On October 4, 1957, the world’s first satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched into the cosmos. Greta, who was 17 at the time, got home from school on the tram and in her imagination leafed through a magazine of do-it-yourself sewing patterns. She had peeked at the magazine earlier, over the knees of her classmate Dasha (despite Greta’s importuning, Dasha had refused to lend her the magazine, even for one night). In the kiosk next to the tram stop, a Komsomol member of about 50 grew obsolete. She wore a red beret and was using a sharp pencil to solve a crossword puzzle for experts.
Greta placed two coins on the counter and received in return toffee with the taste of soap, and an orange postage stamp illustrated with a satellite. The stamp, which had been distributed throughout the country, perpetuated the gap between the Soviet Union and the United States in the space race. Greta returned home following her shopping, to an apartment that had been nationalized d ue to the housing shortage. Its three flats had been divided among three families who insisted on not getting along with each other. The stairwell was inhabited by a drunk who was always about to die. Greta smiled at the drunk like a girl who has a future and gave him her toffee. She put the glossy stamp in a small envelope next to a ring from the czarist period, which she had received as an inheritance from her grandmother, and slid it under her goose-down pillow.
On the agenda was an argument about the best way to pickle cucumbers and cabbage leaves. From there the way was short to personal jibes. Yulia Andreiva scolded Nadia Yaruslavna for it being inconceivable that Gennady, Nadia’s husband, did not clean the toilet bowl after he, pardon the expression, took a crap. Before Nadia could fire back at Yulia and tell everyone exactly what her husband did while she went to the market, the radio announcer declared in a faint voice the good news from Moscow: a live passenger was capable of surviving a launch into orbit and enduring weightlessness. Everyone applauded and Greta felt embarrassed for having received the national holiday in a checked yellow robe and messy hair. Afterward she paused to think and decided that the honorable thing to do would be to buy another stamp, this time with a likeness of Laika’s profile. Greta placed the new acquisition in the drawer of her desk at school and decided that it would be her amulet for getting good marks, so that when the time came she would be admitted to medical school.
Owing to a shortage of connections with members of the socialist party, Greta managed only to get admitted to evening studies in economics and commerce. Parallel to her studies, she started to work as a salary accountant in a screw factory. Married engineers, who had striped hankies in their pants pockets, invited Greta for black tea and a dry cake in the cafeteria. Greta did not want to fall in love with any of them. She preferred to remain free and not expand the pile of laundry in her tub, which she did by hand. Her only dress, a brown dress made of cheap material, and her underwear, by now gray with age, were immersed in the tub’s murky water every week. Through the thin walls in her room Greta had learned how couples make love. She herself had undergone the experience only once, when she was 12, with a stuffy-nosed urchin from a parallel street. In exchange she got a loaf of dry bread.
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