“It was in this way that when Khmelnytsky finally arrived at the port near Subotiv, his mother waited for him on the dock. Khmelnytsky’s story had outpaced him up the river. His mother had known for days already that he was coming home.”
Star City, Russia—1964
Leonid awoke to sunlight glaring through his window. In his years at Star City he had never slept much past dawn, and during the winter he rose well before the sun. At first he thought he was in another hotel. The preceding month had been an endless string of them, visiting every planetarium in Russia, searching every trash heap in every city for a dog. In a way, he had become used to waking up in unfamiliar surroundings. Now he recognized his own room but at the same time did not. Spots he had always taken for shadows turned out to be water stains on the walls. In one corner, dust piled thick and dark.
The search for dogs had yielded nothing. It seemed there was no other dog as pure white as Kasha. None as small and strange as that little mutant Byelka. Leonid suspected that Byelka would not survive even a single night on the street. The rats would eat him alive. He could have no stray counterpart. The only place to find another like him was the dacha of a party official. The size of one’s dog seemed inversely proportional to one’s political power.
A knock came on his door, and it opened before Leonid could answer. The lock had never worked. Giorgi bounded in, yanked the sheet off Leonid, and slapped him on the thigh.
“Arise, ye Russian people!” Giorgi sang the song from Alexander Nevsky. He was always making the other cosmonauts watch old films.
“What time is it?” asked Leonid.
“It’s Sunday. Does time even matter?”
“What do you want?”
“It’s actually pleasant outside, and I’ve managed to gather enough people for volleyball. Well, almost enough. We need one more, and that’s you.”
“What would you have done if I wasn’t wearing underwear when you pulled the sheet away?”
“Looked in the other direction.” He started singing again. “Arise, ye Russian people, to glorious battle, to a battle to the death.”
“It’s too early for a battle to the death.”
Giorgi came around the side of the bed and shoved Leonid to the floor.
“It’s nearly noon,” he said, “and you’re out of bed already.”
“Let me put on clothes at least.”
“If you insist. Outside in five minutes.”
Giorgi slammed the door on his way out of the room.
THE VOLLEYBALL NET spanned a stretch of manicured grass in the long empty quad that ran parallel to the dormitories. Both sides of the quad were lined with trees like a green-walled hallway. Giorgi had jury-rigged posts from a pair of wooden rods that Leonid recognized as belonging to the anechoic chamber, and the net had been woven from old orange restraining harnesses. A crude construction, but it was still nicer than the ratty net they used in the gymnasium.
Whichever side Giorgi was on inevitably won. Not just for volleyball, but for any of the games he organized. Soccer. Hockey. Basketball when the weather was bad and they had to play something indoors. In any one-on-one sport, he dominated, as well. He once smashed a table tennis ball so hard it left a bruise on the Chief Designer’s arm after the bounce.
Today, Leonid was on the opposite side of the net from Giorgi, who teamed up with Nadya, Mishin and Bushuyev, and two younger technicians Leonid knew by sight but not name. Leonid’s own team consisted of himself and the entire cafeteria staff, each of them still in their white uniforms, stained with the grease of breakfast. Leonid had missed breakfast and regretted it now. He felt weak and slow. Jumping seemed as difficult as the first heaving lift of a rocket. Giorgi rained down spikes, and all Leonid could do was watch. When a spike came directly at him, Leonid made half an effort to pass it, the other half of him concerned with simply getting out of the way. The first set went to Giorgi’s team. Then the second. Then the third.
Giorgi cajoled the group into another game, reorganizing the teams so that everyone switched sides except him and Nadya and Leonid. The temperature rose with the sun. The men removed their shirts, except Mishin, or was it Bushuyev, who had grown a potbelly over the last year. Sweat drenched his shirt, turning the fabric translucent, letting everyone see what was underneath anyway.
In the second game, Giorgi chose to play setter, so instead of him spiking it was usually Nadya. This did not help Leonid much, who still watched the ball whistle by more often than not, and his new team seemed equally unable to keep the ball off the ground. Another three sets all to Giorgi’s team. Leonid was not sure if his own team’s combined points from the whole match would have been enough to win even a single set. He doubted it.
After the second match, everyone gathered in the shade of the trees lined up along the side of the quad. The cafeteria staff had brought food on ice and unpacked it, spreading out several blankets and arranging a small feast on top of them. Dark bread, cheeses, pickled fish, vegetables—also pickled. Sometimes it seemed that they would pickle anything. They had a patch in the garden dedicated to dill, and by the end of summer the whole plot was bare, picked clean. Leonid was used to the flavor, but now, glossy with sweat and dry in the mouth, he thought it tasted wrong, like something spoiled.
Giorgi pulled one of the blankets and everything on top of it a few meters to the side, from the shade into the sun. Dishes and flatware clinked together. He laid back on the sunny corner of the blanket, still shirtless, skin hale and golden.
“Thank you all,” he said. He lifted his head just enough to look at everyone sitting around him, then let it fall back into the grass. “I have two weeks in the Chamber of Silence starting tomorrow. You’ve allowed me a final afternoon in the sun.”
Leonid and Nadya groaned at the same time. The Chamber of Silence, the anechoic chamber, that little box of suffering. Leonid had only had to enter once, and only for a week. The twins who trained to fly into space, though, like Nadya, would spend as long as a month inside. Walls two meters thick. Artificial light. Sensors stuck all over the body. Just a chair and a bed and a desk and whatever equipment the engineers decided to include. And then the meals, shoved through a slit at the bottom of the door with one of the wooden poles that now supported their volleyball net. That was the only noise that ever came in from outside. The scrape of the tray along the two meters of the entryway. Mars, the one who died, would crouch by the door at mealtimes and press his ear into the slit when it opened. Otherwise, not a sound.
“Two weeks?” said Leonid. “What a hell.”
“We’ve all done worse,” said Giorgi.
He did not know that the Leonid in front of him had never spent more than seven days in the chamber. The other Leonid was the one who had lasted over a month. Leonid was not allowed to speak to his brother when he emerged from the chamber, but he had seen him from the observation room. He felt that they no longer looked the same. He felt sure that the ruse would be uncovered the moment he was presented as his brother in public.
Giorgi sprang into a seated position then hopped to his feet.
“Who’s ready for another game?”
Mishin and Bushuyev grumbled.
“The food hasn’t even made it to my belly yet,” said Leonid.