Russian Spring (8 page)

But those shadows passed as quickly as clouds across the Spanish sun, as quickly as the sidewalks of St.-Germain refilled after a summer cloudburst, as quickly as the
TGV
sped through the banlieue and outskirts and showed her a quick vision of central Paris in the hazy distance beyond the ticky-tacky before plunging into the underground approach to the Gare du Nord.

From this distance, Paris was a picture-postcard diorama, reminiscent, in a way, of the view of central Moscow she had once seen through the window of Vitaly Kuryakin’s office in the Red Star Tower.

There she had looked down from on high on the red-brick battlements, cathedral, and gardens of the Kremlin compound, the gaily colored domes of St. Basil’s, the broad main avenues converging on Red Square, and across the sweeping blue curve of the river meandering through its city not unlike the Seine, knowing all too well that Moscow looked much better from this perspective than from down there in the quotidian streets of the real city, where life was all too prosaic and familiar and hardly a romantic fantasy even in the melting snows of the Russian Spring.

But here, however, she was left with the image of the Paris skyline floating like a shimmering mirage above her as the train descended into the darkness of the tunnel, the white dome of Sacré-Coeur, the lacy Victoriana of the Eiffel Tower, the monolithic Tour Montparnasse, shining distantly in the sunlight like the fairy castles of the Magic Kingdom, and, like the signature skyline of the Disneylands and quite unlike the view from the Red Star Tower, promising carnival and magic in its enchanted streets.

Oh yes, of all the cities Sonya Ivanovna had frolicked in in her year in Europe, Paris was the best of all, and not just because she spoke the language, for neither London nor Geneva nor Brussels nor even Nice so lifted her spirit as the City of Light.

It was the greatest cliché of every tourist guidebook in the world, but nevertheless it was true. It was not just the sidewalk cafés and the gardens and the wonderful promenades along the Seine and the restaurants and the clubs and the museums, and certainly not the climate (which was quite inferior to Madrid or Athens or Rome), nor even the enticing food aromas everywhere.

It was the Métro honeycombing the city with instant access to
everywhere and the oceans of wine and the intimate scale of things—the neighborhood market, the brasserie on the corner, the shops ringing every little square, and the way the streets were filled into the wee hours of the night, and the madhouse street fair surrounding the Beaubourg and the tawdry grandeur of the Boule Mich, the sheer compression of a city constructed on such a human scale, a city seemingly designed on the one hand completely for pleasure and on the other hand, bustling with the electric energy of Common Europe’s wheeling and dealing economic metropole.

Paris made Moscow seem like Siberia, Vienna seem like a museum piece, London seem gray and glowering, Geneva like an old folks’ home, and Brussels like, well, as the French would say, like
Belgium
.

By the time the train slid out of the underground darkness and into the cavernous grimy vastness of the Gare du Nord—noise, and bustle, and huffing passengers lugging baggage, and polyglot babble, and the mingled aromas of ozone, greasy fried merguez, dark tobacco smoke, petrol, and travel-sweat—Sonya’s atavistic moment of nostalgic Slavic melancholia had vanished back into the cold eastern steppes of memory from whence it came.

It was summer, it was party time, it was two weeks of freedom to do with as she willed. She was young, the sun was shining, and it was Paris, and never could the little girl who had sat before the TV in a two-room flat in grim old Lenino, longing to dance down Main Street in the new French Disneyland with Mickey and Donald, have truly believed that one day this moment really
would
arrive, nor wished for anything more.

Representative Sigmunsen: “We can’t simply sit back and watch lunatic Marxists turn Peru into an American Lebanon. If we don’t step in and restore order now, these maniacs will spread their subversion to Colombia, Bolivia, even Brazil, and who knows, someday we may even find them at the Rio Grande. My mail tells me that my constituents are overwhelmingly in favor of dealing with the situation now.”

Bill Blair: “You’re suggesting that we send ground forces into Peru too?”

Representative Sigmunsen: “Only to establish and protect bases for helicopter gunships and tactical fighters. A major air commitment should be enough to enable the Peruvian freedom fighters to gain the operational initiative.”

Bill Blair: “And if it doesn’t?”

Representative Sigmunsen: “Well, Bill, as Caesar said at the Rubicon, we’ll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it.”

—
Newspeak
, with Bill Blair

AIDS VACCINE STILL NOT REACHING AFRICA

“While the Western world enjoys its so-called Second Sexual Revolution, millions are still dying in Africa, and the number of new cases is only now beginning to decline slowly,” Ahmad Jambadi, Secretary General of the World Health Organization declared at the United Nations today after a ten-day fact-finding tour of the African continent.

“The World Health Organization simply does not have the funds to begin to deal with the problem,” he said, “either in terms of hiring the manpower needed, or securing an adequate supply of the vaccine at current prices. The Western drug companies simply must donate what is necessary out of the enormous profits they’re making in their domestic markets. The fact is that the cost of manufacturing a dose is a tenth of what they’re charging. Now that AIDS is no longer a major problem in the developed world, there is no further civilized excuse for not dealing with the African situation in the only way possible, as a global community.”

—
Le Monde

III

It took Jerry Reed about twenty-four hours to get unzoned, with André Deutcher walking him through it.

André let him crash out for a few hours, then appeared in his room at about 2:00
P.M.
with a room-service waiter and a pot of powerful black coffee. He drew open the curtains to wake Jerry with a golden bath of bright sunlight, handed him a cup of coffee and a handful of pills, which Jerry regarded blearily and dubiously.

“Two hundred units of B-complex, a gram of C, five hundred milligrams of kola extract, three hundred milligrams of phenylalanine, all perfectly legal,” André assured him. “Though if you want something stronger, that too could be arranged.
ESA
does not consider it dignified to require people to piss into bottles, let alone stick its nose into the odious results.”

The pills, two cups of coffee, and a long steaming shower in a bathroom the size of an ordinary hotel room later, Jerry was feeling almost human.

“So,” said André, as he emerged in the thick blue terrycloth robe provided by the Ritz, “while you are dressing, let us discuss important matters. What shall we have for lunch? Would you prefer cuisine minceur, cuisine bourgeois, fruits de mer, perhaps Provençale?”

“Uh . . . maybe you know a place where we could get some eggs Benedict?” Jerry muttered in an attempt to sound sophisticated.

André Deutcher was archly scandalized. “Come, come, Jerry, be serious!” he exclaimed. “A man’s first meal in Paris must be an event to remember, anything less would be an insult to the honor of France, not to mention the
ESA
expense account.”

“Then you choose, André,” Jerry told him. “To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t know cuisine bourgeois, whatever that is, from Taco Bell.”

Outside the hotel, instead of the Citröen limousine, a sporty little red two-seat Alfa-Peugeot convertible waited at the curb with the top down, a noisy, head-snapping, old-fashioned gas-powered demon that André told Jerry was his own car. “Ecologically atavistic, peut-être,” André admitted as he peeled rubber away from the Ritz, “but I prefer a bagnole, as you Americans say, with some crash.”

And as if to prove it, he took Jerry on a crazy alfresco ride during which crashes seemed to be averted by a whisker every other minute—down a traffic-choked side street to a main avenue running between a park on one side and a crowded arcaded shopping sidewalk on the other and into a huge square where hundreds of cars careened across each other’s paths every which way at once like a monstrous demolition derby in which no one managed to score a hit, across a
bridge over the Seine, down another boulevard, through an impossible maze of back streets, another boulevard, more back streets, then onto a riverside avenue going the other way for a couple of blocks, to a parking space, such as it was, that seemed squarely athwart a crosswalk.

By the time they had parked, Jerry was wide awake—how could he not be?—and by the time André had led him up three flights of steep, rickety old stairs to a strange sort of rooftop restaurant redolent with enticing aromas, he realized that he was now quite hungry.

“Le Tzigane,” André told him the place was called, not that it purveyed Romany cuisine, whatever that might be, Jerry was assured.

Formally set tables with white tablecloths were set out in the open air under a moveable canopy, rolled halfway back now to afford most of the tables sun. Waiters in traditional black and white moved in and out of a mysterious tent at the back of the rooftop as a similarly clad maître d’ who seemed to know André showed them to a choice table at the front with a truly magnificent view across the river at the Gothic gingerbread spires and buttresses of Nôtre-Dame.

“A gypsy restaurant indeed,” André told him, as they were handed menus in ornate handwritten French that Jerry found about as comprehensible as Arabic graffiti. “No fixed address, it moves around Paris with the months and the seasons, here for a while, the Luxembourg Gardens, a riverboat, Montmartre, one never knows where it will appear next when it folds its tents—unless one is on the mailing list—they refuse to even list the new location on the minitel. It is intimated that master chefs from other restaurants rotate through its portable kitchen, though that too they insist upon mystifying.”

André ordered for them, and it was all quite delicious. Tiny raw oysters in little individual nests of fried buckwheat-sesame noodles topped with shredded wild mushrooms, green onions, and roasted peppers in rice-wine vinegar, washed down with a hearty white wine. Thin slices of wild boar in a fresh raspberry sauce served with thin green beans stir-fried with cumin, cayenne, and turmeric; roasted onions glazed with Stilton; tiny baked potatoes soaked in some tangy caraway-flavored butter and garnished with caviar; and a truly powerful Bordeaux. Little soufflés in three flavors—chocolate, orange, and walnut—with three different sauces. Cheeses. Roasted pecans. Coffee. Cognac. One of André’s Cuban cigars.

By the time they were back on the street, Jerry had a wonderful glow on, though what with the small portions of everything, he did not feel at all stuffed. Nevertheless, he readily enough agreed when André suggested they “take a little stroll along the Seine and St.-Gerrnain to walk it off,” for by now he was quite eager to finally explore a bit of the city afoot.

The “little stroll” turned out to be a meandering promenade that lasted something like three hours, with time out for three leisurely pit stops people-watching at sidewalk cafés, two for coffee, and then another for a blackberry-flavored wine drink called “kir.”

For a native Southern Californian like Jerry, whose only previous acquaintance with real pedestrian street life had been a dozen or so blocks of Venice and Westwood, Tijuana sleaze, and San Francisco, the Left Bank was like a city on some exotic alien planet, though somehow it also managed to seem like a place familiar to him from half-remembered dreams.

Or more likely from endless TV shows and movies, for so much of this part of Paris had been used as locale for so many shows down through the decades that it was familiar to Jerry in the same way that Hollywood Boulevard or Mulholland Drive or the Ventura Freeway was to people throughout the world who had never been within six thousand miles of
LA
.

However, seeing a movie set in Paris was one thing, and
being
in one quite another. Paris had its own characteristic aroma, something too subtle to quite register as a smell, but something that sank into the backbrain and told Jerry on a level that vision never could that he
really was
in a foreign land.

And the girl-watching was something else!

Not that the women on these Parisian streets were any more physically stunning than the fabulous starlets and surfer girls and hookers of Los Angeles, where feminine pulchritude was a major item of commerce at every level.

But all these tantalizing creatures were
right out there on the street
, displaying themselves at sidewalk tables, promenading by when Jerry and André sat down for a drink, dozens of them, hundreds of them at every turn; the unfamiliar density of it all was overwhelming, creating the impression that meeting them would be so easy, given the sheer law of averages, given the compacted human environment of the St.-Germain streets.

On the other hand, everyone
was
speaking French.

Not that Jerry hadn’t expected it, of course, but he had always associated the sound of tongues other than English with people on the outside looking in, immigrants, foreigners, and street-sleaze.

Here, however,
he
was the one on the outside looking in. There they were, all these French guys making easy conversation with all these beautiful girls, leaning from one café table to the next, walking down the street, making it all seem so easy, as for them it probably was, as it could be for him too, if only it wasn’t all going on in
French
.

Before Jerry had too much time to reflect on his linguistically frustrated
horniness, André had walked him to the banks of the Seine, where they descended an old stone ramp to the quay, and boarded a tour boat a good deal smaller than most of the angularly glassy behemoths plying the river, though just as crowded.