Happily Ever After
Pubbed in Iconoclast #122 2021
I’m seventy-nine and I’m the first Yuri I ever knew. I will never travel back to the old country, but I love the story – how my parents fled the USSR – holding hands – leaving Komsomolsk. But now – I’ve been married forty-four years and it’s only gotten worse. Much worse. My wife’s sense of justice has. Ted, Elaine and the great grand kids just left and my hand is forced. She forced it. She won’t stop it. I’m divorcing her. I’ll start on it Monday.
When my wife Ikatarina bought here in 1981, there were still horses and gravel, but now our road is paved sixty feet wide – with bike lanes! It’s gotten much busier. Now, the cars throw cigarette butts for me to pick up in the morning. They speed by our house. Tonight, at dinner with the great grand kids here, my wife was on her guard and she heard the cars accelerating up from the light two blocks away and she rushed out into our road and she chased them – the cars – rushed out suddenly as they sped by. One of them swerved to miss her. But she chased them yelling – barking! Like a dog. A dog!
I was my first Yuri. Now, I’m the only.
My wife is just seventy-four. “Yuri”, she insisted over twenty years ago, “We’ve got to move from this strip. The county won’t pay for a speed bump. What will we do when you’re eighty. Yuri, I want to move. This year!”
But we didn’t.
Well, it’s too late. I’m seventy-nine. It’s too late. And the liabilities! The car that hit our big Oak tonight. I didn’t tell the paramedics who I was. I’m responsible for her chasing. The liabilities! If they find out, this will cost us our home! I should have seen it coming. Why didn’t I? My wife did – over twenty years ago. But back then, it just sounded like – something else she wanted. Now, she wants justice, peace, security – all of them – her own island of safety! I simply can’t give it to her. How can I? At seventy-nine.
It’s worse, much worse, when the grand kids are here. And she moaned it again tonight after the tow truck driver swept up the glass and the neighborhood was quiet again, “Yuri, it’s breaking my heart and you just stand there. It’s not the first time, either. Oh, what is wrong with me? I should have married...”
But she didn’t marry...
...Anselmo. I never could understand why not. Why on God’s earth did she think a puke U.S. Navy Ensign could give her more than Doctor Anselmo? But she did. She married me – later. Her sense of justice? Of truth? But there I was – ironically working “The Russian Problem” – during the last of the Space Race – and the innovation was all tailing off into bureaucracy both here and in the USSR anyhow and I hated the Navy and she knew it and she still married me because she told me all she really ever wanted was happily ever after and I said, “Me, too.”
Numerous occasions – Doctor Anselmo – numerous occasions she’s thrown his legend in my face. Numerous occasions, she’s known her mistake. Numerous occasions, she’s thought of leaving me – talked of it in my face.
But she hasn’t.
The Navy. They assigned me my target studies – Cosmonauts to exploit. But I look now at pictures of my sublime Ikatarina in my Navy days and I ask myself, “What else were you going to do, Yuri?”
Yuris. There were three of us then. Gagarin became famous in Vostok in 1961. That’s why I never forgot Yuri Zhutov’s compromising quote. He and Gagarin – Soviet Cosmonauts – in that famous first twenty. I realized then that all three of us were Yuris and I could understand them. I loved them. I loved our name-sake Us-ness. But Zhutov. In Pravda! I found Premier Nikita Khushchev himself scolding Yuri Zhutov publicly, in Pravda! Because Zhutov is known to have said about Gagarin,
“Yuri succeeded in Vostok. He was first in Space. But if he had caught cold, I would have gone instead. I never rode the Soyuz. But I would have. I would have gone into space in that gadget(sic) and probably been killed like Bondarenko. But then my Ikatarina, my wife of then only fourteen years, would have known me finally and been able to brag that her marriage to me was not the colossal mistake of her life. For me, privately, leading up to Yuri’s launch date, this was a very comforting thought.”
I think of this now and I know in my heart that both my Yuris are dead – Gagarin honorably – and probably smiling – making his final mistake – in a MiG 21. But Zhutov – is just erased now from the surviving photographs of that first twenty – probably sent to Siberia under Article 58. I think of this now and so much, I love her, my own Ikatarina Terezhnova – who demands only safety – but chases cars – chases them I tell you – panting and barking – like a dog! A dog! So much I love her.
And I am only seventy-nine.