Russian Spring (84 page)

The parade would have already started back in Moscow as Franja left the Anvers Métro station, and she double-timed through the streets to the apartment building on Avenue Trudaine, waited impatiently for the agonizingly slow descent of the elevator, and thumbed the doorbell repeatedly till Mother appeared to let her in.

She dashed into the living room with Mother trailing behind her, where Father rose to greet her, and where Bobby sat frozen on the couch, looking anywhere but into her eyes.

“Hello, Father,” she said, giving him a brief hug and a peck on both cheeks. Then she broke the embrace, loped across the room, turned on the wall screen, and tuned in the Tass channel.

A huge formation of schoolchildren in bright white peasant blouses, brilliant red pants, and black felt boots was marching past the reviewing stand atop Lenin’s tomb. On a big float in the midst of the formation, a huge robot cossack danced with a giant robot bear.

“Jesus Christ, Franja,” Bobby snapped, “I don’t expect you to
pretend to be glad to see me, but this is hardly the time to watch television.”

“Shut up, Bobby, I have to watch the May Day parade!”

“Franja!”

“You too, Mother, something terrible is about to happen, I just know it!”

A squad of Olympic athletes, dressed only in red shorts and competition T-shirts despite the apparent chill, paraded past the camera behind ranks of Soviet and Olympic flags, the privileged few bearing giant papier-mâché replicas of their medals.

“Yeah,” Bobby said, “we’re all gonna be bored to death.”

“Come on, Franja, is this really necessary?” Father said. “You haven’t even said hello to your brother, whom you haven’t seen for ten years!”

Franja glanced away from the TV long enough to glare at Bobby for a moment. “Hello, brother,” she said poisonously, and then returned her attention to the parade coverage.

Behind the Olympic athletes came a huge formation of cossack horsemen in a film version of the traditional costume, with long red cloaks, black fur hats, and waving outsized swords in slow lazy circles above their heads while the prancing hooves of identical black chargers beat a staccato thunder as they trotted across the stones of Red Square.

Behind them came a unit of the Red Army. The front rank was a squad of hovertanks, their rotors roaring like an endless rocket blast inside their armored skirts, their turrets swiveled around backward so that the long guns seemed slung over their metal shoulders at the same angle as the combat rifles of the infantry in full-dress uniform that entered the square after them. Behind the infantry was a rank of self-propelled rocket guns, tracked all-terrain vehicles with huge clusters of revolving barrels mounted like telescopes atop them, each capable of firing ten mini-rockets a second.

“Screw you too, Franja!” Bobby said.

“Please!”

The tanks came abreast of Lenin’s tomb. Gorchenko, standing in the center of the reviewing stand with Marshal Bronksky at his side in a uniform festooned with comic-opera medals, saluted. Only when the hovertanks had gone well past the tomb and the infantry was parading before it did the Marshal bring his own hand to the brim of his cap.

The hovertanks stopped. They cut their engines and came to rest on their skirt supports. The sudden silence came like a thunderclap. Slowly, almost majestically, and in smart unison, the turrets rotated, and the cannon swiveled to aim their barrels directly at Lenin’s tomb.

“My God, what’s happening!” Mother shouted.

“What do you think, Mother?” Franja muttered, sinking to the floor in front of the wall screen.

At the other end of Red Square, the self-propelled rocket guns also had the tomb squarely focused in their point-blank field of fire. The infantry formation marched in place for a few beats, then did a parade right to face the tomb. On the next beat, they unslung their combat rifles. On the beat after that, they sank to one knee, and brought their weapons up into firing position.

“Holy shit . . . ,” Bobby muttered behind Franja’s ear.

Marshal Bronksky said something to President Gorchenko. Gorchenko seemed to somehow melt back into the crowd of dignitaries behind him. Bronksky stepped up to the microphone on the central podium. The camera did not move in for a close-up. It held a long shot centered on the tiny figure atop Lenin’s tomb as it spoke with a thunderous and echoing amplification.

“Citizens of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics! In order to preserve the territorial integrity of the USSR and protect Socialist Democracy, I have been authorized by the Central Red Army Command to place the nation under conditional martial law for the duration of the current election campaign. The Presidency is hereby declared vacant for the duration of the election campaign. When the Soviet people have spoken, control of all government functions will be returned to their duly elected representatives.”

“Conditional martial law?” Bobby muttered. “What the hell’s that?”

Glancing behind her, Franja saw that her brother was kneeling on the floor before the wall screen now, close behind her, and looking at her with a dismay on his face that almost seemed to match her own.

“Quiet, Bobby, please,” she pleaded.

“During the interim period, all civilian functions will be carried out by the officials presently in place and all Soviet citizens will retain their full rights under Soviet law. Full responsibility for military and foreign policy will be assumed by the Red Army Central Command.”

Now the camera finally did move in for a head-and-shoulders shot of Bronksky, a solemn broad-featured man in middle years, whose face, somewhat to Franja’s surprise, did not betray any pleasure in what he had just done. It seemed like the face of an honest Soviet citizen quite convinced that he was doing his painful patriotic duty.

That is, until he spoke again. Then a certain fire flared in his eyes and a certain wolfish satisfaction creased his lips.

“And the first official act of the Red Army Central Command will be to end the treasonous insurrection against Socialist Legality in the
Ukraine. If the Kronkol clique surrenders itself to the Red Army Central Command within forty-eight hours, they will be permitted, despite their crimes, and in the interests of peace, to take political asylum in any country willing to bear their presence. If they fail to accept this magnanimous offer within forty-eight hours, their rebellion will be crushed at once by the full force of the Red Army.”

The screen flickered, and then a tape loop of a Soviet flag waving gloriously against a bright blue sky replaced Marshal Bronksky. They played the “Internationale” through once, and then Moscow went off the air.

Sonya sat there staring at the dead screen without reacting for a long moment. Then she staggered over to the couch and let herself collapse onto it beside Jerry. “I can’t believe this is happening . . . ,” she stammered. “Fifty years of progress blown away just like that . . . A general issuing ultimatums from the top of Lenin’s tomb . . .”

Jerry took her hand. Franja got up from the floor, sat down beside her, and put her arm around her shoulders, and the two of them huddled against each other as mother and daughter, as fellow Soviet citizens, as forlorn lost children of the Russian Spring.

Bobby got up and turned off the television set. He stood there across the room staring uncertainly at the three of them. No, at the
two
of them, Sonya could see it in his eyes. He was looking at two Russians, and Franja was glaring back at an
American
with naked hatred in her eyes.

“Just don’t say it, Bob-bee,” she snarled. “Just keep your big gringo mouth shut!”

But this was a different Bobby now. This was not the unhappy little boy writhing under the insults of his big sister who would miss no opportunity, let alone one as rich as this, to hit back. This, Sonya saw, with pride in her heart and tears in her eyes, was a mature man. A son to be proud of.

He didn’t rise to the bait. He didn’t snap back. Instead he walked slowly over to the couch and looked down at his sister with no anger in his eyes.

“Believe me, Franja,” he said, “no Russian alive can hate what Harry Carson has gotten the world into more than I do. Not even you.”

Franja looked back at her brother with open amazement. “You can say that now? This is not your moment of glory, now that it is
we
whom the whole world will hate and fear, as they did in Stalin’s day, for what the Red Army has done and the catastrophe that the Bears are about to bring about?”

Bobby shook his head slowly. And then he knelt down in front of his despised sister. “Now maybe you understand what it was like for me when we were kids together,” he said. “Now maybe you understand what it means to love a fucked-up country that the rest of the world hates. Now maybe you know what it feels like to be ashamed of the country you love. And love it still.”

Then Sonya thought her heart would burst as he reached out to lay his hand gently upon his sister’s.

Franja wouldn’t take it, but she didn’t pull away.

“Hey, Franja,” Bobby said soothingly, “let’s not let all the assholes do to us what they’re doing to the rest of the world.”

“Politique politicienne,” Jerry muttered.

“You listen to Dad, Franja,” Bobby said. “He’s a crazy space cadet, but that’s one thing he’s been right about all these years. Politics has to stop somewhere. Can’t we stop it here? Can’t we stop it now? Can’t we be some kind of half-assed family again?”

“Now you
do
make me ashamed, little brother,” Franja said. And she squeezed Bobby’s hand tightly, closing a circuit that Sonya had never thought to feel completed again.

The four of them touching, flesh to flesh to flesh to flesh, heart to heart to heart to heart.

What a golden tender moment it was!

How bitter and how sweet!

How bitter that it had taken a family tragedy and an imminent global catastrophe to bring it about!

How sweet that such a thing could happen at all!

Yet Sonya was certain that unlikely reunions like this must be taking place now all over the world. In her mind’s eye, she could see this scene repeated in a million variations, as feuds were buried in tearful reconciliations and black sheep were hugged back into the fold, and long-lost lovers embraced, as all over the city, all over Europe, all over the world, families huddled together fearfully and reached out for the touch of reassuring flesh, finding out in the hardest possible way what really mattered as they held hands and waited for the end of the world.

“. . . and in Geneva, a spokesman for the Congress of Peoples announced that its delegates would immediately submit a resolution calling for the expulsion of the Soviet Union from Common Europe on the grounds of blatant violation of the treaty of admission . . .”

—BBC

XXVII

Though Mother’s distractedly prepared linguini à la Romanoff was about the most glutinous version of that loathsome dish that Franja had ever been subjected to, she forced herself to pretend to eat the mess with relish; this was certainly no time to complain about the cooking, not with the world coming apart and Father spinning out his incredible fantasy of having himself “polymerized.”

“. . . in Rome, the Pope announced the beginning of a prayer vigil that he vowed not to end till the crisis was past. . . .”

Franja could not decide which seemed more unreal—the military coup in Moscow and the imminence of nuclear war, the discovery of a brother who seemed like quite another person, Father’s plans for his own death, or the fact that all of this was going on while they sat around the dinner table together for the first time in ten years, eating Mother’s linguini à la Romanoff.

“. . . estimated at twenty thousand demonstrated outside the Soviet Embassy . . .”

To make matters even more bizarre, Mother, of all people, had insisted that the portable TV be set up on the sideboard, Mother who had always barred TV at the dinner table as barbaric and nikulturni.

But no one wanted to be far from the newscasts that were blanketing all channels, for at any moment, the news could come that the missiles had started to fly.

So while they sat there in the insanely normal process of eating a family dinner, while Father kept blathering about genome recordings,
tissue samples, brain polymerization, and how they were going to come up with the money, there the TV sat, muttering darkly at low volume, haunting what should have been this most intimate and personal reunion like an evil electronic icon of the greater forces now controlling everyone’s lives.

“We could take out a new mortgage on the apartment, that should get us close, and maybe we could even persuade
ESA
that this should be covered by my medical insurance. . . .”

“. . . denounced the military coup in Moscow as a betrayal of Europe’s faith in the dedication to democracy of the Soviet . . .”

“Assuming there’s an apartment or an
ESA
left by tomorrow morning,” Mother blurted, then bit her lip in dismay at her own lapse into the subject they had strenuously avoided all evening. “I mean, it seems so strange to be sitting here eating dinner and planning for the future when . . .”

There was a long uncomfortable silence only made worse by the muttering of the TV set.

Franja broke it by heroically forking a big glob of linguini à la Romanoff into her mouth, pretending to savor it, and saying, “If we are all going to be vaporized, I prefer to go with a full stomach.”

Bobby actually laughed, picked up his own fork, and did likewise. “And Mom’s linguini à la Romanoff always was our favorite dish, wasn’t it, Franja?” he said dryly. Even Mother was able to crack a smile at that one.

“. . . was meeting with the National Security Council . . .”

“And as for planning for the future,” Father said earnestly, “well, what have we got to lose? If they don’t blow us all up, we’ll have to get on with it afterward, and if they do, well at least we won’t go out staring at the TV like zombies and doing nothing.”

That sucked the momentary jocularity right out of the atmosphere.