FSF, March 2008 Read online

  My issues of Boys’ Life were filled with pictures of Moon bases, and stories about boys settling planets orbiting distant stars. I once calculated how old I would be at the turn of the new millennium, and discarded that age as scarcely credible, but knew that we'd be scanning asteroids for likely metals and eating in restaurants lit by the light of Saturn's rings, accompanied by large-breasted women in oddly cut but revealing outfits. The breasts are the one thing that actually came to pass. I've learned to live with that.

  * * * *

  I scored a Playboy off my friend Paul, who had two older brothers. I read it cover to cover. Yes, I know that's a joke, but what I learned about hi-fis, driving sports cars at high speeds, and choosing shirts was almost as important as seeing naked breasts. So I was in despair when it vanished.

  I had hidden it in what I thought was a perfect spot, above a heating duct in the basement, at the end opposite the washer and dryer. I had searched through the house for a long time, trying to figure out a place which could escape Mother's relentless cleaning and rearranging, and here, where there was a half-inch layer of old dust, seemed perfect. I even slid it a fair way in so that a casual glance from someone getting a light bulb off the top shelf opposite would not reveal it.

  Then, one day, it was gone. I imagined a protective kitchen glove and a flipped-up garbage can lid as she disposed of the thing.

  I walked past Vassily's room a few days later, and there he was, reading it. The cover was folded back, revealing an ad for a Teac reel-to-reel tape recorder, but I recognized it. He had his reading glasses on and was paying deep attention. He read something—a joke, a cartoon caption—lips moving, and frowned. He pulled the English-Russian volume of Smirnitsky's dictionary off the night table and looked up a word. Then he reread. He paused for a moment, blinked, then howled with laughter, teeth glinting.

  * * * *

  Vassily was enormously and irritatingly facile at a whole range of small things.

  He could tie any number of knots. He could tie knots to secure a load on top of our station wagon, or to tie up a package neatly, or attach a thin line to a thicker so that it did not slip. He even indulged in decorative knots, though I learned about that only by accident.

  I delivered some food to Mrs. Melmar from my mother. She was having a party, and my parents had been invited, but were unable to come. I didn't think they'd ever made it over to one of Mrs. Melmar's parties, but that was fine; Mr. Melmar never seemed to be able to attend either. My mother always sent food: casseroles, plates of cookies, Jell-O molds. When Mrs. Melmar answered the door, flushed from the shower, with her hair in a towel turban, I saw that her living room had been decorated with swags of dark-red velvet ribbons.

  "Oh, it was Vassily,” she explained. “He says it's a style that was used at the Imperial court. For those grand balls. Thank you so much, Drew, for this lovely..."

  "Chicken Tetrazzini. But—"

  "Thank your mother for me.” Before I could decide whether to start with an explanation of Vassily's complete and total lack of connection with the Romanovs, or with the information that I was not called Drew, she had closed her door and disappeared.

  My mother tallied everything, from dinner invitations to caramels in seemingly long-forgotten candy boxes, and so she also kept close track of dishes that ended up at Mrs. Melmar's. But the bowl that held the chicken reappeared in its proper cabinet just as Mother was on the phone telling a friend of our neighbor's lack of responsibility. Papa came into the living room holding it triumphantly, “See, it was here all along! You should go a little easier on her, her life's pretty difficult...."

  As I only learned years later, sometimes 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 of vodka that, due to my depredations, was at least half water. I don't know what that many-times-reglued tax seal looked like in the light, but Papa seemed to enjoy the party anyway.

  * * * *

  Some of the metals in Vassily's false teeth: gold, stainless steel, palladium, platinum, and zinc. He once said he could teach an introductory metallurgy class just by opening his mouth.

  * * * *

  Vassily's friend Kolya, the one who had written the plant engineering textbooks, would sometimes visit Chicago. He worked for GE. The two of them would walk around the neighborhood, talking, and once spent a weekend in the Indiana Dunes together. The gangly and well-dressed Kolya had slid into American life in a way that Vassily had never managed. He had a Japanese wife and drove a late-model car.

  It was after one such visit that the picture of the woman on Vassily's bureau disappeared.

  * * * *

  Vassily had worked on the Soviet space program, and had, in fact, worked on the first Sputnik. He built a mockup of the satellite for testing separation from the spacecraft. His first model had been a cone, the initial design, but Korolev, the design bureau chief, wanted a sphere. It was an aesthetic decision, not an engineering one. He wanted a gleaming sphere, with the antennae thrown back as it galloped through the sky.

  Vassily was reprimanded for his work, a humiliation he still felt over a decade later. Some of the welding on the test sphere was less than perfect. “But it is a test, Sergei Pavlovich,” he said. “To test separation."

  "This test sphere, all these things, they will be in museums!” Korolev shouted. “Do you want your grandchildren shaking their heads over your drunken welds?"

  Vassily fixed it, and said that he was careful to be perfect from then on.

  He only defected after Korolev's death.

  * * * *

  My friend Paul's older brother came through for me again: a six-pack of Pabst. I hid it in the shrubs by the garage. Paul and I had some elaborate plan—we were even going to see if Marilyn and Stacy from Paul's CCD class would join us. But that disappeared too, and the cans showed up, one by one, in Vassily's trash, which it was my responsibility to haul out.

  Vassily had spent a few years in the gulag. I didn't think that was any excuse.

  * * * *

  Vassily brought with him several pieces of a strong, light, silvery metal: part of a wing strut of a MiG-25, an open-ended wrench, and a cup, which he kept pencils in. He sharpened his pencils with a pen knife.

  This was titanium. Everything's made of titanium now, from bicycles to eyeglasses, but then it was a mystery, and all sources of it lay within the Soviet empire. This metal was his negotiation point, and his knowledge of how to handle it almost got him down to Huntsville. Almost.

  Would he have made it down there if he'd stuck around? My mother says no, and she's usually right. Still, I think about the former zek shaking hands with the former Sturmbannführer and getting down to the job of getting us into space. I don't know if that's a happier ending, given the way things have happened.

  Using some rubber tubing, he turned the wing strut into a slingshot. He preferred ball bearings as projectiles.

  "Ah, we would have dreamed of this. I would have ruled Sobornaya Street. We tore the trees in the city park apart, looking for strong forks. And the postman lost his tires once: a rubber inner tube made enough for a dozen. Acorns we had plenty."

  Demonstrating the technique to me, he knocked a squirrel from its perch in a tree branch. I was near tears, looking at that elegant fluffed tail and the blood drops on its mouth.

  Vassily was unmoved. “Squirrel. You like squirrels? They are cute on TV. Mice too. Children here like amusing vermin. Could not find a live squirrel in Kostroma, not even to eat. Cats either."

  "You killed cats?"

  He looked disgusted at my squeamishness. “They are much harder to kill. Don't worry about them. They yowl and run.” He grabbed the dead squirrel by its tail and slung it into Mrs. Baumeister's battered garbage can. He stared at it judiciously. “Trash day is Tuesday. Air not too warm. Will not smell too bad.” And he chuckled to himself.

  And here I'd thought one of the characteristics of Russians was h
ow much they loved animals.

  * * * *

  He could also spit farther than anyone I'd ever seen, and he was disgusted that this was no longer a skill much valued. “In Penrod ... ah, they are dead,” he would mutter, for in addition to Twain, he seemed to have grown up reading a shadow version of American literature: Booth Tarkington, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Carl Sandberg, James Fenimore Cooper.

  He did not understand why there was a big shrine to a sport he knew nothing about in the hometown of Leatherstocking's creator. It seemed disrespectful.

  And he was an excellent swimmer, with a loose-limbed form that got him through the water with a lot of splashing, though he did not wear bathing trunks, which he regarded as a bizarre affectation, and used a ragged pair of shorts, held up by a length of clothesline, that stayed wet and clammy for hours. He knew the constellations, which planet was up, and the species names of the trees on our street. I presume there is a detectable difference between a maple and an oak, but to this day I am not sure what it is. Taxonomy and classification are dead and dusty arts to me, but to Vassily they were vital parts of viewing the world.

  But there were limits to his taxonomic abilities. The cliché about Russians loving mushrooms is absolutely true. On the cover of one of my Russian readers is a dirt road curving through a wheat field somewhere out in the great Russian plains, without a person or habitation to be seen. The very last double-page spread in the book shows edible mushrooms on one page, poisonous ones on the other, and a brief story about children having a contest collecting mushrooms in the woods. One brings back a full basket of toadstools and one brings back a bunch of beautiful red mushrooms with white spots: fly agaric, death caps. Aside from a scornful reprimand from Mom about their poor mushroom hunting skills, there is no panic or hysteria over death narrowly averted. The third brings back a handful of fine edible mushrooms. Quality, not quantity, is, I gather, the most unSoviet moral.

  Vassily told a few stories about finding mushrooms with a fuel engineer in the woods outside Plesetsk, the space complex he worked at before moving to Kazakhstan. The stories were not interesting, but you could see that they brought back important memories.

  One day he borrowed my mother's car, drove off to the woods, and came back with a full bucket of dirt-flecked fungi. We were alone in the house. My mother was visiting her sister in Ohio, and Papa was at some academic conference. The neighborhood was silent. Vassily fried the mushrooms in butter. I declined to join him.

  He became desperately ill. “Evil twins,” he gasped. “Here mushrooms have evil twins. No wonder Anglo-Saxons do not eat them. They fool you. This is a frightful continent."

  Despite my irritation with him, I took care of him. He never apologized for having stolen my desperate attempts to enter the adult world, but he started telling me things that he had not before. At the time, I did not see that as evening anything out between us. But, still, I let him talk.

  * * * *

  Commentators always called the Soviet cosmodrome “Baikonur,” as TASS, the Soviet news agency, insisted. It drove Vassily crazy, since the launch site was really at Tyuratam, over a hundred miles away. He did not understand why our news media were so obedient.

  He talked about how cold it was, and how hot. “At your Canaveral they sip colorful drinks on the beach with their toes in the warm water. That makes sense, ah? Americans know how to do it."

  The Soviet engineers went between their barracks and the launch sites by a special train called a motovoz, made of wood, probably a lot like the train Vassily had ridden on the way to the camps. No toilets aboard. No water. Windows stuck shut or open. Once a blizzard came up as they were on their way home from work, and the train was stranded for two days. No one died, he said, and no wolves came. Just a bad commute.

  The more he learned about the Saturn V, the more despairing he became. The first stage of the Saturn V came by barge from Louisiana, through a canal dug just to get it out of the facility to the Intracoastal Waterway. The second came from California through the Panama Canal. The third was flown from California in a Super Guppy airplane.

  Soviet boosters had as many as thirty multiple engines. That had been a quick fix to getting sufficient power in the early days, but hamstrung their later development. The rockets were built in Kuibyshev, then taken apart, put on trains, and shipped to the cosmodrome. It had been Vassily's responsibility to get them all welded back together.

  * * * *

  Two more things he loved:

  Getting “free gifts.” In his room he had three toasters, a waffle iron, and a never-functional pants presser he got for opening checking accounts, along with a yellow whistle shaped like a locomotive, a paperweight shaped like Mt. Vernon, and a Frisbee, all also with bank names on them: We would get multiple statements from accounts with minimum deposits for years afterward. He also had a gravy boat, a plate with the Maryland state seal, two tumblers of different styles, and a teaspoon, from various gas stations and supermarkets. He kept them lined up on a shelf like trophies.

  Archie comic books. He did not steal those 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 mechanical record player he'd trash picked and repaired, but I could never actually find it in his room. I had heard that piece of classic bubblegum in there, somewhere between the Tchaikovsky and the Puccini, late at night, quietly, I was certain. I know he was fascinated by Veronica, but would grunt “the kind of person who caused the Revolution” if I wanted to talk about it. It seemed that the Veronicas of the world had a lot to answer for.

  * * * *

  Vassily had defected wearing a pair of heavy black shoes with weirdly thick soles. Even for Soviet shoes, they seemed ridiculous. Once, he turned them over for me. Shining flecks of metal studded the shoes’ soles. I touched them. They were tacky, like tar on a hot day.

  He and some other metallurgists had been taken on a plant tour visit in West Germany. Some kind of ostpolitik thing. They weren't allowed contact with anything potentially useful to them, but Vassily had worked out a way to pick up alloy shavings without being obvious about it.

  "They were all over the floor. Impossible to pick them all up with alienated proletarian labor. So they were available to us.” I never knew whether the occasional appearance of Marxist-Leninist concepts in Vassily's speech was satirical, or whether a lifetime of political and linguistic indoctrination had actually had some effect.

  Not enough, though. He faked food poisoning, ran off to the bathroom, and kept running, out a door and into a street where he was almost run over by a tiny BMW Isetta. He and the driver, a bank officer from Augsburg, exchanged Christmas cards for a while.

  * * * *

  When Sputnik was launched, everyone involved, Vassily included, walked together, in silence, in front of the rocket carrier. It was two kilometers from the assembly-testing building to the pad. No one said a word. Most people only realized that they had been part of history afterward, if at all. But they knew. It was not a Red Square parade, though that certainly came later. It was a real event.

  Did Vassily really weep when he heard the first beeps from the satellite he had helped build? He never told me that he did. But the way he avoided saying anything about it made me think that he had.

  * * * *

  I was responsible for mowing Mrs. Melmar's lawn. I did it gladly, though I always demanded a decent rate for it. I neglected the Toro, and it crapped out. I asked Vassily to help me fix it.

  So I watched him do it.

  "Von Braun wanted to go to the Moon, but found himself killing schoolchildren in London and Antwerp with rockets built by slaves kept in underground pens inside a mountain. Like Flash Gordon. Why read your books when we can achieve those horrors with such ease?” We watched reruns of Flash Gordon serials together, but I guess we were watching two different shows.

  He ran his finger on the inside of a metal ring, frowning. “Pitted. No good.” He fli
cked it off into a dark corner of the garage. I heard it tinkle and vanish beneath a stack of old tires—the remnants of a truly Soviet project of Vassily's that involved retreading them by hand ("the only way we kept our vehicles moving in Tyuratam!"). Even he had finally realized the incompatibility of this with American production capabilities, but the tires remained, to my mother's dismay. Papa collected so much crap of his own that the tires barely mattered.

  "Korolev wanted to go to the Moon too, but found himself putting atomic bombs on top of rockets to destroy New York City. Even Sakharov loved his bomb. He wanted to understand the Sun, and he found a way to destroy cities with what he learned, working for men who would tear your fingernails out with pliers as easy as I talk to you now. Men he never would have broken bread with. But he let them stand over him in their bloodstained boots. Because they let him build and understand. Someone above knew us better than we knew ourselves."

  He threaded a cotter pin through the hub, took the needlenosed pliers and bent it to hold. You could see the satisfaction he took in having just the right tool for the job, hanging right there in the tool rack, a tool rack my father never used.

  "I am no different. I worked on missiles, as well as satellites and spacecraft. It was like anything else. Not defense of the motherland, or a desperate attempt to equalize power with the capitalist enemy. Just work, interesting work. Good work, what a man lives for. We sat in that miserable desert for years, testing. Not enough testing, for we were always in a hurry. You should static test all engines. Americans always do. They can afford it. We did not. Hurry, hurry. We had to meet our schedules, get the engines working, get them firing. Once we were testing an ICBM. The R-9. Oxidized with liquid oxygen. Made no sense for an ICBM. I can admit that now, but then we fought with the other design bureaus, some who were developing storable propellants. An ICBM needs to be launched quickly, and so needs a storable propellant. A space probe or manned flight, not so much. So, were we secretly working on what we really wanted to work on? An interplanetary spacecraft disguised as an ICBM? No. We were working on a weapon. It just wasn't a very good weapon. It does not excuse us.