Russian Spring (29 page)

So Bobby grew up with a peculiar montage image of America as seen from afar, compounded of his father’s vision of an America which had had a golden age that put men on the Moon and then sold it out for a mess of military hardware, his mother’s reading list, what he learned in a French school, and the random results of his own packrat curiosity.

By the time he was about fifteen, he thought he had it all figured out.

America had indeed once been the light of the world. It had given the world democracy and modern industrial technology and the telephone and the airplane and movies and the phonograph and jazz and rock ’n’ roll. It had fought a terrible war to save Europe from the Nazis. It had rebuilt Japan and Western Europe after the war with its own money and protected the shattered countries from Stalinist Russia with its own troops and atomic bombs. Without America there would be no Common Europe now, and maybe there would never have been a Gorbachev or a Russian Spring either. Once it had been a great and wonderful and prideful thing to be an American; the
people of the world had loved America, and not without good cause.

But it all started to slide downhill when the
CIA
assassinated John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy was the father of the American space program. He had promised to put an American on the Moon before 1970, and America did it. But it was the last great thing that America did.

The
CIA
and the Pentagon and the Military-Industrial Complex hated Kennedy. The
CIA
was in the drug-running business in Southeast Asia, the Pentagon was pissed off because Kennedy wouldn’t let them invade Cuba, and the Military-Industrial Complex wanted to make a lot of money selling weapons, so they all wanted the little war in Vietnam to turn into a big one that would last a long time. They knew that JFK wouldn’t allow this, that he wanted to spend the money on a space station and a Moon colony and an expedition to Mars instead, so they had him assassinated.

They got their nice long war, but a generation of Americans not much older then than Bobby was now had seen through the jingoistic propaganda, they were listening to their own rock ’n’ roll, which was telling them a different story. They refused to fight, and they marched against the war, and in 1968 they hounded Lyndon Johnson out of office. They would have ended the war that year and saved America’s economy and its honor by electing JFK’s brother Bobby, but the Military-Industrial Complex wasn’t having that either, so they had Bobby killed too.

The hippies tried to start a revolution in Chicago and Kent State and Woodstock. The military put it down easily, but it made the country paranoid enough to elect Richard Nixon, the biggest paranoid of all, who almost succeeded in making himself dictator.

The war finally ended after Nixon was overthrown, but by that time America was broke and no longer the light of the world, and all that was left of the civilian space program was the shuttle. And then because the Ayatollah Khomeini wanted to destroy the United States economically, he held American hostages during the whole election campaign while Jimmy Carter was tortured and humiliated on television, and so the Military-Industrial Complex was able to elect its own President again, a professional actor named Ronald Reagan who was
very
good on television.

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—”

“Ro
baire!
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 wasn’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.