Russian Spring (7 page)

He reeled it all off rapidly and diffidently like an American politician reading off a TelePrompTer into a television camera.

“Two weeks’ paid vacation the first year, going to three after two years, four after five, an extra day for every year of seniority thereafter. The right of free travel within Comecon and Common Europe on your days off with a permanent travel visa from the Foreign Ministry on your passport. Free lunches at the commissary, wine or beer extra . . .”

He paused, sipped more tea, seemed to downshift into a lower gear. “Well, I think that about covers it,” he said. “You
do
want to take it, now don’t you?”

“Yes, of course!” Sonya exclaimed without thinking.

It was all like some fabulous dream, like something happening to the heroine on some American soap opera cassette, like a jet to Disneyland West. Brussels! Common Europe! 5,000
ECU
a month in
valuta! Unlimited and unencumbered travel in Europe on weekends and holidays and vacations and the hard
ECU
to pay for it!

“But . . . but . . .” she stammered in the next moment as the reality began to sink in. Yuli . . . the foreign service . . . engagement . . . marriage . . . the whole life scenario that she had carefully constructed and worked for . . .

“But what?” Kuryakin snapped in annoyance. “I thought it was all settled.”

“But I’ve never even thought of being a translator,” Sonya said, playing for time in which to collect her wits. “I can read and write English and French fluently, to be sure, but I have no training in—”

“No problem, no problem,” Kuryakin said expansively, with a dismissive wave of his Rolexed hand. “Translation is AI augmented these days, three weeks at our seaside training school in the Crimea, and you will know enough information technology to begin. We have a hole to fill immediately, and we don’t expect a graduate from the foreign languages institute!”

He glanced at his watch. “Well, what do you say, yes or no?” he demanded. “I’ve got another interview scheduled in five minutes, and with all the tea I’ve been drinking today, I really
would
like to have time to go to the toilet first.”

“Can’t I have a few days to think about it?”

“No, you cannot,” Kuryakin said flatly. He leaned back in his chair, sipped his tea, swirled the glass in front of her face, and regarded her more sympathetically. “Look, I know this is a big decision to make right now, on the spot,” he said, “but the fact is that I’ve got twenty-eight positions to fill in four days, and I’ve got at least ten possible candidates for each, so I can’t afford to wait around while one of them decides what to do.”

He smiled, he shrugged. “Or think of it as a test,” he said. “We’re socialist entrepreneurs here at Red Star, we deal with high-speed capitalist jet-setting wheelers and dealers, and we have to be able to wheel and deal just a little faster than they do. We deal in options and currency-rate fluctuations and the electronic economy, where if you stop to think too long you’ve already blown it. We don’t want the kind of obsolete Russian who thinks slowly and carefully and paranoically, as if the
KGB
is watching every moment. We want the
new
Russian, Sonya Ivanovna, the Eurorussian—worldly-wise, decisive, instinctive, even a little impulsive.”

He stood up and peered down at her with the big window at his back looking down on the Kremlin and Red Square and the river and southern Moscow beyond, all small and unreal from this vantage in the cloud-dappled bright sunshine, like a diorama of a toy city illumined by spotlights from above in a children’s palace.

“Yes or no,” Kuryakin said. “Brussels or the foreign service academy? The New Europe or the old Russia? Rubles or valuta?” He laughed. “If you find
that
a difficult decision to make, you’re certainly not for us!”

Put that way, what
could
Sonya say? It wasn’t as if she was so in love with Yuli that she really wanted to spend the rest of her life as his wife, she had never been sure she loved him, and if she couldn’t be sure, it must mean she really didn’t, and if she didn’t really love Yuli enough to throw away the instant fulfillment of the dream of her lifetime for him, then what other reason was there for stupidly turning down such a golden opportunity?

“You have a point, Comrade Kuryakin,” she said, “and you have hired yourself a translator for Brussels, and you still have time to visit the toilet.”

And in the end, it was as easy as all that after all.

Though telling Yuli was another matter.

Sonya’s stomach tightened as the memory of that night rose up unbidden, and she took a quick swallow of Côtes-du-Rhône, and tried to concentrate on the countryside whipping past the train window.

But the
TGV
was slicing through the awful, banlieue housing blocks northeast of Paris now, huge monolithic towers of workers’ apartments all too reminiscent of the arrondissement she had grown up in, in Lenino, and there was nothing quaint about that, only another reminder of the past, and even the taste of Bordeaux wine in her mouth seemed to conspire against her, for, she suddenly remembered, she had brought two bottles of château-bottled Médoc to his room and insisted they polish off the first one before she told Yuli the reason for this unprecedented extravagance.

When she had finally had wine enough to blurt it all out, Yuli carefully placed his wineglass on the floor and just sat there across the bed, staring at her in immobile stony silence.

“Well, aren’t you going to say something?” Sonya demanded.

“What would you have me say?” Yuli said woodenly.

“That you hate me? That I’m a coldhearted self-centered careerist bitch?”

Yuli managed a little laugh. “I’ve always said I’m not a
perfect
hypocrite,” he said, breaking her heart with his gallantry. “Which I would be if I pretended that
I
would give up my life’s ambition for
you
.”

“True,” Sonya said, strangely enough loving him more in that moment of cynical admission than she ever had before.

“And of course, this always has been your real life’s ambition, Sonya, hasn’t it?” he said in a harder voice. “Life in the West with
a nice supply of valuta, that’s always been enough for you. Everything else, your studies, the foreign service, has always just been a means to that end. . . .”

“Not you, Yuli,” Sonya moaned miserably.

And his expression softened again just as suddenly. “Of course not, Sonya,” he said, touching a hand to her cheek. “In some ways, we are real soul mates. If I had to choose between my dream and love, I’d choose my destiny too, which would not mean that I didn’t really love you either. On that level we truly understand each other, and there is no blame, Sonya Ivanovna.”

“Yuli—”

“But in other ways we are quite different,” he said, snatching up the second bottle of Médoc. “For you the dream is merely personal, but I serve a vision. I too am a careerist and an individualist, but I am also an idealistic Communist, or will be when I am admitted to the Party.”

He opened the second bottle with the corkscrew, refilled their glasses, slugged half of his down as if it were cheap vodka rather than a noble imported French vintage. “You seek only personal gratification, whereas I identify my own personal gratification with the good of Mother Russia.”

“What’s good for Yuli Markovsky is good for the Soviet Union!” Sonya snapped back, swilling an unseemly gulp of wine herself.

“What’s good for Yuli Markovsky is the satisfaction of sailing the ship of Soviet state into the safe harbor of Common Europe,” he declared grandiosely, and Sonya, through her own growing barblement, realized that he had become quite drunk.

“And living the luxurious life of a globe-trotting diplomat in the process!” she said.

“But of course! The New Soviet Man is no socialist monk!”

“I’ll drink to that!” Sonya declared, and she did.

“And so will I,” said Yuli, pouring himself another.

“You don’t hate me for doing this, Yuli?” Sonya muttered, feeling her head starting to spin, feeling herself becoming quite maudlin.

With what seemed like a mighty effort, Yuli held himself bolt upright and stared with bloodshot eyes unwaveringly into her own, and through the drunken haze, or perhaps via its instrumentality, a crystal moment of clarity seemed to pass between them.

“I don’t hate you, I pity you, Sonya,” Yuli said. “There is a dimension of life you are blind to, a passionate color your eyes don’t see, the joy of true dedication to a vision of something greater than yourself, without which, without which . . .”

“Ah yes, Yuli Markovsky, the selfless servant of the people, and
next you will be quoting Lenin on socialist idealism, no doubt!” Sonya shot back. But there was something in his eyes, something behind his words, that made her want to get even drunker, though the room was already beginning to whirl, and she swilled down another gulp of wine, without, however, being able to avert her gaze.

“Nothing of the kind,” Yuli said. “These are great days to be young and Russian and part of a great adventure. This is to be our hour in the center of the stage, to push against the world and feel it move, to ride the wild stallion of history, to hold the reins in your hands and bend destiny to your will to serve the greater good. . . .”

“Great days to be young and Russian and be living in Common Europe, that is the great adventure, Yuli,” Sonya shot back, clawing her way back from the edge of something pulling her down into his wild bloodshot Rasputin eyes, something she feared to fathom, something that was beginning to make her feel small and foolish and lost.

“You don’t understand what I’m saying, do you?” Yuli said, and then at last he broke the intense eye contact, and slugged down another drink. “You have no sense of destiny at all, mine, or your own!”

“Don’t patronize me!” Sonya snapped.

“Oh I wouldn’t think of it,” Yuli said, lurching across the bed in her general direction.

Sonya managed to catch him in her arms as the room really began to reel. “You’re completely drunk!” she declared.

“And so are you!”

“Who am I to deny it?”

“In that case,” Yuli said, rolling her over under him and fumbling at her breasts and his pants at the same time, “let us not spend our last night together yammering like feckless intellectuals. Let us fuck ourselves good and senseless like honest drunken peasants!”

And so they did.

Under the circumstances, it seemed the only thing to do. They screwed and screwed and screwed without either of them coming until they passed out in each other’s arms. And when Sonya awoke in the morning with an awful headache and a sour taste in her mouth, she knew it was over.

Three weeks later, she found herself at the Crimean seaside, swimming in the Black Sea before breakfast, studying “information technology” until five, another swim before dinner, and more often than not uncomplicated sex on the beach afterward with someone she knew she would never see again.

It was a perfect transition. The weather was balmy, the food was good, the alfresco sex was bracing and athletically unemotional, and the studies not at all taxing when compared to what she had long
been used to in the university, consisting mainly of familiarization with computer hardware and software, with a perfunctory pass at actual programming.

Three weeks after that, there she was living her new life in Brussels, with a studio apartment all her own that might not be much by local standards but which seemed immense compared to her room in her parents’ flat in Lenino.

True, her job as “translator” had proven to be mostly deadly tedium, as day after day she sat there before a screen and keyboard in a big boiler room with ten other “translators,” rewriting agrammatical AI babble into decent English and French, enlivened only by the occasional random humor emerging from the translation software.

True too that she was endlessly fending off the drippy advances of her supervisor, Grigori Pankov, a timid old goat who
would
take no for an answer, but who doggedly insisted on submitting himself to the humiliation of her coy rejections on a regular basis just the same.

But there was no homework, no mandatory Komsomol meetings, no worries about black marks on her kharakteristika, no parents. For the first time in her life, Sonya’s nonworking hours were entirely her own.

Brussels was not exactly London or Paris or even Amsterdam, but by plane or even cheaper high-speed trains, it was a weekend jaunt from everywhere that was anywhere, which was to say that she was indeed in
Europe
, and it was spread out before her, and it was everything she had dreamed of and more as she tripped the weekend life fantastic.

She learned to ski in Zermatt and water-ski in Nice. She gambled in Monaco and went to an actual orgy in Berlin. She partied in Paris and went to the theater in London and got disgusted at the Oktoberfest in Munich and went to the races at Le Mans and the bullfights in Madrid and smoked hashish on a canal boat in Amsterdam and drank retsina in the Plaka in Athens, and, yes, even went to Disneyland, and contrived to do most of it at someone else’s willing expense.

For she was young and attractive and openheartedly eager to give herself freely to simpàtico companions in fun and adventure, and she was a member in good standing of the Red Menace, the tide of liberated young Eurorussians like herself rolling through Common Europe, an innocent sort of wild bunch who hadn’t gotten to party like this for a hundred years and were determined, in their wide-eyed and charming enthusiasm, to make up for it at once. Her major ambition in life, a common obsession of both Red Menace sexes, was to collect lovers of every European nationality as she had once collected stamps, and there were girls at the office who actually stuck pushpins in a map.

Only at rare moments like this, alone in a train or a plane in a hiatus of transition, with too much time to think, and a random resemblance of a face across the aisle, or an overheard snatch of political passion in Russian, or the taste of Bordeaux wine in her solitary mouth calling up an old memory of Yuli Markovsky, of the road not taken, of the way they had parted, did she give any thought to the possibility of any morning after.