Mars

DOSSIER: M. A. VOSNESENSKY

“Why can’t you be reasonable, like your brother?”

Mikhail Andreivitch had heard that cry from his father all his life, it seemed. Nikolai was the older of the two boys, the paragon of the family. He studied hard at school and won excellent marks. He was quiet; his favorite pastime was reading books. His friends were few, but they were as studious and well mannered as Nikolai himself.

Mikhail, the second son (there was a younger daughter), sailed through school hardly even glancing at his textbooks. Somehow he got good grades; not quite as good as his older brother’s, of course, but good enough to send him to the engineering college. Instead of studying, Mikhail listened to music, imported American rock mostly. The noise drove his father wild. Mikhail had lots of friends, girls as well as boys, and they all liked to listen to loud rock music and dress in blue jeans and leather jackets like bikers.

And he gambled. “The curse of the Russians,” his father called it. His mother wept. Mikhail played cards with his friends and, sometimes, with older men who dressed well and had faces of stone. His parents feared the worst for him.

“You’re turning your mother gray!” his father shouted when Mikhail announced he was going to buy a motorbike. He had worked for two years in secret, spending his afternoons in a garage helping the mechanic instead of attending classes. Somehow he had still managed to pass his examinations at school. Even so, two years’ wages were not enough to buy the handsome machine he coveted. Mikhail had risked every ruble on a card game, vowing that if he won he would never gamble again. He won, mainly because he had been willing to take greater risks and had more money to put up than the other gamblers that night.

True to his self-imposed discipline, he never gambled again. He bought the bike over his father’s objections and his mother’s flowing tears. It did not matter to them that Mikhail could now drive from their apartment to his college classes without spending two hours a day on city buses. They only saw him zooming along the streets of Volgograd with pretty young girls shamelessly showing their legs as they rode behind Mikhail, clutching him tightly.

His mother was already gray, and his father almost totally bald. The old man had been a civil servant, one of the numberless apparatchiks who had been pushed out of the government bureaucracy in the name of perestroika and forced to find another job. Briefly he had worked as an administrator in one of the largest factories in Volgograd, but only briefly. He entered politics and soon was elected to a seat on the city council, where he settled down in comfortable anonymity for the remainder of his working life.

“Why can’t you be reasonable, like your brother?” his father cried when Mikhail announced that he was going to take flying lessons. He had done well that school year, even winning academic honors now that he had given up the mechanic’s job.

That was the summer Mikhail learned that he loved flying, and flying loved him. He was good at it, very good. He took to the air as naturally as an eagle, his instructor told him. He was actually in the air on his first solo flight when his older brother was killed in a senseless accident. A drunken truck driver smashed into the city bus he was riding. Fourteen injured and one killed. Nikolai.

Somehow his parents seemed to blame Mikhail for Nikolai’s death. They raised no objection when he told them he had been accepted for cosmonaut training and would be leaving Volgograd. It was while he was in training that his mother quietly passed away in her sleep. When he went home for her funeral his father and sister treated him so coldly that Mikhail never returned.

Mikhail had not even been born when Yuri Gagarin made his epochal first flight in orbit. Vaguely, from early childhood, he recalled seeing blurry television pictures of the Americans on the moon. All through the long years of growing up he nursed the secret ambition of being the first man to set foot on Mars.

He told no one of his dream. Except once, when he was still a child, one dark autumn night while the first snow of the year gently sifted out of the sky to cover grimy old Volgograd with a clean coating of white, he spoke of it to his brother, half asleep in the bed next to his.

“Mars,” his brother said dreamily, drowsily.

“I want to be the first man on Mars,” Mikhail whispered.

“The first, no less.” Nikolai turned in his bed. “All right, little Mickey. You can be the first. I give you my permission. Now let me sleep.”

Mikhail smiled in the darkness, and when he dreamed he dreamed about Mars.