Russian Spring (76 page)

He had to admit that, from her point of view, she was doing the right thing.

And the only way he could see to change it would be to tell her the truth.

But he couldn’t do that, he just couldn’t. He might be willing to give up everything to walk on water, including what little was left of his life, but when it came down to it, he realized that the one thing he couldn’t do was take away Sonya’s hope. He just didn’t have the ruthlessness or the cruelty to go that far.

And that left Franja.

Franja shared the dream. She had been up there herself. At least Franja would understand what he felt. Perhaps she could convince Sonya without having to tell her . . . without having to tell her . . .

He badly needed an ally. Perhaps just as badly, he needed someone to confide in. But that would mean telling Franja the full truth.

Could he do that?

Was there anything else he could do?

Jerry sighed. He got up off the couch, went to the breakfront, poured himself a big Cognac, downed it all in one long fiery gulp. There was nothing else for it. Sonya was at work, Franja was in the kitchen making lunch, if he was going to do it at all, he might as well get it over with.

He reeled up his cable snugly, grabbed the handle of the hibernautika, and walked into the kitchen, wheeling the damned thing along with him.

Franja stood by the wooden countertop, buttering slices of bread for sandwiches, the tomatoes, ham, cheese, and red onions already sliced and ready.

“It’ll be ready in a few minutes, Father,” she said without looking up. “Want to open some white wine?”

Numbly, Jerry opened the refrigerator, pulled out a half-full bottle of Bordeaux, pulled the cork with his fingers, fished two wineglasses out of the dishwasher, filled them, gulped down a glass, refilled it, and held out the other glass to Franja.

“Just put it in the dining room and I’ll be right in,” she said without looking at him.

“Drink it now, Franja,” Jerry said, shoving the glass at her.

“Father?” Franja said, looking up, finally, and eyeing him peculiarly.

“There’s . . . there’s something I’ve got to tell you, Franja . . .” Jerry stammered. “And . . . and it’s not going to be easy. . . for either of us.”

He handed Franja the glass. She shrugged, took a small sip. Jerry stared at her. She stared back. Neither of them spoke for a long moment.

“Well, Father,” Franja finally said. “For God’s sake, tell me!”

Jerry sighed. He took another gulp of wine, screwed up his courage, and did.

“I . . . I’ve got a good reason to ride the next Grand Tour Navette, Franja,” he began shakily. “I . . . I’ve got a good reason to get myself up there as soon as I can. . . . Your mother . . . she doesn’t . . . The fact is that I’m dying, Franja, I’ve got maybe a year or two, that’s all, and it’s not going to be pleasant. . . .”

“Why . . . why are you telling me this, Father?” Franja said in a strange cool voice.

“Because I don’t want to go through it, Franja! I want to trade a year or two of slow agony for a few bright shining hours! I want to die happy, is that so hard to understand? Wouldn’t you, Franja? Wouldn’t you?”

Franja stared at her father, not knowing what to say, not knowing what to do, but knowing how cold and hard she must seem to him now, standing there dry-eyed in the face of this awful revelation. She tried to bring tears to her eyes by an act of will, but failed utterly. For she had known all this too long, she had cried herself out with Mother when she had told her.

And Father had known all along after all! Of course he would, she realized in retrospect. She should have known that Jerry Reed would plunge into the data banks as soon as he was able. And Mother should have known too. He was that kind of man, he always had been.

And just as Mother was the kind of woman who would shield him from the truth, so was he the kind of man who would shield
her
.

And that, finally, was indeed enough to bring honest tears to her eyes. “I do believe I would,” she said softly. “But why tell me?”

“Because I need your help, Franja,” Father said. “I have no one else to turn to. I certainly can’t tell your mother. I’m telling
you
because you’ve got to help me find some way to convince her to do what we both know is right without telling her the whole truth and breaking her heart.”

Franja looked at her father through new eyes. There he stood, with an electrode fastened to the back of his head, wired to a device that was keeping him alive and slowly killing him at the same time, facing the end of his life with a bravery she doubted she could ever have summoned up.

Here he was, still, in some sense, the same overgrown little boy that he had always been, ready to pursue his vision to the very end with the same open heart, yet unwilling, even now, to break Mother’s to do it.

Perhaps this man has misjudged me in the past, she thought. Perhaps he has done me injustice, even cruelties. But he gave me his dream, did he not? And now, in his moment of need, who does he turn to?

How much more have
I
misjudged
him
?

And now, here
she
was, with the hardest decision of her life facing her. Should she do what she knew her mother would want her to do and hold her tongue? Or speak the truth and put an end at last to this beautiful but foolish dance of loving deceit?

She sighed. She reached out and took her father’s hand.

Oh yes, he had a Russian heart!

And so did she.

“Mother already knows,” she said.

Father stared at her without reacting for a long, long moment.
Then he put his glass down on the countertop and took her in his arms.

“Asshole that I am, I love you very much,” he whispered into her ear. “What a fool I’ve been, what a blind stupid fool.”

Franja burst into tears. “Moi aussi,” she said, burying her face in her father’s neck. “Moi aussi.”

No one greeted Sonya at the door when she returned home from work, and when she went into the living room, Jerry and Franja were sitting on the couch together, side by side, their thighs almost touching, closer than she had ever seen them sitting since Franja had left home, and with strangely identical solemn expressions on their faces.

The sight of the two of them sitting together like that, like a loving father and daughter at last, should have warmed her heart, but the hardness in their eyes, the determined set of their jaws, filled her instead with a foreshadowing frisson of dread, and she somehow knew before Franja opened her mouth.

“Father knows,” Franja said. “He knows everything.”

“You told him!” Sonya cried angrily. “Franja, how
could
you!”

“
I
told
her
,” Jerry said quietly.

“You . . . you told her?” Sonya stammered. “You . . . you knew all along?”

“Of course I knew,” Jerry said. “You really think I’m such a fool? You really thought I wouldn’t research the literature?”

“Why didn’t you tell me, then? Why did you let me . . . ?”

“Why didn’t
you
tell
me?”
he said softly, not at all in an accusatory tone.

“Because . . . because . . .” Sonya’s eyes filled with tears. And she could see that Jerry was on the brink of crying too.

“Exactly, Sonya,” he said. “You couldn’t tell me, and I couldn’t tell you. What a pair of fools!”

“
Loving
fools, Jerry, loving fools . . . ,” Sonya whispered.

“You’d better sit down, Mother,” Franja said, and she squirmed her way along the couch away from Jerry, leaving room for her to sit in between.

Sonya sat down on the couch between her husband and her daughter, feeling the warmth of their bodies beside her, the comfort of them, feeling more truly at home in her apartment—in
their
apartment—than she had in years and years. Now, only now . . .

“Now what?” she sighed.

“Now we face reality like a family of adults,” Franja said with quite undaughterly firmness.

“My lungs are going to fill up with fluid, and my arteries and veins are going to decay, and there’ll be heart arrhythmias, and little strokes, and—”

“Jerry! Please!”

“It’s the truth, Sonya. You can’t do anything to save me. Nobody can.”

“You can’t give up hope like this, Jerry!”

“I haven’t given up hope, Sonya,” he told her. “I’ve got all the hope in the world for something wonderful, something you
can
help to—”

“Oh no, Jerry, for God’s sake, not
that
now!” Sonya cried. “You can’t be serious!”

But one look at his face told her how serious he really was.

“I’m . . . dead serious,” he said. “It’s now or never. I ride the next Grand Tour Navette, or I die without ever having my moment, for nothing, as the buffoon in a stupid farce. Is that what you really want for me? Is it, Sonya?”

“Jerry . . .”

“Spaceville is full of people in worse shape than I am,” he went on relentlessly. “I’ve done my homework. Hell, I designed the
GTN
, remember? The Grand Tour Navette will take me all the way to the Moon and back and I’ll never even pull more than half a g.” He gave her a foolish little smile. “In fact, it’ll be healthier for me up out of the gravity well than it would be down here on Earth.”

“I . . . I’ve done some homework too, Jerry,” Sonya admitted. “The reentry strain . . . the cabin pressure differential . . . and you’d be under nearly three g’s on the trip up to orbit. It’d cut months off your life, a year maybe. . . .”

“So what?” Jerry said coldly. “I’ll have been there.”

“I won’t do it!” Sonya said. “I won’t let you just give up and die! In the months you’re talking about throwing away,
anything
could happen!”

“My God, Sonya, what do I have to do to convince you to help me?” Jerry said angrily. “Get down on my knees and beg?”

“Tell him, Franja!” Sonya cried. “Tell him how insane this is!”

“I can’t do that, Mother,” Franja said. “You’re wrong, and he’s right.”

“What?”

“He’s going to die, Mother. And nothing we can do is going to save him.”

“I just can’t accept that!” Sonya sobbed.

“You have to, Sonya! I have!”

“How can you sit there and . . . and . . . ?”

“Because I’ve still got a dream,” Jerry said. “I don’t want to spend
what’s left of my life doing nothing but sitting around and watching myself die. A few months of pain and agony for a chance to have what I’ve always wanted. Can’t you see that
not
making that tradeoff is what’s insane?”

“No, Jerry, I can’t, I just can’t. . . .”

“Because it’s not your dream, Mother, that’s it, isn’t it?” Franja said. “You’ve never understood it. You don’t know what it means.”

And she looked at Jerry as she spoke now, speaking to him, speaking for him, as Sonya had never heard her speak before.

“To feel the power of those engines fighting against gravity, against the bonds of the Earth, to feel the planet itself resisting your will . . . And then, suddenly, it’s over, and there’s silence, and you’re weightless, and you look out, and there’s the Earth, shining out there in the darkness, immense, and beautiful, and wonderfully alive. And the stars, more of them than you can count, and you know that there are planets out there around them, other living worlds, and on them, creatures like yourself, looking back across the light-years, across the centuries, and it all goes on forever, worlds and time without end . . .”

Franja sighed. She turned to face Sonya. “It’s like . . . it’s like nothing else there is, Mother. It’s . . . it’s everything there is, and you know your place in it. And you feel grand, and you feel tiny, and somehow . . . somehow you know what you’re for. People have died for much less, Mother. For much, much less. Let him have it. Let him go.”

There were tears in Jerry’s eyes now. He reached across Sonya’s lap and squeezed his daughter’s hand.

“Listen to me, Mother,” Franja said. “I’m my father’s daughter, and I
know
. I’ve been there.”

And Sonya almost saw it then, this vision that could never be hers, like what one experienced among true believers in the church of a religion whose faith you could not share.

She envied the two of them that vision. And loved them for it. And felt the bite of jealousy too. And the happiness of being part of a true family again. And the pain of standing a pace apart from its heart.

If only . . .

She raged at the injustice of it all. I am a Soviet bureaucrat, she thought. I am a good Marxist and a dialectical materialist. But just this once, I would like to believe in God. I would like to believe that you are out there listening to me, you miserable phallocratic bastard! I would like to believe that you are able to hear me telling you what a sadistic brute you are!

But no voice from the whirlwind answered back. There was only Jerry and Franja holding hands across her lap, regarding her silently with the same infinite vista in their eyes.

Sonya sighed. She reached out and took their hands. The touch of the two of them warmed her heart. She had never felt closer to them and yet never more far apart. It was the best moment of her life and the worst.

“I just don’t know,” she said. “What you’re asking is so hard. . . .”

“I know it is,” Jerry said softly. “Really I do. . . .”

“You’ve got to give me time . . .” Sonya said miserably.

“I’d like to,” Jerry said. “I’d like to give you anything you want. I’d like to give you all the time in the world.”

He shrugged. He smiled oh so bravely. “But I just don’t have that much time to give,” he said tenderly. “It’s just not in this hand of cards.”

VADIM KRONKOL TO ADDRESS UNITED NATIONS

Despite the strenuous efforts of the Soviet Union to prevent it, Vadim Kronkol, the new Ukrainian President, will be allowed to address the United Nations General Assembly next week, and is expected to use the opportunity to declare Ukrainian independence.

In 1945, when the U.N. was founded, the Soviet Union demanded 15 General Assembly seats, one for each of its constituent republics. The United States offered to accept this position providing it was given 48 General Assembly seats, one for each state. The eventual compromise gave the Soviet Union 3 seats, one each for the republics of Russia, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine.