by Dan Brown

 

1. Man is half what he is and half what he would want to become, said Oscar Wilde. If it is true, Soviet children of the sixties and seventies were all semi-cosmonauts. I know that for sure, because I myself at the age of 7-8 was also a half-cosmonaut. It’s surprising, but I had a feeling even then, that all this is childish drivel, which will pass with years. At the same time, I was saying to myself, “I know that everyone wants to become a cosmonaut. But with me it is different! I really want to become one, really! Yet if in the case of others this will pass—and so be it!—not in my case!”

 

2. I think that many of my peers, who were dreaming of flying to the cosmos reached the same depths of self-reflection. Some even kept the vow – a pair of cosmonauts after all really existed. Nevertheless: then we all, young and old, lived with one foot in the cosmos. The cosmos was everywhere. In school books, in the walls of houses and in the mosaics of the Moscovite subway: a snub-nosed cosmonaut behind the glassware of his helmet-aquarium performed some symbolic work – planting small green sprouts in the dimples on Mars or extending a satellite to the stars. In the smog of the cities he was always and everywhere, and to some degree he became the permanent eye-witness of every happening, the permanent «third», the hypostasis of the same species, like that Lenin, who drags the beam on Saturday volunteer work. (By the by) adults understood him, by all appearances, as the ineluctable drinking buddy, who if did not put in any contribution into the purchasing of the bottle, did not drink much either. Maybe it is he to whom boozers consecrate that pair of drops, which they ritually sprinkle on the earth before the bottle starts its first round.

 

3. Under the windows of five-storied building [Khrushchev style] models of satellites stand. In block calendars, one spacecraft succeeded another. A stream of cosmic allusions was revealing to the Soviet monotony, so to say, the road to the future, and saving our noses from the stench of life. The surrounding world seemed to be a camping ground, in which people lived only temporarily, while the city of the sun was being built. And in the moments of apotheosis of our cosmic allusion we completely forgot the fact that this camp was around almost forever: they showed on television the spaceship lift-offs in the Baikonur. These were the moments, when cosmonauts came to life from the friezes (borders) of [our] homes. In their spacesuits and hoods, with microphones at [their] lips, they waved their hands to the television viewers for the last time, before turning and going toward the white phallus, which stood in readiness, aiming at the navy-blue sky of Kazakhstan.

 

4. One accessory of the cosmonauts` gear seemed particularly enigmatic to me. They carried with themselves small, paunchy cases, which sparkled in the sun with steel and titanium. I was [always] quite concerned with the question, what could [possibly] be inside. Star charts perhaps? Translation tables? A secret weapon? Emergency rations for emergency situations? For some time I chose not to ask grown-ups about this – knowing from experience that after their explanations, the world seldom grew more interesting. When I nonetheless couldn`t hold out, the answer was stupefying. “The case?” repeated one of [those] seated by the television. “It`s for shit. Look, it is connected by a hose to the space suit. Cosmonauts, after all, are also people.”