The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 163
When a person reads from a sheet of paper it does not mean that they hide the eyes to conceal their shame, they just do their job, how else would we know the news? Shortly before Gagarin’s death, I heard in the adults’ gossip that after all, he didn’t live up to what you’d call an impeccable hero, because he became too vain and proud, and he cheated on his wife. Consider, for instance, that wide scar in his eyebrow which appeared after his jump from a lover’s apartment on the second floor.
(…but who’s interested today in all those rumors, be they true or false?
For my son Ahshaut, and so for all of his generation, Gagarin is just a name from a history textbook, as for me was, say, Marshal Tukhachevsky.
Orbited the Earth? Well, OK, good job.
Got executed by a firing squad? Well-well, bad luck.
However, for me Gagarin is not a textbook but a part of my own life and, as long as I’m alive, I am interested to find out what happened, how and why. And, when digging for certain facts, it’s hard not to fall in love with Internet search engines. The only venue for getting info then was the radio-voices from behind the crackle-’n’-burst static 24/7 or the yarn by Zone old-timers. The first was effectively unreadable, like the Pilutikha curses inside the pottery pressed to the wall, the lack of exact dating and absence of references made the eye-withesses’s tales sound fairly mythological. Still and yet, even before the rise of Netscape, I managed to learn that his attitude to the superiors in the chain of command grew markedly conceited after cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov returned to the Earth in form of a scorched firebrand…
Vladimir Komarov knew that he would not survive his space flight because his backup, Yuri Gagarin, when inspecting the spaceship Voskhod, found two hundred technical flaws which he listed in a written report of ten pages. He passed the report thru his higher commanders to Leonid Brezhnev, the then Ruler of the USSR. The commanders held the report by them, they knew that Brezhnev would never agree to postpone the launch date taking risks that Americans might get ahead of the Soviet Union in the space flight race.
Komarov could refuse to go to his obvious death, but then the doomed spaceship would be manned by his backup and personal friend, Yuri Gagarin. On the doomsday morning, Gagarin appeared at the launch pad wearing an astronaut spacesuit and demanded that he be sent instead of Komarov, but he was not listened to…
After the burial of Komarov’s ashes in the Kremlin wall, next to the ashes of Marshal Malinovsky, Gagarin’s behavior became extremely defiant and uncontrolled. By unconfirmed rumors, at one of the government banquets, Yuri Gagarin splattered his glass of vodka into Brezhnev’s face.
Americans rule out the plausibility of such an incident not because of the lack of perspicacity inherent in the mixed up nation taking root in simpletons unable to survive among the population of their origin but because of the different grammar. Since in the Russian language “mother” and “death” are of the same grammatical gender, for a Russian mujik, consciously or unconsciously, there feels some similarity in the 2. Well, how to plausibly bring over the meaning of “Death-Mommy” to Americans if all they've got is just “Mr. Death”? Not anything fits into one's mind until they got it under their skin… As a tangent effect, they shove an anti-tank mine under their belt and with the cry, “Try to bear me back, Mom!” throw themselves under the trucks of advancing tank… Then go and rack your brains over the mystery of the Russian soul. To crack the riddle check the language rules…