“I’m sorry,” repeated the driver. “If you wish, I can let you drive the car before you leave.”
The convoy veered off the road they had been following, made a series of quick turns down side streets, and stopped alongside a cemetery wedged between two concrete tenements. The buildings here were new, but had the same worn look as everything erected by the Soviets, not much different from the headstones sandwiched between them. No aging or decay could affect these buildings because they were old from the start.
Everyone exited the cars and passed through a gateless gap in the cemetery’s low iron fence. Kasha waited by the car. One of the drivers attached a leash to her, even though she made no signs of moving. The soldiers, who had ridden in the first car behind the hearse, were already unloading the casket. They marched it through the gate, barely wide enough for them to pass, toward a fresh grave, wet black dirt piled high beside it. Several people, family members dressed for mourning, faces stretched to unusual shapes by sadness, already stood by the grave. An officer that Leonid did not recognize stood beside them. He had a hand on the shoulder of a woman Leonid assumed to be Giorgi’s mother. Her face was the same as Giorgi’s, broad features, a mouth that would likely launch into a grin on another occasion. Now, though, she wept at the sight of the casket, as did the children, teenagers maybe, beside her.
The soldiers navigated an indirect route through the close-packed graves, sometimes straddling the casket over the top of a gravestone when there wasn’t room for them all to pass on one side. By the time they reached the fresh hole, the soldiers struggled under the weight of their burden, muscles trembling as they stooped and set the casket onto the straps of the lowering device.
The officer who had been consoling Giorgi’s mother stepped forward and began to speak. Leonid ignored most of what he said, letting the words wash over him like the white noise of the Antonov’s engines. He picked up just enough to know that the man spoke as if he had been Giorgi’s superior officer, but Leonid had never seen this man at Star City. Ignatius, holding her leather jacket tight around her by the fur collar, stared intently at the officer, mouthing the words along with him. That was the story, then. Giorgi’s death, officially, had come in a plane crash. Giorgi had been a test pilot, though of planes, not spaceships. He was being posthumously awarded some sort of minor medal. Honor and the Motherland and honor and pride and superiority and honor. Leonid wanted badly for this man to shut up.
Next, one of Giorgi’s relatives, a brother by the looks of him, spoke, or tried to. He managed a few words, and then fell into tears. A few more words, more tears. Most of what he said seemed familiar to Leonid, and he recalled the words were parts of the Psalms the old village priest had used before the Soviets hauled him away. Even before the famine, there had been enough funerals for Leonid to have learned the usual phrases. Here, though, any reference to the creator was absent. No lords, thys, gods, almightys. Just the little poem at the start of each Psalm. My soul cleaves to the dust. Turn my eyes from looking at vanities. The brother choked out a few final words, face wet from crying, and someone, maybe a sister, led him from the graveside.
Giorgi’s mother stepped forward and touched the coffin, caressing the wood as though it were her son’s skin. Leonid thought that it was probably more like skin than Giorgi’s own, crisped in the fire, flake and ash. She turned to face the semicircle of mourners. Her eyes were pink but her face dry. She thanked everyone for coming. At her words, behind her, the cemetery’s caretakers cranked a handle and the straps supporting the coffin lengthened, lowering Giorgi into the ground. The mourners turned and left. The sound of shovels piercing the dirt reached Leonid as he ducked his head back into the waiting car.
WHEN THE CONVOY stopped again, it was in front of a row of townhomes that still showed scars from the German occupation. Roofs had been rebuilt and windows replaced, but the stone of the walls bore white gashes and dark streaks, gouges and burns. At the sight of so many shiny black cars, several children on the opposite side of the street halted in the middle of a game of Dragon. They stared openly at all the strangers, paying particular attention to anyone in uniform.
Ignatius crossed over to the children. She grinned and spoke to them, and the children laughed at whatever she said. She pulled a handful of candy from her pocket and distributed it, reprimanding a girl who tried to take more than one piece. Everyone but Leonid had already siphoned into the house when Ignatius recrossed the street.
“Do you always carry candy with you?” asked Leonid.
“You never know when you might need a piece,” said Ignatius.
“You’ve never shared with us.”
“You never seem hungry.” She turned around in place, observing the buildings and the few cars other than those the funeral party had arrived in. Far down the sidewalk, a couple strolled arm in arm. “I like streets like this. I’m from the country, a collective farm. Well, it’s collective now. When I was a child, it was just a farm, but everyone in the area worked there anyway. A few buildings with kilometers and kilometers of land. The first time I went to the city—and it was not even a real city, just a town—I knew that was where I had to be. A place where you would every day come across people you didn’t know by sight, much less by name. But I like streets like this because it’s a little of both. For this one block, you might know everyone, but anonymity is just around the corner.”
“Do you ever think about what it’s like for Nadya, for whom no such corner exists?”
“It’s my job to make sure no such corner exists for any of the cosmonauts. So yes, I think about it often. But there’s one difference. Nobody knows Nadya. They just know her face. Her accomplishments. Part of being famous is being anonymous. A hero isn’t a person but an act. An ideal to worship. That’s what it is. Worship. In a nation without a god, we must provide an outlet for faith. We must show the people that greater heights exist, not on some ethereal plane, but right here on Earth. Or, in Nadya’s case or yours, in outer space.”
“So we’re just symbols, not people?”
“Of course you’re people. Just not the people that everyone thinks you are.”
Ignatius unwrapped one of the candies from her pocket, a Lobster Neck, the outer shell like streaked brass. The white wrapper crinkled as she kneaded it into a ball between her fingers. She held the candy in her other hand, observing it as if it were a smooth pebble, something she’d stumbled across on a riverbank instead of pulled from her pocket. She opened her mouth and pushed the candy toward it, but stopped, and instead offered the piece to Leonid. He took it and sucked on it without really tasting.
“Do you know the General Designer?” asked Ignatius.
“I know of him, but we’ve never met.”
“At his last rocket test, there was an explosion. Somewhere around a hundred people died.”
Leonid gulped down a mouthful of sugar-sweetened spit, almost choking down the candy with it.
“Marshal Nedelin was among those who died.”
“I only met him the once,” said Leonid. He recalled that meeting, the graciousness of the man, how even Nadya had seemed at ease with him.
“This is a dangerous business.” She pulled out another Lobster Neck and plopped it in her mouth. She looked up at the tops of the buildings, where the little architectural flourishes, a superfluous crenellation, a pattern in the bricks, were evidence that the structures predated the Revolution.
“If he’d survived,” continued Ignatius, “Giorgi, that is. If Giorgi had survived, he would have flown the next mission. The Chief Designer believes he has a capsule ready for reentry.”