“You have a point, Comrade Kuryakin,” she said, “and you have hired yourself a translator for Brussels, and you still have time to visit the toilet.”
And in the end, it was as easy as all that after all.
Though telling Yuli was another matter.
Sonya’s stomach tightened as the memory of that night rose up unbidden, and she took a quick swallow of Côtes-du-Rhône, and tried to concentrate on the countryside whipping past the train window.
But the TGV was slicing through the awful, banlieue housing blocks northeast of Paris now, huge monolithic towers of workers’ apartments all too reminiscent of the arrondissement she had grown up in, in Lenino, and there was nothing quaint about that, only another reminder of the past, and even the taste of Bordeaux wine in her mouth seemed to conspire against her, for, she suddenly remembered, she had brought two bottles of château-bottled Médoc to his room and insisted they polish off the first one before she told Yuli the reason for this unprecedented extravagance.
When she had finally had wine enough to blurt it all out, Yuli carefully placed his wineglass on the floor and just sat there across the bed, staring at her in immobile stony silence.
“Well, aren’t you going to say something?” Sonya demanded.
“What would you have me say?” Yuli said woodenly.
“That you hate me? That I’m a coldhearted self-centered careerist bitch?”
Yuli managed a little laugh. “I’ve always said I’m not a perfect hypocrite,” he said, breaking her heart with his gallantry. “Which I would be if I pretended that I would give up my life’s ambition for you.”
“True,” Sonya said, strangely enough loving him more in that moment of cynical admission than she ever had before.
“And of course, this always has been your real life’s ambition, Sonya, hasn’t it?” he said in a harder voice. “Life in the West with a nice supply of valuta, that’s always been enough for you. Everything else, your studies, the foreign service, has always just been a means to that end. . . .”
“Not you, Yuli,” Sonya moaned miserably.
And his expression softened again just as suddenly. “Of course not, Sonya,” he said, touching a hand to her cheek. “In some ways, we are real soul mates. If I had to choose between my dream and love, I’d choose my destiny too, which would not mean that I didn’t really love you either. On that level we truly understand each other, and there is no blame, Sonya Ivanovna.”
“Yuli—”
“But in other ways we are quite different,” he said, snatching up the second bottle of Médoc. “For you the dream is merely personal, but I serve a vision. I too am a careerist and an individualist, but I am also an idealistic Communist, or will be when I am admitted to the Party.”
He opened the second bottle with the corkscrew, refilled their glasses, slugged half of his down as if it were cheap vodka rather than a noble imported French vintage. “You seek only personal gratification, whereas I identify my own personal gratification with the good of Mother Russia.”
“What’s good for Yuli Markovsky is good for the Soviet Union!” Sonya snapped back, swilling an unseemly gulp of wine herself.
“What’s good for Yuli Markovsky is the satisfaction of sailing the ship of Soviet state into the safe harbor of Common Europe,” he declared grandiosely, and Sonya, through her own growing barblement, realized that he had become quite drunk.
“And living the luxurious life of a globe-trotting diplomat in the process!” she said.
“But of course! The New Soviet Man is no socialist monk!”
“I’ll drink to that!” Sonya declared, and she did.
“And so will I,” said Yuli, pouring himself another.
“You don’t hate me for doing this, Yuli?” Sonya muttered, feeling her head starting to spin, feeling herself becoming quite maudlin.
With what seemed like a mighty effort, Yuli held himself bolt upright and stared with bloodshot eyes unwaveringly into her own, and through the drunken haze, or perhaps via its instrumentality, a crystal moment of clarity seemed to pass between them.
“I don’t hate you, I pity you, Sonya,” Yuli said. “There is a dimension of life you are blind to, a passionate color your eyes don’t see, the joy of true dedication to a vision of something greater than yourself, without which, without which . . .”
“Ah yes, Yuli Markovsky, the selfless servant of the people, and next you will be quoting Lenin on socialist idealism, no doubt!” Sonya shot back. But there was something in his eyes, something behind his words, that made her want to get even drunker, though the room was already beginning to whirl, and she swilled down another gulp of wine, without, however, being able to avert her gaze.
“Nothing of the kind,” Yuli said. “These are great days to be young and Russian and part of a great adventure. This is to be our hour in the center of the stage, to push against the world and feel it move, to ride the wild stallion of history, to hold the reins in your hands and bend destiny to your will to serve the greater good. . . .”
“Great days to be young and Russian and be living in Common Europe, that is the great adventure, Yuli,” Sonya shot back, clawing her way back from the edge of something pulling her down into his wild bloodshot Rasputin eyes, something she feared to fathom, something that was beginning to make her feel small and foolish and lost.
“You don’t understand what I’m saying, do you?” Yuli said, and then at last he broke the intense eye contact, and slugged down another drink. “You have no sense of destiny at all, mine, or your own!”
“Don’t patronize me!” Sonya snapped.
“Oh I wouldn’t think of it,” Yuli said, lurching across the bed in her general direction.
Sonya managed to catch him in her arms as the room really began to reel. “You’re completely drunk!” she declared.
“And so are you!”
“Who am I to deny it?”
“In that case,” Yuli said, rolling her over under him and fumbling at her breasts and his pants at the same time, “let us not spend our last night together yammering like feckless intellectuals. Let us fuck ourselves good and senseless like honest drunken peasants!”
And so they did.
Under the circumstances, it seemed the only thing to do. They screwed and screwed and screwed without either of them coming until they passed out in each other’s arms. And when Sonya awoke in the morning with an awful headache and a sour taste in her mouth, she knew it was over.
Three weeks later, she found herself at the Crimean seaside, swimming in the Black Sea before breakfast, studying “information technology” until five, another swim before dinner, and more often than not uncomplicated sex on the beach afterward with someone she knew she would never see again.
It was a perfect transition. The weather was balmy, the food was good, the alfresco sex was bracing and athletically unemotional, and the studies not at all taxing when compared to what she had long been used to in the university, consisting mainly of familiarization with computer hardware and software, with a perfunctory pass at actual programming.
Three weeks after that, there she was living her new life in Brussels, with a studio apartment all her own that might not be much by local standards but which seemed immense compared to her room in her parents’ flat in Lenino.
True, her job as “translator” had proven to be mostly deadly tedium, as day after day she sat there before a screen and keyboard in a big boiler room with ten other “translators,” rewriting agrammatical AI babble into decent English and French, enlivened only by the occasional random humor emerging from the translation software.
True too that she was endlessly fending off the drippy advances of her supervisor, Grigori Pankov, a timid old goat who would take no for an answer, but who doggedly insisted on submitting himself to the humiliation of her coy rejections on a regular basis just the same.
But there was no homework, no mandatory Komsomol meetings, no worries about black marks on her kharakteristika, no
parents. For the first time in her life, Sonya’s nonworking hours were entirely her own.
Brussels was not exactly London or Paris or even Amsterdam, but by plane or even cheaper high-speed trains, it was a weekend jaunt from everywhere that was anywhere, which was to say that she was indeed in Europe, and it was spread out before her, and it was everything she had dreamed of and more as she tripped the weekend life fantastic.
She learned to ski in Zermatt and water-ski in Nice. She gambled in Monaco and went to an actual orgy in Berlin. She partied in Paris and went to the theater in London and got disgusted at the Oktoberfest in Munich and went to the races at Le Mans and the bullfights in Madrid and smoked hashish on a canal boat in Amsterdam and drank retsina in the Plaka in Athens, and, yes, even went to Disneyland, and contrived to do most of it at someone else’s willing expense.
For she was young and attractive and openheartedly eager to give herself freely to simpàtico companions in fun and adventure, and she was a member in good standing of the Red Menace, the tide of liberated young Eurorussians like herself rolling through Common Europe, an innocent sort of wild bunch who hadn’t gotten to party like this for a hundred years and were determined, in their wide-eyed and charming enthusiasm, to make up for it at once. Her major ambition in life, a common obsession of both Red Menace sexes, was to collect lovers of every European nationality as she had once collected stamps, and there were girls at the office who actually stuck pushpins in a map.
Only at rare moments like this, alone in a train or a plane in a hiatus of transition, with too much time to think, and a random resemblance of a face across the aisle, or an overheard snatch of political passion in Russian, or the taste of Bordeaux wine in her solitary mouth calling up an old memory of Yuli Markovsky, of the road not taken, of the way they had parted, did she give any thought to the possibility of any morning after.
But those shadows passed as quickly as clouds across the Spanish sun, as quickly as the sidewalks of St.-Germain refilled after a summer cloudburst, as quickly as the TGV sped through the banlieue and outskirts and showed her a quick vision of central Paris in the hazy distance beyond the ticky-tacky before plunging into the underground approach to the Gare du Nord.
From this distance, Paris was a picture-postcard diorama, reminiscent, in a way, of the view of central Moscow she had once seen through the window of Vitaly Kuryakin’s office in the Red Star Tower.
There she had looked down from on high on the red-brick battlements, cathedral, and gardens of the Kremlin compound, the gaily colored domes of St. Basil’s, the broad main avenues converging on Red Square, and across the sweeping blue curve of the river meandering through its city not unlike the Seine, knowing all too well that Moscow looked much better from this perspective than from down there in the quotidian streets of the real city, where life was all too prosaic and familiar and hardly a romantic fantasy even in the melting snows of the Russian Spring.
But here, however, she was left with the image of the Paris skyline floating like a shimmering mirage above her as the train descended into the darkness of the tunnel, the white dome of Sacré-Coeur, the lacy Victoriana of the Eiffel Tower, the monolithic Tour Montparnasse, shining distantly in the sunlight like the fairy castles of the Magic Kingdom, and, like the signature skyline of the Disneylands and quite unlike the view from the Red Star Tower, promising carnival and magic in its enchanted streets.
Oh yes, of all the cities Sonya Ivanovna had frolicked in in her year in Europe, Paris was the best of all, and not just because she spoke the language, for neither London nor Geneva nor Brussels nor even Nice so lifted her spirit as the City of Light.
It was the greatest cliché of every tourist guidebook in the world, but nevertheless it was true. It was not just the sidewalk cafés and the gardens and the wonderful promenades along the Seine and the restaurants and the clubs and the museums, and certainly not the climate (which was quite inferior to Madrid or Athens or Rome), nor even the enticing food aromas everywhere.
It was the Métro honeycombing the city with instant access to everywhere and the oceans of wine and the intimate scale of things—the neighborhood market, the brasserie on the corner, the shops ringing every little square, and the way the streets were filled into the wee hours of the night, and the madhouse street fair surrounding the Beaubourg and the tawdry grandeur of the Boule Mich, the sheer compression of a city constructed on such a human scale, a city seemingly designed on the one hand completely for pleasure and on the other hand, bustling with the electric energy of Common Europe’s wheeling and dealing economic metropole.
Paris made Moscow seem like Siberia, Vienna seem like a museum piece, London seem gray and glowering, Geneva like an old folks’ home, and Brussels like, well, as the French would say, like Belgium.
By the time the train slid out of the underground darkness and into the cavernous grimy vastness of the Gare du Nord—noise, and bustle, and huffing passengers lugging baggage, and polyglot babble, and the mingled aromas of ozone, greasy fried merguez, dark tobacco smoke, petrol, and travel-sweat—Sonya’s atavistic moment of nostalgic Slavic melancholia had vanished back into the cold eastern steppes of memory from whence it came.
It was summer, it was party time, it was two weeks of freedom to do with as she willed. She was young, the sun was shining, and it was Paris, and never could the little girl who had sat before the TV in a two-room flat in grim old Lenino, longing to dance down Main Street in the new French Disneyland with Mickey and Donald, have truly believed that one day this moment really would arrive, nor wished for anything more.
* * *
Representative Sigmunsen: “We can’t simply sit back and watch lunatic Marxists turn Peru into an American Lebanon. If we don’t step in and restore order now, these maniacs will spread their subversion to Colombia, Bolivia, even Brazil, and who knows, someday we may even find them at the Rio Grande. My mail tells me that my constituents are overwhelmingly in favor of dealing with the situation now.”
Bill Blair: “You’re suggesting that we send ground forces into Peru too?”
Representative Sigmunsen: “Only to establish and protect bases for helicopter gunships and tactical fighters. A major air commitment should be enough to enable the Peruvian freedom fighters to gain the operational initiative.”
Bill Blair: “And if it doesn’t?”
Representative Sigmunsen: “Well, Bill, as Caesar said at the Rubicon, we’ll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it.”
—Newspeak, with Bill Blair
AIDS VACCINE STILL NOT REACHING AFRICA
“While the Western world enjoys its so-called Second Sexual Revolution, millions are still dying in Africa, and the number of new cases is only now beginning to decline slowly,” Ahmad Jambadi, Secretary General of the World Health Organization declared at the United Nations today after a ten-day fact-finding tour of the African continent.
“The World Health Organization simply does not have the funds to begin to deal with the problem,” he said, “either in terms of hiring the manpower needed, or securing an adequate supply of the vaccine at current prices. The Western drug companies simply must donate what is necessary out of the enormous profits they’re making in their domestic markets. The fact is that the cost of manufacturing a dose is a tenth of what they’re charging. Now that AIDS is no longer a major problem in the developed world, there is no further civilized excuse for not dealing with the African situation in the only way possible, as a global community.”
—Le Monde
* * *
III
It took Jerry Reed about twenty-four hours to get unzoned, with André Deutcher walking him through it.
André let him crash out for a few hours, then appeared in his room at about 2:00 P.M. with a room-service waiter and a pot of powerful black coffee. He drew open the curtains to wake Jerry with a golden bath of bright sunlight, handed him a cup of coffee and a handful of pills, which Jerry regarded blearily and dubiously.
“Two h
undred units of B-complex, a gram of C, five hundred milligrams of kola extract, three hundred milligrams of phenylalanine, all perfectly legal,” André assured him. “Though if you want something stronger, that too could be arranged. ESA does not consider it dignified to require people to piss into bottles, let alone stick its nose into the odious results.”
The pills, two cups of coffee, and a long steaming shower in a bathroom the size of an ordinary hotel room later, Jerry was feeling almost human.
“So,” said André, as he emerged in the thick blue terrycloth robe provided by the Ritz, “while you are dressing, let us discuss important matters. What shall we have for lunch? Would you prefer cuisine minceur, cuisine bourgeois, fruits de mer, perhaps Provençale?”
“Uh . . . maybe you know a place where we could get some eggs Benedict?” Jerry muttered in an attempt to sound sophisticated.
André Deutcher was archly scandalized. “Come, come, Jerry, be serious!” he exclaimed. “A man’s first meal in Paris must be an event to remember, anything less would be an insult to the honor of France, not to mention the ESA expense account.”
“Then you choose, André,” Jerry told him. “To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t know cuisine bourgeois, whatever that is, from Taco Bell.”
Outside the hotel, instead of the Citröen limousine, a sporty little red two-seat Alfa-Peugeot convertible waited at the curb with the top down, a noisy, head-snapping, old-fashioned gas-powered demon that André told Jerry was his own car. “Ecologically atavistic, peut-être,” André admitted as he peeled rubber away from the Ritz, “but I prefer a bagnole, as you Americans say, with some crash.”
Russian Spring Page 6
