* * *
XX
Sonya Gagarin Reed had been waiting in dread for the other shoe to drop ever since Robert called to blithely announce that he had just signed his American citizenship papers and gotten married to someone they had never even met. And to turn the screw a little further, Jerry had refused to understand her ire, had taken it out on poor Franja in the end, and they had been arguing bitterly ever since.
“How could you do such a thing without even consulting us?” she had demanded, admittedly with a good deal less than maternal enthusiasm.
“We love each other, Mom,” Robert’s voice said over the phone.
“That’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it!”
“No, I don’t, Mom, I don’t know what you’re talking about at all.”
“I’m talking about taking American citizenship without considering the consequences,” she snapped.
“I certainly have considered the consequences! The consequences were that without American citizenship, I could never get a job!”
“And what about my job, Robert?” Sonya shouted back.
In the afterglow of the Great Stock Market Coup, Sonya had expected some kind of promotion. When it had not been forthcoming, Ilya had assured her that it was only because they were saving her for his job when the time came for him to move up. After all, he had pointed out, it would be foolish to promote her sideways to director of some other department, where her experience would not be nearly so valuable.
But a year and a half later, when Ilya Pashikov was made Director of the Paris Office of Red Star, they brought in a bitch on wheels from Moscow named Raisa Shorchov to fill his old job above her.
The night he told her, Ilya took Sonya out to an expensive dinner at La Mer Noire, filling her with champagne, Sevruga caviar, baked sturgeon, Pouilly-Fuissé, raspberries Romanoff, and ancient Cognac, and he didn’t work up the courage to say it until the second after-dinner drink, leading her to believe all the while that this was by way of some kind of celebration.
As, for him, it was.
“Well, as the old American saying has it, there’s good news, and there’s bad news,” he said when he was finally drunk enough. “The good news is that I’ve been promoted to Director of the Paris Office—”
“Oh, Ilya, that’s wonderful!”
“The bad news is . . . ,” he muttered, studying the bottom of his Cognac snifter.
And he told her.
Sonya sat there stunned, motionless, not even able to cry.
“I did everything I could, believe me, I came perilously close to losing my own promotion over it, I mean, we have been discreet, but once I started making calls over people’s heads to Moscow, well, even what’s left of the KGB can still manage to put one and one together if you rub their noses in it hard enough. . . .”
“But why?” Sonya demanded. “I’ve more than earned it!”
Ilya sighed. He shrugged. “What it all seems to boil down to is that the Moscow Mandarins just don’t consider you politically pure enough to hold such a position. With a son going to university in America, and Jerry forever trying to go over Boris Velnikov’s head to his French friends at ESA . . .”
“It’s just not fair!” Sonya exclaimed, holding back her tears.
Ilya reached across the table and took her hand. “I quite agree,” he said. “You know I do. But the Bears are taking bites out of other people’s asses too, you know. . . .”
“You went too far trying to help me, didn’t you?” Sonya said softly.
Ilya smiled ruefully. “Do you know what I say to that?” he said. He held up the middle finger of his right hand. “I say this to that!” he declared. “And as for going too far—in the end, it will be the miserable chauvinist bastards who go too far! In the glorious words of Nikita Khrushchev, we will bury them, you’ll see!”
“Oh, Ilya,” Sonya sighed.
And in the end, she had gone off with him to his apartment for solace after dinner that night too. He was such a true friend. And if she was going to have a lover, who better than Ilya Pashikov?
Ilya, with all his other women, was entirely undemanding. The thought of falling in love with such a man and doing something irrevocable and foolish was ridiculous, as Ilya himself often enough took pains to point out. Ilya was a true comrade in the best and truest sense of the word. And if she knew all too well that having sex with him was a betrayal of Jerry, well, at least, it was a betrayal with a friend who knew its limits.
So too had Ilya done his best to make her durance vile under Raisa Shorchov as bearable as it could be under the circumstances. Shorchov was ten years her junior, which was humiliating enough. Shorchov, unlike Ilya, treated Sonya like a subordinate instead of a colleague, indeed, seemed to delight in lording it over an older woman with so much more experience. Perhaps this was because she was an incompetent capable of doing little but collecting reports and projections, signing her name to them, and passing them on to her superiors as her own work.
Shorchov was, in fact, a political appointee who seemed to have been shoved down Red Star’s throat by the Bears in Moscow. Her idea of economic strategy seemed to be theirs, namely that Red Star should serve as an instrument of Russian policy, and that Russian policy should be to seize control of as much of Common Europe’s industrial apparatus as quickly as possible, and never mind what it did to the balance sheet.
Shorchov was forever babbling on about Slavic Destiny, and she made it quite clear that she considered her sojourn in Paris an exile to be endured on her way to bigger and better things in the future, once she was safely back on sacred Russian soil.
It was only Sonya who kept the morale of the economic strategy department from completely falling apart under such titular leadership, and Ilya virtually refused to meet with Raisa Shorchov without Sonya’s presence. “Comrade Director of the economic strategy department” was what he called Shorchov to her face, and the real input from the department into Red Star policy decisions came from private conversation with Sonya.
But while this kept Sonya functioning instead of throwing up her hands and doing something foolish, it certainly did little to endear her to her superior, and she knew full well that Raisa Shorchov would seize the first available opportunity to have her removed from the assistant directorship. Which was why when Robert so cavalierly informed her that he had taken American citizenship, which might just finally be the edge that Shorchov needed, Sonya had indeed, to a certain extent, lost control.
But that certainly didn’t justify the way Jerry had treated Franja when she called all the way from Cosmograd Sagdeev two days later to give them her good news.
Being a call from orbit, there had been no video, but when she had put the call on the speaker so they could both listen to their daughter’s excited voice, Sonya didn’t need a video hook-up to picture Franja’s happy face as she burbled on about the good turn in her fortune.
Some cosmonaut friend of hers, a lover by the sound of it, had prevailed upon an apparently well-connected relative to get her into Concordski pilots’ school at the end of her tour on Sagdeev.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” Franja exclaimed. “With Concordski wings and a year’s experience in orbit, I’ll be first in line when your Grand Tour Navettes open up all those new positions, Father, Nikolai agrees with you entirely on that!”
Sonya saw Jerry wince at the phrase “your Grand Tour Navettes.”
“We’re both very happy for you, Franja,” she said quickly to cover Jerry’s silence, glad for once that there was no video link to show Franja the look on his face. “You’re sure everything has really been arranged?”
“No problem, Mother,” Franja assured her. “Marshal Donets has already presented my application personally, and as soon as my citizenship papers—”
“Your what?” Jerry snapped.
“My Soviet citizenship papers,” Franja said. “They’ve already been processed in Moscow, but until copies arrive at the pilots’ school, they can�
�t formally—”
“You just went ahead and did it without even asking my permission?” Jerry said thickly.
“I’m a legal adult, and I no longer need your permission, Father!” Franja snapped back. Then, in a much more conciliatory tone, “Besides, a Marshal of the Red Army could hardly walk an application through for someone who wasn’t even a Soviet citizen. He’d look ridiculous, or worse, and—”
“You did this to avoid embarrassing some fucking Russian general!” Jerry shouted.
“I . . . I thought you’d be pleased, Father,” Franja said, more in pain than in anger.
“Pleased! Pleased that you’ve taken Soviet citizenship to kiss some Russian general’s hairy ass!”
“Stop it, Jerry!”
“Pleased that I’m at least going to have a chance of being aboard one of your Grand Tour Navettes after all, maybe even as a pilot,” Franja said, her voice an unsteady mixture of hurt and controlled anger that she had somehow managed to modulate into an attempt at conciliation. “You and me together on a GTN to the Moon, Mars even, just like you told me, Father. . . .”
Even as she heard her daughter say it, Sonya knew that Franja, with the best of intentions, was saying the worst thing possible, for Jerry was quite irrational on the subject these days, and this was certain to do nothing but set him off.
But the vehemence of his tirade stunned even her. Jerry’s face reddened, tears welled up in his eyes, his hands balled into fists, veins stood out in his neck, and he went quite out of control.
“My Grand Tour Navettes!” he shouted, his voice breaking up into sobs. “The goddamn Russians have stolen the whole fucking project away from me! I’ll never fly on a Grand Tour Navette, thanks to the fucking Russians! I’ll never live to see the Moon! I’ll never even get up out of the gravity well! The goddamn fucking Russians have taken my whole life away from me! You disgust me, Franja! You make me want to puke!”
“Jerry—”
“Father—”
And he had stormed out of the living room into the bedroom and slammed the door behind him.
And now, here they were, sitting in the living room continuing yet another dinner-table argument over Robert and Franja long after the second cups of coffee had grown as cold as their marriage bed. Sonya sat on the big blue leather couch where there was plenty of room for two, but Jerry had pointedly taken up his usual position in the armchair on the other side of the coffee table.
“Please, Jerry,” Sonya insisted yet again. “You’ve got to make your peace with Franja, you can’t just disown your own daughter!”
“Like the peace you’ve made with Bobby?” Jerry snapped.
“I told you, Jerry, I’ll call Robert and try to smooth things over as soon as you apologize to Franja,” Sonya said. “If you agree to do it afterward, I’ll even call him first.”
“She’s the one who should be apologizing to me!”
“For what?” Sonya demanded. “For doing what she had to do to get into pilots’ school?”
“How is that any different from what Bobby did?”
Sonya sighed. “It isn’t,” she admitted. “I was wrong too, and I am willing to do the right thing. You’re just being stubborn, Jerry, and you know it! You’re furious at Boris Velnikov, and you’re just taking it out on the easiest available Russian, who unfortunately happens to be your own daughter. Not to mention—”
The phone rang.
“Saved by the bell,” Jerry said dryly, and punched the accept button.
A Soviet flag appeared on the screen, immediately replaced by a young woman’s face.
“Somehow I think this is for you,” Jerry said, and he got up out of the chair next to the phone and let Sonya sit down within range of the camera.
“Sonya Gagarin Reed?”
“Yes. . . .”
“I am required to inform you that your presence is required at the office of Ivan Josefovich Ligatski, assistant counselor to the deputy director of the political section, at the Soviet Embassy this Thursday at 3:00 P.M.”
“Are you . . . are you required to tell me what this is all about?” Sonya stammered.
The young woman glanced down at something off camera, or at least pretended to. “Review of Party status,” she said.
“Review of Party status?”
“That’s what it says here,” the functionary said. “It would not do to be late.” And she hung up.
Sonya sat there staring numbly at the blank screen.
“What was that,” Jerry said blithely, “more red tape?”
Sonya looked up at him, and as the expression on his face changed, she saw mirrored there what he had seen on her own.
“It’s serious?” he said softly, peering down at her with an expression of real concern, a concern for her that she had not seen for a long, long time.
“Very serious,” she said somberly. “I have a terrible feeling that this is just what I was afraid of when Robert became an American citizen. I knew that Shorchov would try to use it against me somehow, but this . . .” She shuddered.
Jerry came closer. He actually placed his arm across the back of the chair, not quite touching her shoulders.
“You’re . . . you’re not in trouble with the KGB?” he said.
Sonya would have laughed if the situation were not so grim. “I only wish that was it,” she said. “The KGB is in no position these days to intimidate high Red Star circles. Ilya could make a few phone calls, and they’d be forced to go away. But this . . . this is much worse . . .”
Review of Party status? Assistant counselor to the deputy director of the political section? In the bad old days, they used to have a more straightforward term for that—commissar.
“Worse than the KGB?” Jerry said nervously. “What could be worse than the KGB?”
His anger had quite evaporated. Real worry was plainly visible on his face. Was it possible that he really did still care?
“Anything to do with a review of Party status,” she told him. “Shorchov would like nothing more than to see my Party card lifted. . . .”
“They’d really do that?”
Sonya shrugged. “Probably not,” she said. “Probably they’re just calling me in on the carpet. But review of Party status is an official proceeding, and it will appear on my kharakteristika. And that’s bad enough, what with all the black marks I have already. . . .”
Jerry’s arm touched her shoulder. “You’re really this worried about that kind of bureaucratic bullshit?”
Sonya looked into his eyes, bobbed her head. “Yes,” she said, “I am.”
Jerry looked back, and she could see the pain in his eyes when he said it, feel the shame of it knot her own gut, knowing what it must be costing him. “Surely your good friend the Golden Boy can take care of it, can’t he?” he said with no irony in his voice.
“Not this,” she said. “If he tried, that in itself would be a black mark on his kharakteristika too.”
“And you wouldn’t want to risk that, would you?” Jerry shot back, and all at once she could see him withdrawing, sense that a moment that might have been was already past.
“I couldn’t, it wouldn’t be fair,” she told him from the other side of the wall that, after all, still lay between them.
CONGRESS OF PEOPLES CONVENED IN PARIS
Delegates from separatist movements from all over Common Europe opened their four-day meeting at Port Maillot today, designed to draw up a charter for an ongoing Congress of Peoples which will promote the rights of so-called national minorities. Groups represented include Basques, Scots, Ukrainians, Walloons, Slovaks, Welsh, Bavarians, Uzbeks, Corsicans, Catalans, and Bretons.
While there seems to be no general agreement on ultimate goals, there does seem to be a consensus that those European nationalities that do not have their own nation-states within the Common European framework must band together to bring about structural alterations that will further de-emphasize the already-diminished sovereignty of the member states in favor of
building what a huge banner hung inside the meeting hall calls “A Europe of Peoples, not Nations.”
—Le Monde
Oh how Jerry Reed hated this prison cell of his dreams!
When Corneau had assigned him the low-status windowless office, Jerry hadn’t really cared, even though he knew what it implied in the pecking order, for he had no interest in such bureaucratic games. He had a desk, a chair, and a computer terminal, and as far as he was concerned that was all he needed to do his work.
While everyone else was tied up in endless meetings during the setup phase, he was able to spend his time at the computer turning his old conceptual renderings into blueprints for actual hardware. By the time the maneuvering system section had been set up without him, under Steinholz, he already had plans detailed enough to break up into hardware specs for subcontractor bids.
Rather than slap Steinholz in the face with them, he had taken them directly to Patrice Corneau. “I can see you haven’t been wasting your time, Jerry,” Patrice had told him. “It’s possible we can use some of this. I’ll pass it along to Velnikov and ask him to have Steinholz take a look.”
“What are you talking about, Patrice? These are complete plans for the maneuvering system, ready to let out for bid. We can save months!”
The project director shook his head. “That’s really being naive, Jerry,” he said. “We can’t start subcontractor bidding until all systems and components have been firmed up into hardware specs. Your maneuvering system specs look very good in isolation, but how can we know how well they will integrate with the specs for the other systems until those specs exist?”
Reluctantly, Jerry had been forced to agree, and in the months that followed, as he continued to design his own versions of various subsystems in isolation, he watched, via his terminal, with a galling mixture of personal anger and professional satisfaction, as Steinholz’s team slowly and meticulously duplicated his own work at a snail’s pace, making only minor modifications to justify their existence.
Russian Spring Page 47
