That he was going to do to her what Mom was doing to him?
Bobby sighed. Franja had tormented him for as long as he could remember and certainly had never done anything noble for him. Was it really possible to love such a sister?
But that wasn’t the point, was it? Nor was vengeance, however sweet, however richly deserved.
Dad was teaching him a hard, loving lesson about himself that he would never forget.
Clean vengeance was one thing, but a deliberate act of naked injustice was just something he couldn’t make himself commit.
“Sign the papers, Dad,” he muttered unhappily.
“Spoken like a man, Bob,” Dad said, gathering up Franja’s admission papers. He turned his gaze on Mom for a long silent moment. “Spoken like a real American.”
Never before had losing felt like having won.
Sonya sat there marveling at her husband as Jerry signed the papers. After what had been done to him today, he was still able to see his way through to the fair thing and make Robert show it to himself in the bargain!
During the last few years of travail and conflict and career stagnation, she had in her darker moments seen Jerry as a lead anchor, whom she had somehow had to marry to get transferred to Paris.
But moments like this reminded her that she really had married Jerry Reed because she loved him, for they reminded her of why. This was the Jerry Reed who had left his country for love and a dream. This was the Jerry Reed who had kept his faith all these long years of bitter disappointment.
And understanding that anew, she also knew that Emile Lourade was indeed Jerry’s friend, that in a sense he had understood Jerry better than she had lately. He might be too much of a bureaucratic infighter to make a futile gesture that would endanger his position, but he had given Jerry the only thing he could, the chance, at whatever cost to his pride, to work on the dream of his lifetime.
And knew too that she could never report tonight’s conversation to Ilya Pashikov, though she couldn’t quite fully understand why. Did she really care that much about betraying Lourade, when all it would do was change some figures in a treaty by a few percentage points? Because it would be a betrayal of Jerry even though it did him no harm?
Or was it for the same reason that Jerry had put the decision to sign Franja’s papers in Robert’s hands? The same reason that made Robert tell him to sign them? She was sure that was true.
But she couldn’t quite put her finger on what that reason was.
Nevertheless, she knew she had to act on it anyway, even though it was going to make trouble with Pashikov and put her even further out of favor with the Moscow Mandarins.
Sometimes even a professional bureaucrat had to follow her own heart.
Franja couldn’t help herself from stealing a glance at Bobby while Father was signing all the forms. No, he didn’t look any different. He was still wearing that idiotic jacket, and a halo had not magically appeared in the air over his head.
She couldn’t for the life of her see what he had hoped to gain by doing what he had done. She found it hard to believe that he had done it out of a suddenly developed sense of brotherly love.
That left only one other possibility that she could think of, no matter how improbable it seemed. He had done it because even Bobby knew damn well that it was the right thing to do.
Was it possible? Was Bobby really capable of violating his own petty self-interest to do the right thing like a true Socialist Idealist?
She glanced at him again. Well, yes, all the right features were in all the right places, she had to admit that they were members of the same species, members of the same family, when you came down to it.
Maybe it was true.
Maybe her little brother was a human being after all.
Jerry Reed put the pen back in its holder and slid the papers back across the table to Franja. “Now it’s Bob’s turn to have his college plans finally decided,” he said, looking at Sonya, on whose face he was surprised to see a radiant smile of a sort she hadn’t turned on him in years. “He’s certainly earned the right to go to America as far as I’m concerned.”
Sonya’s smile turned to a hectoring frown. “It’s not that I’m not very proud of Robert for what he’s just done, and it’s not that I have any intention of denying him a right to choose,” she insisted. “If he doesn’t want to go to the Sorbonne, he can go to any university in Common Europe that will admit him, and if he wants to study in English, there are much better schools in Britain than anything in the United States.”
“Britain!” Bob cried. “Everyone there talks like they’ve got a pencil up their nose! And they play cricket instead of baseball!”
“I wasn’t aware that you were planning to major in baseball, Robert,” Sonya said dryly.
“You know damn well that I’m gonna major in history, Mom!”
“And the British are very good indeed at teaching that. And no place is better than the Sorbonne.”
“American history, not a bunch of crap about dead kings and who conquered what when!”
“I simply cannot agree to let my own son receive an education in a country where the history presently being made is which Latin American country needs to be invaded next! You can’t seriously expect to learn anything about history in a country that won’t even remember history long enough to pay its own debts.”
“Very funny, Mom.”
“I’m serious, Robert. You can’t get a decent education in an atmosphere like that, and what’s more, it may be dangerous. There’s quite literally no way of predicting what the madmen in Washington might get it into their heads to do next.”
“What do you think is really going to happen to me in America, Mom? Am I gonna be drafted into the Army or lynched by rednecks or eaten by alligators in the swamp? You really think I’m going to be in physical danger?”
“No, but—”
“Brainwashed by the CIA? Turned into a Republican?”
“He’s got a point,” Jerry said. “What are you afraid of? The only reason you’ve given for not letting Bob go to college in America is because you don’t like its politics!”
“No rational person likes its politics!” Sonya snapped back at him. “Do you?”
“Screw politics!” Jerry told her angrily. “I didn’t let politics stop me from signing Franja’s papers to go to school in goddamn Russia, did I? And Bob didn’t let politics stop him from doing what was right.”
Jerry stared into his wife’s eyes and wondered who was looking back now. The Russian? The career bureaucrat? The girl who had called herself Samantha Garry on a wild tour of Paris all those years ago? All of them? What was she seeing now? The man she loved? A failure? An American who wanted to turn her son into one of them?
“You know why Bob and I did that, Sonya?” he said. “Because it was the right thing to do. The fair thing. The American thing to do. Being an American used to mean that too, Sonya. Maybe to some people it still does. Maybe some of that’s still alive over there. . . .”
“And if it isn’t?”
“Then I have a right to find that out for myself, don’t I?” Bobby said.
“What about a little of the famous romantic Russian spirit, Sonya?” Jerry said. “What about a little of the socialist justice they’re supposed to have these days in Moscow? Or are we Americans the only ones who know anything about it?”
“Now who’s playing cheap chauvinist politics, Jerry Reed!”
Franja had tried to disappear into the meal before her as Father and Mother argued over Bobby’s fate, but the congealed mess on her plate did not exactly invite careful attention, and what was being done to Bobby made it hard for her to just sit there in the glow of victory.
It just wasn’t right. Having just won her own freedom of choice, she could not avoid knowing all too keenly how she would have felt if Father had refused to sign those admission papers, meaning that whether she liked it or not, she could not avoid knowing precisely how Bobby felt now.
&nbs
p; Against her will, despite her better judgment, and to the further erosion of her appetite, Franja found herself taking the side of her brother inside her own head.
Bobby, after all, had just been her ally for the first time in his life. And now it was costing him.
It just wasn’t fair.
Maybe all that stuff about being a real American was jingoistic blather, but Bobby had believed it, and believing it had actually made him act like a real brother for the first time.
Maybe such a thing as an American concept of virtue was actually possible. Maybe it really wasn’t that much different from the concept of socialist morality, from the idea that the community existed to promote the welfare of the people through the bonds of fraternal solidarity among its individuals as a family of equals.
And if that were so, socialist morality, honor, and simple human decency, which was what this was really all about, demanded that she stand up for justice for her brother now.
After all, she told herself unconvincingly, you’ll forever be in the little monster’s debt if you don’t, and that would really be unbearable.
“Father’s right, Mother,” she found herself saying. “You’re wrong. Bobby has a right to live his own life too. And you have no right to stop him.”
Sonya gaped at her daughter in astonishment. “Et tu, Franja?” she cried.
Franja stared straight into her eyes, and in that moment, she somehow seemed more like a sister to Sonya than a daughter, an adult equal in every sense of the term.
“Aren’t you the one who taught me that a society only thrives when its citizens are free to follow their own hearts?” that adult equal told her firmly. “Where’s our Russian Spring if we act like unreconstructed old Stalinists with our own family? Doesn’t socialist morality begin at home?”
Sonya looked away from this new Franja, looked at Jerry, who was smiling like the doubly proud father now. She looked at Bobby, who had manfully sacrificed his own pragmatic advantage to do what was right for the sister he had seemed to despise, Bobby, who was looking at that sister now with a new respect, with as much love for her as he was capable of.
Finally, she looked back at Franja, at this daughter who presumed to lecture her on socialist morality.
And she saw that the same spirit united the three of them in a way that it never had before.
She felt proud. She felt defeated. She felt ashamed. She felt very much on the outside looking in. Her mind could not be changed, but in the end her heart could only be melted.
She sighed, she shrugged her shoulders, once, twice. “I still think we are making a terrible mistake,” she finally said. “But clearly I have been outvoted. So I guess I really do have to accede to the will of the majority, don’t I? Because I have no right to do anything else. Merely the power. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, Sonya,” Jerry said softly. “That’s what it’s all about.”
“Well then you have my permission, Robert,” Sonya sighed. “It’s not so easy to admit that your child has a right to a will of his own. Do you understand that, Robert? Do you understand how I feel?”
Bobby looked back at her and smiled a tender little rueful smile. “Yeah, Mom,” he said, “I do believe I do. I think we all do.”
There was a long moment of silence, but there was nothing awkward about it; Sonya felt it as a moment of grace, a moment of completion, a moment of familial unity she had never quite experienced the like of before, a moment so tender as to be almost embarrassing.
Sonya came blinking out of it looking at what was on the dinner table before them and found herself surveying a loathsome uneaten mess of congealed pasta covered with thoroughly decomposed crème fraîche sauce and forlorn bits of cold, tough meat.
“We are going to poubelle this stuff and go down to Le Magnifique,” she declared. “It may not be exactly the best brasserie in Pigalle, but even they can do better than this. And this decision, at least, will not be subject to a majority vote of the Supreme Soviet!”
* * *
Representative Carson: “Hell no, Billy, we’re not bluffing. We’re going to go into joint session as the Common European Parliament votes, there’s a ton of legislation in the hopper, and believe me, we’re not going to adjourn until we’ve given the President what he needs to really kick some European butt. We’ll show them who’s been bluffing! They’ve got our paper, but I’d just like to see them try and collect on it! We may not have exactly built Battlestar America with this in mind, but it’s nice to know it’s about to pay off a big fat extra dividend. The Russians and the Peens have been sneering at ‘Festung Amerika’ for years, now we’re gonna see who laughs last!”
Billy Allen: “Speak softly and carry a big stick, eh?”
Representative Carson: “Speak softly, my ass! We’re gonna let them know it loud and clear, or my name isn’t Harry Burton Carson!”
—Newspeak, with Billy Allen
COMMON EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT ADMITS SOVIET UNION
With only 53 dissenting votes out of 561 cast, and despite the bellicose and hollow threats continuing to emanate from Washington, the Common European Parliament courageously voted today to admit the Soviet Union to Common Europe.
“This is the greatest historical event since the end of the Great Patriotic War,” President Dimitri Pavelovich Smerlak declared. “Indeed, historians of the next century may end up deeming it greater. The great wound down the center of Europe has at last been healed. Mikhail Gorbachev’s old dream of a common European house has at last been realized—one Europe, from the Atlantic to Vladivostok! A golden future is spread before us!”
—Tass
* * *
XI
When Red Star, S.A., minitelled its invitations to the gala celebration, Sonya’s was in the name of Sonya Ivanovna Gagarin, the usual signal that her American husband was persona non grata.
This time, however, she could easily understand why, nor would she think of subjecting Jerry to such an ordeal even if he were invited. An American at a celebration of the Soviet Union’s entry into Common Europe would only be the object of triumphant gloating.
Nor would Jerry’s presence aid in her endeavors to clear her political karma with the Moscow Mandarins, a cause that might at least be advanced in tonight’s expansive atmosphere, where the champagne and vodka would flow freely and everyone would be happily speculating about how the Soviet entry was going to enhance Red Star’s fortune and their own careers.
Ordinarily, she would have arrived with Ilya Pashikov, who would have left with someone else, an oft-used social convenience for both of them. She had her boss as her escort, and in return served as the perfect beard for the notorious lady-killer, since no one could think him a cad for leaving with a woman other than the one he arrived with as long as the woman he arrived with was married and strictly a business connection.
But that would be pushing things a bit now.
Ilya had called her in on the carpet first thing in the morning on the day after ESA sprang the fully funded design stage Grand Tour Navette program on the Soviet negotiating team.
“You knew about this, Sonya, didn’t you?” he said by way of greeting when she arrived in his office. “It wasn’t true that your husband knew nothing.”
Something about the way he was looking at her told her that denial would be worse than futile. “No, Ilya Sergeiovich, it wasn’t,” she was forced to admit.
“Then why didn’t you tell me?” Ilya whined with as much petulance as anger. “Believe me, they’re not exactly impressed with our department now back in Moscow!”
“I . . . I haven’t put your position in danger, have I . . . ?” Sonya asked woefully, realizing for the first time that not reporting Emile Lourade’s strategy to Moscow through Ilya would indeed reflect rather directly on him.
“No, no, no, of course not,” Ilya said irritably. “But if we had delivered up the information, the Paris economic strategy department, which is to say you and me, Sonya Ivanovna,
would have come out looking like the state of the art.”
He peered at her speculatively. “You knew all this, Sonya,” he said. “So why didn’t you do what was right?”
“I did what was right, Ilya,” Sonya found herself declaring somewhat forcefully.
Ilya leaned back in his chair. “You would perhaps not mind explaining how this is possible . . . ?” he said in a strange soft voice.
Sonya tried. She told him what Emile Lourade had done to Jerry. And how he had nevertheless signed Franja’s admission papers. “After that, there was no way I could do anything that he might see as yet another betrayal, and whether he ever found out about it or not was entirely beside the point.”
She looked at Pashikov, who was eyeing her most peculiarly now. “Not that I really expect you to understand, Ilya. . . .”
“Why not? Am I some nikulturni peasant from the tundra?” Ilya said quite indignantly. “Do you suppose that just because I wear Italian suits I lack a Russian heart?”
“You’re not angry?”
Ilya shrugged, and in that moment his patrician airs seemed to become the genuine versions of themselves, and Sonya could see what all those other women must see in this man aside from the long blond hair and the cossack good looks.
“How could I be angry?” he said. “You did as your heart commanded, like an honest Russian wife, if you will forgive my Slavic phallocracy. I admire you all the more as a woman for it.”
Then the moment passed and he became her boss again. “This, however, will not be what appears on both of our kharakteristikas. Instead of heroes of socialist entrepreneurship, Sonya,” he said, “if the Moscow Mandarins were to be told this explanation of our failure, we would both be written off as hopeless bourgeois romantics, so we had just better let them grumble about our incompetence for a while and forget it.”
Russian Spring Page 25