“But if we mistake the mistakes of the previous generation, then perhaps we right them. Maybe we’re exactly like the people that the people we tried to emulate tried to emulate.”
Nadya left his side and sat on the end of the bed, directly on top of his jacket.
“These beds are terrible,” she said.
“It doesn’t help that you’re sitting on my medals.”
“I have more than you.” She ran her hand along the line of them. They clicked together with a pathetic, tinny sound. She shifted on the bed, but did not move off Leonid’s jacket. She grasped one of her medals in particular. “This one is from the French.”
“Ignatius lets you wear it?”
“I doubt there’s anyone who can identify all of them. I received a ribbon once as a child. If I still had it, I would wear it, too.”
The door opened and Ignatius entered without knocking.
“Yes, please,” said Leonid, “come in! Come in!”
“It’s time to go.” She glanced around the room, pausing at the open armoire. “Where’s your jacket?”
Nadya raised herself off the bed just enough to slide the jacket out from under her. She held it up for Ignatius to see. Ignatius took the jacket, shook it once like fluffing a pillow, and tossed it across the room to Leonid. The medals clicked together.
UP CLOSE, GEORGIU-DEZH’S sobor rose to an impressive height, the main golden dome visible only from the underside, its point implied but unseen. The four smaller domes were set half as high in the ordinal directions. A gray base surrounded the whole church like a fortification. The walls above it shone so white in the sun that Leonid had to squint when he faced them. Out front stood a statue of Lenin, upturned hand held out as if in offering. Leonid had seen old men in a Paris park posed the same way, feeding stale bits of bread to birds from their palms.
A panel truck, left over from the war and as old as Leonid at least, was parked in front of the church. The drab army green had been painted over with a mural taking up the whole side. The mural depicted, in the flat style typical of propaganda posters, a rocket launching into space, arcing back toward the center of the frame. From the bottom corner emerged the figure of a woman, lifting the smaller figure of a man to the heavens in the red wake of the rocket.
Nadya regarded the truck from a distance, and then stepped close, tracing the lines of the illustration only centimeters away with her eyes.
“Giorgi’s paintings are better,” she said.
Ignatius ran her hand along the surface of the truck. “These things are produced in factories. A line of painters, each with a single brush and an individual color. The first painter paints his marks, and then the next. The whole process takes only minutes.”
She flicked her fingernail against the metal siding. The interior of the truck resounded with a long, lone ping.
“I don’t understand art,” she said.
The back doors of the truck sprung open from the inside, and a woman’s face poked out, perfectly parallel to the ground.
“What was that?” asked the woman.
“We’re here,” said Ignatius.
The woman’s head pulled straight back into the truck. A moment later she scrambled out into the open. Her hair was a plaited mess, strands tangled so intricately it almost seemed intentional. Her coat, dusty gray, bore wrinkles all across it, as if it had only just then been unballed from the back of a closet.
“Is it already time?” she asked. “I slept in the truck last night.”
“It’s almost evening,” said Ignatius. “Apparently you slept all night and day.”
“Astronomers use the term night how you use day, and likewise the inverse. My work begins when the sun sets. My day is marked by stars.”
The astronomer looked behind Ignatius to where Nadya and Leonid stood, and took in a deep breath. Her mouth dropped more and more open. She stumbled forward, bumping into Ignatius and then around her. The astronomer raised her hand, fingers outstretched in an unnatural way, like in the ancient portraits Leonid had seen in the Louvre. The astronomer rested her hand against Nadya’s face, letting her fingers conform to the contours of her chin and cheek. The astronomer smiled, showing a set of yellowed teeth.
“And now the stars have come to me,” she said. “Tell me, what did you see?”
Nadya grasped the astronomer’s wrist between the tip of her finger and the fat of her thumb and drew the astronomer’s hand down.
“I saw the same as you,” said Nadya, “only closer.”
Ignatius smiled at that.
“Come, astronomer,” she said. “It’s nearing dark. Introduce us to your planetarium before the crowds arrive.”
The sun had dipped low enough to shoot the sky through with orange. The white walls of the church went from blinding to warm, like hot glowing coals. The domes, shimmering before like agitated water, now seemed coated in melted glass.
“Yes, yes, of course,” said the astronomer.
She scuttled back to the truck, and turned a hand crank sprouting from the frame beside the back doors. The clacks and clanks of chains echoed from inside. The whole muraled side of the truck, hinged at the top, began to flip open. The astronomer kept cranking until the panel was at a forty-five degree angle above vertical, like an awning hung upside down. The underside of the panel was painted flat black. Leonid thought that the effect was not much different from the factory-produced image on the opposite side.
The astronomer began to unload items from the back of the truck. She set up a telescope—similar to the one Giorgi would pull out on clear evenings at Star City, but even larger—perched atop a tripod of thick wood. Next came a short stick, which Leonid guessed was simply a pointer. And lastly, the astronomer lifted out a small black dome and set it on the ground under the middle of the open panel. A cable ran from the back of the device to the truck, where it disappeared through the wall into the cab. The only thing left in the back was a bedroll, still crumpled from the astronomer’s afternoon somnolence.
“There!” exclaimed the astronomer, clapping her hands as if crashing cymbals. “All done.”
“That’s it?” asked Ignatius.
“What more do you want?”
“I had expected something… more elaborate.”
Nadya looked through the telescope’s eyepiece, but did not adjust the focus. All she could have seen was the blurry sky, now sunk to purple. She turned the telescope to face Ignatius.
“What are you doing?” asked Ignatius.
“Your surprise is a rare and precious thing. I want to see it up close.”
Leonid laughed, and then kept laughing and could not stop. The others watched him until he quieted.
“Shut it, Leonid,” said Ignatius, her face stuck halfway between scowl and smile.
Leonid convulsed with a few final laughs, but held them silent and inside. He kept staring at Ignatius and kept smiling until she turned away.
“What’s next?” asked Ignatius.
The astronomer answered, “Now we wait for dark.”
THE FIRST of the crowds arrived even before the sun finished setting. These were farmers and their families, come into town specifically for the demonstration. They wore clothes the color of the earth, the same color as their deep-tanned skin. Each had donned one article or accessory that looked fancy and brand new, as if they had divided the household’s one nice outfit among the whole family. A bright white shirt here, a necktie there, a scarf, a sash, a watch colored artificially gold. These farming families stayed huddled close together. The youngest among them, children with the gnarled hands of the elderly, stared up at the church and the other tall buildings and never lowered their gazes to the familiar ground.