Russian Spring

by Norman Spinrad

  And as if to prove it, he took Jerry on a crazy alfresco ride during which crashes seemed to be averted by a whisker every other minute—down a traffic-choked side street to a main avenue running between a park on one side and a crowded arcaded shopping sidewalk on the other and into a huge square where hundreds of cars careened across each other’s paths every which way at once like a monstrous demolition derby in which no one managed to score a hit, across a bridge over the Seine, down another boulevard, through an impossible maze of back streets, another boulevard, more back streets, then onto a riverside avenue going the other way for a couple of blocks, to a parking space, such as it was, that seemed squarely athwart a crosswalk.

  By the time they had parked, Jerry was wide awake—how could he not be?—and by the time André had led him up three flights of steep, rickety old stairs to a strange sort of rooftop restaurant redolent with enticing aromas, he realized that he was now quite hungry.

  “Le Tzigane,” André told him the place was called, not that it purveyed Romany cuisine, whatever that might be, Jerry was assured.

  Formally set tables with white tablecloths were set out in the open air under a moveable canopy, rolled halfway back now to afford most of the tables sun. Waiters in traditional black and white moved in and out of a mysterious tent at the back of the rooftop as a similarly clad maître d’ who seemed to know André showed them to a choice table at the front with a truly magnificent view across the river at the Gothic gingerbread spires and buttresses of Nôtre-Dame.

  “A gypsy restaurant indeed,” André told him, as they were handed menus in ornate handwritten French that Jerry found about as comprehensible as Arabic graffiti. “No fixed address, it moves around Paris with the months and the seasons, here for a while, the Luxembourg Gardens, a riverboat, Montmartre, one never knows where it will appear next when it folds its tents—unless one is on the mailing list—they refuse to even list the new location on the minitel. It is intimated that master chefs from other restaurants rotate through its portable kitchen, though that too they insist upon mystifying.”

  André ordered for them, and it was all quite delicious. Tiny raw oysters in little individual nests of fried buckwheat-sesame noodles topped with shredded wild mushrooms, green onions, and roasted peppers in rice-wine vinegar, washed down with a hearty white wine. Thin slices of wild boar in a fresh raspberry sauce served with thin green beans stir-fried with cumin, cayenne, and turmeric; roasted onions glazed with Stilton; tiny baked potatoes soaked in some tangy caraway-flavored butter and garnished with caviar; and a truly powerful Bordeaux. Little soufflés in three flavors—chocolate, orange, and walnut—with three different sauces. Cheeses. Roasted pecans. Coffee. Cognac. One of André’s Cuban cigars.

  By the time they were back on the street, Jerry had a wonderful glow on, though what with the small portions of everything, he did not feel at all stuffed. Nevertheless, he readily enough agreed when André suggested they “take a little stroll along the Seine and St.-Gerrnain to walk it off,” for by now he was quite eager to finally explore a bit of the city afoot.

  The “little stroll” turned out to be a meandering promenade that lasted something like three hours, with time out for three leisurely pit stops people-watching at sidewalk cafés, two for coffee, and then another for a blackberry-flavored wine drink called “kir.”

  For a native Southern Californian like Jerry, whose only previous acquaintance with real pedestrian street life had been a dozen or so blocks of Venice and Westwood, Tijuana sleaze, and San Francisco, the Left Bank was like a city on some exotic alien planet, though somehow it also managed to seem like a place familiar to him from half-remembered dreams.

  Or more likely from endless TV shows and movies, for so much of this part of Paris had been used as locale for so many shows down through the decades that it was familiar to Jerry in the same way that Hollywood Boulevard or Mulholland Drive or the Ventura Freeway was to people throughout the world who had never been within six thousand miles of LA.

  However, seeing a movie set in Paris was one thing, and being in one quite another. Paris had its own characteristic aroma, something too subtle to quite register as a smell, but something that sank into the backbrain and told Jerry on a level that vision never could that he really was in a foreign land.

  And the girl-watching was something else!

  Not that the women on these Parisian streets were any more physically stunning than the fabulous starlets and surfer girls and hookers of Los Angeles, where feminine pulchritude was a major item of commerce at every level.

  But all these tantalizing creatures were right out there on the street, displaying themselves at sidewalk tables, promenading by when Jerry and André sat down for a drink, dozens of them, hundreds of them at every turn; the unfamiliar density of it all was overwhelming, creating the impression that meeting them would be so easy, given the sheer law of averages, given the compacted human environment of the St.-Germain streets.

  On the other hand, everyone was speaking French.

  Not that Jerry hadn’t expected it, of course, but he had always associated the sound of tongues other than English with people on the outside looking in, immigrants, foreigners, and street-sleaze.

  Here, however, he was the one on the outside looking in. There they were, all these French guys making easy conversation with all these beautiful girls, leaning from one café table to the next, walking down the street, making it all seem so easy, as for them it probably was, as it could be for him too, if only it wasn’t all going on in French.

  Before Jerry had too much time to reflect on his linguistically frustrated horniness, André had walked him to the banks of the Seine, where they descended an old stone ramp to the quay, and boarded a tour boat a good deal smaller than most of the angularly glassy behemoths plying the river, though just as crowded.

  “Hopelessly touristic, oui,” André said with a shrug as the boat warped out into the river, “but one must get these things out of the way nevertheless, no?”

  And so they did. They cruised around the St.-Louis, back into the main channel under the Pont Louis behind Nôtre-Dame, westward down the Seine under ornate bridges and past the Tuileries and the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, to the Trocadéro, across from the foot of the Eiffel Tower, where the boat made a one-eighty back upriver to the dock at Pont-Neuf.

  After that, André took him on another crazy ride, this time to the Eiffel Tower to watch the sun go down and the lights come out from on high, sipping another kir that began to turn Jerry’s knees a wee bit rubbery.

  “I think I’m beginning to fade, André,” Jerry said when they got back to the car. “Maybe I should just go back to the hotel and crash, after all, I’ve only had about three hours’ sleep. . . .”

  “No, no, no,” André insisted, “it is not even eight o’clock, you must stay awake till midnight, or you will take days to get unzoned, trust me! It is a bit early, but we can proceed to dinner.”

  “I’m not really all that hungry. . . .”

  “Something light, peut-être. . . . Ah, of course, bouillabaisse at Le Dôme, it is still the best in Paris, and at this hour, we should be able to get in without reservations!”

  Another drive through the streets of the Left Bank, five minutes of driving around back streets looking for a place to park, and then a four-block walk on rubbery legs to the Boulevard Montparnasse, a big bustling nightlife avenue not unlike St.-Germain, and into Le Dôme, brightly but warmly lit, somewhat cramped but still congenial, all old wood and brass, but somehow modern and airy too, opening out onto its own sidewalk tables.

  It was noisy in a not unpleasant way, it picked up the energy of the streets without being washed over by it, and once Jerry was seated and inhaling the heady odors of the spicy seafood stew, he found himself perking up a bit. Though by the time he had finished the bouillabaisse, and half a bottle of white wine, and a raspberry mousse in chocolate sauce, and the snifter of Cognac that André insisted he must have, he was fading out
again.

  “Now can I go back to the hotel?” he asked plaintively when they got back to the car.

  André checked his watch, shook his head. “Two more hours, mon ami, and then you will sleep like a rock and wake up naturally on Paris time in the morning, ready for some real fun.”

  “I don’t think I can stay awake that long. . . .” Jerry moaned.

  “We go to La Bande Dessinée, that should keep your eyes open if anything can,” André said, and off they drove again, with Jerry beginning to nod out even in the open sports car, so that the trip passed in a timeless blur as if he had been teleported to he knew not where, and then a short wobbly walk through a genteelly sleazy neighborhood full of neon marquees with nude photos and sex shops and loud bars, floating just about out on his feet past a doorman and into . . . and into . . .

  Oh God, a sleazy TJ sex-show bar!

  In the middle of the bar, and lit from above by a rose-colored spotlight, was a round central stage upon which quite a stunning nude redheaded woman and a sleekly muscled black bodybuilder type were screwing away to an electronic version of an ancient burlesque bump-and-grind rhythm on a red velvet couch, she atop and blowing kisses to the patrons. Around three walls of the roughly circular room ran a brass and polished-wood bartop, with stools, mirrors behind, and bartenders in candy-striped shirts and handlebar mustaches. Between the stage and the bar, little café tables were serviced by topless waitresses in stylized French-maid miniskirts. A thick rosy mist, compounded no doubt of tobacco smoke and reddish lighting, seemed to fill the air and soften the edges of everything.

  “Jesus, André, you’ve gotta be kidding,” Jerry said as they took one of the few available empty tables, about halfway back from the stage. “I come all the way to Paris, and you take me to a Tijuana sex show?”

  André laughed. “Things are not always quite what they seem,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “Observe the customers.”

  Jerry did as André ordered something from a passing waitress. The place was pretty well packed, but not with the horny sleazoids and middle-grade hookers one would have expected. There were as many women as men, but it seemed to be mostly couples, not a pick-up scene. Most of the people, men and women, were rather fashionably dressed in one way or another; younger people rakishly modish to be sure, but quite a few conservatively dressed older couples. There was indeed something peculiar about it.

  “So it’s a lot of trendy people slumming,” Jerry finally said as the waitress returned with snifters of what looked like straight vodka.

  André laughed again. “Drink,” he said, lifting his glass. “Watch,” he said, nodding toward the stage.

  Jerry drank. The clear liquid was at room temperature, it had the kick of vodka with absolutely no sweetness but it tasted like pears. Wow! He could get used to this stuff.

  On the stage, the black man had somehow removed himself while Jerry wasn’t looking, and the redhead lay back on the couch in the big shaft of rosy light stroking her breasts lubriciously, awaiting a new partner—

  —who suddenly seemed to drop into the spotlight from out of nowhere to the opening bars of the theme from the Superman movie, and oh no, it was indeed some muscular dork poured into a full Superman suit, red cape and all, who stood there with his hands on his hips above her, and then, what the—

  A penis sprouted from the crotch of his costume, silvery and throbbing, and as the customers in the bar cheered, grew, and grew, and grew until it was about the size of a baseball bat. As the Superman theme played louder, and louder, and louder, the Man of Steel somehow managed to plunge the full length and width of it into the woman on the couch and began humping away.

  Jerry took a fiery slug of his drink, not really knowing what he was doing, and certainly not comprehending the impossible thing he was seeing!

  Superman humped and humped, and the redhead thrashed and thrashed, and then they both came. You could tell because sparks and stars and smiling sperm shot out of her ears and Superman was propelled backward off of her and out of the spotlight by the billowing red blast of a dick which had metamorphosed into a booster rocket complete with ornate Flash Gordon tailfins.

  The girl on the couch turned a sleek shiny black, her nipples glowed bright neon red, her ears grew and rounded, her eyes became wide white circles with central black dots, and yes, there she was, a lusciously buxom Minnie Mouse, rolling her eyes, grinning her wide cartoon smile, and ready for action.

  And here came Pluto, the canine klutz, scampering into the spotlight with a foot and a half of bright red tongue lolling out of his mouth, which he proceeded to apply between Minnie’s legs. . . .

  “Holy shit!” Jerry finally exclaimed. “It’s all a hologram!”

  “Better than anything in any of the Disneylands, n’est-ce pas?” André said dryly. “A triumph of French technology!”

  And so it was. Mickey Mouse dislodged Pluto, found himself being buggered by Donald Duck. Woody Woodpecker made it with Jessica Rabbit, the Michelin Rubber Man displayed an awesome flexibility, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Mr. Natural, Batman, and Wonder Woman, all joined in the general orgy.

  It was even more impressive when Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe and the American President and Adolf Hitler and James Dean and the Pope began to join in the action, along with a whole panoply of others, who from the jeers and hoots and laughter they drew from the crowd must have been famous French show-business personalities or politicians—for they must have done such stuff by holoanimating two-dimensional film library material, even black-and-white stills, and that took wizard programs and gigabytes of memory.

  And then the show metamorphosed again, into something that drew Jerry’s attention out of the bits and bytes of what he was seeing and into a marvelous and beautiful erotic reality.

  The crazy-quilt orgy melted into an equally crowded Indian erotic temple frieze, stonework turned sinuously and sleekly subtle to the drone and driving rhythm of sitar and tabla, breasts and thighs and legs and lingams and yonis moving in and out and around to the rising beat like a living arabesque of intertwined sensuality. . . .

  Becoming a classical Greek version of the same sexual tableau, pale white marble flesh, finely delineated musculature, rounded nippled breasts, strong thighs and clean athletic arms, noble visages under flowing ringlets, idealized realistic bodies moving against each other like gods and goddesses to the music of flute and lyre . . .

  And in turn transforming into a living painting of the high Renaissance in full rich oil tones and dancing chiaroscuro modeling, with violas and woodwinds, with fauns and full-fleshed nymphs of rosy-fleshed cheeks and tremulous buttocks . . . a Flemish realist version to a cerebral Bach fugue . . . a French Romantic version, all swirling bodies and Beethoven bombast . . . softening into the perpetual sunset and shimmering eroticism of Maxfield Parrish Art Deco damsels and fey swains to the accompaniment of Spanish guitars . . . an orgy scene in the Japanese floating world style . . . Impressionist etherealism . . . the heavy dark-skinned Polynesians of Paul Gauguin . . .

  A truly smoky Weimar Republic version, all net stockings and fancy brassieres and high heels and leather to down-and-dirty jazz, transformed itself into a Haight-Ashbury love-in to the electric guitars and synthesizers of acid rock, girls with long swirling flower-bedecked hair, young long-haired men in paisley and velvet, the colors and the flesh, and the wildly flowing hair, all melting into an abstraction of themselves, into a dance of pure erotic shapes and motions, of light, and tone, and interpenetrating movement that exploded into stained-glass shards to the climax of Ravel’s Bolero . . .

  Leaving a round central stage lit from above by a rose-colored spotlight upon which a nude redheaded woman and a sleekly muscled black bodybuilder type were screwing away to an electronic version of an ancient burlesque bump-and-grind rhythm on a red velvet couch, she atop and blowing kisses to the patrons, sophisticates all, who seemed to be resuming their previous conversations as if nothing really extraordinary had h
appened.

  “Vive la France. . . .” breathed Jerry Reed.

  “Welcome to Europe,” said André Deutcher.

  Jerry Reed dozed in and out of Parisian dreams on the drive back to the Ritz, and by the time André got him to the hotel, it was indeed after midnight, and he had just about enough strength left in him to get to his room, get out of his clothes, and crawl into bed before passing out and sleeping like a brick for a solid nine hours.

  He awoke the next morning feeling rested and not at all hung over. He had a little trouble ordering a room-service breakfast—the woman spoke good English but couldn’t get the concept of sausage and eggs somehow, so he had to settle for a ham-and-cheese omelette—and by the time he had showered, shaved, and wrapped himself in the fluffy terrycloth robe, it had arrived. He was just finishing a croissant with raspberry preserves and his second cup of coffee, when, as if on cue, the phone rang.

  It was André Deutcher, down in the lobby. It was time for him to get back to work at his ESA job, so he had brought along “Jerry’s guide for the next few days” to make the introductions, they’d be right up.

  Jerry hesitated. Should he try to get his clothes on before they got there? He probably didn’t have time. As it turned out, he was right, but he found himself wishing he had tried anyway, for there was a knock on the door in about three minutes, and when he opened it, standing there with André was a woman who snapped his prick to instant attention, a rather embarrassing occurrence with him clad only in the bathrobe.

  “Good morning, Jerry,” André said, as Jerry closed the door behind them, hunching over and twisting to one side as best he could to hide his erection. “This is Nicole Lafage, who will be your companion for the next two days or so.”

  Nicole Lafage was certainly one of the two or three most stunning women Jerry had ever seen in the flesh.

  She was just about his height and carried herself like an athlete, long leanly muscular bare thighs and calves displayed above tight leopard-skin boots, a rakishly cut black skirt, longer on the right side than the left, that belled out at the bottom but seemed painted on her hard, rippling ass, some kind of silky black sheer T-shirt that displayed tantalizing glimpses of small jiggling breasts with frankly visible nipples beneath a short, unbuttoned leopard-skin jacket. Long wavy black hair fell to her shoulders in artful dishabille. Thin dark eyebrows and long black lashes framed bright green eyes above a full-lipped little mouth with a subtle built-in pucker, and the aroma of sensuality coming off her went directly to Jerry’s backbrain.