Sputnik

Bella Zhou

Anyone who doubted its existence could walk into the backyard just after sunset and see it.

— Mike Gray, Angle of Attack

On the evening of October 14, 6:00 P.M., 1957, Gregori Golubev walked out of the factory with three things in his mind: his pocket-watch, Igor, and the satellite. By that same order he began to sort them out in that dumb, laggard manner of his, verifying first through a slight circumspection that it was indeed six o’clock – that his stalwart, pawnable timekeeper had not failed him, then jotting a mental note to buy food for his cats, this note he will draw up at the most inconvenient of places such as a distant cemetery on a Friday midnight, then instinctively widening his eyes to engulf the gaping absurdity of space above, and, characteristic of a Gregori, began to stand vigil.

He could barely hear the radio in the factory as it scratched and burned for a clearer transmission of the satellite’s feeble pulse. He could hear it, nevertheless, feeble as it was, enough to feel an urge to distance himself from Sputnik’s heartbeats, wild and intimate, and fast. Here the rural night was fully silent. He raked the sky for a glint of metal. It made no response.

Mikhail et al. had envisioned 22 weeks of the satellite’s passing over earth, and vowed to keep it company throughout all twenty-two. Gregori, however, was not invited. Only attributable to pure luck had Gregori Golubev the opportunity to associate himself on any level with the making of Sputnik. The Stalin administration found him freshly emerged from the war in Korea, confused, sprung from a long line of non-Kulak peasant farmers who were also slow and laggard in their thought, and, recalling that they needed someone to weld the alloys and aid assemblage, shrugged their shoulders and declared him employed. “But,” as Gregori recollected to himself, standing like a skinny scarecrow above the charred field with his scraped, worn, and singed leather shoes, “I always had good luck.”

Again he made a note to himself about the food for Igor. 

It was almost 6:07 when the satellite made its unhurried way through the horizon, pushing away black waves of space as it went, too much like a piece of paper inching along a chalked-out arc. When it disappeared the time was 6:39. Gregori mounted his rusting bicycle and pedaled slowly the opposite way, through century-old footpaths, torn and stomped, yellow fields receding behind his thin black cloak. He threw the hood over his head, and – as he imagined – with the creaking and groaning of his instrument beneath him, became an ominous organ of the still, slithering dark.

He imagined a lot of things. After all, he wasn’t just a factory worker with a bland life of no excitement. He made Sputnik.

Another thirty minutes and he was on the fourth floor of a toppling flat, the building only half-finished before abandoned in another long-past, hazy October. Obscured by the warm glow of twilight like a swollen bruise raining blood over him, his keys jangled from his knee pocket. He bent to feel their glacial texture. He took out a string of unfamiliar shapes, and was about to attempt one, before realizing that there was no keyhole.

He kicked open the door.

There was no other sound than that of his own. A battered chair and table sat primly in the middle of the room, along with a bed, a radio, a jug of water and an oil-lamp. Gregori blinked. He took his shoes off, carefully laid them by the crumpled doorframe, drew the chair, then sat down.

He stood up again to remove the newspaper he just unbecomingly trampled. Sputnik! Let the greedy, uncultured Americans look, exclaimed the wrinkled headline. Below was an illustration of a ball with several antennae attached. Sputnik’s image was still hot in his mind from when he regarded it above the dry ground. He thought of whirling through miles of barren landscapes, endlessly sprinting, and yet beneath his feet something so graceful and smooth that it could not be possible. An elegant, circular trail. Such things are difficult to make; there are always accidents. Those scientists he worked with. Have they thought of that?

He shifted, feeling the dry cold of a town some seventy miles north of St. Petersburg. That of congealed blood. He had no hearth.

Immediately he felt a subtle nudge against his pant leg. He looked down, astonished but not too astonished, to see Peter.

“I thought you were asleep,” he murmured.

“I was,” Peter mumbled back, then lifted a slender paw to point at the apartment door, wide open. “Then I heard you come in.” He yawned, his whiskers rising then draping down over his sharp teeth. “Weren’t you hot? Today was so hot, even for Moscow. I despise summer. Igor retched twice. They’re all sleeping beneath the bed.”

“Oh,” Gregori could only say.

“We couldn’t do much for him. Spots tried pressing his stomach, but…Oy, Igor! Davai!”

Yet it was not Igor who emerged. Instead stalked Spots, Peter’s narrow-eyed, sharp-clawed tabby companion. “Igor’s still sleeping,” she drawled, and casually snaked a paw over Peter’s shoulder.

Gregori remembered reading somewhere the average lifespan of a cat – twelve years. Igor turns twelve tomorrow. And he has mulled over this thought for weeks. In fact, in his mind he could often sense Igor’s sickness bubbling from his mouth, rising in the room and fuming out the window. However, much like a child of ten years, he still experienced the run-of-the-mill pang of alarm.

“His age is old,” said Peter. He always knew what Gregori was thinking.

“You knew he was going to die long ago,” said Spots. She always knew what he liked least to hear. “In fact, we –”

“Spots,” Peter cautioned. He beckoned Gregori and together they padded toward the bed. The wall was plastered in a ghastly white. Glued on it was a torn newspaper fragment, showing a subtitle lost in no doubt a vortex of headlines, timidly announcing Soviet fighter jets struck by ‘Friendly Fire’. Below it, forcefully welded with the first headline, read Antiwar: American & Commie nurses in Korea found dead with red spots covering their bodies, Chicken Pox? Both were curling up at the edges, oxidized, so old and yellowed that the text was barely present.

Spots glanced back at him and realized he was contemplating the wall decor. “You better not let anyone see that,” she warned Gregori. “It’s American. They’re trying to take Korea, Gregi! And you have America on your wall.”

Gregori nodded in agreement, and tried, with halfhearted force, to pry the papers off. The obstinate glue clung on, which infuriated him, prompting a violent tug-of-war.

Peter prodded underneath the bed. “Awake yet?”

An orange head popped up. “No, not yet,” said October, the most recent of Gregori’s cats. His face cleaved itself into a smile – its most frequent position – as he found his joke quite disarmingly funny. October was rather attractive: young, spry, robust, his well-combed bushy fur rippled even though, as Gregori observed, there was no wind. Gregori also noticed that, despite him having little means to feed them, his cats were always in prime shape. “Gregi, you’re back!” October spoke cheerfully, something akin to an astronomical glow enveloping his amber pupil. “Gregi, did you hear about Kapyong? Seoul? Khvalit' Stalina. I’m so proud of Ma. I’m so proud of Pa.”

Gregori promptly let go of the newspaper cutouts, momentarily struck by an image of October sheathed in a green army suit, his orangish hair billowing in the wind, two miles of corn fields behind him, a rifle below his arm. This was perhaps his mind making stories again. Suddenly the rifle went off in October’s armpit. The fields are starched and he is gone. As Gregori refocused, the floor was empty before him.

Immediately October reappeared, his arms wound about another shape. The fleeting phantasm was forgotten at once. Gregori took it with shaking hands, the small, broken form, his muddy fur, eyes tightly shut, limbs never emerged into maturity.

“Igor,” he said.

“Cold.” replied Igor.

His room had no hearth. Gregori regretted this now. Igor was always one for trouble, falling into mudpits, getting lost in forests, knocking over apple-carts. He was short, stout, red-cheeked, fitting for one who rolled over hay hills and crawled under hay doors, dusty scars splattered over his face. Always Gregori would pick up the fallen apples, apologize to the neighbors; wash his clothes before his mother found out. Igor loved people and hated porridge, both vehemently.

As he enveloped Igor’s limp body in his own bedsheets, Gregori thought that he wouldn’t last the night. It was seven thirty now. Outside, twilight was lazily spinning into darkness.

Suddenly Gregori could feel his knees against the hardwood floor, pressing in hard, suddenly hurting. He’d never thought about what he’d do without Igor. Perhaps he would forget the way to the factory and lose the old trails around this solitary town. Perhaps all his other cats would dissolve as well – his precious cats – fade into piles of dust in his mind’s eye. After all, it started with Igor. It started with Gregori scraping for Igor’s body under mounds of the young and newly dead in Paris, finding nothing but a torn hand, a last glance, an untook breath, back in 1945; then Peter’s plane whizzing from the sky and pounding into the ground like a bullet on skin, leaving a groove, ‘friendly fire’, ’52; then Spots, that same year, contemplating a Seoul sky, red spots arching over her face like mountains, or stars; then October, that stupidly passionate optimist, four years ago, whatever happened to him?

Still he could hear pink-lipped Igor telling his mother: “I want to be a pilot like Gregori’s Pa!” And receiving a big red slap across the face.

No one in this house could understand his frenzy. It was a human madness, and they were all cats.

Still he could not give Igor up. It was partially his fault, too – he would’ve went to Paris to see the Germans go down himself, had it not been that damn flu he came down with that spring, he had coughed his own lifeblood up on cheap white sheets and seen their Moscow cottage upside down and touched the kettle to ‘feel’ and scared his usually-optimistic brother to hell. He even gave Igor a carnation before he set out. How was he to know Igor would die right as the war ended? Human existence is too frail and too delicate for games like these. A banana peel could kill, even though satellites do not stumble once from their path. How cruel. And yet he could still feel himself hurtling in orbits. And he could hear the dusty yellow stream gush past as he knelt on the soaked riverbank, spears sunk beneath the mud, damp spots blooming over his own pants, washing his best friend’s clothes.

It has almost been twelve years since Paris. It will be four and a half hours before Igor dies. 

Outside, the satellite confidently sails outside of Russian eyesight, without a blink, a word, a pause.

Gregori placed a hesitant hand against his oldest cat’s chest. With the touch, he could hear something sputter, and come alive; an erratic beeping, a radio-broadcasted beat; he could feel it overhead now, as if it were hanging right over the ceiling, his very own creation, his lightweight metal vehicle. The Stalin administration wanted to find someone who would forget about secrets right after they were spoken, “and I was squatting right by the road”, he thought. If only life was not so wanton – if only life’s movement was round and glassy, a smooth concourse towards drowning in the endless turns of constellations and time’s quizzical, slow trickling. And yet – his breathing hitched – memory drained steadily, linearly, inevitably, like a pre-planned downfall, like battery levels enough to sustain twenty-two weeks.

He will bury Igor’s bones beneath the gunpowder-drenched field by the abandoned factory so he can watch Sputnik roll over the starless night with the comfort of companionship, almost like being in Moscow, almost like Igor the cat existed – what? – and they will find Gregori’s body cold, alone, in his empty lifeless run-down apartment, clutching a fragment of a newspaper dated four years ago. Then America will launch its first-ever satellite.

NOTE

In Russian, Gregori bears the meaning of watchful or vigilant, and Golubev means dove.