the checklist. He asked Yuri again how he was feeling and how well did he hear him. Yuri said he was feeling fine, he heard him fine. The start key was put in position. The blow valves were opened and then the fuel valves. The cables to the Vostok dropped away. Yuri said he was ready. He reported hearing the valves working. At precisely seven minutes past the hour, the Chief Designer gave the order for ignition. “Let’s go!” Yuri cried. That too, would be repeated by each of the men and women who were to follow, another of our customs of departure.
Budyonnovsk
БуДеHHOВСК
Telephone
A woman in a small provincial town sits at a table in a sweltering kitchen, a bruise rising under her right eye. The woman is silent, the muscles in her face slack. Her hands are clasped on the table, which is bare save for a beige-and-brown telephone. She stares into the table. In another room children are watching a video paced by a strident, tumultuous sound track. The heat of the day smells like blood.
A man sits across from the woman. Sweat trickles along the side of his face. His shirt is drenched and he is keenly aware of its odor. When he lifts his arm, his skin pulls at the table, leaving a pale, glistening shadow. He repeatedly opens and closes his fist, amazed at this simple motor activity; then he conceives that this unpremeditated gesture may somehow be taken for remorse. He stops. Blood pounds in his temples, flickering his vision. And in fact he is touched by the first cold caress of remorse.
The telephone between them bleats twice. They pretend not to hear it. The man suspects some sort of trick. His remorse evaporates. The electrical impulse that induces the noise has been almost certainly generated by his wife’s mother. Every peal raises the temperature in the kitchen another degree. Neither the man nor the woman makes a move, as if their argument is about who will answer the telephone. Anger clenches the man’s heart. The structure of time now seems constructed entirely from the knells of the telephone, and in the moments between them the world halts its rotation. With a quick, urgent gesture, the man grabs the receiver and brings it to his face.
“Yeah.”
There’s a brief silence at the other end of the line—no, it isn’t his mother-in-law, the silence and subsequent throat-clearing is masculine.
“This is Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.”
“You’ve dialed the wrong number,” the man says. “You want to speak to Basayev. The Chechens have crossed the border and shot up the town. They’re holding hundreds of hostages in the hospital. They’re demanding safe passage back to Chechnya. The hospital is five thirty-seven fifty-four; we’re five thirty-seven forty-five. People are always making this mistake. We get calls in the middle of the night—drug overdoses, heart attacks, traffic accidents. It’s a nuisance, sir.”
“No, Vasily Yegorevich, I haven’t made a mistake. I want to speak with you.”
The man doesn’t answer. He wishes for a cigarette and suddenly recalls another grievance: there are no goddamned cigarettes in the apartment.
“First, we must be calm,” Chernomyrdin says. His voice is gruff but sonorous, resonating reasonableness and dependability.
“I am calm.”
“Let’s resolve these matters peacefully, without resorting to violent measures.”
“Fine.”
“So, that’s agreed. Now, Vasily Yegorevich, I propose that we begin by discussing the situation in its entirety…”
The situation. Vasya is overwhelmed by the enormity taken in by this single word. It’s like a massive cloud that has floated into the kitchen through the open window. No, it’s like a balloon expanding within the walls of the apartment, crushing against him, displacing the air. He pounds his fists against its sides. Choked with anger and frustration, he usually flees to the dusty, frozen, or muddy street alongside the market—no, not today, today bodies lie in the crimsoned gravel—where he passes the tables and kiosks, circles back, lingers, loiters, finds a friend or an acquaintance and, eventually, yes, a bottle comes unscrewed. And then back in the flat, in the permanently damp bed, there’s a moment in nearly every passage through the night in which the alcohol he’s consumed during the day has exited his system but the natural sleep-inducing chemicals in his blood have not yet sufficiently accumulated—and he wakes in the dark, desperate to reason, fight, or imagine his way out of this trap, this box, this grave, this situation.
Cigarettes
Start with the cigarettes. Vasya buys them, Ira smokes them, perhaps two packs in a single day, less the three or four she sullenly parts with at his demand. At times she’s enshrouded in smoke, completely protected from the outside world, barely able to see it. She takes no pleasure in the cigarettes, smoking as mindlessly as she cooks, cleans, and talks. Two packs of Bond cost nearly as much as a liter of White Eagle. But she has somehow computed that a bottle is equal to a certain percentage of his weekly earnings and thus a measurable theft of food from their children’s mouths. Despite the softness of her logic—whatever the drink costs would be a percentage of his weekly earnings, and why isn’t the pack of cigarettes a percentage? and the children aren’t hungry anyway, just filthy—he knows that she’s right or close enough to right to trivialize his objections, which he cannot in any case articulate. And he usually buys her Russian-made Kazbeks, never Bond. But then, she herself has no weekly earnings from her so-called job in the paper factory, which has been closed for months.