I realized that Filin had walked completely past me, completely past the worried administrator and nurse. A moment later Cherbakov emerged, immediately lighting a cigarette. His hands shook even more.
Finally Katayev glided out, shaking his head and snapping his fingers to the administrator. “My coat.”
“Where are you going?”
“Back to my cottage.”
“What about your patient?” the administrator pleaded, with a sidelong glance at me. “Aren’t you going to operate?”
“I don’t operate on dead men.”
Then he plucked the cigarette from Cherbakov’s shaking hands, and walked away.
2
State Security
After the disturbing scene with the doctors concerning the fate of Sergei Korolev, I moved around Filin’s hospital room, bundling up his papers. “Should I take these back to the office?”
“Yes,” he said, numbly, like a man who had been struck.
“Would you like me to call a doctor for you?”
“Those butchers! No!” For a moment he looked lost. “Yuri, what are we going to do without him?”
“Is he really dead?” It was a stupid thing to say, but that’s what came out of my mouth.
“You heard the big specialist.” Filin lowered himself to his bed, making himself even smaller. “And he wasn’t even sixty!”
“Who will tell the people at the bureau?”
“Not me,” he said, swinging his legs up on the bed and lying flat on his back, arms over his face. “His family is around somewhere. It will be up to them, and the Central Committee.” Every facet of Korolev’s life and work was a State secret. “Fifty-nine years old!”
“You’re sure you’ll be all right? Is your family coming to visit you?” I knew Filin had a wife and son, though I had never met them.
“They’ll be coming to get me out of this place tonight, if I have anything to say about it!” Suddenly he reached out, took my hand, and looked into my eyes. “You were my witness, Yuri.”
“Yes, I was right there—”
“There are going to be a lot of questions. I’ll have to answer them, and you have to stand by me.”
I had no idea of what he was talking about. “Yes.”
It wasn’t until I drove away from the hospital that I realized the significance of Filin’s obsession with Korolev’s age. He, too, was fifty-nine.
Back in Kaliningrad, after a miserably slow drive, I returned the car and carried Filin’s papers upstairs. It was getting dark — on those short winter days the sun would set at four in the afternoon. The main administration building seemed deserted, a disappointment: I was hoping to see what Korolev’s death would mean. But the news had not spread, and I certainly wasn’t going to be its messenger.
I returned to Bauman via the train and the metro, and a cold walk in the dark to what would be a lonely weekend, since Marina had gone off to visit her parents in Orel.
I shared a flat on October Street with three other students. One of my roommates, a dark, good-looking Georgian named Lev Tselauri, and I went out to a movie on Saturday night, a film about the Great Patriotic War — not that we cared: It was just a way to get out of the two-room flat. The rest of the weekend we studied, since we both had an exam on Monday morning.
There was no mention of Korolev’s death — or existence, for that matter — on Saturday, not in the papers or on the radio.
Sunday morning, however, the headlines in Pravda and Izvestiva proclaimed the death of the great hero. Not on the front page, but inside, filling pages three and four. It was Lev who showed me. “Is this where you’re working? At Korolev’s bureau?” he said.
Technically, my place of work was a secret, identified only by a mailbox number. But Lev knew that my particular mailbox dealt with manned spacecraft and interplanetary probes. It was pointless to deny it, and I didn’t.
“That means we’re rivals.” Lev had told me weeks ago of his assignment to a different design bureau, this one known only as Number 52 and concentrating on, I assumed, missiles or aircraft. This was the first I’d heard that my country had a second bureau for spacecraft.
Rivals.
On Monday, Lev and I caught a bus on Spartak Street, hoping to connect with one moving north and west on the Ring Road to Leningrad Prospect. Our exams would take place at the Ilyushin aircraft bureau. The bus was a better choice than the metro, given the time we would have to spend walking between stations. And even during the October 1964 coup, when Khrushchev was forcibly retired and tanks could be seen at most downtown intersections, the buses still ran on time.
Today, however, with the temperatures below freezing and half a meter of snow on the ground, the bus simply stopped in front of the Dynamo Stadium on Leningrad Prospect.
I was jammed in the back, standing next to Lev, when we heard someone up front say, “Christ, what’s wrong now?”
“Roadblock,” the driver said.
Lev shouted, “Get your fat ass out there and tell them to open it!” He grinned with the knowledge that the driver would never know who had said this.
I looked out the window and immediately saw the reason for the delay. A stream of military trucks was flowing out of the old Central Airport and turning south onto Leningrad Prospect, presumably headed for Red Square, less than three kilometers away. First built when the Tsar was in power and now surrounded by military design bureaus, airplane factories like Ilyushin and Sukhoi, as well as the sprawling Moscow Aviation Institute, Central was all but useless as an airport now. Its proximity to Red Square made it a good place to land troops for parades, however.
“Has there been another coup?” Lev said.
I finally realized the cause of the traffic jam. “It’s Korolev’s funeral. We could be stuck here all morning.” Polished green trucks rolled past, with parade troops huddled in their open backs. An occasional Zil or Mercedes limousine roared down the VIP lane in the center of the prospect. I was beginning to see how important Korolev had been.
“Oh, yes, your great genius is dead. You should transfer to my organization right now if you want to put the first man on the Moon.”
“Your organization.”
Lev gave me a sly look, then touched a finger to the tip of his nose. “Number 52. Ask around.”
Suddenly the bus lurched back to life, to scattered, sarcastic applause.
With the delay, however, we were late for our exams. Strangely, our proctor was more frantic than we were. “Ribko, what are you trying to do to me?”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. “A man was just here looking for you. State Security.” Typically for a Russian, the proctor made it seem as though I was doubly at fault, not only for the tardy bus, but because I had kept a security official from handing out some no doubt well-deserved punishment.
“Do I take the test or not?”
“Yes. He said he’d be back, so don’t mess around.” He actually slapped the papers down in front of me. Lev gave me a sympathetic look, and took a seat as far away from me as he could.
I was too shaken — State Security, for me? — to concentrate on my test at first. But my five years of training at Bauman paid off. Pretty soon I was solving equations faster than I could write the answers.
I returned the test before the time was up. The proctor accepted it, then nodded me toward a door where a tall State Security type in glasses and black overcoat waited. “Your Uncle Vladimir wants to see you.”
My father had told me once that Uncle Vladimir did not work out of the dreaded Lubiyanka but from the fourth floor of the building behind the Belorussia Station. That is where my escort delivered me.