Russian Spring (33 page)

She looked at Pashikov, who was eyeing her most peculiarly now. “Not that I really expect you to understand, Ilya. . . .”

“Why not? Am I some nikulturni peasant from the tundra?” Ilya said quite indignantly. “Do you suppose that just because I wear Italian suits I lack a Russian heart?”

“You’re not angry?”

Ilya shrugged, and in that moment his patrician airs seemed to become the genuine versions of themselves, and Sonya could see what all those other women must see in this man aside from the long blond hair and the cossack good looks.

“How could I be angry?” he said. “You did as your heart commanded, like an honest Russian wife, if you will forgive my Slavic phallocracy. I admire you all the more as a woman for it.”

Then the moment passed and he became her boss again. “This, however, will not be what appears on both of our kharakteristikas. Instead of heroes of socialist entrepreneurship, Sonya,” he said, “if the Moscow Mandarins were to be told
this
explanation of our failure, we would both be written off as hopeless bourgeois romantics, so we had just better let them grumble about our incompetence for a while and forget it.”

It wasn’t quite clear whether they
had
forgotten about it in Moscow, for while Ilya’s anger had evaporated instantly, and while he was still friendly enough, he had been acting a little strangely around her, had become a bit more formal and closemouthed, as if, perhaps, more bureaucratic shit had flowed downhill upon him than he gallantly cared to admit.

So Sonya hadn’t even thought to ask Ilya to escort her to the celebration. She just left the office after work, slowly ate a platter of coquillage at a nearby brasserie to kill some time, and then took a taxi to La Decorusse by herself.

When Red Star decided that Paris should have a trendy place dedicated to Soviet Chic for it to show the corporate flag in from time to time, it had chartered a corporation in which it held 40 percent of
the shares. The other 60 percent went to its French partners under the commission to create a hall that major corporations would be eager to rent for major corporate parties, thereby enhancing Red Star’s prestige when it commanded the place for itself. And, of course, to make the style Russian, to make that style à la mode, and to do it at a profit.

Voilà, La Decorusse, which had spawned the style that was sweeping through Europe, and which Red Star subsidiaries were marketing unmercifully with everything from furniture to clothes to fast-food decor to food packaging to the new Place Russe Métro station. These days everything was Deco Russe.

The vanguard of this Soviet marketing invasion had been built on the Seine-side site of the sprawling old Renault factory as the centerpiece of the Place Russe, a new traffic circle that was accreting a trendy residential quartier around it in the traditional fractal Parisian fashion. On land that another Red Star partnership with well-connected Frenchmen had previously acquired at quite a reasonable price.

This icon of the Deco Russe style was modeled on traditional Russian church architecture and retrospective science fiction. An onion dome had been blown up into the entire structure, but it had been cunningly formed into a compromise between an Orthodox cupola and Flash Gordon’s antique rocketship. Laser panels sent spirals of dopplering light up and around it, so that it looked like a combination of a church dome, some kind of Islamic flying saucer, and a rocketship about to screw itself out of the gravity well like a baroque Slavic phallus. Subtle it was not.

The inside of the dome was painted like a traditional outside, except that the brilliant spirals of colors rotated upward into interpenetrating double helices that spangled the ceiling with oddly curved diamonds of scores of different hues formed by the interference pattern.

The bandstand was a Lucite bubble suspended from the ceiling by a mirrored tube and speed-streaked with chrome eagle’s wings like a cartoon satellite, and in it a quartet in rakish asymmetrically cut black tuxedos played subdued instrumental versions of transmogrified Russian folk songs on synthesizers and electronic balalaikas.

Buffets and bars had been set out around the periphery of the circular hall, with random scatterings of café tables inboard of them, leaving a large central area for dancing, which, though the place was crowded already, was being largely ignored.

The walls of the hall were not quite there. Holopanoramas circled the room, opening it out into a kind of generalized Soviet landscape, where bustling Tverskaya Street in the winter snow merged into a sunny Black Sea summer into spring sunset on the tundra into Tashkent sunrise into late afternoon on the Nevski Prospekt.

High above the floor and roughly on a level with the orbiting bandstand, a hodgepodge of walkways and little platforms were cantilevered out from a circumferential balcony; clear plastic, shining chrome, burnished steel, with railings and ramps of stylized space construction girders, giving the feeling of some kind of conceptual Cosmograd hanging overhead, with those who could take the vertigo perched on high and able to conceive of themselves as cosmonauts.

Nothing exceeds like excess, as somebody’s old folk saying has it, Sonya thought as she wandered aimlessly around the party, sipping pepper vodka, nibbling at caviar canapés and cracked crab, drifting in and out of idle conversations, and counting the house.

Just about everyone from Red Star’s Paris office above the level of secretary and janitor was there, including Ilya Pashikov, who was chatting up a ravishing young redhead, and whose sidelong glance and body language gave Sonya to understand that he wished the conversation to remain private and become as intimate as possible.

There were a lot of Embassy people as well, to judge from the presence of Ambassador Tagourski and his wife, who never attended such functions without an enormous entourage. There was a scattering of Red Army colonels and generals. There were a lot of people who might have been anything at all—security people,
KGB
, Tass, industrial representatives, Space Ministry people. Any Russian in Paris who was anyone seemed to be at the party.

And not much of anyone else, it would appear, for everyone seemed to be speaking Russian, and there was a certain Russian mood to the party that would not have persisted at an international reception, a looseness in the atmosphere, a loudness of voice and expansiveness of gesture, an easy disregard for personal body-space, a Slavic earthiness and exuberance bursting through the bonds of the formal clothing.

We are good Eurorussians all, Sonya thought, but tonight a bit more Russian than Euro. She found herself approving of the policy that had made this a basically Russian celebration. For while this was indeed a great day for all of the new Greater Common Europe, it was a day of special sweetness to a Russian.

“One Europe from the Atlantic to Vladivostok,” if still a geographically confused slogan, was no longer a dream but a reality. The Soviet Union was now a member of the European family of nations, not as an economic charity case, but as the major economic, military, and technological power, first among equals.

And for the people here, for the Eurorussians of Paris, who had spent their careers outside Mother Russia helping to bring this reality about, it was a special kind of communal triumph.

We will not be any less the good Europeans for allowing ourselves
to celebrate this one very special night together by ourselves as Russians, Sonya decided.

And so she wandered around the party, sipping vodka and not counting the glasses, chatting idly in Russian with people from other departments, with an office manager from Tass, with an economic officer from the Embassy, with a military attaché, with people from secretarial pools, with everyone in general and no one in particular, letting the traditional Russian sacrament melt her into the warm and exuberant communal glow.

And then she saw him.

Or thought she saw him.

Could it really be?

He was sitting at a little café table with a fellow who had the air and formal dress of a diplomat, and he looked a bit the diplomat himself in his black suit and white shirt. His hair was more gray than black now, and there were lines in his face, of course, but the eyes were the same, and the curve of the nose, and the ironic line of the mouth.

It was. It was Yuli. Yuli Markovsky. Here in Paris. After twenty years.

Sonya stood there on the spot, transfixed. Yuli hadn’t noticed her yet. What should she do? How could she
not
speak to her old lover, the man she had been more or less engaged to, the road not taken? But on the other hand, it had all ended so badly that last drunken night in Moscow. . . .

Sonya edged closer to the table, hoping that Yuli would see her and take matters into his own hands, but he was deep in conversation with his colleague and didn’t notice her. She went over to the nearest bar, got herself a fresh glass of vodka, and drank half of it down for courage.

When she returned, Yuli was alone.

Sonya shrugged. There was nothing else for it. She took another sip of vodka and approached his table.

“Yuli . . . ? Yuli Markovsky?”

Yuli looked up at her somewhat blearily with reddened eyes. He was obviously somewhat drunk. But tonight, by now, who wasn’t?

“Sonya . . . ?” he said.

“May I?” Sonya said, pulling up a chair before he had nodded.

They sat there for a long moment just staring at each other awkwardly.

“You are still working for Red Star?” Yuli finally said.

Sonya nodded. “Assistant director of the economic strategy department here in Paris. And you?”

Yuli laughed strangely, and the ghost of an old familiar smile played
across his mouth. “Well, as you may have heard, they have not made me Foreign Minister yet,” he said. “But I am still in the foreign service, a middle-rank position in the Moscow bureaucracy, admittedly, but I still have my hopes. . . .” He frowned and sipped at his own half-empty glass. “Not under the present political conditions, of course,” he muttered rather bitterly.

“Married . . . ?” Sonya asked, not knowing what else to say. This was all so incredibly formal and awkward.

Yuli nodded. “Three children. You?”

“Two,” Sonya said, not caring to bring up the matter of her American husband.

“So, Sonya?” Yuli said.

“So, Yuli?”

“Have you gotten what you wanted out of life? Are you happy?”

“Good marriage, good children, a good life here in Paris,” Sonya told him. “Perhaps my career might be advancing more rapidly. . . .” She shrugged. “And you?”

Yuli laughed again, but it did not seem like a particularly happy laugh. “La même chose, as they say in France,” he said.

“And what are you doing in Paris?”

“Ministry business,” Yuli said, in a tone of voice that made it clear he was not about to elaborate.

There was something truly horrible about this conversation that had Sonya wishing she had never noticed Yuli. Having once seen him, there had been no way she wasn’t going to talk to him, but having begun talking to him, she found that she really had nothing of consequence to say, and neither, from the looks of it, did he. Their time together had been twenty years ago, it had not ended well, and they hadn’t had any contact with each other since.

They were two other people, two strangers, attempting to make idle talk under extremely awkward circumstances, and Sonya found herself searching for a graceful exit line, when the music suddenly stopped.

Heads turned upward toward the bandstand as Ambassador Tagourski, of all people, looking a bit green around the edges with vertigo, emerged from the access tube and into the bubble, where he spoke with one of the musicians, who said something back to him, as conversations died into a pregnant silence.

“I have a rather unpleasant announcement to make, though I suppose the news is not entirely unexpected,” the Ambassador’s amplified voice said. “The President of the United States has signed a bill suspending interest payments on all government paper held by the governments of Greater Common Europe or private European citizens or corporations. These external debts will be converted into non-interest-bearing
bonds redeemable only in blocked funds which may only be used to purchase manufactured goods and agricultural commodities within the United States. . . .”

Murmurs of confusion swept around the hall.

“For those of us unversed in these technicalities,” Tagourski said, “what it means in plain Russian is that the Americans are abrogating their external debt, or at least the part owed in Common Europe, which amounts to something on the order of fifteen trillion American dollars.”

“They’ve done it!” Sonya exclaimed as the place broke up into tumult. “They’ve actually gone and done it!”

“You expected otherwise?” Yuli Markovsky said cynically. “Believe me, this is only the beginning. Their next move is going to be the one that really hurts.”

“Their next move?”

“Of course,” Yuli said, “isn’t it obvious? This is merely their vengeance on Western Europe, almost none of the loans they’ve just turned into toilet paper are in any way held by the Soviet Union. But when the expropriations begin—”

“Expropriations!”

“What a wonderful excuse for them!” Yuli said almost as if Sonya wasn’t there. He took a sip of vodka and launched into the sort of semi-drunken declamation that she now found herself remembering all too well.

“No one quite knows just how much American real estate, stock, oil fields, coal mines, manufacturing facilities, and the rest is owned by European governments, individuals, corporations, and consortiums, but the Foreign Ministry’s best estimate is that it is close to 30 percent of their national wealth, after all these decades of investment. What a boost for their moribund economy when they seize it all and sell it off to their own capitalists! Even at the discount prices the government will probably let it go for, they will net almost enough to pay off the Japanese component of their external debt in the bargain! One must admire their ruthlessness!”

“But that’s outright theft!” Sonya exclaimed.