Russian Spring

by Norman Spinrad

  * * *

  VI

  “You’re really a Russian? But . . . but Samantha Garry . . . that accent . . . ”

  “You think Russians cannot do accents? Besides which, ducks, having never been to Old Blighty, how do you know whether this isn’t the old phony baloney out of the movies, eh mate?”

  Jerry Reed laughed. He had been awoken with a kiss and a confession.

  The kiss had come from his porn starlet from London of the night before, and the confession had come from another woman, who had sat up in bed after the kiss with the strangest expression of trepidation on her beautiful face, and babbled it all out nervously to him in English of quite a different accent—American almost, or Canadian, with only the slightest hint of a foreign flavor in its rhythm.

  “I really do not know how to tell you this, Jerry, I’ve been lying awake here for an hour trying to think of something clever, but there isn’t anything clever to say, I’ve been far too clever already, so all I can do is tell you the truth and get it over with one way or the other, and the truth is that my name is Sonya Ivanovna Gagarin, not Samantha Garry, and I am not a porn star, just a translator for Red Star, S.A., in Brussels, and I am from Moscow, not London, and I am Russian, not English, and I was bored at that party, and you were the only interesting man there, and it started as a joke, but now I do not think it is a joke, though I am not saying I am falling in love with you, you understand, and so there you have it, and I’m sorry, which is not to say it wasn’t fun. . . . ”

  And, having spat it all out in a single lump, she had crossed her arms over her bare breasts and heaved a great theatrical sigh of relief. “There, now that is over,” she had said in the same accent, but in quite a more confident tone of voice, the confident tone of the apparently nonexistent Samantha Garry. “So what do you think? Do you want to throw me out of your bed, or should we make love again?”

  Jerry hadn’t known what to think. Indeed, she had hit him with it before he was awake enough to think at all, before he was even awake enough to consider being pissed off.

  And now that she had made him laugh by becoming for a moment the Samantha Garry of the night before, it was pretty hard to work up any anger at her, especially when she was feeling him up under the bedclothes and looking at him with those big green eyes.

  “I guess I’ve got to admit you did a pretty good porn starlet,” he said.

  She licked her lips and snuggled closer to him. “For a tool of the Pentagon,” she said, “you weren’t so bad yourself.”

  “Tool of the Pentagon?”

  “Don’t you remember? You told Samantha Garry everything last night. All about your job in California building satellite sleds for Battlestar America, and how ESA wishes to hire you away to work on—”

  “Oh my God!” Jerry moaned. He remembered all right now. He had told this woman the whole story of his life thinking she was a British porn star, and now it turns out that she’s a Russian!

  Sonya Gagarin laughed. “Shall I tell you what you are thinking?” she said. “You are thinking, what if this woman is a Russian spy.”

  Jerry blushed. “It sounds kinda dumb when you put it like that. . . ,” he had to admit.

  “Why, not at all, Jerry,” Sonya Gagarin said slyly. “After all, I had you completely fooled last night, now didn’t I, so I could be fooling you now too, yes? For all you know I could indeed be an agent of the KGB. . . . ” She gave him a little wink. “Or worse still, of the CIA! In which case . . . ”

  “In which case . . . ?”

  “In which case, it’s far too late for you to do anything about it, now isn’t it, luv?” she said, stroking his cock teasingly. “So, as they no doubt say in the porn business, you might as well lean back and enjoy it.”

  “You’re not really a Russian spy, now are you?” Jerry Reed said over the grotesquely expensive lunch of lobster bisque, raw oysters, Sevruga caviar, and champagne they had put on the room-service tab after the long morning’s love-making.

  “Of course not, Jerry,” Sonya said seriously. “I am who I told you I am, just a girl from Moscow with a job in Brussels, halfway through a two-week vacation, and out to have fun. . . . ”

  “There’s got to be more to you than that.”

  “Does there?” Sonya said somewhat wistfully.

  “Sure there does,” Jerry said.

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s more than that to everyone.”

  They had made love all morning, and when the room-service waiter had arrived, Sonya had gone into the bathroom and Jerry had put on his robe to let him in. Now they were seated across the little dining table from each other, Jerry in his robe, and Sonya naked, and all at once feeling quite exposed.

  “Not to me . . . ,” she said, suddenly feeling rather depressed without quite knowing why. “Not really. I’m not like you, I don’t have a vision of the way things ought to be, I don’t want to change the world. . . . ”

  “No girlhood dreams?”

  “Well of course! But nothing very grand, nothing that I haven’t already achieved. . . . ”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “There’s really not very much to tell.”

  Jerry winked at her. He stood up, took off his robe, dropped it on the floor. “Come on, Sonya,” he said. “I’ve shown you mine, now you show me yours.”

  Sonya laughed. Jerry sat down again, leaned back, picked up his glass of champagne, swirled it around, looked straight at her. “Come on, luv, as yer friend Samantha would say,” he said in a truly dreadful British accent that touched her heart, “tell me all the secrets of your soul.”

  And so she did, such as they were.

  She tried to tell him what it was like growing up in Lenino, and what traveling in the Disneyland of the West had meant to her, how this selfish little dream, so petty and egoistic beside his own, had shaped her whole life, had made her aspire to a foreign-service career. . . .

  And then she paused, poured herself another glass of champagne and drank it down for courage, and found herself telling this naked man, this stranger of the night before, this American, about Yuli Markovsky, about how she had turned her back on him, on love and her chosen career, on everything else that mattered to her, when Red Star held out the offer of life in the West right now.

  “And do you know what the worst thing about me is, Jerry?” she said. “The worst thing about me is that I don’t regret it! I’ve gotten what I wanted, and it turned out to be everything I thought it would be! I’m happy with my decision. I’d do it all over again!”

  She sighed, she picked aimlessly at an oyster shell with a fork, and averted her gaze from him. “That’s what a shallow creature I really am . . . ,” she said much more softly.

  Jerry Reed got up from his chair, walked over to her, put one hand on her shoulder, lifted her chin with the other so that she was looking right into his eyes, so that she could see his soft little smile.

  “Hey, lady, you managed to pick yourself up maybe the one guy in Paris who really understands just how shallow that’s not,” he said.

  Sonya cocked her head at him in total incomprehension.

  “I grew up dreaming of going to the Moon and Mars, and you grew up dreaming of traveling to the West,” Jerry Reed said. “I’ve spent my whole life looking for a way to get out there to the worlds of my dream, and now, if I’m brave enough, maybe I can get to do it, sort of. . . . ”

  Jerry’s eyes were shining down at her so glowingly that somehow she found her depression melting away like a cool spring morning’s mist under a warm rising sun, even if she did not quite understand why. “I don’t think I follow you. . . , ” she said.

  “I told you about my ‘Uncle’ Rob last night, didn’t I?”

  Sonya nodded.

  “Rob told me a line he had read somewhere that stuck with him, and I’ve never forgotten it either,” Jerry said. “You can learn to walk on water. You’d have to give up everything else to do it, but you could walk on water.”
>
  “So . . . ?”

  “So that’s what I’ve got to find the guts to do now,” he said, and the way he looked at her seemed absolutely radiant. “But you, Sonya, you’ve done it. You’ve given up everything else to do it, but that little girl from Moscow has walked on her water already.”

  Sonya’s eyes quite filled with tears.

  “Jerry Reed, you are a beautiful man,” she said, “has any woman ever told you that before?”

  “No,” he said quite seriously, “no one ever has.”

  And then they were in each other’s arms.

  And so it began.

  So it truly began.

  They spent the afternoon just walking and talking. They talked about growing up in Moscow and growing up in Los Angeles. They talked about movies they had seen. They talked about Paris. They talked about food. They talked about what it might be like to live in one of the houseboats tied up along the Seine.

  Jerry Reed was falling in love, which was a thing that had never really happened to him before, but he didn’t really want to talk about that, because he didn’t know how, and in any case saw no need.

  Instead he talked about space. He babbled on and on, and Sonya Gagarin let him talk, and smiled, and never called it “space babble,” as other women had, and she never ever told him it was boring her to tears, and she asked him the occasional technically naive but intelligent question as if to prove that she was sincere, and held his hand, and told him with her eyes that she really was entranced, that if she didn’t understand a lot of what he was talking about, she was willing to learn, for she understood entirely what it all meant to him.

  And that, somehow, was the most magical thing of all.

  Late that afternoon, they went back to the Ritz, opened the French windows of the hotel room wide, moved a table and two chairs halfway out them onto the balcony, and Jerry ordered more champagne to sip as they watched the golden Parisian sunset.

  “It’s all like some kind of old Hollywood movie,” Sonya said dreamily. “Sipping champagne up here on our balcony overlooking the Seine, and this hotel room, good Lord, what it must cost . . . ”

  Jerry clinked glasses, raised his in a toast. “To the European Space Agency!” he said. “To the people who are paying for it all!”

  “They must really want you very badly,” Sonya said, and a thought like a shadow drifted across her mind, namely that there was something a bit peculiar for ESA to be spending this kind of money to recruit someone like Jerry, someone who by his own description was no senior engineer or scientist, someone not much older than herself.

  Jerry shrugged. “It’s probably all a tax write-off anyway,” he said. “It’s not as if anyone were spending their own money!”

  No doubt that was it. Sonya had encountered this strange capitalistic attitude before, if never on this lavish a scale. She wondered just how far it might be pushed. . . .

  “I’ve got an idea,” she said. “I’ve got eight days’ vacation time left, and all you’ve seen of Europe is Paris, so why don’t we take a trip together, a kind of mini grand tour, yes? London, Baden-Baden, Vienna, Budapest perhaps, certainly a bit of the Greek islands, Rome. . . . ” She shrugged, she laughed. “Let’s not even plan it, let’s just hop on trains and planes and get off where we feel like. . . . ”

  Jerry’s eyes lit up. “Wow, that’s great!” he exclaimed. He frowned. “But also monstrously expensive, do you have that kind of money? I certainly . . . ”

  He paused in mid-sentence, looked at Sonya. She clinked her champagne glass against his, grinned, nodded. “To the European Space Agency!” she said.

  “Do you really think . . . ?”

  Sonya shrugged. “The worst they can do is say no,” she pointed out. “Even in the Soviet Union it’s been a long time since anyone was shot for just trying. . . . ”

  “Pas problem, I am sure, Jerry,” André Deutcher told him on the videotel when Jerry had nerved up enough courage to explain the situation and broach the outrageous idea. “I will call Nicola Brandusi right now. . . . ”

  Twenty minutes later the videotel chimed. It was Brandusi. “What a wonderful romantic notion, Mr. Reed,” he said, his videotel image positively beaming. “I almost wish I was going with you, but of course that is the last thing you have in mind, eh! The best thing is a Gold Eurocard, it is good everywhere, and you can get cash out of automatic tellers, and they will just bill ESA. Of course this will take some time to arrange. . . . ”

  “Uh, we only have eight days, Mr. Brandusi. . . . ”

  “Nicola, Nicola, please, Jerry!” Brandusi said effusively. “Not to worry, not to worry, we will messenger it to your hotel tomorrow. Have un petit déjeuner, make love, have a nice lunch, and it’ll be there for you by fifteen hundred hours, in time for you to catch dinner in London or Madrid. And don’t worry about your room, it will be there when you get back. Arrivederci, Jerry, have a good trip, kiss the lady for me where it counts, eh!”

  And sure enough, when they arrived back at the hotel from lunch the next day, the magic piece of plastic was there waiting, and in an elegant little goatskin case too.

  “Well then, where should we have dinner tonight, Sonya?” Jerry said gaily, waving the card under her nose.

  “It’s your Eurocard, Jerry, you choose.”

  “Let’s go to London, then,” he said, “it’s the only place where I know anyone. . . . ”

  “I thought you’d never been there.”

  “I haven’t,” Jerry said, laughing. “But I met this English porn star, see . . . ”

  Sonya had heard that the Savoy Hotel was the British equivalent of the Ritz, so they checked into a room there that was almost as big and even more expensive than the one they had left in Paris, and after a full British breakfast the next morning that left them both groaning, she took Jerry on the obligatory whirlwind tour of the standard sights—Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park Corner—all of which were in walking distance of the hotel.

  They had dinner in an incredible Indian restaurant Sonya had heard about, which featured curries and tandooris of venison, quail, partridge, bear, rattlesnake, and even elephant, hippo, and lion, or so the menu claimed, and then they crawled through the pubs of Chelsea and Bayswater before reeling back to the Savoy.

  The next day, Jerry quite surprised her by playing tour guide himself. He dragged her around to the famous high-tech toy stores on Tottenham Court Road, fed her lunch in a random pub, bought her an expensive ostrich-skin purse in Harrods, took her sailing on the Serpentine in Hyde Park, something he had seen in a movie, and to the London Zoo, which he had heard was almost as good as the one in San Diego.

  Eurocard or not, Jerry insisted on fish and chips for dinner, because, he said, he wanted some real English food. Sonya felt like sinking through the floor when he asked the Savoy desk clerk to recommend the best fish and chips place in town.

  But the desk clerk smiled and recommended a place in West Kensington called “Poisson avec Pommes Frites” which, he said, was certainly the best fish and chips restaurant in the world.

  And so it was. There, in a salon done up like an elegant private club, waiters in full evening dress served them succulent nuggets of salmon, sturgeon, halibut, tuna, eel, and boned trout; bits of lobster and langoustine; whole clams and oysters and snails, enrobed in the most delicate tempura batters spiced with saffron and basil and cilantro and fried in sesame, walnut, and olive oils, served up with light-as-air fried slices of potato and yam and a whole trayful of exotic flavored vinegars, washed down with a truly noble Czech beer.

  It was certainly the strangest day Sonya had ever spent in London, and in its way the most charming, for her unworldly American from California had somehow contrived to show her the city anew through his own innocent eyes.

  That night, she showed her appreciation, and in the morning they were off via hydrofoil to Normandy, where they had moules and cider for lunch, took a TGV to Bordeaux and a local train to Bayon
ne, where they spent the afternoon at a bullfight, hopped a plane to Madrid, and watched the sun go down from a sidewalk café over tapas and a bottle of Rioja, checked into a hotel, made love, had a seafood paella, crashed out about midnight, then got up about ten, took another TGV to Barcelona, where Sonya hired a taxi, showed Jerry some of the fantastic organiform buildings erected there by Gaudi, which Jerry said reminded him of nothing so much as certain crazy movie-star homes in Bel-Air, then caught a first-class luncheon flight on Air France to Nice.

  They lazed away the afternoon sipping Americanos on the beach in front of their hotel and swimming in the Mediterranean under azure skies, made love under a beach blanket in the middle of a crowd, and then rented a huge old Rolls convertible, which Sonya drove that evening under the starry skies along the bas-corniche past the luxury homes of Cap Ferrat to Monaco, where Jerry managed against all odds to win almost enough at blackjack to pay for the lobster thermidor and Pouilly-Fuissé they had at a quayside restaurant, after which Jerry declared grandly that the true Angeleno learned as a teenager to drive from anywhere to anywhere drunk out of his mind, and against all odds proved it by somehow managing to drive the Rolls back to their Nice hotel.

  They collapsed in each other’s arms and slept till nearly noon. They had lunch in town, then caught a flight to Rome, where they spent the day seeing the standard sights, gorged themselves on tournedos Rossini and pasta, caught a quick flight to Brindisi, which was truly ghastly, and slept that night on a ferry to the Greek isle of Corfu.

  Kerkyra, the major town on Corfu, was a tourist nightmare that Jerry said reminded him of nothing so much as Tijuana, but it did have an airport, so they caught a flight to Athens in time for a lunch of moussaka and retsina in a taverna high up in the Plaka, after which they reeled rather drunkenly up the Acropolis to wander around the crumbling ruins.

  Athens itself, below the monuments to its own great past, was a smoggy, noisy, smelly nightmare, and so Sonya decided that the best thing to do was catch a flight to Munich, have a fairly early dinner there, hop on a train to Baden-Baden, rent a cabin outside the town, and make love in front of a fireplace in the Black Forest, with the odor of pine surrounding them, and the gentle night breezes whooshing through the tree crowns.