Reagan did what he was elected to do. Even though the Vietnam War was over and he wasn’t able to start a new one, he still managed to buy lots of expensive weapons, but because the country was broke from Vietnam, he had to borrow huge amounts of money to do it and kill the civilian space program, which was why the American economy was still such a mess after all these years that no one knew how to keep it going without a war somewhere, and why Dad had to come to Common Europe to work for ESA.
Meantime, Common Europe had been formed, and America got shut out of what was the world’s biggest market, and had to keep devaluing the dollar to stiff its European creditors and fight the Forever War in Latin America to keep the crumbling U.S. economy afloat.
And now that the Soviet Union was talking about entering Common Europe, the United States was trying to stop it by threatening to abrogate its overseas debt in Europe if that happened, rather than enrich the people who sold out democracy to the Communists.
And that was why Dad couldn’t work on his spaceships and why he was catching such shit from the real French kids for being a gringo, and from Robert Reed’s fifteen-year-old perspective, it had become hard to blame them.
That was the year that Bobby went through his brief anti-American phase. He took to calling himself “Robaire” and speaking French exclusively, even to his father. He tried to learn to play soccer. And when the United States invaded Panama again, he even marched in an anti-American demonstration.
When Bobby came home from that one and monopolized the dinner table with an endless incoherent anti-American tirade, that was finally too much for his father, and Dad sat him down at the dining room table afterward for a man-to-man.
“Look, Bob—”
“Robaire! Et en français!”
Dad actually seized him by the shoulders and shook him. “We’re Americans, damn it, Bob,” he said, as angry as Bobby had ever seen him, “and we will damn well discuss this as Americans, in English.”
“I was born in France,” Bobby told him sullenly. “When I’m eighteen, I want a Common European passport and French citizenship!”
“Look, Bob, I’m not very good about this political crap,” Dad said much more gently. “But . . . let me show you something. . . .” And he led Bobby out of the dining room, through the living room, and down the hallway to his own room.
Despite his current anti-American phase, Bobby had never bothered to redo his room. It was all still there—the Statue of Liberty rug, the star-spangled bedspread, the models of American spacecraft in the corner bookcase, the piles of Rolling Stone and Playboy, the books, the huge baseball-card collection, even the big wall map of the United States, marked up with little scrawled baseballs for major-league cities, rocketships at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg, routes of his fantasy trips traced along the road networks, peace signs drawn over San Francisco and Chicago and Woodstock and Kent, Ohio.
“How come you haven’t gotten rid of all this stuff, Bob?” Dad asked.
Bobby shrugged. “Je ne sais pas. . . .”
“I’ll tell you why, son,” Dad told him. “Because you collected all this stuff and put it together over your whole life, ever since you were a little kid. It’s . . . it’s a model, like one of those spacecraft, but what it’s a model of is the inside of your head, and it didn’t come as a kit, you built it from scratch. It’s the America inside you, Bob. Battlestar America, the invasion of Panama and Peru and Colombia, the dollar devaluations, what the Pentagon did to me and Rob Post, Vietnam, piss tests, debt abrogation, economic blackmail, all that crap, that’s politique politicienne, and it’s right to hate all that. . . .”
Dad paused. He waved his arms as if to encompass the whole room. “But don’t start hating this, Bob!” he said forcefully. “Don’t hate Project Apollo and the High Sierras, don’t hate the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Statue of Liberty, don’t hate the Boston Celtics and Highway One, and Mardi Gras, the redwood forests and Mulholland Drive and Donald Duck, don’t hate three hundred million fucked-over people with the same stuff inside their heads as you have. That’s the real America, Bob, and if you start hating that, you’re gonna end up hating yourself.”
Dad’s passion subsided and he looked directly into Bobby’s eyes with a much softer expression, sad, and lost, and a little confused. “I’m not real good at this stuff, Bob,” he said with a little shrug. “Do you understand what I’m telling you, kiddo?”
“Yeah, Dad,” Bobby found himself saying. “I do believe I do.”
And so he did. From that moment on, America wasn’t the wonderful time-warped Disneyland version of itself that he had never seen, or the evil and paranoid “Festung Amerika” of the French media; it was neither, and it was somehow both.
It was a mystery, and that mystery, Bobby realized from that moment on, was inside of him as well. And from that moment on, he knew that he had to go to America to solve its mystery for himself. For it was in some way the mystery of himself, and he knew he would never know who he really was, let alone what he wanted to become, until the mystery within confronted its mirror image without on the American shore.
And that was the beginning of his campaign to go to college in America. He had announced it at the dinner table about three weeks later. Franja had sneered, but Franja sneered at everything he did or wanted to do, of course. Mom had been noncommittal, she didn’t really take it seriously at the time. But Dad had nodded, and let him know he understood.
“I hear Berkeley and UCLA and Cal Tech are still pretty good schools,” he said.
“You can’t really be serious, Jerry. . . .”
“What’re you going to study in America, Bob-bee?” Franja whined. “Baseball?”
“What’re you going to study in Russia, spacehead, zero-gravity pipe-jobs?”
“Robert!”
“I’m going to be a cosmonaut! What are you going to be in America, an imperialist blackmailer or just more cannon fodder?”
“Franja!”
And so it went. Franja ragged him mercilessly about it, Mom tried not to take him seriously, but Bobby persisted, and Dad encouraged him, and Bobby’s marks even began to improve. And on his sixteenth birthday, Dad gave him the Dodgers jacket.
“You’ll need this when you see your first ball game in Dodger Stadium,” the enclosed card said.
The Dodgers jacket had been his emblem and his battle flag ever since, and ever since he had first put it on, the battle had turned serious, had become more and more of an open conflict between Dad and Mom.
“We can’t let our son waste his college education in some backwater school in the United States,” Mom would declare.
“We’re going to let our daughter study in the Soviet Union,” Dad would counter, for by now Franja was quite serious about cosmonaut school.
“That’s different!”
“What’s so different about it?”
“It’s Yuri Gagarin, Jerry, it’s a very prestigious place!”
“It’s a Russian school, that’s what you mean, isn’t it?”
“Do you really want your son to have a third-rate education?”
“In a third-rate country, isn’t that what you mean, Sonya?”
“You said it, Jerry, I didn’t!”
“But you thought it!”
“Well, isn’t it true?”
“How would you know, Sonya, you’ve never been to the United States.”
“And neither have you, for almost twenty years!”
“So neither of us can tell Bob anything at all about what America is all about. That’s why he has a right to see for himself!”
It had gone round and round like that for two years now, with neither of them giving ground, but now that Franja had actually gotten into cosmonaut school, Bobby was becoming confident of victory.
For Franja needed Dad’s signature on her admission papers, and Bobby had long since persuaded him, or so at least he hoped, not to sign them until Mom agreed that he could go to college in America. It was only fair, now was
n’t it?
And this morning, when he looked in the mail, there was a big packet of papers for Franja from the Yuri Gagarin Space Academy in the Soviet Union, which could be only one thing.
If he knew his older sister, and by now, alas, he certainly did, Franja would waste no time in presenting the admission papers for the necessary parental signatures, meaning at dinner tonight.
Bobby went to his closet and took the Dodgers jacket off the padded hanger where he always carefully placed it when he finished wearing it. He laid it out on the bed, sprayed the satin with the special cleanser, wiped it off with a chamois cloth, put it back on the hanger, and hung it on the edge of the bookcase, where he could see it while he played an ancient Bruce Springsteen chip and waited.
Dinner was not exactly a formal event in the Reed family. But Robert Reed was going to dress for it tonight.
UNCLE JOES GET PIE IN THEIR MUSTACHES—AND WORSE!
It was quite a scene on Saturday afternoon in Gorky Park when Pamyat hooligans tried to break up an outdoor picnic of the Moscow Socialist Feminist Society. The ladies had anticipated just such a Bear attack, tipped off the police, and armed themselves with what must have been at least three hundred cream pies. While police and militia stood by laughing uproariously, they pelted the aggressors with them.
Several police and militia persons had brought their own pies, eager to take it out on the Uncle Joes who have long since become their number-one headache.
No custard-cream humor for these earthy guardians of the public order, however. Their pies were filled with pig manure.
—Mad Moscow
Franja Gagarin Reed had not quite gone to the point of calling herself Franja Gagarin, even though her mother did use her own famous Russian name professionally. Reed might be a loathsomely American name, and an American name might be a burden, but Jerry Reed had made that burden an honor too, and she loved him for it.
Anyone who wanted to go to Mars and beyond as passionately as Franja did could hardly be ashamed to have Jerry Reed for a father, a father who not only shared, but served the same dream.
It was Bobby, of course, his personal favorite, whom Father had tried to give the dream to when they were both small, Bobby who got the expensive models for his birthdays and Christmases, while Father got her stupid dolls and his weird concept of little girls’ clothing, Bobby whom he told his best stories to, Bobby whom he fed all that chocolate ice cream.
But there had been a certain rough justice built into the universe of her childhood, and not just because Mother made Franja her favorite, her little confidante, her fellow Russian in willing exile, sharing as much of her work life as Franja could understand, spinning tales of her girlhood in an awakening Soviet Union, even hinting at a previous life as a notorious member of the legendary Red Menace.
For Bobby, despite Father’s ardent wishes, refused to become the little space cadet that Father longed for. The little ingrate blew it.
When she was about twelve, and had learned enough from Mother about the art of bureaucratic manipulation to take matters into her own hands, and even Father had begun to face the fact that his efforts with Bobby were hopeless, she began to ask her father questions about space. Intelligent questions. Questions she studied to prepare and framed carefully. Questions designed to pique his attention, to show him that he at least had a daughter to pass the torch along to.
“Do you think the Barnards have starships, Father?” she asked him one day. “Do you think they might mount an expedition when they get our message?”
Father looked at her peculiarly. “Starships?” he muttered.
“It would seem that there are artifacts scattered throughout the Barnard system, large ones too, as if they’ve built something like the old O’Neil colonies. Wouldn’t that imply the technology to take the next step? A generation ship expedition, or at least an automated probe?”
Father got a distracted faraway look in his eyes, the one Mother called his outer-space stare. “We’ll both be gone before anyone knows the answer to that,” he muttered.
“Maybe not. Maybe they’ll answer our message. If they do, I’ll still be around to hear it. And if they do answer, by that time, won’t we be ready to mount an expedition to them?”
“You’re probably right,” Father said. “They do seem to have occupied more of their solar system than we have, and we probably could mount an expedition thirty or forty years from now.”
“With a little luck, we could both live to see it!”
Father laughed. “I’m afraid I’d need a lot more than a little luck to last that long,” he said. “But you, Franja . . .”
He had looked at her with new eyes then, with a new awareness; he was deep into his outer-space stare, but now it was focused intently on her for the first time. She could feel things shifting. She could feel the world changing.
“You, Franja . . . ,” he said again.
“Me, Father,” Franja said softly, outer-space staring back at him, measure for measure.
And after that, it was Franja who got the telescope, Franja whom Father encouraged to pursue a career in space, Franja to whom Father poured out what Mother called his space babble, father and daughter who found each other through a shared vision.
“We’re like the ancient Polynesians sailing our first little outrigger canoes from island to island across the unknown Pacific,” Father told her. “And one day one of our tiny little boats is going to sail into the harbor of some galactic city a million years of evolution grander than anything we could have dreamed. And you could be on it.”
Franja believed that, she really did. She did more than believe it. She set it up before her as the shining goal of her lifetime, and she worked to fulfill it. She studied hard. She became something of a grind. She watched her nutrition carefully and kept herself in shape with long hours of swimming, which also, she had heard, was the best exercise to prepare her reflexes for zero-gravity locomotion.
She was going to get there. She was going to be a cosmonaut. She would do what she had to to get into Yuri Gagarin, the only real space academy in the world, where Russians who had been to the Moon and Mars trained what was by far the largest cosmonaut cadre in the world.
But when she finally proudly told Father of her intentions, she was stunned by his reaction.
“You don’t want to go to Yuri Gagarin,” he told her. “You don’t want to end up stuck in the Soviet program. Not when ESA is someday going to open up the whole solar system with my Grand Tour Navettes. ESA’s the place for you, Franja, where I can help you, where someday you can go to Mars on a ship that I built. Won’t that be something? Who knows, I might even get to ride along.”
What could she say to that? Certainly not the bitter truth, she knew even then.
“But Father,” she told him instead, “Soviet cosmonauts are going to Mars already! Who knows when ESA will really build Grand Tour Navettes? It’s the Soviet Union that has the real space program. Tell the truth, Dad, if you could, wouldn’t you become a Soviet cosmonaut right now?”
But Father refused to believe that the Soviet space program had been a visionary one from the start, as far back as Tsiolkovsky’s dreams of exploring the solar system and Yuri Gagarin himself, a thing of the romantic Russian heart.
The Americans had gone to the Moon for political prestige, and then their space program degenerated into a militarist nightmare. Common Europe could think of nothing grander to do than expend all its energies on building a glorified resort hotel for senile plutocrats. The Japanese cared for nothing but orbital factories and power stations.
But the Soviet Union had had a vision all along. Why couldn’t Father see that it was his vision too? Of exploring for life on Mars, or on Titan, or even in the superheated sea beneath the Uranian ice. Of eventually extending the search to the stars. And of building in the meantime a solar system–wide civilization that would be worthy of sailing its canoes into the galactic main as equals.
Why couldn’t Father accept
that as good enough reason to go to Yuri Gagarin and not tempt her to cruelty?
Surely Father knew the bitter truth that Mother had explained to her in words of many painful syllables. Surely Franja could have won this argument once and for all by forcing him to acknowledge it.
Surely she could never do it, no matter how frustrated with him she became, no matter how sorely she was tempted.
How could she tell her own father that being his daughter would be the political kiss of death to her at ESA?
She couldn’t. She didn’t. She couldn’t stoop to winning the endless argument with that any more than she could rid herself of her American family name by calling herself Franja Gagarin at the cost of what was left of her father’s pride.
Not that she exactly made a point of using her family name these days, either. An American name did not exactly endear anyone to the powers that be in the French educational system, nor was it worth the risk to be caught lying about her father being English when his name appeared in the back pages of the newspapers at unpredictable intervals.
At school, she was Jerry Reed’s daughter, and she was stuck with it, and if that meant a certain pointed pronunciation of her name from time to time, she had to admit that there were also times when it was a badge of honor.
But when it came to her social life, what there was of it, being Franja Reed was quite another matter.
Franja was a good Russian name, and it was a fine thing to be young and Russian and in Paris. Not only was the Soviet Union greatly admired, Paris was embracing styles and trends and things Russian, and the French were eager to embrace what Russians they could find, in every sense of the word.
Russian Spring Page 23
