The sons and daughters of Embassy staff and Red Star personnel who formed the core of her small circle of friends joked about it among themselves, and made a wry point of doing so in thick Russified French, but that didn’t stop any of them from dressing up in stylized cossack gear and playing the second coming of the Red Menace for appreciative French audiences.
Oh yes, it was fun being a Russian named Franja in Paris!
Being an American named Reed was something else again.
There were boys who eyed her from afar, only to flee in the other direction when they learned her full name. There were self-styled men of the world who professed not to care until their parents forced them to end it. There were cretins of both sexes forever trying to force her into the position of actually defending the loathsome policies of the United States so they could vent their wrath upon a convenient target.
The old Russian solution would be to substitute the patronymic whenever possible, but “Franja Jerryovna” was hardly an option.
It was the rising tide of socialist feminism that rolled in with a modern Russian solution.
In the Soviet Union, a fashion arose among the enlightened youth of the Russian Spring for giving yourself a new patronymic of your own choosing; as a declaration of generational perestroika if you were a socialist feminist chafing under the linguistic yoke of tired old Slavic phallocracy, and if you knew what was good for you when paying court to same, even if you were a hairy unreconstructed phallocrat among the boys.
One chose the name of someone one admired, someone famous, someone you were telling the world you wished to emulate. For Franja, of course, the choice of a pop patronymic was obvious and perfect.
Who could deny that Yuri Gagarin was a worthy exemplar of socialist virtue and Russian pride? Who better personified everything she wished to become?
So she chose to call herself “Franja Yurievna Gagarin Reed,” “Franja Yurievna” period, when she could manage, and if there were those who called her “Franja Yurievna Gagarin” let them make of it what they would, and preferably to her advantage; she did not encourage it, now did she, and she had never used anything but her full legal name on any document.
Including the application for admission to the Yuri Gagarin Space Academy.
And there it was in full, “Franja Gagarin Reed” all over the admission forms that had arrived in the mail this morning.
Not that she could have hidden behind any pop patronymic with the Yuri Gagarin Space Academy. Jerry Reed might be an American, but he was still her father, and under Soviet law, she could no more attend Yuri Gagarin without her father’s written consent than she could claim her Soviet citizenship without it until she reached her legal majority.
And Father, who had every reason to want to sign these papers, who had encouraged her career so strongly, who wanted so much to see his daughter go where he could not, was being manipulated by Bobby into withholding his permission until Mother agreed that her brother could go to college in his beloved America.
As far as Franja was concerned, ruining his life by getting a third-rate education in a country that was loathed by the civilized world would only be what Bobby deserved. Let them draft him into their Foreign Legion and ship him to some Latin American jungle if that’s what he wanted.
But with all the scruples and honor of the devious paranoiacs in Washington who were trying to sabotage the Soviet entry into Common Europe, Machiavellian little Bobby had weaseled himself into a position where he held her admission to the Soviet space academy hostage.
If she had a right to go to Yuri Gagarin in the Soviet Union, then he had a right to go to college in America. That was the way Bobby saw it, and that was the way he had manipulated Father into seeing it.
Father would never pretend to be balking at letting her go to Gagarin if Bobby hadn’t persuaded him that linking the issues was the only way to persuade Mother to let Bobby go to America.
What Father would really do if Mother called his bluff, Franja didn’t want to think about.
“Dinner is ready,” Mother’s voice called from the kitchen.
Franja grimaced, and not just because Father and Mother had been in the kitchen together by themselves since they came home, which usually meant a private argument and a truly revolting concoction on the table, for she had the feeling that the dinner conversation was likely to be even more unpalatable than the battleground cuisine.
When Franja walked down the long hallway past Bobby’s room, the door was ajar and the room was empty. Just like him to make sure he got there first, as if . . . as if he had sneaked a look in the mailbox this morning before she got there and seen the packet from Moscow.
And indeed, he was already seated at the dining table when she arrived, greeting her with a fatuous smile and knowing eyes that told her that was exactly what he had done.
It was not like Jerry Reed to come staggering home from work drunk like some nikulturni muzhik, so Sonya did not have to be a Pavlov Institute psychic to guess that his meeting with Emile Lourade had not exactly been a triumph.
She was in the kitchen cutting up the beef when he arrived and plunked down a bottle of some dreadful-looking Barolo on the long wooden counter under the window, his acumen clearly adversely affected by what he had already drunk before purchasing it at some Felix Potin instead of their regular caviste.
“Somehow I sense that the news was not exactly good, Jerry?” she said as he began cutting onions off the string beside the spice rack with a paring knife as if this were the most normal day in the world.
“Well, as the famous old American saying goes, there’s good news and bad news,” Jerry said sardonically, angrily slicing off the ends of onions as if they were the heads of enemies. “The good news is that the Director of the European Space Agency had a few drinks at the corner brasserie after work with the newly appointed project manager of the newly funded Grand Tour Navette Project. . . .”
“Why that’s marvelous, Jerry!” Sonya exclaimed, and moved down the countertop to give him a hug.
“The bad news is that I was there too,” Jerry told her, freezing her in her tracks. “Does that answer your question?”
“La merde, Jerry, what happened?”
As Jerry stood there cutting up onions and spitting it all out through the sniffles and tears, the dreadful realization came over her that she was in the process of acquiring precisely the information that Ilya Pashikov was after for the Space Ministry without having decided whether she wanted it.
Knowing what Emile Lourade had cooked up now would probably allow the Space Ministry to hammer out a deal on a combined space budget about 10 percent better than what they’d get if Lourade controlled the timing of its revelation to them.
What had been done to Jerry was appalling, though in retrospect hardly surprising. But what was somehow at least as appalling was the pettiness of the moral quandary she had now been put in.
If she told Pashikov what she now knew, it would save the Soviet Union about 10 percent of the combined space budget, a modest bureaucratic coup that would look good on her kharakteristika and make the economic strategy department look good, and not much more.
If she kept this to herself, she might not be blamed for being unable to come up with the information, but it would not exactly enhance the confidence of the Moscow Mandarins in her political loyalty. Nor would it exactly enhance her working relationship with Ilya, who would lose bureaucratic points with the Moscow Mandarinate too.
Under the circumstances, she was not about to tell Jerry about her day at the office with Ilya Pashikov and the bureaucratic vengeance they could take on Lourade, since as far as he was concerned Lourade was not the villain, but the more Jerry blamed it on Soviet pressure, the angrier she became at the treacherous Emile Lourade, and the sweeter the opportunity to deal him a little justice seemed.
It was in these dissonant but equally distracted moods that the two of them had cooked dinner, and she didn’t need Franja’s turned-up nose as she
put the tureen down on the table to tell her that the linguini à la Romanoff showed it. The pasta had been overboiled into a sticky mess while they weren’t watching it, and the crème fraîche had been simmered long enough to fall apart into a runny goo, in which floated slices of overcooked beef and undercooked lumps of raw tomatoes.
But with Robert dressed in his ludicrous baseball jacket, always a bad sign at the dinner table, and with Franja fingering the packet of papers on her lap nervously, Sonya had the awful feeling that it was somehow going to be fitting fare for tonight’s table talk.
THE AMERICAN BLUFF
Despite the current posturing in Washington, it is hard to find anyone in the City who seriously believes that the impending entry of the Soviet Union into Common Europe will really result in a so-called unilateral junk bond rescheduling of the American overseas debt.
They simply can’t do it, so the smart thinking goes. Even if they suspended interest payments entirely, the American Federal Budget would still be deeply in deficit, and the need for overseas borrowing would still be there. And who would be willing to lend more money to a nation that had totally destroyed its financial credibility?
The United States would in the end only be committing financial suicide, and while the current American administration may indeed be foolish enough to do almost anything, the American financial and industrial establishment, which would be left to face the grim consequences as its overseas financing quite dried up as well, will never permit the politicians to carry their self-defeating policies to such a terminal extreme.
When the discount on American paper reaches 40 percent, institutional bond traders are set to leap into the market and gobble it up.
—Financial Times
Mother put a horrid-looking meal on the table that Franja recognized all too well—a huge dish of overcooked spinach pasta and a tureen of beef and mushrooms stewed in a tomato and crème fraîche sauce that she called “linguini à la Romanoff.”
Father emerged from the kitchen with the wine, plunked it down on the table, collapsed into his chair, and then just sat there leaning on his elbows staring into space with the most desolate look on his face. His eyes were bloodshot, and there were deep circles under them.
There was an unspoken rule at the dinner table that no one was to discuss anything but culinary matters until everyone had food on their plate and wine in their glass. Since what Mother had placed on the table appeared to be something that no one wanted to pay any more attention to than necessary, the loathsome linguini was dished out in silence while Franja squirmed in her seat, impatient for an opportune moment to present her papers for parental signature and get things over with.
But brother Bobby wasn’t going to allow that.
“What’ve you got there, Franja?” he said, as soon as everyone had begun the distasteful task of getting this ruined dinner down. No doubt he was just delighted to see Father in some kind of funk, under the circumstances, it would make it all that much easier for Bobby to play on his emotions.
“What are you talking about, Bobby?”
“The papers on your lap,” Bobby said disingenuously. “You’re not careful, you’re gonna spill sauce on them, why don’t you just put them on the table.”
“What do you have there, Franja?” Mother said, and now there was nothing to be done but go through with it as planned.
Jerry Reed stared at the packet of papers that Franja had laid out on the table as if they were a pile of dog turds. “Jesus Christ, Franja,” he moaned after she had finished her little speech, “why do you have to hit me with this stuff at a time like this?”
“At a time like what, Father?” Franja said, furrowing her brow.
And now he had gone and done it! Now he was going to have to tell his kids about what the damn Russians had done to him! Well, he was going to have to tell them sooner or later, and now at least, he thought as he took a huge gulp of wine, I’ve got a head start on getting drunk enough to do it.
“Those sons of bitches!” Bobby exclaimed when Dad was finished. “You can’t let them get away with that, Dad!”
“What am I supposed to do, Bob, call up the American Embassy and ask for a Terminator sortie against Moscow?”
“Maybe you should call up the Embassy,” Bobby found himself saying. “Maybe they’d let you build your own Grand Tour Navettes for America, so the Russians won’t end up owning the solar system. . . .”
“Bobby, Bobby,” Dad said in a little sad voice, “the people running the United States these days aren’t interested in exploring the solar system. Besides, the way they see it, I’m the guy who gave Common Europe American sat-sled technology. If I show up in Downey asking for my job back, they’ll ship me to Leavenworth and throw away the key.”
“Then why can’t you understand that Yuri Gagarin is the place for me, Father?” Franja butted in.
“Merde, Franja, how can you still be thinking about sliming into the Russian space program after what the bastards have done to your own father!” Bobby snapped at her.
“Because it’s obvious that being the daughter of Jerry Reed is not exactly going to open doors for me at ESA!” Franja shouted back.
“Franja!” Mother shouted. Not that she had to, for Franja was regretting the words almost in the act of shouting them, furious at Bobby for having goaded her into it.
But Father just sat there waving his wineglass woozily, nodding his head slightly, and looking at her with only sadness in his eyes.
“No, Sonya, she’s right,” Father said. “I can’t even open the door to the men’s room at ESA. . . .”
“Dad . . .”
“Jerry!”
“Then you will sign my papers?” Franja said, reaching into a pocket, pulling out a pen, and laying it down on top of the packet.
Jerry Reed stared at the papers before him in somewhat Scottish befuddlement.
Why had he really been against his daughter going to Yuri Gagarin anyway? With his dream of being Franja’s fairy godfather at ESA shattered, Jerry had to admit that Gagarin was the place for Franja. The two programs were going to be merged anyway in some fashion, and Common Europe had nothing like Yuri Gagarin; careerwise Gagarin graduates would have the fast track.
He reached down somewhat clumsily and picked up the pen.
“Wait a minute, Dad,” Bobby blurted, “what about me?”
Dad’s pen hand froze in midair. “What about you, Bob?” he said, staring at Bobby perplexedly.
“It isn’t fair! Why should Franja get to go to school in Russia if I can’t go to college in the States?”
“Oh no, not that again!” Mom moaned.
“Yes, that again, Mom! It isn’t fair! If Dad’s gonna let Franja go to Russia, you’ve got to let me go to the United States!”
“Have you been putting him up to this again, Jerry?” Mom said, looking at Dad, not at him.
“Putting him up to what?” Dad said confusedly.
“It’s Bobby who’s been putting Father up to it!” Franja whined.
“Shut up, Franja!”
“Shut up yourself!”
“Shut up everyone who says shut up!” Dad roared at the top of his lungs. He shrugged, threw up his hands. “Including me,” he added in a much smaller voice. And he led the laughter at his own expense.
And all at once, Bobby could see that Dad had taken charge of the table, not by outshouting everyone, but by making them laugh. And in the act of so doing, seemed to have recovered his full faculties.
“It seems to me we’ve had this discussion a few million times before,” Dad said.
“But not with Franja’s admission papers handed over to be signed, Dad,” Bobby told him, and then he found himself telling an inspired lie, which he would certainly turn into the truth tomorrow morning. “I’ve already written away for applications to Berkeley and UCLA, because if I want to get in for next fall’s term, I’ve got to apply before this one is over. . . .”
“He’s got a point, Sonya,” Dad said
. “We’re going to have to decide where he goes to school sooner or later, so it might as well be now—”
“So that the two of you can blackmail me with Franja’s admission papers to Gagarin?” Mom said angrily.
“That isn’t fair, Sonya. . . .”
“No, Jerry, it certainly isn’t! You never really objected to Franja’s going to Gagarin. It’s been a bluff all along! You’ll sign Franja’s papers no matter what I do, because you love your daughter too, and you’re not mean enough to destroy her life as an act of vengeance against me.”
Dad shrugged. “You do know me,” he said.
“Dad!” Bobby cried, feeling it all starting to slip away.
“Your mother’s right on this one, Bob,” Dad told him. “You really wouldn’t want me to ruin Franja’s life to punish her for your not getting what you wanted, now would you? How would you feel if you were in her shoes?”
“Just like I feel now,” Bobby moaned miserably.
“Well, I’m going to give you a chance to feel a little better, Bob,” Dad said, picking up his wineglass and sipping at it lightly, but never taking his eyes off Bobby’s. “I’m going to leave it up to you. You tell me whether to sign Franja’s papers or not. I won’t sign them until you give your permission—”
“Jerry!”
Dad held up his left hand for silence, but he didn’t even look at Mom. His bloodshot eyes kept staring into Bobby’s until Bobby felt that his father was staring right down into the center of his soul.
“It’s simple, Bob. Would you feel better doing what those Russian bastards just did to me or would you rather feel like an American?”
Bobby stole a sidelong glance at Franja, and for a moment their eyes met. There was nothing he could read in his sister’s eyes but the intensity of their focus on him. What must she be thinking? Cringing inside knowing that now he had his shot at vengeance? Fear that he was going to take the dream of her lifetime away from her?
Russian Spring Page 24
