Russian Spring (37 page)

And now this thing tonight with Bobby—

Sonya came out of the kitchen with a sour look on her face and
the big wooden serving tray in her hands bearing a dish of salmon steaks and roasted potatoes and a bowl of hollandaise sauce. She put it down on the table and dished out salmon and potatoes for the three of them, leaving Bobby’s plate empty.

Where the hell
was
he? It just wasn’t like Bobby not to show up for dinner like this. And I
told
him to stick close to home, what with all the anti-American—

“Oh, Mother, this fish is dry as dust!” Franja moaned.

“Well then put some of this hollandaise—”

The apartment door opened and then closed with a thump. And then Bobby came down the hallway and into the dining room.

“Bobby!” Sonya exclaimed.

Bobby stood there in his shirtsleeves. His pants were coated with a dried crust of what appeared to be shit, the left side of his hair was plastered to his head with what looked like more of the same, there was a smear of it on his forehead, and his shoes were splattered with something that looked very much like dried vomit.

“Where the hell were you, Bobby?” Jerry demanded. “What the hell happened to you?”

Bobby smiled at him stupidly. He fished something out of his back pants pocket and held it up like a protective talisman. “I . . . uh . . . went down to the American Embassy to get my passport,” he said. “I . . . uh . . . got caught in this demonstration. . . .”

“You were in the riot at the American Embassy!” Sonya cried, not knowing whether to be furious or relieved.

“What riot?” Jerry said.

“Haven’t you seen—”

“There was a peaceful demonstration at the American Embassy,” Franja broke in, “but the gringos turned on their neuronic disrupters and turned it into—”

“That’s a lie!” Bobby shouted. “They were charging the wall, they were throwing blood and shit and bottles and stones, and the Marines
had
to—”

“I saw it on the news!”

“I was
there
, and you weren’t!”

“And I’ll bet you really enjoyed it!”

“That’s enough, you two!” Sonya shouted. “Robert, you go take a shower at once! We’ll discuss this when you’re decent!”

“About a century from now!”

“That’ll be enough of that, Franja,” Sonya said angrily. “Be quiet and finish your dinner, or leave the room!”

It was a tense ten minutes in the dining room while Bobby showered. Franja sat there silently gobbling up her salmon and potatoes. Sonya picked impatiently at her food, not speaking, obviously saving it up for Bobby.

Jerry didn’t even bother with his food as he sat there dreading what was about to come.

Finally, Bobby returned to the dining room in a T-shirt, jeans, and his battered old Dodgers jacket, his hair wringing wet from the shower, bedraggled, but triumphant and defiant.

“You’ve got some explaining to do, Bob,” Jerry said quickly, before Sonya could open her mouth or Bobby even had a chance to sit down. “You were
told
to stick close to home.”

“But this was
important
, Dad,” Bobby said as he seated himself. “I
had
to go get my passport, I’m leaving for America next week, after all, and I—”

“That’s quite out of the question now!” Sonya snapped.

“What?”
Bobby shouted.

“The Russian mission to the U.N. was ransacked by a mob! They’ve put Battlestar America on yellow alert! You’ve got Senators screaming for the seizure of Bermuda and Cayenne and Martinique and Curaçao under the Monroe Doctrine! The President himself is talking about annexing Baja California! The worst elements of the American ruling class are using the anti-American reaction in Europe that they provoked themselves to justify a new round of naked imperialist aggression!”

“So what?” Jerry said. “What does all that political crap have to do with—”

“So what!” Sonya shouted. “The entire country has gone mad! America is about as stable as one of its Latin American puppets! We cannot send our son into such chaos! It would be like . . . like blithely sending him off to college in Madrid right before the Spanish Civil War!”

“Or Budapest just before Khrushchev sent in his tanks to crush the Hungarian freedom fighters?” Bobby snarled angrily. “Kabul just before the Russians invaded?”

“Bob!” Jerry exclaimed. “Can’t
you
at least leave politics out of it?”

Sonya stared across the table at her son, feeling the full brunt of his rage as he glowered back at her, and strangely enough, she felt a surge of love for him as he stared her down and swapped political insults like an adult and an intellectual equal.

“No, Jerry, Robert is right,” she said, still looking straight at Bobby.
“Politics
is
what this is all about. Yes, Bobby, the Soviet Union has done terrible things in the past, even as America is doing now. You’re quite right, letting you go to America now would be just like sending you to Budapest or Kabul in front of the Russian tanks.”

“That’s not what I meant, Mom, and you know it!”

“I know you won’t believe it, but I
am
doing this for your own good, Robert—”

“You lied to me!” Bobby shouted. “You never intended to let me go!”

“That’s not true, Bobby!”

“How can you call your own mother a liar?” Franja cried indignantly.

“No one’s talking to you, so shut your fucking face!” Bobby screamed at the top of his lungs, his face flushed red, his eyes bulging, veins standing out in his neck, as he bolted to his feet and slammed his fists down on the table.

“You’re all the same!” he shouted. “All you fucking Russian liars! You’ll do anything to get your own way! You’ll cheat and steal and spy and scheme and lie to your own children!”

“That’s enough, Bobby!” Sonya cried. “I’m still your mother, and I don’t have to listen to this imperialist filth!”

“Oh don’t you, Mom?” Bobby snarled at her. “Haven’t you been going around bragging how you and Red Star pulled off your big stock market swindle? Some Common Europeans! The Soviet Union is in Common Europe for a month, and you’re already screwing everyone! And you call
Americans
imperialists!”

“How dare you—”

“I’ve got my ticket and I’ve got my passport and I’m an American and I’m going to America and no fucking Russians are going to stop me!” Bobby howled in completely uncontrolled rage. And he stormed out of the dining room.

“So go to America and rot with the rest of the dirty gringos!” Franja shouted after him.

“That’s enough, Franja!” Jerry shouted. “Go to your room! Your mother and I have some private talking to do!”

And Franja left, leaving Sonya sitting there vibrating with adrenal backwash, alone with her husband, as he stared at her with a cold unreadable expression.

“The boy is right,” Jerry said evenly, forcing himself to stay calm. “We gave our word, Sonya. It’s a matter of honor.”

“Honor!”
Sonya snapped. “What about
duty?
What about parents’ duty to their children, to protect them from danger, and if necessary
from themselves? Would you really send your own son into danger over a
word?
”

“It depends on the word,” Jerry told her.

“Phallocratic rubbish!” Sonya declared angrily. “For
this
, you’d let your son march off into a hornet’s nest?”

Jerry thought of Bobby, standing there befouled and bedraggled, but holding up his American passport triumphantly. “If that’s what it takes to let him become his own man,” he said. “Better danger than giving up a dream.”

“Honestly, Jerry!”

And Jerry remembered another young man with another dream, long, long ago, a young man who had given up everything to follow it, and the girl who had stood by his side and given him the courage to do it.

“You didn’t always feel this way, Sonya,” he said softly. “Don’t you remember someone else who risked everything for love and a dream?”

Sonya’s eyes softened. “Yes, I do, Jerry,” she said, her hand creeping across the tabletop toward his. “You were very brave, and I do remember. But this is different. . . .”

Jerry was not quite ready to take her hand yet. “The dreams may be different,” he said, “because they’re our children’s, not ours, but the courage to follow them, that never changes. . . .”

“Jerry—”

“
I
had a dream people told me I could never have, and if I hadn’t chosen my dream over safety, I wouldn’t be here now begging you to let our son choose
his
.”

Sonya’s hand backpedaled across the table. “And if I don’t?” she said.

Jerry thought about it. He thought about twenty years of marriage. He thought about his own endless travails and frustrations. He thought about Rob Post, dead now, with all his dreams unfulfilled. And he thought about Bobby, standing there with his passport in his hand, covered with blood and shit and vomit, but undefeated still.

He sighed. He hardened his heart. Now too was a moment that called for courage, not for himself, but for his son.

“If you don’t, Sonya, I’m going to have to march him down to the American Embassy tomorrow and put him in their care. He’s got a right to American citizenship, and they’ll give it to him. And keep him in the Embassy until it’s time to board the plane.”

“You do this, and I’ll leave you, Jerry!” Sonya blurted.

“You make me have to, and I won’t care,” Jerry shot back without thinking.

“It’s blackmail.”

“Call it what you like.”

They stared at each other for a long hard moment.

Finally, Sonya sighed. “Over the summer, then,” she said. “But in the meantime, he applies to the Sorbonne. And comes home in the fall.”

“That’s going to be up to him, isn’t it?” Jerry said.

“He applies to the Sorbonne or he doesn’t leave with my permission,” Sonya said coldly.

“You drive a hard bargain.”

“So do you, Jerry, so do you.”

“I’ve learned in a hard school.”

“Moi aussi,” Sonya said. “Moi aussi.”

And she rose from the table and left him sitting there with the wreckage of dinner in the empty room.

NEW ANTI-AMERICAN VIOLENCE IN BAJA

A mob of at least a hundred Mexicans, apparently under the influence of alcohol and marijuana, invaded the Sunshine Plaza Shopping Mall in Libertyville on the southern outskirts of Tijuana today, harassing shoppers and inflicting considerable property damage before being forcibly ejected by American security guards.

“The Tijuana police refused to do a damn thing about it,” Elton Jarvis, Sunset Plaza’s manager, complained angrily. “If the Mexican authorities refuse to protect American property, maybe it’s time we Baja Californians got ourselves a government that will.”

—
Los Angeles Times

“What’s wrong with you, Sonya?” Ilya Pashikov said. “You’ve been dragging around the place like something out of Dostoyevski for days now. Why the long face and the staring into space?”

“I’m sorry, Ilya,” Sonya muttered. “I know I’m not getting much work done, give me a few days and I’ll snap out of it. . . .”

Ilya shrugged. “Why not?” he said with a warm little smile. “Take a whole week if you want to. After this last month, who is to say we haven’t earned it! And when you come back,
you
can cover for
me
, there’s a lady friend of mine in Antibes who’s been pining away for lack of attention. . . .”

“A vacation?” Sonya said in some surprise. “Just like that?”

When Ilya had called her into his office, she had expected a dressing-down, for she knew full well that she had not been working well since that awful confrontation with Jerry. She would drag herself into her
office, shut the door behind her, shuffle papers aimlessly, drink endless cups of coffee, avoid dealing with anything she could put off, initiate nothing, and spend most of her time brooding over what had happened.

It wasn’t so much that Jerry had gotten his way in the end, it was the
way
he had worked his will on her, and indeed, if she was honest about it, the way she had tried to work her will on him too.

You do this, and I’ll leave you, Jerry!

You make me have to, and I won’t care.

“Politics stops at the bedroom door,” someone’s old folk wisdom had it.

But whoever had said that had not peered inside
her
bedroom these past weeks! After almost twenty years of marriage, one could hardly expect the red-hot passion of courtship. But surely that did not mean that marriage was supposed to slide into this amatory Cold War?

They were polite to each other, too polite, perhaps, but she lacked the courage to reach out to him and break the ice for fear of rejection, and so, perhaps, did he. There was only one way to heal the wound that those terrible words had opened up in their marriage, but the wound itself seemed to keep them from touching, the lack of sexual contact seemed to feed on itself, the hurt feeding the celibacy, the celibacy feeding the hurt, the tension building and building into something too complex and convoluted for the simple straightforward resolution of a good uncomplicated fuck. . . .

“Cannes? Ibiza? Crete?”

“What?”

“Where will you go, Sonya?”

“Go?”

“On your vacation!” Ilya exclaimed. “From the look of you, you’re a thousand kilometers from here already!”

“I’m sorry, Ilya,” Sonya muttered. “I don’t think this is the time for me to take any holiday. . . .”

“Why not?” Ilya said. “You’re certainly not doing much good around here!”

There was no censure in his voice when he said it, only Ilya’s usual lighthearted bantering tone, and when she rose up out of her funk to take a really good look at him, she saw that beneath it there was a genuine warm concern. She felt a surge of emotion as she looked into his honest blue eyes, a longing she could not quite define.

“I just can’t go off and leave Jerry and the children right now, Ilya,” she said equivocally, wondering why she could not quite meet his gaze.

Ilya leaned across the desk toward her. “Trouble at home?” he said softly. “Is that what this is all about?”