Russian Spring (18 page)

And so she did, such as they were.

She tried to tell him what it was like growing up in Lenino, and what traveling in the Disneyland of the West had meant to her, how this selfish little dream, so petty and egoistic beside his own, had shaped her whole life, had made her aspire to a foreign-service career. . . .

And then she paused, poured herself another glass of champagne and drank it down for courage, and found herself telling this naked
man, this stranger of the night before, this American, about Yuli Markovsky, about how she had turned her back on him, on love and her chosen career, on everything else that mattered to her, when Red Star held out the offer of life in the West
right now
.

“And do you know what the worst thing about me is, Jerry?” she said. “The worst thing about me is that I don’t regret it! I’ve gotten what I wanted, and it turned out to be everything I thought it would be! I’m
happy
with my decision. I’d do it all over again!”

She sighed, she picked aimlessly at an oyster shell with a fork, and averted her gaze from him. “That’s what a shallow creature I really am . . . ,” she said much more softly.

Jerry Reed got up from his chair, walked over to her, put one hand on her shoulder, lifted her chin with the other so that she was looking right into his eyes, so that she could see his soft little smile.

“Hey, lady, you managed to pick yourself up maybe the one guy in Paris who really understands just how shallow that’s
not
,” he said.

Sonya cocked her head at him in total incomprehension.

“I grew up dreaming of going to the Moon and Mars, and you grew up dreaming of traveling to the West,” Jerry Reed said. “I’ve spent my whole life looking for a way to get out there to the worlds of my dream, and now, if I’m brave enough, maybe I can get to do it, sort of. . . . ”

Jerry’s eyes were shining down at her so glowingly that somehow she found her depression melting away like a cool spring morning’s mist under a warm rising sun, even if she did not quite understand why. “I don’t think I follow you. . . , ” she said.

“I told you about my ‘Uncle’ Rob last night, didn’t I?”

Sonya nodded.

“Rob told me a line he had read somewhere that stuck with him, and I’ve never forgotten it either,” Jerry said. “You can learn to walk on water. You’d have to give up everything else to do it, but you could walk on water.”

“So . . . ?”

“So that’s what I’ve got to find the guts to do now,” he said, and the way he looked at her seemed absolutely radiant. “But you, Sonya, you’ve
done it
. You’ve given up everything else to do it, but that little girl from Moscow has walked on her water already.”

Sonya’s eyes quite filled with tears.

“Jerry Reed, you are a beautiful man,” she said, “has any woman ever told you that before?”

“No,” he said quite seriously, “no one ever has.”

And then they were in each other’s arms.

And so it began.

So it truly began.

They spent the afternoon just walking and talking. They talked about growing up in Moscow and growing up in Los Angeles. They talked about movies they had seen. They talked about Paris. They talked about food. They talked about what it might be like to live in one of the houseboats tied up along the Seine.

Jerry Reed was falling in love, which was a thing that had never really happened to him before, but he didn’t really want to talk about that, because he didn’t know how, and in any case saw no need.

Instead he talked about space. He babbled on and on, and Sonya Gagarin let him talk, and smiled, and never called it “space babble,” as other women had, and she never ever told him it was boring her to tears, and she asked him the occasional technically naive but intelligent question as if to prove that she was sincere, and held his hand, and told him with her eyes that she really
was
entranced, that if she didn’t understand a lot of what he was talking about, she was willing to learn, for she understood entirely what it all meant to him.

And that, somehow, was the most magical thing of all.

Late that afternoon, they went back to the Ritz, opened the French windows of the hotel room wide, moved a table and two chairs halfway out them onto the balcony, and Jerry ordered more champagne to sip as they watched the golden Parisian sunset.

“It’s all like some kind of old Hollywood movie,” Sonya said dreamily. “Sipping champagne up here on our balcony overlooking the Seine, and this hotel room, good Lord, what it must cost . . . ”

Jerry clinked glasses, raised his in a toast. “To the European Space Agency!” he said. “To the people who are paying for it all!”

“They must really want you very badly,” Sonya said, and a thought like a shadow drifted across her mind, namely that there was something a bit peculiar for
ESA
to be spending
this
kind of money to recruit someone like Jerry, someone who by his own description was no senior engineer or scientist, someone not much older than herself.

Jerry shrugged. “It’s probably all a tax write-off anyway,” he said. “It’s not as if anyone were spending their
own
money!”

No doubt that was it. Sonya had encountered this strange capitalistic attitude before, if never on this lavish a scale. She wondered just how far it might be pushed. . . .

“I’ve got an idea,” she said. “I’ve got eight days’ vacation time left, and all you’ve seen of Europe is Paris, so why don’t we take a trip together, a kind of mini grand tour, yes? London, Baden-Baden, Vienna, Budapest perhaps, certainly a bit of the Greek islands,
Rome. . . . ” She shrugged, she laughed. “Let’s not even plan it, let’s just hop on trains and planes and get off where we feel like. . . . ”

Jerry’s eyes lit up. “Wow, that’s great!” he exclaimed. He frowned. “But also monstrously expensive, do you have that kind of money? I certainly . . . ”

He paused in mid-sentence, looked at Sonya. She clinked her champagne glass against his, grinned, nodded. “To the European Space Agency!” she said.

“Do you really think . . . ?”

Sonya shrugged. “The worst they can do is say no,” she pointed out. “Even in the Soviet Union it’s been a long time since anyone was shot for just trying. . . . ”

“Pas problem, I am sure, Jerry,” André Deutcher told him on the videotel when Jerry had nerved up enough courage to explain the situation and broach the outrageous idea. “I will call Nicola Brandusi right now. . . . ”

Twenty minutes later the videotel chimed. It was Brandusi. “What a wonderful romantic notion, Mr. Reed,” he said, his videotel image positively beaming. “I almost wish I was going with you, but of course that is the last thing you have in mind, eh! The best thing is a Gold Eurocard, it is good everywhere, and you can get cash out of automatic tellers, and they will just bill
ESA
. Of course this will take some time to arrange. . . . ”

“Uh, we only have eight days, Mr. Brandusi. . . . ”

“Nicola, Nicola, please, Jerry!” Brandusi said effusively. “Not to worry, not to worry, we will messenger it to your hotel tomorrow. Have un petit déjeuner, make love, have a nice lunch, and it’ll be there for you by fifteen hundred hours, in time for you to catch dinner in London or Madrid. And don’t worry about your room, it will be there when you get back. Arrivederci, Jerry, have a good trip, kiss the lady for me where it counts, eh!”

And sure enough, when they arrived back at the hotel from lunch the next day, the magic piece of plastic was there waiting, and in an elegant little goatskin case too.

“Well then, where should we have dinner tonight, Sonya?” Jerry said gaily, waving the card under her nose.

“It’s your Eurocard, Jerry, you choose.”

“Let’s go to London, then,” he said, “it’s the only place where I know anyone. . . . ”

“I thought you’d never been there.”

“I haven’t,” Jerry said, laughing. “But I met this English porn star, see . . . ”

Sonya had heard that the Savoy Hotel was the British equivalent of the Ritz, so they checked into a room there that was almost as big and even more expensive than the one they had left in Paris, and after a full British breakfast the next morning that left them both groaning, she took Jerry on the obligatory whirlwind tour of the standard sights—Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park Corner—all of which were in walking distance of the hotel.

They had dinner in an incredible Indian restaurant Sonya had heard about, which featured curries and tandooris of venison, quail, partridge, bear, rattlesnake, and even elephant, hippo, and lion, or so the menu claimed, and then they crawled through the pubs of Chelsea and Bayswater before reeling back to the Savoy.

The next day, Jerry quite surprised her by playing tour guide himself. He dragged her around to the famous high-tech toy stores on Tottenham Court Road, fed her lunch in a random pub, bought her an expensive ostrich-skin purse in Harrods, took her sailing on the Serpentine in Hyde Park, something he had seen in a movie, and to the London Zoo, which he had heard was almost as good as the one in San Diego.

Eurocard or not, Jerry insisted on fish and chips for dinner, because, he said, he wanted some real English food. Sonya felt like sinking through the floor when he asked the Savoy desk clerk to recommend the best fish and chips place in town.

But the desk clerk smiled and recommended a place in West Kensington called “Poisson avec Pommes Frites” which, he said, was certainly the best fish and chips restaurant in the world.

And so it was. There, in a salon done up like an elegant private club, waiters in full evening dress served them succulent nuggets of salmon, sturgeon, halibut, tuna, eel, and boned trout; bits of lobster and langoustine; whole clams and oysters and snails, enrobed in the most delicate tempura batters spiced with saffron and basil and cilantro and fried in sesame, walnut, and olive oils, served up with light-as-air fried slices of potato and yam and a whole trayful of exotic flavored vinegars, washed down with a truly noble Czech beer.

It was certainly the strangest day Sonya had ever spent in London, and in its way the most charming, for her unworldly American from California had somehow contrived to show her the city anew through his own innocent eyes.

That night, she showed her appreciation, and in the morning they were off via hydrofoil to Normandy, where they had moules and cider for lunch, took a
TGV
to Bordeaux and a local train to Bayonne, where they spent the afternoon at a bullfight, hopped a plane to
Madrid, and watched the sun go down from a sidewalk café over tapas and a bottle of Rioja, checked into a hotel, made love, had a seafood paella, crashed out about midnight, then got up about ten, took another
TGV
to Barcelona, where Sonya hired a taxi, showed Jerry some of the fantastic organiform buildings erected there by Gaudi, which Jerry said reminded him of nothing so much as certain crazy movie-star homes in Bel-Air, then caught a first-class luncheon flight on Air France to Nice.

They lazed away the afternoon sipping Americanos on the beach in front of their hotel and swimming in the Mediterranean under azure skies, made love under a beach blanket in the middle of a crowd, and then rented a huge old Rolls convertible, which Sonya drove that evening under the starry skies along the bas-corniche past the luxury homes of Cap Ferrat to Monaco, where Jerry managed against all odds to win almost enough at blackjack to pay for the lobster thermidor and Pouilly-Fuissé they had at a quayside restaurant, after which Jerry declared grandly that the true Angeleno learned as a teenager to drive from anywhere to anywhere drunk out of his mind, and against all odds proved it by somehow managing to drive the Rolls back to their Nice hotel.

They collapsed in each other’s arms and slept till nearly noon. They had lunch in town, then caught a flight to Rome, where they spent the day seeing the standard sights, gorged themselves on tournedos Rossini and pasta, caught a quick flight to Brindisi, which was truly ghastly, and slept that night on a ferry to the Greek isle of Corfu.

Kerkyra, the major town on Corfu, was a tourist nightmare that Jerry said reminded him of nothing so much as Tijuana, but it did have an airport, so they caught a flight to Athens in time for a lunch of moussaka and retsina in a taverna high up in the Plaka, after which they reeled rather drunkenly up the Acropolis to wander around the crumbling ruins.

Athens itself, below the monuments to its own great past, was a smoggy, noisy, smelly nightmare, and so Sonya decided that the best thing to do was catch a flight to Munich, have a fairly early dinner there, hop on a train to Baden-Baden, rent a cabin outside the town, and make love in front of a fireplace in the Black Forest, with the odor of pine surrounding them, and the gentle night breezes whooshing through the tree crowns.

Sonya sighed as she drifted slowly off to sleep afterward, in the cozy feather bed, with Jerry warm and toasty beside her, and the glowing embers of the fire the only light in the smoky cabin bedroom. If only this could go on forever, she thought. If only I didn’t have to be back to work in Brussels in three days. . . .

Somewhere in the distance an owl hooted lugubriously, like a far-off pleasure train already receding from her into the depths of the nostalgic past.

You sound like I feel, she told the mournful night bird inside her own head. And then she was forced to laugh silently at herself.

Poor Sonya! How unfair of the world to refuse to ice your cake with chocolate mousse forever and not continue to drop organically grown eggs in your fine German beer! You have found the love of your life, and you have been privileged to have a princess’s vacation all expenses paid, and now you are outraged at the thought that you must soon go back to work!

She snuggled closer to Jerry. Yes, this magic time must soon end, but not our time together, luv. We may soon lose our magic piece of plastic, but there’s no reason we have to lose each other, Brussels is not so far from Paris, we can be together most weekends, and surely you can make
ESA
give you the same vacation weeks as mine. . . .