Adelaide is a sun struck city of about a million hidden away at the edge of the desert and the sea in southern Australia, and has plentiful alcoholics. Alexei, incidentially, had never been one of them, although he had been the first man in space.

The neighborhood in which Lenovsky rented the filthy room where he was patiently waiting to die of old age had seen better days. During the time he lived there it was all bus station grime, tangled electricity wires and faded Cyrillic lettering peeling from the empty shop fronts. The place was a stagnant, small time ghetto of Russian refugees who after escaping from their homeland had found themselves unable to fit into the country that had taken them in.

The Australians sometimes said that they should try harder adapt and show a little gratitude, these Russians, but that dazed expression a lot of them seemed to have painted their faces on went deeper than a mere inability to cope with the strength of the sun. For many of them the main difference immigration had made was that their already difficult lives had become a bad dream in a foreign language, and the reason they didn't integrate was that they couldn't entirely let go of the hope that one day they might wake up. The dislocation left them lacking the fight to avoid being pushed into the part of the city where the pimps and the junkies were.

A lot of them developed a degree of resignation to the idea that perhaps it was their fate to be foreigners wherever they went.

As a lost cosmonaut Alexei was, of course, different. The pension he got off the Chinese, whose prisoner he had been for four decades after his space capsule careened burning out of a blue sky and squished down into a potato field near Shanghai was by no means lavish, but it was enough that he could have done better. The thing was that he liked this part of the city. Among these people who had fled his homeland he felt safe, and in the winter, when it occasionally rained, he was able to imagine he was back in Odessa.

Before they had taken him to the airport to put him on the plane to Adelaide, after he had been their prisoner for forty two years, the Chinese told Alexei that it would be better if he didn't talk about his decades in the gulag and being a lost cosmonaut and all that.

Alexei was a patient man, so patient that even after all those decades spent digging potatoes out of the mud on the prison farm and having lost but one of his toes to frostbite he didn't have anything particularly against the Chinese, but he was proud of having been the first man in space, and he didn't see why he should have to hide it.

Instead, from the first moment he arrived in Australia, he made it his mission to tell everyone about who he was, regardless of whether or not they were willing to listen.

He really didn't mind that no one believed him. As he was fond of explaining to people, his near miraculous ability to calmly cope with whatever life threw at him was one of the reasons he'd been selected for cosmonaut training in the first place.

Five years before the fifties finished, as part of the cosmonaut course, Alexei had been subjected to a type of endurance training which involved being locked into a small lightless box for two days. For any ordinary person this would have been bad enough on its own, but cosmonauts were not supposed to be ordinary people. Just to make sure the box was, at random intervals, heated to sort of temperature that some cookbooks recommend for baking cakes, cooled sufficiently that the resulting pus and sweat froze where it had seeped from his skin, and had most of the oxygen drained out of it.

Alexei had been surprised to find that none of the other space cadets, all test pilots like himself, could deal with it. Half an hour in there was enough to have them literally head-butting the wall, screaming that they didn't want to be cosmonauts anymore, to just let them out, now! Not without justification they felt as though they were being cooked or frozen or about to die from lack of air, all of which, to give the designers of the box credit for being more than sadists, were hazards a cosmonaut might very well be faced with.

Alexei suffered like all of them, his trick was that, somehow, he just didn't mind.

It puzzled people.

"How do you do it?" they'd ask him, and they never believed he was serious when he gave his answer.

"Don't you know" he would say with no sign of joking, with his face completely straight, "that in the end everything works out fine?" He never tried to explain it. It was just how he saw the world.

"Would you believe" he would tell anyone who came within earshot, almost fifty years later as he shuffled along the sea front in Adelaide, startling the sun bathers with his tangled beard and frank stale urine stench, "that I was the first man in space"?

The guy who sold fish and chips from the shop next to his building was reminded daily that there were absolutely no fish and chips in orbit.

Perhaps one of the reasons why no one ever showed any indication of comprehending what Alexei said is that he didn't speak English, just Mandarin and Russian, which although it was his native language had become so garbled through misuse that not even the Russians he lived among were able to clearly understand him.

In his very last years he discovered a factory not far from his house where not quite legal immigrants could find employment soldering together computer keyboards. The smell of carcinogenic melting plastic fumes, even the diluted essence of them that wafted through to the foyer, was almost exactly the same one that had filled his space capsule. It was very nostalgic for him. He liked to sit in there and let the memories come flooding back.

"I was actually in space before Gagarin you know?" he would mention, conversationally, to the security guard as he was manhandled out onto the street.

All in all Alexei wasn't unhappy with the way his life had turned out, although there were times, like when he was on the pavement after being booted out of the plastics factory yet again with that delicious, toxic space pod smell still clinging to the hairs of his old nostrils, that he did think about how different things might have been if he had have landed safely back in Russia the way he was supposed to.

...

This was the thing, in 1959, when Alexei became the first man in space, no one had given much thought to the potential difficulties of retrieving him from up there. Everyone working on the space program knew that the Americans were trying to beat them to it, and the truth is that in the rush to get Alexei into orbit a lot of corners were cut. Just having got him off the launch pad without incinerating him had seemed like an achievement, and outside of Moscow, at mission control, the technicians whose job it was to guide him home were a little drunk with self congratulations.

Skimming the edge of the atmosphere at speeds that had previously only been achieved in the imagination of physicists Alexei knew that he would be national hero on his return, and was aware of the irony of that. The space pod he was riding in, basically a well insulated metal sphere, was almost exactly the same model that had previously been used to send monkeys into space. Among other things the tests had revealed that the stresses of space flight were enough to set the more excitable primates madly gnawing at the instrument panel. Wary of what this might imply the scientists who had planned the mission had deliberately minimized the type of button pushing, decision making behaviors the first man in space would have to undertake during his ride.

Almost the sole concession that had been made to Alexei's status as an elite test pilot and not a monkey had been the addition of a small port hole through which it would be his privilege and duty to take mankind's first glimpse down at the Earth from above.

Peering out from his sphere, his single orbit over and his superheated tumble back to Earth begun, it was clear to Alexei that something had gone wrong. Although his decent should have begun over the mid Atlantic, he could clearly see he was already directly over where the planned landing ground on the steppes of Russia and slipping further hundreds of kilometers further east with every second.

On the ground, it seemed, someone with a slide rule had slipped up. Now, sealed in a sphere designed for a space monkey, there was nothing he could do.

Alexei figured that it was possible he might land somewhere on the coast of China but that it was more likely he would splash down into the Pacific Ocean where the hastily designed pod would sink straight to the bottom.

Plunging through the atmosphere Alexei looked through the porthole at the Himalaya's directly below him. From above the Earth was an imperfect, space fruit, a swirling ball of blue and white and green and yellow- brighter and more alive than anything he had previously imagined. When the outside of the sphere became heated to the point that the view from the window was replaced by the pulsing brightness of superheated metal he thought a little of tuberculosis and car accidents, and it seemed to him that things could have been so such worse. In his last minutes of clarity he'd looked down on the living blue ribbon that was the river he'd swam and fished in as a child.

"It's OK" he said, and shrugged his shoulders to the extent that the straps that were holding him into the reentry seat allowed. On Earth, in the deserts of Xinjiang and the mountains of the Karakom, people pointed at the sky and thought they were seeing a meteor streaking overhead.

Above them Alexei waited.

...

By an amazing stroke of luck the farmer who had been working the field Alexei landed in was under a nearby tree having a nap when it happened. On being retrieved by the fire brigade what he had really wanted to do was explain to the man that the Soviet government would compensate him for the damage to his potatoes, but instead he was dragged off to the local police station where he was enveloped by a crowd of people who all seemed to be shouting at once in Chinese.

The way Alexei saw it, even if the process of bringing him down had been bungled that didn't have changed the fact the Soviet Union had put him into space was pretty impressive. He didn't see why it had to be such a big secret.

But someone did.

Alexei was surprisingly at peace with his place on the mountain prison farm they sent him to. He didn't even think of it as a prison, there was a beautiful view of the glaciers and for all the unpleasantness of the fleas and constant gnawing hunger, he liked being close to the soil. There was no barbed wire or anything like that, although anyone who tried to run away was more or less assured of freezing to death or being eaten by wolves.

Why they decided to let him go after forty two years was also a mystery to him. Alexei supposed that with China opening up the possibility of some outsider stumbling upon a lost Cosmonaut on a remote gulag would cause too much trouble.

The leaders of the new Russia were not in any way pleased when they were informed that Alexei Lenovsky was, in fact, still alive. By then half the high schools in their country had been named after Yuri Gagarin, officially the first human in space, and most of their generation had grown up with his picture pasted on their bedroom wall. Yuri had become a genuine Soviet hero, and there would be nothing simple about the task of having to rename everything and rethink the meaning of some of their fondest childhood memories. It was just easier for Lenovsky to remain dead.

...

The Russians and the Chinese, as it happens, had been the best of friends almost up until 1959, and if Alexei had have crash landed only a year or two earlier there would have been no need for any secrecy. In all likelihood Old Chairman Mao himself would have donated his private luxury train to ship him back home in glory, and his flight would have been seen as a symbol of the superiority of the system they claimed to share.

By 1959 however they no longer claimed to share the same system, instead accusing each other of having forsaken the path to true communism and gone across to the dark side. The Chinese were uneasy with what the Russians had done with the legacy of their former dictator Stalin. After his death in 1953 they had all but disowned him. In China, by contrast, he went on being revered as a sort of visionary archangel.

The Chinese felt this was definitive proof that the Russians were in fact hegemonic revisionists, whatever that meant.

The Russians replied in kind by claiming that the Chinese interpretation of Marxism which differed from theirs by placing peasants not industrial workers as the driving force of revolution, was simple minded, and labeled them as cabbage patch communists.

On this pretext, on both sides, men with slide rules took time off from their fraught attempts to retrieve people like Alexei from space to plot mutual nuclear annihilation.

It was all nonsense, of course. The Chinese were continually showing that they were anything but simple minded. Forty two years later, they showed it by looking outside the box to see that the ghetto at the arse end of Fitzpatrick Street in Adelaide was perhaps the only place in the world they could send a decrepit old Slav with a weird accent and stories of his life as a Lost Cosmonaut to die without attracting any attention at all.

...

Each week, on Tuesday evening, the nephew of the slumlord who owned the building where Alexei lived, came to collect the rent.

The drunks that were still sufficiently sober to open up when they heard him knocking were rarely keen for conversation, or even to look him in the eye. They generally preferred to pull back the door just enough to stick out a handful of crumpled notes and leave it at that.

This the slumlord's nephew didn't mind- the dust, smell and stale heat of the building was enough to make his eyes water- it was not a place he wanted to linger.

Alexei though, was never one to need any invitation to talk. Far from just opening his door a crack, he came right out onto the top floor landing where he stood slowly counting his rent money from an enormous brick of notes he always carried, steadily prattling the whole time.

The rent collector tried to tell him to just shut up and hand over the money in English, but he couldn't speak Russian or Mandarin so it didn't do any good. Annoyed, but a little taken aback by the articulate sound of the words coming from the old guy's mouth he was reduced to awkwardly standing on the top step trying to express how he felt by impatiently tapping his foot. Alexei didn't seem to notice.

The reason for this is that he was deeply into a discourse on how, before deciding to become a pilot, he had almost become an engineer. He told the rent collector that although he didn't hold anything against the people who had built and guided the space capsule that had taken his life so far off course, he had for a long time felt as though he could have done a much better job himself. He explained that he believed that even without access to specialist materials and government sponsorship he thought it was possible for anyone to build themselves a basic little launch vehicle.

Alexei paused at this stage and used an elbow to point through his open door.

"Look", he said, "if you don't believe me just have a peek in there and see for yourself". Alexei was referring to the inside of his flat where every available surface was covered by coils of the type of paper that is usually used by butchers for wrapping up meat, although Alexei was using it for the unconventional purpose of laying out the blueprints for a home brewed spacecraft.

If the rent collector had have caught on and looked things might have worked out differently. The paper was covered with finely traced lines and the sort of numbers that represent thrust to weight ratios and metal fatigue projections and other things which rocket scientists know about. Even he could have seen it was something amazing and out of place.

But he didn't.

As far as he was concerned there nothing the old man could have in his room that would be of interest to anyone. He wasn't even interested enough to give a grunt of thanks when he received the rent money. He roughly thumbed over the notes Alexei had given him, looked at his watch, and trotted off down the stairs.

Alexei was evidently no fool, but by the age of 85 there's no doubt his ability to read people was getting a little rusty.

"Don't be like that" he called out after him, there was a slight treble of something like surprised disappointment in his voice. As sometimes happened on the rare occasions he got upset or excited his rusty Russian had given way to the Mandarin he'd spent the past four decades practicing. "Don't get me wrong young fella. It's not that I'm bitter. I glad Yuri got the recognition, God bless his soul."

His voice didn't echo in the stair well but got smothered by the other sounds seeping from behind the closed doors. Television, a running bath, someone coughing their lungs out.

"It's not even that I want to go back into space" Alexei went on, now alone on the landing and not shouting anymore because he knew the rent collector couldn't hear him, "I just enjoy putting things together, that's all".