The Faces of Mikhail Gorokhov

by David Barber

Samarkand, June 1941

One of the soldiers fetched Gorokhov out of the mausoleum just as his excavators were opening the sarcophagus.

Waiting to see him was the keeper of the tomb, an ancient bearded Muslim, an imam from the days before Stalin frowned on such men. He pointed out the inscription in Arabic over the doorway arch. The man spoke no Russian, but a youth at his elbow translated: When I rise from the dead, the world shall tremble.

It had crossed Gorokhov’s mind that there might be trouble — the grip of the Party being looser in these far-flung Soviet Republics — but it was just an old man, voicing old superstitions, the dread of a name and the fear of retribution.

“You know what these are?” Gorokhov waved papers in the old man’s face, documents with the stamp of the Soviet State upon them. He gestured at the youth to translate. “Orders from Stalin himself.”

It was only permission to excavate the tomb, but it amounted to the same thing; what was not forbidden was compulsory. Gorokhov was at the forefront of the scientific reconstructions of faces of the dead, and his Ivan the Terrible would be admired by members of the Politburo.

Back inside the mausoleum, his team had managed to lever aside the huge slab of green jade that was the sarcophagus lid.

The old man had followed him. “Emir Gorokhov...”

“There are no Emirs,” said Gorokhov absently. “We are all citizens now.”

Perhaps the youth had never been allowed inside before. He wrenched his open-mouthed gaze from the ornamental vault rising high above him. “He says, what would the Emir Stalin think if Muslims threatened to disturb his tomb one day?”

Gorokhov closed his eyes. The old man was trying to sign his own death warrant. “This inscription here, ask him what it says.”

“He says it is a curse: ‘Whosoever opens my tomb shall unleash an invader more terrible than I.’”

“Professor?” called out an assistant, crouching inside the sarcophagus. “The casket contains a skeleton, and the skull is intact.”

The old man was plucking at his sleeve, still talking. Mikhail Gorokhov gestured for soldiers to take him outside.

From the skull he would reconstruct the face of Timor the Lame, known to history as Tamburlaine the Great, a Mongol despot who conquered half of Asia. He smiled to himself. He would dedicate it to Stalin.

It was only coincidence that two days after the Gur-e-Amir tomb was opened, Hitler unleashed Operation Barbarossa to invade the Soviet Union.

Perhaps Stalin believed in curses, perhaps he was just a pragmatist. To encourage the Muslim conscripts from distant Soviet Republics who were fighting and dying at Stalingrad, he would order the bones of Timor reburied with full Islamic rites.

Krasnoyarsk Krai, Siberia, October 1953

Gorokhov had zig-zagged east from Moscow in stages, aboard aircraft of increasing vintage and decreasing airworthiness. But now he was the sole passenger aboard a huge Mil helicopter of the Soviet Air Forces, in a cargo space big enough for an elephant.

He shared it with a young conscript in an ill-fitting uniform, who surreptitiously swigged vodka from a bottle in a pack at his feet. Gorokhov considered reporting him but, after three hours of teeth-rattling vibration and incessant noise, he wished he’d brought his own drink.

Endless dark forest swept beneath them. Somewhere to the south lay Lake Baikal, where he had made his name in archaeology. On his office wall was a silver medal for that iconic find of a mammoth scratched on ivory. He had been ambitious, and lucky. Those had been simpler times.

They landed in a clearing near a stream, a row of tents flapping and straining in the wash from the rotor blades. He was helped down the ladder by Saparov, a functionary he recalled from the Soviet Academy of Sciences, sly and untrustworthy even for a Party apparatchik.

Immediately, his shoes began sinking into the mud. He was only too familiar with excavation sites like this. He would insist he was too old to be scrabbling in the dirt. “Is Fyodor Svetlenko not here? I understood that he asked for me.”

In fact, the official letter from the Ministry of Culture had read more like an order than a request, but there had been much uncertainty since Stalin’s death, and it had seemed wiser to comply than to complain.

“Yes, there is a skull he thinks you may be able to reconstruct.”

The man avoided further questions as they struggled through the mud to his tent.

“First of all, read this Comrade Gorokhov.”

In the folder was a scientific report on the 1908 Tunguska meteor and an article from Pravda about the exploding spacecraft theory. The newspaper clipping featured a childishly drawn rocket and a chubby alien with antennae.

Puzzled, Gorokhov pretended to read them, using the time to consider.

“What do you think?” asked Saparov after a while.

“I am an archaeologist, not an expert in...” He gestured with the papers. “It seems a bolide exploded above the forest with the power of an atom bomb.”

“A bolide from space?”

“Well, obviously.”

“Tell me, Comrade Gorokhov, what is your opinion of Professor Svetlenko? Professionally speaking.”

“A sound excavator.” The rivalry between the two was well known. Gorokhov had once called him a digger of the second rank. “Though sometimes he becomes obsessed with detail and cannot see the bigger picture.”

These were the exact words he had written in a letter to the Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology in rebuttal of Svetlenko’s criticisms.

“So you would trust the findings of his excavation?”

Gorokhov sensed a pitfall. “His work on the Palaeolithic in the Crimea was well received. But tell me, what is all this about Tunguska?”

Saparov shrugged. “The impact site is just a few kilometres from here.”

Around the inside of Svetlenko’s tent, tables were stacked with boxes. Saparov unfolded a chair and made himself comfortable.

Svetlenko still wore the beard and moustache of an aging Lenin but was much greyer now. Gorokhov had started dying his hair. Once again he wondered how the man could afford such expensive suits. Didn’t he also support a wife and daughters?

They shook hands briefly.

“Saparov,” began Svetlenko, “could you leave us for a moment? There are, ah, personal matters to be settled if Comrade Gorokhov and I are to work together.”

The man was reluctant to leave but could think of no objection.

“The fellow reports back to the Ministry of the Interior,” shrugged Svetlenko, and began to unpack boxes.

“Beria is involved? But—”

“These were found by geologists mapping mineral deposits. One of them thought he knew something of palaeontology. Since then, they’ve attracted official interest like flies to a cowpat, including those I would prefer not to be noticed by.”

Gorokhov looked over the first few bones. “But these are not fossils. I don’t recognise them, but they are local wildlife, presumably.” He shrugged. “I’m no naturalist.”

Svetlenko smirked. “Look at this hip joint.”

“Ah. It walked upright.”

“But not human. Not Neanderthal, say?”

“Obviously.”

“And this skull?”

Gorokhov was silenced by its extraordinary shape, the many teeth, the abnormal attachment of the jaw.

“Cranial capacity about 400 cubic centimetres greater than your own, Gorokhov.”

“A pathology of some sort, surely.”

“Is that your expert opinion?”

The man had outmanoeuvred him. Only now did he begin to see what he had walked into.

“What else could it be?”

“Indeed,” said Svetlenko, carefully replacing the skull in its box. “I convinced our superiors it would be helpful if you carried out one of your infamous reconstructions. We have readied a tent for you.”

Under a microscope, the bones were like nothing he had ever seen. And the teeth, instead of being socketed, grew like shark’s teeth. He asked to see where the finds had been made, but the site was gone, dynamited in the hunt for minerals. So far, excavations of virgin forest had found nothing of note. A flint arrowhead. Tiny teeth of extinct rodents. A musket ball.

Svetlenko’s report was a masterpiece of circumspection. He avoided responsibility by suggesting someone more expert be consulted. Gorokhov could feel the knife in his back.

Having no choice, he made his measurements and began work with a cast of the skull, looking for muscle attachment points, carefully building up the clay, layer by layer. When he left his tent, he draped the head with a cloth, embarrassed by what was growing beneath his hands.

The face was of no creature anyone knew, and tainted by the proximity of Tunguska and rumours of alien spaceships, what could he say to those in authority? Or would they prefer it be some mythical beast of the forest, a crackpot monster made real by his efforts?

The scientific community would pronounce him a crank if he admitted what he was thinking.

He was not even sure what Khrushchev and the new regime expected. Did they want the find trumpeted as a triumph of Soviet science, or brutally discredited as bourgeois nonsense?

Around midnight, after much thought, he began to rework the face.

If Svetlenko was disappointed next morning, he did not show it.

“Something of the wolf about it,” he judged.

“The anatomy is pathological. Inbred. Perhaps the last of its kind. Or a freak interspecies cross. That is what my report will say.”

Lost to science, the bones would gather dust in the basement of some provincial museum. At least he had saved his career. Mikhail Gorokhov gave a wan smile.

“Unless you want to be the one who claims it had a more exotic origin.”

Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, April 1964

They had coaxed Gorokhov out of retirement and flown him halfway across Russia to Baikonur. It was the year Brezhnev would replace Khrushchev, though in this modern age there would be no bullets. The deposed were pensioned off to a dacha on the Black Sea.

The airport was not open to the public, it seemed. A familiar figure waited in the empty concourse, wearing the same leather coat and dark glasses.

“You have put on weight, comrade,” said Geladze.

A few years ago, this man had been his minder during a visit to East Germany to reconstruct the face of the poet Schiller.

“Retirement agrees with you.”

“This is a fool’s errand.” Gorokhov was tired and irritable, the journey had been long and he had his chest pains again. “Are there no pictures of this cosmonaut? Any halfway competent sculptor could do the job from a photograph.”

He had explained all this over the telephone but received aeroplane tickets to Baikonur just the same.

“Come, we have a car.” Geladze belched into his fist. Gorokhov recalled the man had been plagued by digestive troubles their whole time in Germany.

Seated in the back of the car, Geladze produced photographs one at a time from a briefcase, as if presenting a slide-show.

“All taken at school. Too young to be any use. Or the face is just a blob in a class photograph. This one is recent, but obscured by a space helmet. It could be a man. I imagine they planned formal photographs when she got back.”

A belch swelled his cheeks. He unwrapped a tablet and popped it in his mouth.

“Here’s a snap of what your half-way competent sculptor produced.”

A Hero of the Soviet Union, face raised to the new dawn, smiling nobly. But this young woman was not Yelena Sidorova.

“There will be statues. One in her home town, so it needs to be recognisable.”

Gorokhov began to see their problem. How could they admit they didn’t know what their tragic heroine looked like?

Geladze turned over the last photograph. “And here is what you have to work with. The heat shield of her Vostok spacecraft failed on reentry. She was buried in a sealed coffin. But they made a plaster cast of the skull.”

He expelled a rasping belch, then started putting pictures back in his briefcase.

“I would like to keep those until I’ve finished,” said Gorokhov.

“It was I who suggested you. There will be medals, stamps. Your reconstruction will do for those also.”

“Twenty-two years old. Why so young?”

Geladze snorted. “I imagine the Academy was interested in her offspring. They married off Valentina Tereshkova to another cosmonaut in pretty quick time. To see if their babies had tails.”

They drove in silence. The whole airport occupied just one corner of the vast Baikonur Cosmodrome, the road empty of traffic except for occasional army lorries rumbling past the other way. The landscape was flat and dry, bounded by distant hazy mountains.

Why had they not just hushed it up? Gorokhov wondered. Another rumour of lost cosmonauts. At one time it would have been unwise to ask such a question, but in his retirement there was no need to be so circumspect.

“Don’t you think she deserves to be honoured, comrade?” Geladze answered. He’d put on his dark glasses again. “Things have relaxed a lot under Khrushchev. They no longer keep space launches a secret.

“And besides...” He turned to gaze out the window. “She left her microphone on during re-entry. We know the Americans listen in. Recordings of all that screaming would have been leaked. But if we honour her, they will respect her memory.” He belched quietly. “Anyway, the Soviet Union needs its heroes.”

Gorokhov was provided with a workshop where he pinned up the photographs of Yelena Sidorova. In the first few days, he made good progress with the face. It was both easier and harder, having some idea what she looked like, or at least, what she didn’t look like.

He was almost done, but couldn’t find her expression. He covered the head and went for a walk.

These familiar housing blocks — never more than five stories because they had no lifts — might have been in the suburbs of Moscow, except there was a persistent rumble like gunfire in the distance. They were test-firing a rocket engine, someone said. It explained the vague smell of kerosene in the air.

The clearest photograph of Yelena Sidorova had been taken at school, a thin, solemn child of seven. It was a riddle of the photographer’s art how old portraits viewed in the light of events could take on some hint of tragedy, or a whiff of greatness.

Geladze cursed the parents for not having other pictures, but Gorokhov remembered his own childhood in the countryside along the Volga. Photographs had never been common, sometimes no more than a wedding picture on the wall.

He recalled a rare photograph of his mother holding a baby, after an unexpected pregnancy in later life. It had been put in the window, facing outwards, to quash rumours in the town that it was the bastard of her eldest daughter.

He pulled off the covers and studied the face once more. For two days, this young woman had orbited the world alone in her Vostok spacecraft then died horribly on the way back down. He felt he’d captured her likeness, but her face remained empty, as if she were hearing that the local shop had no soap on its shelves.

He worked the clay, trying to find the right expression. She had been a hero, but he doubted she ever smiled heroically.

In the end, her look was more like his own in the mirror.

A week later, back in Moscow, he received a letter from the Ministry of Culture thanking him for his efforts and awarding him an extra month’s pension, though they would not be using his work.

Davit Geladze telephoned the same day. “Ah, comrade, so they’re using the sculptor’s bust after all. I thought at the time she seemed too sad to be a Hero of the Soviet Union.”

He paused, and Gorokhov heard him belch softly. “Your mistake was making her look real.”