the boarder - alexander jablokov.pdf
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The Boarder
by Alexander Jablokov
We start off this issue with a story tha
sn’t actually science fiction or fantasyonetheless, we think you’ll like “Th
Boarder.” This piece of historica
fiction fits in with the growing body o
works like Andy Duncan’s “The Chie
Designer” and Ellen Klages’s “Th
Green Glass Sea” that view th
scientific changes of the TwentietCentury through a lens of fiction. Mr
Jablokov, who is of Russian descent
assures us that the story is wholl
fictional; in fact, he says that iresearching the story, he had to find
vintage issue of Playboy, just so h
could look at the ads.
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* * * *
A couple of years after I was born, m
parents bought the house where they stil
ive. Before they even moved in, thehad arranged for a boarder to rent th
small room in the basement. They ha
decided, in a fairly formal way, that, a
Russians with extra rooms, they shoul
ake in boarders. Neither had ever ha
an extra room.
So they put lace curtains on thbasement windows and installed
bathroom with a thundering exhaust fa
and a tiled shower stall whose grou
reliably turned black every summer. Iwas my job to scrub it out with
oothbrush. The room had a narrow be
with an embroidered cover, and dar
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cons of several nondescript saints
bought at a church sale from a glum anti
Semite who also tried to sell us copie
of The Protocols of the Elders of Zionfrom a box under his table.
It was not an appealing room, but the
seemed to have no trouble findin
enants. The first was a princess. A
actual princess, some collateral of th
Trubetskoys, born in Paris, he
ransliterated name ending in a scrolledouble “f,” rather than the prosaic
anglo-phonetic “v” of ours. My parents
both products of the Sovie
ntelligentsia, were fascinated baristocrats, even ones whose father ha
made ends meet by becoming
haberdasher. Princess Anna snored
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oudly and had the most impressiv
eyebrows I had ever seen. She alway
sighed over my mother’s food, thoug
she could never articulate, in heexaggerated Petersburg accent, what
was she was looking for. I don’t thin
anyone really missed her when she left
few months later, to move in with
friend of hers, a duchess, in Brooklyn
She thought herself literary and wa
given to observations like: “Alwayread Turgenev in French. He make
much more sense that way. Some peopl
prefer Shakespeare in French also, but
really do think that his cragginess showoff better in the original Russian.”
* * * *
Some time later came the Little Gree
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Man, a skinny, intense guy, an ex-Army
Ranger or Green Beret or Navy Seal,
was never quite sure, who was studyin
Chinese at the University of Chicago.He believed it was possible t
become invisible. He learned ever
board in the house and could slip
hrough without making a sound. After h
moved out, my mother found that he ha
kept a bag of cedar bark mulch in hi
bedroom, to cover up his steps in thflower beds.
The night he earned his name, m
parents had some friends over. I don’
remember them, but I do remember theidaughter, Maureen. She was a couple o
ears older than I, fourteen or fifteen
and wore a short skirt and a loose top.
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was all over her, offering drinks, snacks
ours of the house. After some pesterin
from me she agreed to meet me out at th
end of the block, past the shrubs, for ... hadn’t really thought it through, bu
already knew that thinking it through wa
what kept you from getting it done. Sh
resumed her collapsed stare. For her
each second went by like a swallow o
dry bread.
Then she shrieked, “A little greeman!” and pointed. We caught a glimpse
of a startled face painted in shades o
camouflage amid the rhododendrons. H
dove through the basement window anwas gone. Maureen had hysterics an
nsisted on leaving. She forgot all abou
her agreement with me. Thinking about
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now, I realize that she had someone els
o meet, and that the LGM’s appearanc
n the shrubbery was a godsend that kep
her from having to fake an epileptic for something. Still, my feelings wer
hurt. The LGM later married a nic
Vietnamese girl and they now own
small tax accounting firm in Downer
Grove, not far from my parents’ house.
* * * *
Vassily moved in not long after thatHe was, in his way, much stealthier tha
he LGM. He just appeared one mornin
at breakfast, smearing jam on a chunk o
bread and peering at an already coffeestained issue of Iron Age, a steel
ndustry trade magazine. Too-large bite
at his bread revealed teeth made o
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various alloys, which revealed hi
profession, though I did not know it then
He did not acknowledge me. My parents
somehow following his lead, alspretended I was not there. I only learne
his name a day or so later, by which tim
various of his possessions had mad
heir way into the living room, and eve
nto my closet. I complained about th
gigantic leather bag that took up
residence amid my sneakers, but no onistened to me.
My parents wanted me to lear
Russian, so they had me read Russia
children’s books. There were no nonSoviet Russian children’s books, so
found myself imbibing gentle politica
ndoctrination along with my stories o
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mpudent Pioneers improvising solution
o their dilemmas, and became
sentimental Soviet, longing for tra
cars, red neck kerchiefs, and Leniportraits at the fronts of schoolrooms.
I cringe now to think of how
pompously insistent I was on th
wonders of the people’s paradise: th
free health care, the fine education, th
rights of women, the spotless and promp
public transportation. No wonder it wamonths before Vassily could even
acknowledge my presence.
* * * *
Vassily had an urban Russian’facility for gardening in a small space
He dug up a stretch of weedy grass alon
he side picket fence. Most of bot
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summers he lived with us were spent ou
here, growing odd, dark varieties o
omato, lumpy rustic cucumbers, bean
ou could buy by the pound for almosnothing at the store.
His gardening outfit consisted of
beat-up pair of dress loafers my fathe
had thrown out, black socks pulled up t
he knee, long shorts that looked lik
hey had been cut from a pair of wor
pants by someone who hadn’t quitgotten the hang of scissors, and a ha
folded out of that morning’s Chicag
Sun-Times. He had a sagging belly, and
he beginning breasts that older men getbut he seldom wore a shirt. He was ofte
burned red by the sun, and scratched hi
peeling skin, but never tired of th
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ability to walk around bare-chested. H
always grabbed that day’s paper off th
kitchen table to fold his hat, and becaus
he got up so much earlier than everyonelse in the house he sometimes ended up
wearing a section my mother had not ye
managed to read. She would gulp her te
and glower out of the dining roo
window at him, as if she could pick ou
he headlines as he bent over his hoe.
On the other side of the picket fencwas Mrs. Melmar’s yard. Luscious Mrs
Melmar favored flowers. She had he
own gardening ensemble: straw hat
arge sunglasses, lime green shorts—bit too tight, as my mother observed—
discarded pink oxford shirt of he
husband’s knotted up under her breasts
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and sandals with daisies on them. Sh
had fair skin, despite the amount of tim
she spent in the sun, and you could se
he veins in her legs. She protected thred nails on her hands with huge yellow
gloves. The skin of her belly was loose
from giving birth to her two kids, on
college age, with a red MG I admired
and one just finishing up at St. Joseph’
prep, but that made no difference to how
wonderful I thought she was. MrMelmar worked long hours at a law fir
downtown, and all I ever saw of hi
was the back of his head as he drove of
n his Cadillac.Vassily and his stupid newspaper ha
seemed like an aesthetic affront, and
wanted to defend the innocent Mrs
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Melmar from it, so, the first and onl
Christmas he was with us, I bought him
straw hat. It was not a great straw hat
’ll admit that, not a snappy Panama thaou could roll up and stick into a ciga
ube, but at least the damn thing wouldn
make him look like an idiot. He showe
metallurgical teeth when he saw it. “I’l
ook a regular Tom Sawyer with this
Thank you, Andrewsha.” Like all literat
Russians, he had grown up with “MarTven.” I’d seen the movie, thought th
girl playing Becky Thatcher was kind o
cute, but didn’t really know much abou
him as an author, which distressed andrritated Vassily, as if, in turning my
back on my great national literature,
had committed some kind of crime. H
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assumed that a boy my age would hav
read the complete works of Victor Hugo
Turgenev, and Conan Doyle as well
Such discoveries of my ignorancalways sent him off on a tirade agains
he painfully inadequate America
educational system. “You will lose!” he
would say, though how a knowledge o
world literature was supposed to sav
us, he never said. “But you will not en
up having to learn Russian. Oh, no. Ouday is done. Prepare to speak Chinese!
eedling from me once revealed hi
complete ignorance of Chines
iterature, and he sulkily retreated to hiroom.
I thought he had thrown the hat away
but once the ground thawed, he was ou
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here, with it on his head. He looked lik
Jed Clampett painted by Camill
Pissarro, but, still, I counted that as
small victory.We ate a lot of cucumbers while
Vassily lived with us. I tried to develop
a taste for them, since they were
quintessential Russian vegetable, bu
never managed to do more than tolerat
hem. By the end of the summer, they
rumbled into our kitchen like aavalanche. As it happened, though, th
ast ones were allowed to rot on th
vines.
* * * *I sprawled in the dark living room
reading. Someone creaked past and
waited for Papa to tell me to go outside
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t was such a nice day.
“The true history of that time wil
never be written.” This was the firs
ime Vassily had ever addressed medirectly.
“It’s not about the past,” I said. “It’
about the future.”
He ran his thick finger on the cover
“But what is that?”
Against stereotype, no one in th
house ever gave me a hard time foreading science fiction, or eve
remarked on it, although the ridiculou
covers, with their screaming girls an
unkyard robots, did sometimes made mfeel self-conscious. But this one jus
showed a spacecraft on an airles
planet, with a couple of guys i
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spacesuits climbing a slope toward th
reader. It wasn’t on the Moon, or at leas
not on ours, because you could see a
alien planet with too many continentust at the horizon.
“It’s a spaceship.”
“Is an A-4,” he said. “What Goebbel
decided to call a V-2: the German
vengeance rocket. I took one apar
wenty-five years ago after we overra
heir testing field at Blizna, in PolandWe have better technology now.”
No science fiction writer had eve
magined the complicated and hideousl
expensive way we finally made it intspace. Even as Apollo missions wer
climbing to the Moon, the spaceships i
my books stayed sleek and unitary
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hings you powered up and flew off in.
To Vassily, science fiction was a way
of reasonably thinking about the futur
and its possibilities, so he did not end uiking most of what I lent him to read
with its mental supermen, exotic planets
and entertaining aliens. It made no sens
o him that their very impossibility wa
heir pleasure. He puzzled over th
spacecraft and their handwavium drives
“The thousand and one nights oScheherazade, told by an engineerin
student who failed his graduatio
exams,” was his literary judgment.
* * * *Two things Vassily liked abou
American life:
Saturday morning cartoons. Yogi Bea
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I did actually hear him mutter “smarte
han the average bear” to himself afte
fixing Mrs. Melmar’s lawn mower), an
superhero, though I think he favoreSpiderman. He did not care for Ja
Ward productions, the ones I loved, like
ocky & Bullwinkle or George of th
ungle, I suspect because he did not ge
most of the jokes. I was old enough to b
embarrassed by some of the things h
aughed uproariously at.Breakfast cereal, the sweeter th
better. Trix, Cocoa Puffs, Lucky Charms
Alpha Bits (which he claimed wa
“educational”). And he never finished box, but left a tiny bit at the bottom
making me throw tantrums when only
crumbled handful of Cap’n Crunc
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umbled out into my bowl in the morning
And he picked the marshmallows out o
he Lucky Charms. I’m sure he did. Mor
devious than you would expect of aadult, he would reach into the box an
mine a vein deeper in the cerea
arranging it so that I was the one wh
would get a bowl of marshmallow-fre
cereal, then stare at me expressionlessly
daring me to complain.
* * * *Vassily was an excellent draftsman
While looking for work as
metallurgist, he earned money wit
echnical illustration. He came into ouhouse with two plant engineerin
extbzúks, written by his friend Koly
Mishkin, for which he’d done th
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machine layout illustrations. One of the
continued to be used as a textbook i
Soviet engineering schools into the earl
1960s, in an edition revised by othersKolya Mishkin sometimes wrote Vassily
ong letters, which he stuffed int
envelopes until they were close t
exploding.
So I was used to seeing diagrams o
milling machines lying out on his bureau
But once, on stiffer paper, there was portrait of a woman. Vassily had used
piece of reddish chalk, so that it looke
quite old. The woman had a Louis
Brooks-style bob, and a direct, sad gazeShe looked intelligent, and a bit severe
ike someone you would b
uncomfortable with when you knew her
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but whom you would think about later. A
candle burned in front of it for a day
eaving a lot of wax that enraged m
mother, and that I had to try to get off thoak top of the bureau. I looked at th
picture while I did it. Vassily did not sa
who it was, and I did not ask.
* * * *
One thing Vassily hated abou
American life:
Wernher von Braun.There are plenty of other things on th
ist, but none of them really says muc
about him. Von Braun though ...
remember Vassily sitting in the livingroom, huddled like a sulking child
staring at a NASA press conference afte
Apollo 8 successfully orbited the Moon
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“Sturmbannführer von Braun,” h
muttered, using von Braun’s SS rank
major. He affected to be flabbergasted
by the fact that our space program warun by someone who had been both a
aristocrat and a Nazi, but I don’t think h
was really surprised at all. He was jus
ealous. Years later, my mother revealed
how many times Vassily had tried to ge
work at Huntsville. He blamed hi
failure on security problems, but it wareally the less-than-cutting-edge natur
of his metallurgy. A lifetime working
with Soviet technology had left hi
permanently behind.TV, newspapers, and magazines were
dominated by the launching and orbitin
of space vehicles in a way that makes n
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sense now. Those Mercurys, Geminis
and Apollos were celebrities, in a wa
heir spacesuited occupants never quit
became, despite the ticker tape paradeand interviews in the magazines. It ha
been barely a decade since Sputnik ha
been launched, and now we were gettin
ready to land on another planet. Wh
knew where we would go beyond that
Vassily was always on the lookout fo
something that indicated laxness or poometallurgy on the part of “Her
Sturmbannführer von Braun” and hi
eam. He examined magazin
photographs with a magnifying glass, buhe never found a crooked weld or a ba
alloy choice that he could b
satisfactorily irritated by.
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My issues of Boys’ Life were fille
with pictures of Moon bases, and storie
about boys settling planets orbitin
distant stars. I once calculated how old would be at the turn of the new
millennium, and discarded that age a
scarcely credible, but knew that we’d b
scanning asteroids for likely metals an
eating in restaurants lit by the light o
Saturn’s rings, accompanied by large
breasted women in oddly cut burevealing outfits. The breasts are the on
hing that actually came to pass. I’v
earned to live with that.
* * * *I scored a Playboy off my friend Pau
who had two older brothers. I read
cover to cover. Yes, I know that’s a
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oke, but what I learned about hi-fis
driving sports cars at high speeds, an
choosing shirts was almost as importan
as seeing naked breasts. So I was idespair when it vanished.
I had hidden it in what I thought was
perfect spot, above a heating duct in th
basement, at the end opposite the washe
and dryer. I had searched through th
house for a long time, trying to figure ou
a place which could escape Mother’relentless cleaning and rearranging, an
here, where there was a half-inch laye
of old dust, seemed perfect. I even slid i
a fair way in so that a casual glance frosomeone getting a light bulb off the top
shelf opposite would not reveal it.
Then, one day, it was gone. I imagine
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a protective kitchen glove and a flipped
up garbage can lid as she disposed of th
hing.
I walked past Vassily’s room a fewdays later, and there he was, reading it
The cover was folded back, revealing a
ad for a Teac reel-to-reel tape recorder
but I recognized it. He had his readin
glasses on and was paying deep
attention. He read something—a joke,
cartoon caption—lips moving, anfrowned. He pulled the English-Russia
volume of Smirnitsky’s dictionary off th
night table and looked up a word. The
he reread. He paused for a momentblinked, then howled with laughter, teet
glinting.
* * * *
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Vassily was enormously and
rritatingly facile at a whole range o
small things.
He could tie any number of knots. Hcould tie knots to secure a load on top o
our station wagon, or to tie up a packag
neatly, or attach a thin line to a thicke
so that it did not slip. He even indulge
n decorative knots, though I learne
about that only by accident.
I delivered some food to Mrs. Melmafrom my mother. She was having a party
and my parents had been invited, bu
were unable to come. I didn’t thin
hey’d ever made it over to one of MrsMelmar’s parties, but that was fine; Mr
Melmar never seemed to be able t
attend either. My mother always sen
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food: casseroles, plates of cookies, Jell
O molds. When Mrs. Melmar answere
he door, flushed from the shower, with
her hair in a towel turban, I saw that heiving room had been decorated wit
swags of dark-red velvet ribbons.
“Oh, it was Vassily,” she explained
“He says it’s a style that was used at th
mperial court. For those grand balls
Thank you so much, Drew, for thi
ovely...”“Chicken Tetrazzini. But—”
“Thank your mother for me.” Before
could decide whether to start with a
explanation of Vassily’s complete andotal lack of connection with th
Romanovs, or with the information that
was not called Drew, she had closed he
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door and disappeared.
My mother tallied everything, fro
dinner invitations to caramels i
seemingly long-forgotten candy boxesand so she also kept close track o
dishes that ended up at Mrs. Melmar’s
But the bowl that held the chicke
reappeared in its proper cabinet just a
Mother was on the phone telling a frien
of our neighbor’s lack of responsibility
Papa came into the living room holdint triumphantly, “See, it was here al
along! You should go a little easier on
her, her life’s pretty difficult....”
As I only learned years latersometimes fights aren’t about the past
but about the future. The next time Mrs
Melmar had a party, Papa went, but did
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not bring a casserole. He took a bottle o
vodka that, due to my depredations, wa
at least half water. I don’t know wha
hat many-times-reglued tax seal lookeike in the light, but Papa seemed t
enjoy the party anyway.
* * * *
Some of the metals in Vassily’s false
eeth: gold, stainless steel, palladium
platinum, and zinc. He once said h
could teach an introductory metallurgclass just by opening his mouth.
* * * *
Vassily’s friend Kolya, the one who
had written the plant engineerinextbooks, would sometimes vis
Chicago. He worked for GE. The two o
hem would walk around th
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neighborhood, talking, and once spent
weekend in the Indiana Dunes together
The gangly and well-dressed Kolya ha
slid into American life in a way thaVassily had never managed. He had a
Japanese wife and drove a late-mode
car.
It was after one such visit that th
picture of the woman on Vassily’
bureau disappeared.
* * * *Vassily had worked on the Sovie
space program, and had, in fact, worke
on the first Sputnik. He built a mockup o
he satellite for testing separation frohe spacecraft. His first model had bee
a cone, the initial design, but Korolev
he design bureau chief, wanted
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sphere. It was an aesthetic decision, no
an engineering one. He wanted
gleaming sphere, with the antenna
hrown back as it galloped through thsky.
Vassily was reprimanded for hi
work, a humiliation he still felt over
decade later. Some of the welding on th
est sphere was less than perfect. “But
s a test, Sergei Pavlovich,” he said. “To
est separation.”“This test sphere, all these things, the
will be in museums!” Korolev shouted
“Do you want your grandchildre
shaking their heads over your drunkewelds?”
Vassily fixed it, and said that he wa
careful to be perfect from then on.
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part of a wing strut of a MiG-25, a
open-ended wrench, and a cup, which h
kept pencils in. He sharpened his pencil
with a pen knife.This was titanium. Everything’s mad
of titanium now, from bicycles to
eyeglasses, but then it was a mystery
and all sources of it lay within th
Soviet empire. This metal was hi
negotiation point, and his knowledge o
how to handle it almost got him down tHuntsville. Almost.
Would he have made it down there i
he’d stuck around? My mother says no
and she’s usually right. Still, I thinabout the former zek shaking hands wit
he former Sturmbannführer and gettin
down to the job of getting us into space
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don’t know if that’s a happier ending
given the way things have happened.
Using some rubber tubing, he turne
he wing strut into a slingshot. Hpreferred ball bearings as projectiles.
“Ah, we would have dreamed of this
would have ruled Sobornaya Street
We tore the trees in the city park apart
ooking for strong forks. And th
postman lost his tires once: a rubbe
nner tube made enough for a dozenAcorns we had plenty.”
Demonstrating the technique to me, h
knocked a squirrel from its perch in
ree branch. I was near tears, looking ahat elegant fluffed tail and the bloo
drops on its mouth.
Vassily was unmoved. “Squirrel. You
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* * * *
He could also spit farther than anyon
’d ever seen, and he was disgusted tha
his was no longer a skill much valued“In Penrod ... ah, they are dead,” h
would mutter, for in addition to Twain
he seemed to have grown up reading
shadow version of American literature
Booth Tarkington, Frank Norris
Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Car
Sandberg, James Fenimore Cooper.He did not understand why there wa
a big shrine to a sport he knew nothin
about in the hometown o
Leatherstocking’s creator. It seemeddisrespectful.
And he was an excellent swimmer
with a loose-limbed form that got hi
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he cover of one of my Russian reader
s a dirt road curving through a whea
field somewhere out in the great Russia
plains, without a person or habitation tbe seen. The very last double-pag
spread in the book shows edibl
mushrooms on one page, poisonous one
on the other, and a brief story abou
children having a contest collectin
mushrooms in the woods. One bring
back a full basket of toadstools and onbrings back a bunch of beautiful re
mushrooms with white spots: fly agaric
death caps. Aside from a scornfu
reprimand from Mom about their poomushroom hunting skills, there is n
panic or hysteria over death narrowl
averted. The third brings back a handfu
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of fine edible mushrooms. Quality, no
quantity, is, I gather, the most unSovie
moral.
Vassily told a few stories aboufinding mushrooms with a fuel enginee
n the woods outside Plesetsk, the spac
complex he worked at before moving t
Kazakhstan. The stories were no
nteresting, but you could see that the
brought back important memories.
One day he borrowed my mother’car, drove off to the woods, and cam
back with a full bucket of dirt-flecke
fungi. We were alone in the house. My
mother was visiting her sister in Ohioand Papa was at some academi
conference. The neighborhood wa
silent. Vassily fried the mushrooms in
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blizzard came up as they were on thei
way home from work, and the train wa
stranded for two days. No one died, h
said, and no wolves came. Just a bacommute.
The more he learned about the Satur
V, the more despairing he became. The
first stage of the Saturn V
came by barge from Louisiana
hrough a canal dug just to get it out o
he facility to the Intracoastal WaterwayThe second came from Californi
hrough the Panama Canal. The third wa
flown from California in a Super Gupp
airplane.Soviet boosters had as many as thirt
multiple engines. That had been a quic
fix to getting sufficient power in th
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early days, but hamstrung their late
development. The rockets were built i
Kuibyshev, then taken apart, put o
rains, and shipped to the cosmodromet had been Vassily’s responsibility to
get them all welded back together.
* * * *
Two more things he loved:
Getting “free gifts.” In his room h
had three toasters, a waffle iron, and
never-functional pants presser he got foopening checking accounts, along with
ellow whistle shaped like
ocomotive, a paperweight shaped lik
Mt. Vernon, and a Frisbee, all also withbank names on them: We would ge
multiple statements from accounts wit
minimum deposits for years afterward
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He also had a gravy boat, a plate wit
he Maryland state seal, two tumblers o
different styles, and a teaspoon, fro
various gas stations and supermarketsHe kept them lined up on a shelf lik
rophies.
Archie comic books. He did not stea
hose from me, but bought them himself
and shared them. Actually, I swear he
once bought a forty-five of “Sugar
Sugar” to play on a bulky mechanicarecord player he’d trash picked an
repaired, but I could never actually fin
t in his room. I had heard that piece o
classic bubblegum in there, somewherbetween the Tchaikovsky and th
Puccini, late at night, quietly, I wa
certain. I know he was fascinated b
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Veronica, but would grunt “the kind o
person who caused the Revolution” if
wanted to talk about it. It seemed that th
Veronicas of the world had a lot toanswer for.
* * * *
Vassily had defected wearing a pai
of heavy black shoes with weirdly thic
soles. Even for Soviet shoes, the
seemed ridiculous. Once, he turned the
over for me. Shining flecks of metastudded the shoes’
soles. I touched them. They wer
acky, like tar on a hot day.
He and some other metallurgists habeen taken on a plant tour visit in Wes
Germany. Some kind of ostpolitik thing
They weren’t allowed contact wit
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anything potentially useful to them, bu
Vassily had worked out a way to pick up
alloy shavings without being obviou
about it.“They were all over the floor
mpossible to pick them all up wit
alienated proletarian labor. So the
were available to us.” I never knew
whether the occasional appearance o
Marxist-Leninist concepts in Vassily’
speech was satirical, or whether ifetime of political and linguisti
ndoctrination had actually had som
effect.
Not enough, though. He faked foopoisoning, ran off to the bathroom, an
kept running, out a door and into a stree
where he was almost run over by a tin
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serials together, but I guess we wer
watching two different shows.
He ran his finger on the inside of
metal ring, frowning. “Pitted. No good.He flicked it off into a dark corner of th
garage. I heard it tinkle and vanis
beneath a stack of old tires—th
remnants of a truly Soviet project o
Vassily’s that involved retreading them
by hand (“the only way we kept ou
vehicles moving in Tyuratam!”). Even hhad finally realized the incompatibilit
of this with American productio
capabilities, but the tires remained, t
my mother’s dismay. Papa collected somuch crap of his own that the tire
barely mattered.
“Korolev wanted to go to the Moo
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oo, but found himself putting atomi
bombs on top of rockets to destroy New
York City. Even Sakharov loved hi
bomb. He wanted to understand the Sunand he found a way to destroy cities wit
what he learned, working for men wh
would tear your fingernails out wit
pliers as easy as I talk to you now. Me
he never would have broken bread with
But he let them stand over him in thei
bloodstained boots. Because they let hibuild and understand. Someone abov
knew us better than we knew ourselves.
He threaded a cotter pin through th
hub, took the needlenosed pliers anbent it to hold. You could see the
satisfaction he took in having just th
right tool for the job, hanging right ther
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n the tool rack, a tool rack my fathe
never used.
“I am no different. I worked o
missiles, as well as satellites anspacecraft. It was like anything else. No
defense of the motherland, or
desperate attempt to equalize powe
with the capitalist enemy. Just work
nteresting work. Good work, what
man lives for. We sat in that miserable
desert for years, testing. Not enougesting, for we were always in a hurry
You should static test all engines
Americans always do. They can affor
t. We did not. Hurry, hurry. We had tomeet our schedules, get the engine
working, get them firing. Once we wer
esting an ICBM. The R-9. Oxidize
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with liquid oxygen. Made no sense fo
an ICBM. I can admit that now, but then
we fought with the other design bureaus
some who were developing storablpropellants. An ICBM needs to b
aunched quickly, and so needs
storable propellant. A space probe o
manned flight, not so much. So, were w
secretly working on what we reall
wanted to work on? An interplanetar
spacecraft disguised as an ICBM? NoWe were working on a weapon. It jus
wasn’t a very good weapon. It does no
excuse us.
“We were testing the first stage. Wehad built a test pad: a fixed part, an
part that rotated on it. The missile wa
attached to the movable portion. We
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were ready to ignite, when I saw a clou
of mist at the pad. We were way behind
schedule. Khrushchev himself, we wer
old, had an interest in this test. Hneeded to threaten the Americans wit
our might, and no one was to know tha
we had no missiles. Your John Kennedy
complained about how many missiles th
Russians had, and how badly th
Americans had done under Eisenhower
Fantastic nonsense. I suppose we woulhave laughed if we had not been so bus
rying to make sure he was right. He wo
his election, for all the good it did him
s that democracy, that you get to choosour lies? We had to take the lies we
were issued.
“Condensation meant a leak, whic
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meant a delay in the test, which meant .
we did not want to discover what i
meant. I went out to the pad. It was
night test, no one was seeing me. It waa liquid oxygen leak, a small one. Th
repair would take at least a day, but ...
unzipped, and I pissed on the leaky joint
t froze into ice and plugged the leak. I
held until ignition, and the test went of
well. That was how we did things at tha
ime.”He took the lawnmower back. A shor
while later I heard it start up. Th
bastard. Did he think he could char
Mrs. Melmar by doing her lawn? A fewhours later he came back, as glum a
when he went, and put the mower awa
without cleaning it off. And he’d left
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few stray lines of grass uncut. I snuc
over and trimmed them later, with hand
shears. It’s no wonder you don’t se
many Russians in lawn care.* * * *
Vassily avidly watched the Apollo
coverage—with pleasure at th
accomplishment, but with sadness too
Because he was watching for somethin
else. Something that never came.
All that year, the Soviets were tryino launch the complex, thirty-engined N
1, which was to be their lunar launc
vehicle. And, because of inadequat
static testing, because of the fact thaevery piece of it was essentially a one
off, because they had to hurry, it kep
blowing up only seconds after liftoff. N
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TV
commentator ever mentioned wha
was going on at what they would hav
called Baikonur.Vassily tried to convince himself tha
f only Korolev had lived, a Russia
might still have ended up walking on
dusty surface not too different from th
dusty steppes of central Kazakhstan, bu
don’t think he ever succeeded.
* * * *Years later, while traveling on
business, I found Kolya Mishkin at hi
retirement home in Sarasota. A simpl
phone call, and he invited me over. Hiwife, Kumiko, somehow pegged me a
Russian, and served me a variety o
foods preserved by smoking, salting, an
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fermentation, along with vodka in ornat
shot glasses. Kolya told me a few thing
about Vassily that I never learned while
he lived with us. He and Vassily wereno longer in touch. I could tell this hur
him.
Vassily had had a wife named Irina
who was a physician in the Red Army
and was taken prisoner by the German
at Vyazma, in 1941, along with half a
million of her comrades. She never camback. Presumably she died in one o
hose open-air cattle pens the German
kept Soviet POWs in, regarding them a
barely human. Kolya said she might welhave come back, only to be rearrested b
he NKVD, as all ex-POWs were, bein
of suspect loyalty, and shipped to
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Soviet camp, to die there.
Vassily and Irina never had children.
Vassily was arrested in 1938 afte
other members of his aircraft desigeam, already in custody, cited his nam
as a saboteur. One of their test aircraf
had recently crashed on takeoff an
damaged a wing. He was in the middl
of dinner with Irina. They had bee
married for five months. They never saw
each other again.Vassily lost his teeth in the gold
mining camps of Kolyma. He’d had on
of them, a molar, which he kept in a ja
when he lived with us, along with gallstone (not his, but not an interestin
story either), a rubber lizard, and
valve from the fuel line of a German V-2
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rocket he’d picked up at the testing sit
n Blizna, Poland.
He worked with three of th
colleagues who had betrayed him ivarious space projects in the years afte
he war. One of them even ended up
running a design bureau. Vassily neve
brought up what had happened, an
neither did they. Two of them he liked
and continued to drink with, and one o
hem, the bureau chief, he feuded withbut none of that had anything to do wit
1938. It would have made no more sens
for him to be angry or vengeful abou
hat than it would have been to react tsomething they had done to him in
dream.
Kolya, Vassily, and Irina had all been
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school friends. After a few vodkas
Kolya revealed that he had once bee
nterested in Irina as well. But he wa
assigned to the hydroelectric project aBratsk before an understanding could b
reached, and she married Vassily two
days after her father, an officer, wa
arrested, in the Red Army purges tha
followed the execution of Field Marsha
Tukhachevsky in 1937.
Every year, Kolya lit a candle onrina’s birthday, even though Russian
only learned to care about birthday
after coming to America. I was able to
ell him that, at least once, Vassily haddone the same.
After a glance at his wife, who smile
permission, Kolya went into his stud
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and returned with the woman’s portrai
Vassily had done. It was Irina. Vassily
had had no photographs of her, and so
had done it from memory. He’d given io Kolya as a present during his visit
Kolya had tried to give it back, bu
Vassily refused, saying he could draw
another one.
Neither Kolya nor I thought he’d eve
drawn another one.
* * * *One day, near the end of the summer
Vassily disappeared.
So, to the wonder of the entir
neighborhood, did Mrs. Melmar. Heoungest was now at Penn State, and
might have been that she now saw n
reason to stick around.
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The idea that they had disappeare
ogether took a long time to be accepted
My mother packed up a few things tha
Vassily had forgotten, but did not telPapa what address she was sending the
o. That led to the worst fight they ha
ever had. They got over that, but hav
never seemed as happy with each othe
since.
The next tenant was a sad man with
face like a frog who said he was writina history of the twentieth century. I don’
know if he ever finished it, but he live
here until long after I went to college
The room is now empty.Vassily did not leave anything for me
ot a book, not a note, nothing. He jus
walked out and left, exactly as if I was
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kid he really didn’t have much interes
n.
* * * *
I think about Vassily every time oumakeshift space shuttle blows up, killin
a handful of astronauts, or, mor
optimistically, whenever an elegan
space probe flies past the uncut diamon
of a moon. He would have admire
hose smooth gadgets, so unmakeshift, s
unmanned, so ... unSoviet. The spacshuttle, a thalidomide version of th
proud spaceships that once flew in ou
magination, is completely Soviet.
The Soviets themselves thought even more Soviet than it actually was
When the thing was announced, the
analyzed the costs. It made no sense
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Any number of expendable launc
vehicles would have been cheaper fo
he missions the thing could possibl
perform. And Americans, after all, lovo throw things away. What were the
really up to?
Then they saw its trajectory:
military payload lofted into orbit fro
Vandenberg could reenter and hit centra
Russia in three and a half minutes. A
Polaris missile launched from a boomeoff Kamchatka in a first strike woul
ake at least ten.
So that’s how they managed to
understand the shuttle: as a weapon. Foonce their economic analysis mad
perfect sense, but they still reached th
wrong conclusion. They dropped the res
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of their space program and develope
heir own shuttle, the Buran. It flew onl
once, then sat in a warehouse a
Tyuratam until a fire destroyed it, alonwith whatever was left of the progra
Vassily gave so many years of his life to
I see the shuttle has tile problem
again. Every time someone drops
paperclip, it has tile problems. I’d lov
o talk that over with Vassily, but he
can’t possibly still be alive.
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