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.



* * * *

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



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



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



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.



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



“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



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.



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



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



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.

* * * *



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



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



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



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



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



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.



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



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



* * * *

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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.



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



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



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



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.

the boarder - alexander jablokov.pdf

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