“Super bagnole, eh?” André said, as a liveried chauffeur in a uniform matching Marcel’s emerged from the driver’s seat, and opened the back curbside door for them smartly. “Fuel cell version; we are 90 percent nuclear these days in France, and we have electricity to burn.”
The rear seat was a softly upholstered couch done in deep navy velour, and the carpeting was of the same material, as were the tiny cushioned ottomans upon which to rest one’s feet. Tiny adjustable overhead halogen spotlights bathed each of them in a soft pool of ersatz sunlight. The compartment walls were covered with pastel blue leather set off with chrome brightwork that might actually have been silver plate. Below the sealed window separating them from the front seat, an incongruously cheap-looking little screen and keyboard were built into the plush seatback.
There were sets of dual controls built into each passenger’s armrest. André fiddled with one set, and some kind of subdued electronic pseudo-oriental symphony began playing mellowly in the background. He did something else and laughed when Jerry did a take as a compartment in the seatback before them popped open, revealing the inside of a small refrigerator containing two glasses and a cold bottle of champagne, then snapped shut again.
“Is this thing yours, André?” Jerry exclaimed.
André Deutcher laughed. “Don’t I wish!” he said. “Actually, it’s a diplomatic limousine lent to ESA by the Foreign Ministry for the occasion. After the way you were forced to travel here, we were able to convince them that the honor of France demanded it.”
Amazingly enough, less than ten minutes later, while André was showing him how the videotel in the seatback was both videophone and computer terminal—connecting the car with the phone system, the teletel public data net, and, via access code, with the ESA mainframes too—Marcel appeared with Jerry’s luggage on a little trolley; how he was able to retrieve it with such speed was a bit of magic that somehow impressed Jerry even more than the sail through passport control or this state-of-the-art automotive palace.
“Avanti,” André shouted into thin air as Marcel climbed into the front passenger seat, and the car pulled away from the curb with hardly a lurch and no sound at all that was audible above the low background music.
Soon they were out of the airport and on a highway slicing through verdant green countryside interspersed with fields of dry brown cropped stubble, and it was then it really hit Jerry Reed that he was truly in a foreign country, and not just because the cars and trucks on the road all looked subtly alien and barreled along at incredible high speeds or because the road signs were all in French.
For there was no roadside ticky-tacky at all, no Burger Kings, no Golden Arches, no car lots, no shopping malls and parking lots, no sprawling cheap housing developments, none of the endless suburban crudscape that marked the ride from the airport to any major American city.
And when the Parisian suburbs finally started, it was all at once, as if the car had suddenly crossed a frontier; godawful, they certainly were, but godawful in a way quite different from anything Jerry could have imagined. Blocks of huge apartment houses with balconies from which actual laundry hung drying, gray grim concrete, a lot of it, but a lot of it painted in truly garish pastel colors, sometimes in two or three hideously clashing hues of green and pink and powder purple. And then this gave way to industrial buildings, gasworks, and railyards that might have been anywhere save for the French lettering on the walls, and the billboards that began to appear, flashing bare tits and asses huckstering unknown brands of ambiguous products.
And then the car took a sweeping turn across a bridge, and there it was, faintly visible in the far distance above the ticky-tacky, the unmistakable pinnacle of the Eiffel Tower.
“Et voilà!” André exclaimed, and popped open the refrigerator again, this time withdrawing the champagne bottle and peeling off the gilt foil.
“A little early for me, André,” Jerry muttered in a daze.
“Mais non!” André exclaimed gaily. “For you, it is still late at night in Los Angeles!”
But he waited until the car had turned off the highway and was careening across a huge traffic circle jammed with cars zigging and zagging every which way before he popped the cork. The champagne bubbled up out of the bottle and frothed down it and onto the carpeting. André shrugged and paid the mess no mind. “Good for the carpet as you say in America, oui?” he declared.
And Jerry found himself sitting there in the back of a limousine—careening along through streets packed with traffic, past sidewalk cafés and massively ornate nineteenth-century architecture, sidewalks thronged with people, a city alive with a life and energy he had never experienced before—exhausted, zoned, half asleep, but nevertheless having a high old time getting royally drunk on champagne at eleven o’clock in the morning.
By the time the limousine finally pulled up at the hotel, he was barely able to stand.
“The Ritz,” André told him, as they exited the car amid an absolute swarm of doormen and bellmen. “Hemingway and all that, a bit theatrical, peut-être, but we thought you might find it amusing.”
It was the understatement of Jerry Reed’s life. He was ushered into a reception area that seemed like a palace set for an old Cecil B. DeMille movie, into an elevator out of the same film, and into a room . . . into a room . . .
“Holy shit. . . .” Jerry sighed as André tipped the bellman and closed the door behind them.
The room was enormous. There was a brass bed, and a lavishly furnished sitting area separated from it by brocaded curtains. There was a table heaped with baskets of flowers and fruit and trays of petits fours and a silver tray holding a crystal bowl of caviar with all the fixings. There was a fully stocked bar with a refrigerator and a sink. The ceilings were covered with plaster floral-work painted in garish full color, and the moldings were all gilt braid, and the walls were papered in red and gold and blue velvet flocking, and hung all over with original oil paintings in heavy complicated frames. “My God, I feel like I’m sneaking into some royal bedroom. . . .” Jerry muttered.
André Deutcher laughed. “I know what you mean,” he said. “Nothing exceeds like excess. See a movie, be a movie, as someone once said.”
He went over to the floor-to-ceiling windows, drew the drapes, and opened them vertically like a pair of doors, and with a little bow, ushered Jerry out through them onto a little balcony. “However,” he said, “this is the real Paris.”
Jerry stepped shakily out onto the balcony into the warming morning sunlight. From this vantage he could see far out across the low rooftops of the city to the shining waters of the Seine beyond the treetops of some intervening garden. Traffic buzzed across ornate stone bridges. Bright sunlight through an occasional dappling of shadows from fleecy white clouds illumined the famous Left Bank like a picture postcard of itself, and way off to the right the Eiffel Tower proclaimed the fabled cityscape’s identity.
It was a view that everyone in the world had probably seen a thousand times, a cliché landscape of a cinematic city. But there was a subliminal music in the air and a subtly alien heady perfume wafting to his nostrils that told his backbrain that, no, this was no painting on black velvet, this was no picture postcard, this was no movie.
This was utterly unexpected. This was overwhelmingly beautiful and overwhelmingly real. He could smell it, and taste it, and hear its song calling to him.
“It is said,” said André Deutcher, “that every man has two hometowns. The place he was born and Paris.”
In a way that he doubted André could fully understand, Jerry Reed, American, space cadet, stood there drinking in the marvelous unexpected alien wonder of it all, and knew, somehow, that it was true, dangerously and wonderfully true.
And knew as well in that moment that this would be no mere three-week freebie vacation. Knew that there were temptations here that could change his life forever.
Knew somehow that it had been changed already.
* * *
Turning to the
business news, in Munich today, Red Star announced the purchase of 35 percent of the Löwenbrau brewery empire. “This will not only give the Soviet consumer ready access to good German beer, thereby diminishing our nikulturni reliance on rotgut vodka, it will give us a ready market for surplus grain and establish a major hops industry in the Ukraine,” declared Valery Zhores, Red Star’s Chairman.
“And we’re not paying for it in valuta, either,” he added. “The deal is being financed by furnishing Löwenbrau with grain at 50 percent of world prices over the next ten-year period.”
Score another Hero of Socialist Entrepreneurship Medal for the Big Red Machine!
—Vremya
LONDON INVADED BY THE RED MENACE!
They’re young, they’ve got money to burn, and they seem bent on turning London tits for asses! As our granddads used to say of the Yanks, they’re overpaid, oversexed, and over here! Of course we’re talking about the self-proclaimed Red Menace, the charmingly horny Eurorussians who have made the club scene here part of their weekend circuit.
They’re the barkeeper’s delight and the bouncer’s bane, they’ve all got AIDS vaccination certificates, and they’re giving it away at a rate that’s got half the hookers in Soho on the dole. From me according to my ability, to you according to your need, that’s the party line these days, and the Comrades have dutifully become Stakhanovite party animals!
Check out the scene at Ivan the Terrible’s or The Electric Samovar and see some red-hot glasnost in action!
—Time Out
* * *
II
Thank God or Marx or Gorbachev or whomever passed for the patron saint of the children of the Russian Spring for this vacation, Sonya Gagarin thought as the TGV sped her across the unheeded French countryside at 300 kph, away from Brussels and Red Star and her boring job and Pankov the Human Octopus, toward Paris and two weeks of freedom.
There were times—such as this last week at the office, slaving away at editing particularly boring AI translations of stock prospectuses and stat sheets into humanly comprehensible French and English and fending off Pankov’s moist and pathetic advances—when it seemed to Sonya that she had spent her whole life with her nose to the grindstone waiting for the fun she had so richly earned to finally begin.
On the other hand, there were also times, such as every Friday at 1730, when the office closed and the weekend began, such as right now, sitting in a high-speed train approaching Paris and washing the taste of the workaday world out of her mouth with a passable Côtes-du-Rhône, when she knew full well how lucky she was, or more fairly, how well the scenario she had worked out for her life had played thus far.
Brussels might be Belgium and Red Star might not be the foreign service and her job might not be much more than that of a glorified secretary, but she was young, and she was Russian, and she was actually living in Europe, and how many people could say at the age of twenty-four that they had achieved their girlhood dream?
Not that it had been exactly handed to her as a birthright! Not that she hadn’t earned it by her own diligent efforts!
Sonya Ivanovna Gagarin was no relation to the famous first cosmonaut—though as a Pioneer and a young Komsomol member she certainly did nothing to disillusion peers, teachers, and youth leaders who might think she was.
Glasnost or not, perestroika or not, family connections and prestige still counted for as much in the New Russia as they did in the Decadent West, or anywhere else on Earth if truth be told, and a daughter of a trolleybus driver and a cashier at the GUM growing up in a two-room flat on the tenth floor of a grim housing block in Lenino, barely inside Moscow, with no real connection to anyone with connections for as far back as her ancestry was traceable could hardly afford to toss away the only aura of connectedness she had in the fanatical service of the total truth.
Of course, if she was asked point-blank if she was a relative of the heroic Yuri she would admit she was not, nor did she ever exactly claim she was, for that would be an actual lie, one that would speedily enough be uncovered if told to teachers or youth leaders and inscribed accordingly in her kharakteristika with exceedingly unfortunate consequences. But if they or her schoolmates chose to entertain such fantasies without her assistance, who was Sonya Ivanovna Gagarin to smash their rosy illusions with excess candor?
If she was going to be one of the favored few to live in the West, she needed all the advantage she could get, and—aside from her dark good looks and precocious breast development and her willingness to work hard—her name was the only edge she had.
Sonya Ivanovna had grown up dreaming longingly of life in the West. When had it started? When she was a toddler watching the Vremya coverage of the opening of the French Disneyland, where girls just like herself cavorted with Donald and Mickey? When her father brought home a cassette of Roger Rabbit for her sixth birthday?
It was as old and as deep and as innocently nonpolitical as all that. It started with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and Roger Rabbit and travelogues and progressed through picture postcards into stamp collecting and an interest in geography to pen-pal programs and a knack for grade-school English and French, via Eurovision broadcasts and foreign music videos and magazines, to a career scenario that had been formed long before Sonya knew what a “career” or a “scenario” was.
It was still the time of the Troubles, before perestroika had finally begun to deliver the goods when it came to filling the stores with earthly delights, and intellectual freedom and the official approval of foreign exotica were desperately being offered up to the Soviet people in lieu of same.
So Sonya had never been told that her enthusiasm for the marvelous worldwide Disneyland outside the borders of the Soviet Union was in any way unpatriotic or reactionary. Far from it! Her father encouraged her stamp collecting and her interest in geography and her mother helped her with the correspondences with pen pals in England and France. All this had been encouraged by a sharp Pioneer leader who had seen that with proper channeling this young girl’s passion for things Western might serve as a locomotive for her academic pursuits.
As it did. Sonya was a diligent student and threw herself enthusiastically into any Pioneer activity with even a tenuous connection to the world outside. By the time teachers and parents and Komsomol leaders had begun to broach the question of higher studies and career choices, Sonya had already formulated a firm and resolute answer and was ready to forthrightly enlist their assistance in the attainment of her chosen goal.
Sonya Ivanovna Gagarin was going to become an officer in the foreign service. How better to secure a life of abundant travel in the West? Indeed, considering that she had no family connections, no talent for sport or the arts or science or theater or dance or music, how else for a young Soviet citizen to trip the life fantastic through the wide and wonderful world?
Yes, even her fifteen-year-old decision to join the foreign service was blithely nonpolitical, though she knew enough to construct the persona of an idealistic young Komsomolya seriously aspiring to eventual Party membership and seeking to channel her natural abilities in the patriotic service of the Motherland.
Glowing recommendations from the Komsomol, combined with her high grades in everything not having to do with science or mathematics, got her into Lomonosov University, where she majored in English, French, world history, comparative and pragmatic economics, and met for the first time a crowd of congenial young people in many ways much like herself.
Everyone here whose family lacked connections had arrived at Lomonosov University by a process similar to her own. Thus the composition of the student body represented the realistic triumph of Soviet egalitarianism. The children of Party officials, bureaucrats, academics, and other members of the inevitable national elite might have a leg up by virtue of the luck of their birth, but at least the real sons and daughters of workers and peasants could earn their way into their company without regard to parental fortune as long as they made their grades and took care to present a wholesome enough
image to teachers and youth leaders.
Those in the Golden Circle for the most part kept to themselves, and the “Workers and Peasants,” as Sonya’s crowd sardonically dubbed themselves, had little use for those they referred to as the “Children of the Damned.”
“Meritocracy” was one of the buzzwords of the period when perestroika really started taking bites out of the flabby buttocks of all the entrenched bureaucracies, meaning that the children of the Golden Circle were far less likely to inherit anything from their apparatchik parents save an odious reputation, and the Workers and Peasants, the Meritocrats, were far more likely to be the beneficiaries of the new age as the true Children of Gorbachev.
This might be said to be Sonya’s first awakening to political consciousness, if of a rather careerist sort, an awakening, such as it was, greatly enhanced during her last two years at Lomonosov University by her relationship with Yuli Vladimirovich Markovsky, her first really serious boyfriend in more ways than one.
Unlike Sonya, who as a Muscovite was constrained to live at home with her parents, Yuli, as a student from the provinces, had the right to a bed in an on-campus dormitory. This he scorned, choosing instead to rent a tiny room out in Nikulino, which he could barely afford, and which put him three Métro stops from the university. He pretended that this was some sort of ideological statement, when actually it was more of an open invitation to the hordes of Moscow girls living with their parents while they attended the university, to whom the possibility of any kind of overnight tryst at all was enough to make them less than particular about with whom. Even when it came to sex, Yuli was something of a romantic careerist.
Russian Spring Page 4
