Russian Spring (63 page)

Ligatski favored her with a wintry smile. “Let it not be said that I lack a romantic Russian heart,” he told her. “You are authorized to discuss as much or as little of this conversation as you wish with your husband.” He shrugged. “If he is a reasonable man, he must agree to accept the inevitable. If not, well, what will you have lost?”

“You’re saying that all that is required is a legal divorce and separate domiciles?” Sonya said, grasping at straws. “We can still see each other? We can still spend time together in each other’s apartments?”

“Why of course, Comrade Reed, we are not heartless monsters, we are not made of stone, we want to make this as easy for you as is consistent with the needs of the Party,” Ligatski oozed ingenuously. “Think it over. Talk it over with your husband. I am sure you will see reason. Take your time. You have till next Tuesday at 3:00 to give me your answer.”

STATUS OF FORCES LEGISLATION STILL
BLOCKED IN STRASBOURG

Backstage negotiations have once more failed to produce a compromise to break the deadlock blocking the Status of Forces legislation introduced by Germany and backed by most of the smaller member states. France, Britain, and the Soviet Union still refuse to merge their armed forces under a command structure directly responsible to the Common European Parliament.

The Russians cite internal security needs, the British and the French raise the bogeyman of American adventurism, but in reality it seems more a matter of preserving obsolete tatters of so-called national sovereignty, an outmoded concept that dies hard in military circles.

The British
have
offered to place their nuclear forces under a Common European command, but it seems to be merely an empty gesture aimed at currying favor with the nonnuclear members, for they know full well that neither the French nor the Russians are having any of it.

—
Die Welt

Sonya was sitting on the couch in the living room with a bottle of vodka on the coffee table before her and a large half-full tumbler of it in her hand when Jerry returned home from work. She was not disheveled and she didn’t really seem drunk, but the way she looked at him was enough to tell him that the worst, whatever that might mean under these circumstances, had indeed happened.

“Well . . . ?” he said.

Sonya looked away from him, down into the depths of her glass. “Well, they lifted my Party card. . . ,” she muttered. “And that’s the
good
news. . . .”

“Why?” Jerry said, sitting down on the edge of the couch beside her.

Sonya gulped down a slug of vodka. “That’s the
bad
news,” she said. “They lifted my Party card so they could blackmail me into doing what they want me to do in order to get it back.”

“Which is . . . ?”

Sonya sighed. She took another drink of vodka. She wouldn’t meet his gaze. A shudder wracked her body. “I just don’t know how to tell you this, Jerry,” she said. “But I must. . . I must. . .”

She got up, went to the sideboard, got out a wineglass, sat back down on the couch, filled the glass to the brim with vodka, and handed it to him. “Better have this first,” she said. Now she did look directly at him, and he could see that her eyes were filling up with tears.

“Jesus, Sonya, what is it?” Jerry demanded.

“The worst thing in the world,” Sonya said.

“Will you stop playing games?” he snapped. “Whatever it is, you’re making it ten times worse.”

“Have a drink first, Jerry,” Sonya pleaded.
“Please. . . .”

“You’re really serious, aren’t you?” Jerry said.

Sonya just nodded. And Jerry could feel a cold pressure on the back of his neck, the shock wave of whatever it was that he had dreaded, about to fall upon him with ballistic inevitability and shatter the fragile stability of even the poor sad thing that his life had become.

He lifted his glass to his lips and took a long harsh gulp of warm acrid vodka. It seared his throat on the way down and exploded in his stomach with a blast of bitter bile.

When Sonya had left the Soviet Embassy, it had all seemed horribly simple. In the cold clear light of bureaucratic logic, she could even rationalize what she knew she had to do. Ligatski had left her no choice. She had to divorce Jerry to save Franja and Ilya and Jerry himself, aside from anything they might do to her; the moral responsibility for this despicable necessity therefore lay with the Party, with the Bears, with Ligatski, with Donets, not herself.

Besides which, their marriage
had
long since become a hollow shell. If she sacrificed Franja and Ilya and herself and what was left of Jerry’s career to save it, what, after all, would be preserved but an empty formality?

But then, sitting alone in the living room, in the apartment where they had spent twenty years of their lives, sipping at warm vodka, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting, the memories of all those years came flooding back, and all that cold logic had been quite dissolved away.

How could she
really
do such a thing? How could she let
the Party
make such a decision for her? In what way could she delude herself that she was something better than Ligatski if she did?

“Well, Sonya, spit it out already, will you?” Jerry said.

She sighed. She bolted down an enormous gulp of putrid raw warm vodka. He was right. There was nothing else for her but to puke up the whole vile story.

“So you can keep your goddamn
Party card!
” Jerry screamed. “So some fucking Commie bastard general doesn’t get
embarrassed!
” He bolted down the rest of his vodka and threw the glass across the room, where it bounced off the wall and fell to the carpet without shattering. “Cocksucking motherfucking son of a bitch!”

Sonya sat there on the couch beside him, her head hanging limp between her hunched shoulders. “I had to tell you, didn’t I?” she muttered miserably. “Oh, Jerry, Jerry, what are we going to do?”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing! he thought. Though on another level, of course, it was easy enough to believe that the Russian bastards who had frozen him out of his own project were ruthless and unprincipled enough to pull something like
this
if it served their vile purposes.

But that Sonya hadn’t simply told them to take it and stick it . . .

“What do you mean, what are we going to do?” Jerry shouted at her. “You’re not telling me that you’d really divorce me over a fucking piece of paper! You can’t really be seriously considering going along with this shit!”

Sonya still wouldn’t look at him. “I know this is difficult for you, Jerry,” she stammered, “but you’ve—”

“Difficult!”

“—got to calm down and really think.”

“I am really thinking!” Jerry snapped. “I’m really thinking of going over to the Russian Embassy and beating the living shit out of Ivan Ligatski!”

Now Sonya raised her head slowly and did look at him. Her eyes were red and teary, but the cold expression on her face chilled him to the marrow. “You’ve got to stop reacting and start thinking,” she said in a grim mechanical voice. “We’ve got to consider the options.”

“Options!” Jerry sneered. But all the force had gone out of his voice. An enervating coldness seemed to be radiating from the pit of his stomach, along his limbs, up his neck to his brain. Dust motes seemed to sparkle in the lamplight. Everything seemed to be happening at a distance. A sour backwash of vodka seared the back of his throat.

“This isn’t about my Party card,” Sonya said. “This is about you and me and Franja. They’re not bluffing, Jerry, they have no reason to bluff. They’ll throw Franja out of pilots’ school. They’ll fire me for cause and see to it that the only place I can ever work again will be on the other side of the Urals.”

She forced a bitter false laugh. “The way they’ve set it up, if I
don’t
divorce you, we won’t have anything left but our marriage license. They’ll yank me back to the Soviet Union and we’ll never see each other again.”

“Fuck ’em!” Jerry stammered. “The mortgage here is just about paid off. The kids are grown. I can support us on my
ESA
salary. We can make it. . . .”

“Haven’t you been listening? If I don’t divorce you, you won’t
have
a job at
ESA
, they’ll accuse you of being an American spy and force
ESA
to fire you,
deport
you, maybe. . . .”

“They can’t get away with that!” Jerry cried. “Emile Lourade is still my friend, he’ll protect me—”

“Like he’s protected you from Boris Velnikov all along?” Sonya snapped. “Face it, Jerry, you’re still legally an American citizen. You’ve got an office full of plans for the whole
GTN
project—”

“
My
plans, not theirs!”

“How could you prove it? They’ll break in and film everything, copy everything you have on disc. They’ve probably done it already. And they don’t have to prove anything, just provide
ESA
with a fig leaf. It’s politics, Jerry. The Soviet Union provides 40 percent of the financing for the Grand Tour Navette project, remember? Even if Lourade tried to protect you, which he wouldn’t, he’d be replaced by someone who would see things their way. No one’s going to risk offending the Soviet government just to protect you.”

“Jesus . . . ,” Jerry moaned.

“Besides, this isn’t just about us,” Sonya said. “What about Franja? Three years at Gagarin slaving away for nothing. A year on some miserable Cosmograd. And now she’s finally gotten a chance to make some kind of life for herself. And if we defy them, they’ll take it all away.”

“You’ve really got this all figured out, haven’t you?” Jerry said bitterly.

Sonya turned away from him, slumped forward, hung her head. “
They’ve
got it all figured out,” she said softly. “I’ve had hours to sit here and try to think of a way out. And I can’t find one.”

She raised her head slowly and looked directly into his eyes. “Can you, Jerry?” she said pleadingly. “If you can, please tell me! I don’t want to do this, really I don’t!”

“But you will, won’t you?” Jerry snapped.

“I leave it up to you, Jerry,” Sonya said. “You decide. I’ll do whatever you say.”

“Bullshit!” Jerry cried. “You’ve already decided. You’re just trying to fob it off on me!”

“No, I really mean it. Tell me what to do.”

Jerry glared at her.

He thought about how their marriage had begun, how the goddamn Russians had wanted her to marry him in the first place to insure that he would take the
ESA
job, to get their hands on the American sat-sled technology; what bitter but perfect irony that they were now ending what their own machinations had begun. He thought about that piece of shit Boris Velnikov who had slowly but surely broken his dream just as the same breed of shit in the Pentagon had destroyed Rob Post all those years ago. He thought about the son he had raised in exile whom he might never see again. He thought about his Russian
daughter, the daughter who had shared his dream, who had been forced to betray him to the fucking Russians to pursue it.

And he tried to think of a way out. He tried, and he tried, and he tried, and he came up empty. And the harder he tried, the more furious he became. At Ligatski. At the Party. At the Soviet Union. At Sonya. And in a way that would not bear direct examination, at himself.

“Well, Jerry?”

Jerry threw up his hands. He sighed. “You tell me, Sonya,” he finally said. “You tell me. . . .”

Sonya looked down again. “Look at it this way,” she muttered in a small voice. “It doesn’t have to be anything more than a legal formality. All that’s really required of us is a divorce and separate domiciles. We can still see each other. We’ll keep our jobs. Franja can go to pilots’ school. Marshal Donets won’t be embarrassed. Sooner or later the whole thing will blow away and the Party will lose interest, and then we can live together again as man and wife in all but name. . . .”

Man and wife in all but name!
That inversion of the lie they were already living finally tore it. That was finally a level of self-deception that what was left of his manhood would no longer let Jerry maintain. That was
really
rubbing his face in it!

“Like we’ve been doing ever since you met Ilya Pashikov?” Jerry shouted. “And in the meantime, you can fuck him whenever you like! How convenient for you, Sonya!”

Sonya stared at him wide-eyed, and it all came pouring out. “You really think I’m a complete imbecile? You really think I don’t know you’ve been screwing the Golden Boy ever since . . . ever since you spent all those long nights with him working on the great stock market scam? Oh yes, Sonya, I’ve known all along! And you’ve known that I’ve known, and I’ve known that you’ve known that I’ve known, and the plain truth is that neither of us had the guts to admit it!” Tears burned Jerry’s eyes. A bubble of nausea exploded in his guts. Red rage seethed behind his eyeballs. His hands balled into fists.

“What’s the point, anyway, Sonya?” he shouted. “We’re man and wife
only
in name! What’s the point in throwing everything else away over a
legal formality
like that? Go ahead, kiss the Party’s hairy Red asshole! Get your goddamn divorce!”

And he found that there was a part of him that welcomed this final release of the endless awful tension, this bursting of the angry boil, this outpouring of poisonous pus. “I’ll make it easy for you,” he said in a colder, harder voice. “
I’ll
file! I’ve got plenty of grounds, now don’t I?”

And in those words, he knew, was the real end of their marriage, the true divorce. And at least he had found the courage to do it himself.

Senator Carson: “In a way, this Wolfowitz has a point, I mean besides the one on the top of his head.”

Billy Allen: “How so, Senator?”

Senator Carson: “Well, he’s right about one thing, Billy—a big part of our economic problems stems from the fact that our exports are being frozen out of the biggest and richest market in the world.”

Billy Allen: “
You’re
not suggesting that we join Common Europe too?”