Russian Spring (53 page)

No, in her lifetime, it was all going to be like Sagdeev, cramped little contained environments, long hours of boredom, frail bubbles of life floating in a deadly immensity, submarines in a cosmic sea.

When she tried to share these thoughts with her fellow monkeys, what she got were glazed stares, sexual advances, jokes, the offer of a squeeze bottle of rotgut to lighten her mood. It was contrary to space-monkey etiquette, perhaps of necessity, to consider these things, or at least to voice them aloud, and she soon gave up trying.

More and more, she found herself alone with her thoughts, alone with her doubts. All her life had been focused on getting here, but now, she had found, as the old saying had it, that there was no
here
here, only dull labor, boredom, and mindless screwing, nor could she see an end to it in her allotted span.

More and more, she found herself looking down on the Earth and wishing she were there. There was more life and excitement in the Mad Moscow she had hardly known than up here in any of these tin cans. The stars were cold and dead and unreachable, but the Earth hung huge and alive and eternally tantalizing before her.

Behind the terminator, the Earth too was a galaxy of stars shining in the darkness, but each star was a city—Beijing, Tokyo, Jakarta, Rio, hundreds of them, thousands of places she had never seen—teeming with life, bright with possibility, beacons of adventure. Compared
to that, what was a lifetime spent confined in these miserable little submarines in space?

Day after day, Franja came to the observation deck to look down on the living Earth, longing for something as deeply, in the end, as ever she had longed to be where she was now.

She had fought her way up out of the gravity well seeking some sort of magical transformation. And now that she had found it, it had turned out to be something quite different from what she had imagined it would be.

Up here on high, she had seen the Earth from a new perspective, and it would never seem the same again.
That
was the transformation. She had sought a new land of wonder and adventure. And there it was, shining in the darkness before her, where it had been all along.

It took a long time for her to admit it, but finally she knew that she wanted to go home, home to a world that the woman she had now become had never seen before. And she started counting the days and the weeks and the months till her release.

CARMELO TO CHALLENGE MICHAELSON

State Assemblyman Albert Carmelo (D-Berkeley) announced today that he would seek the Congressional seat now held by Republican Dwayne Michaelson. “Berkeley has a long Democratic tradition,” Carmelo declared, “and without Presidential coattails to help my opponent this time around, I feel confident that I have a good chance of unseating him.”

—
Oakland Express

XVIII

In Robert Reed’s junior year at UC Berkeley, Nat Wolfowitz decided to run for Congress. He announced this in the middle of a poker game, right after he had raked in a pot at seven-card stud with nothing better than tens and sixes.

“You’re out of your mind, Nat,” Bobby told him. “You’d be lucky to carry Telegraph Avenue.”

“I bluffed you out of this one on the sixth card with nothing but a lousy pair of sixes showing, didn’t I?” Wolfowitz said.

“That’s not exactly the same thing!”

“Isn’t it?”

“Come on, Nat, you’re not really
serious!
” Marla Washington said.

She was the only person in the game who had been living at Little Moscow when Bobby had arrived in Berkeley, and she had never been too terrific at poker. The other two hands, Johnny Nash and Frieda Blackwelder, were relative newcomers whose skill did not at all match their enthusiasm, and while Bobby was still no match for Wolfowitz, and knew he never would be, he had long since learned that by playing defensive poker behind Nat and not getting greedy, he could win modest amounts more or less consistently enough to augment the modest living allowance he was getting from his parents in Paris.

“Depends on what you mean by
serious
,” Wolfowitz said. “It’s not as if I expect to
win
.”

“Huh?”

“Of course I don’t have a chance of winning,” Nat said blithely. “The district takes in a big chunk of Oakland as well as Berkeley, the whole economy is dependent on the Navy Yard, even Berkeley is more Gringo than Red, most people are not gonna like what I’m saying at all, and even if the Democrats and Republicans split right down the middle, I don’t have a prayer of sneaking in.”

He laughed. “Who the hell wants to live in Washington anyway?”

It was Bobby’s deal. “Straight draw,” he declared cautiously, not wanting to deal with anything more complicated while Nat was running this little psyche-out. If that was really what it was. Nat had the strangest look on his face, devilish and ironic, yes, but also somehow dreamy and faraway. He couldn’t
really
be serious, could he . . . ?

“Come on, Nat, what are you
really
up to?” Bobby said as he dealt the cards.

“Teddy Roosevelt, Jesse Jackson,” Wolfowitz said. “Writ small.”

“What
are
you babbling about?” Marla said.

“Was Teddy Roosevelt who called the Presidency a bully pulpit,” Wolfowitz said. “Jesse Jackson was this radical black preacher back in the 1980s and ’90s who kept running for President over and over again even though he knew he had no chance of winning.”

Bobby checked his cards. King high, without even a pair or a three-card flush. “Because
running
for President was also a bully pulpit?” he said.

Frieda checked. Johnny bet fifty dollars. Marla raised fifty. Wolfowitz glanced at his cards and folded. Bobby locked eyes with him for a moment and then dropped out too. Frieda called. Johnny called.

Wolfowitz beamed at him. “You’re getting it, kid,” he said.

Frieda took one card, probably pulling to a straight or a flush. Johnny took three, probably holding a pair. Marla took two, three of a kind, no doubt.

Bobby lost interest in the hand as they bet and raised each other, and so did Nat Wolfowitz. “I’ve won enough in the big games to finance a couple thousand posters, a few radio spots maybe, and we could start charging a few bucks’ admission to the Saturday night parties. Enough to generate a little free press coverage, if I keep saying the same outrageous thing.”

“Which is?”

“The United States has to do whatever it takes to get into Common Europe,” Wolfowitz said.

Marla looked up from her hand. “That’s crazy, Nat!” she said.

“We all know that it’s true,” Wolfowitz said.

“Yeah, but
we’re
a bunch of Reds!”

“Bet, will you, Marla!”

“Yeah, play
poker?
”

“Uh . . . call . . . ,” Marla said distractedly, shoving another fifty into the pot.

“What about you, Comrade Eurocrat?” Wolfowitz asked Bobby. “Does it look so crazy from your perspective?”

Bobby, by now, was one of the senior members of Little Moscow, and his European background gave him a certain intellectual cachet. So he felt that he really had to say something intelligent; it was necessary to his mystique.

The so-called Western Hemispheric Common Market gave America an enormous captive market and raw materials at artificially depressed prices. But this kept Latin America impoverished, and with the United States frozen out of Greater Common Europe, Africa a basket case, and the Japanese pretty much in control of Asian markets, Latin America was the only export market America had.

The endless guerrilla wars all over the hemisphere kept the American defense industry humming and unemployment at a politically tolerable level. But, having stiffed Common Europe, the United States had firmly established itself as an international deadbeat, leaving no way to finance deficits overseas.

Domestic spending had to be cut to the bone, but the federal budget still ran a deficit, which meant floating rubbery paper inside the United States, which meant high interest rates, which meant inflation, which meant higher interest rates, which meant more inflation . . .

The only things that kept the economy from collapsing were cheap raw materials from Latin America, cheap food prices generated by unexportable surpluses, and government pressure to keep wage increases below the inflation rate and profit margins above the prevailing interest rates.

So the standard of living kept drifting downward, but not dramatically enough to rock the slowly sinking boat. Especially with Europe and Japan and guerrillas in Latin America to blame for the American people’s misfortune and the ever-tightening strictures of the constantly amended National Security Act to silence anyone unpatriotic enough to voice the awful truth.

“Sure, Nat,
we
all know that getting into Common Europe is the only way out,” Bobby finally said. “But
how?
They won’t even let in our exports. How do you propose to get them to even think about letting us join?”

Marla turned up three eights. Johnny and Frieda groaned as she raked in the pot.

“Pay them back what we owe them,” Wolfowitz said.

“You’re talking about trillions and trillions of dollars!” Bobby exclaimed.

Wolfowitz took the cards. It was his deal. He cut the deck and began shuffling the cards with his usual gambler’s flourish. “It’d be an offer they couldn’t refuse,” he said.

“Yeah, sure, but where would we get the ante?” Bobby replied. “And even if we could, how on earth would you sell such a thing to an electorate of Peen-hating jingos?”

Wolfowitz shrugged. “I haven’t figured that one out yet,” he admitted. “But then, I’m not going to be elected, so I don’t have to worry about such petty details, now do I?” he said. “All I want to do is to force people to at least start
talking
about it.”

“The bully pulpit? Bully-
shit
, you ask me!”

Wolfowitz shrugged again. “How does that make me any worse than the Democrats and the Republicans?” he said. “Seven-card stud, suckers, the ante in
this
game is only fifty dollars, so pony up, surely you guys can come up with
that much
somehow!”

Wolfowitz kicked off his campaign with a big Saturday night party. Bobby and the other inhabitants of Little Moscow pasted posters up all over Telegraph Avenue and the campus, and Wolfowitz mailed out a press release that got him a short item in the college paper and a brief mention on one FM radio station. “Nathan Wolfowitz for Congress—Now Is the Time for a Futile Gesture,” the slogan went.

It was hard for Bobby to take the whole thing seriously, but much to his surprise, the house was jammed to the rafters by nine o’clock Saturday night, with people spilling out onto the front porch, the lawn, even the junk-strewn backyard, despite the chill fog rolling in off the bay. Wolfowitz had decided against charging admission, at least for tonight, in order to maximize the crowd, but he had Bobby and the others going around with bowls and baskets and hats to solicit contributions, and amazingly enough, in small bits and pieces, the money came pouring in.

It was too much of a mob scene for Nat to do anything like make a big speech, but that would have been redundant anyway, Bobby realized after an hour or so of listening to snatches of conversation while he passed the hat.

The Reds of Berkeley, those of them who still dared to show their true colors and risk the wrath of the Gringos who had ruled the streets ever since the night of the infamous Flag Riot, were longing for something like this. It could have been Wolfowitz or it could have been anybody. Now indeed was the time for a futile gesture, as far as the Reds of Berkeley were concerned, and futile or not, Bobby had not
seen such political energy and even crazy hope since the annexation of Baja.

Bobby kept having to empty his hat onto the ever-growing pile of small bills and coins on Wolfowitz’s bed, and his pockets were stuffed with bits of paper scrawled with the names and telephone numbers of people eager to work in the campaign.

It was exhilarating to be sure, at the very least it made for one hell of a party, and some of the phone numbers in his pockets were those of interesting girls who had already been impressed by his residency at Little Moscow, his European background, and his proximity to Nat.

But he also found it all rather disturbing. All these people, all this money, all that energy, all that hope, and the truth of it was that Nat Wolfowitz didn’t have a ghost of a chance of being elected to Congress, or even dogcatcher for that matter, even in Berkeley. That all these people had managed to convince themselves that it
was
possible, that they were willing to invest their time and even their money in the “Futile Gesture,” well maybe that wasn’t so bad, it gave them hope, direction, something to do that could make them feel they were really accomplishing something.

What really troubled Bobby was that Nat himself didn’t even pretend to believe it. He went around talking about getting the United States into Common Europe and the need for an “American Gorbachev,” namely himself, and all the while openly calling the whole thing a futile gesture. Yet he did it with the sly grin he always used to convince the marks that the garbage he
seemed
to be holding was going to be the winning hand when he turned up his hole cards.

But Bobby knew damn well that in
this
game, Nat had nothing better than a four-card flush in his hand, and there was something about
that
that made him seem like, well, like something of a four-flusher.

“You’re Bobby Reed, aren’t you?” a girl said as she dropped a bill in his hat as he was making his way down the hall to the staircase to dump another full load on Wolfowitz’s bed.

She was of medium height with short straight mousy brown hair, and she was wearing a bulky blue sweater and a long loose red denim skirt that gave little indication of what might lie beneath. But there was something about her face . . .

“The one and only,” Bobby admitted.

“The guy who moved here from France . . .”