Russian Spring (48 page)

I do hope you are enjoying yourself in Gringoland, little brother. I suppose you’re not very interested in what your vile little blackmail scheme has done to your own parents, but I’m going to tell you anyway.

Father went out and wired you your tuition money without even telling Mother, did you know that? I only wish you had been there when he finally told her at dinner, it would have been only what you deserve. They screamed and yelled at each other for over an hour. It was horrible.

They called each other all kinds of names, and when Mother finally ended up calling Father a fascist gringo unilateralist, Father actually accused her of having an affair with Ilya Pashikov.
And the so-called conversation ended with Mother shouting “Just maybe I will!”

Mother ended up sleeping on the couch, and when I left they were barely speaking to each other.

When you told Father to sign my admission papers to Gagarin, I made the mistake of thinking you might have some human decency, after all. Stupid me! You’re no different from the rest of them, Bobby Le Gringo. You’ve wrecked our parents’ marriage for your own selfish purposes just as Washington is intent on wrecking international peace and prosperity in the service of American greed and envy.

But then, you’re actually
proud
to call yourself an American, now aren’t you?

Bobby stormed out of the house in a tearful rage and jogged all the way to Telegraph Avenue. He knew just what he was looking for. Half the stationery stores on Telegraph Avenue were selling the hateful thing, and it was just the perfect reply for sister Franja.

He bought one of the postcards, addressed it to her with no message on it, and mailed it before he had time to think about it, wondering maliciously what the Soviet postmen would make of it.

On the postcard was a hideous bear wearing a big sombrero with a hammer and sickle on it in case anyone didn’t get the message. It was bent over at the knees with a piteous expression on its face and its ass in the air.

Uncle Sam was buggering it with a laser-beam phallus.

Franja never answered back.

Eight days before classes started at
UC
Berkeley, there was a coup in Mexico City. Two days after that, the blatantly
CIA
-backed puppet regime ceded Baja California to the United States in return for cancellation of the Mexican debt. The next day, elements of the Mexican Army seized the capital and executed the traitors.

The day after that, an American aircraft carrier task force sailed into Vera Cruz harbor, Navy planes strafed the city, and Marines went ashore. Another carrier task force landed amphibious forces at Rosarita Beach, and two armored divisions crossed the border and occupied Tijuana. Yet a third carrier task force blockaded the Pacific coast of mainland Mexico.

The Gringos celebrated with enormous beer-busts all that weekend. There was no party at Little Moscow that Saturday. Everyone sat in the living room watching TV coverage from the war zones.

The Marines were wiping up the last resistance in Vera Cruz. The amphibious forces landed at Rosarita Beach had already linked up with elements of the ground forces that had taken Tijuana. The President went on the air and announced that the United States had no territorial ambitions in mainland Mexico. The President of the Soviet Union denounced American imperialism but promised nothing. The Common European Parliament passed a meaningless resolution of condemnation. The Mexican chief of staff had apparently ordered his army to disperse into battalion-sized units and begin guerrilla warfare.

It was all over but the shouting, which was still going on all over town.

“And in Berkeley, California,
this
 . . . ,” the announcer said.

“Hey, that’s Telegraph Avenue!” Bobby exclaimed.

And so it was, the camera apparently mounted on a truck moving down the center of Telegraph, about two hours ago, by the look of the lighting, dollying slowly past sidewalks jammed with drunken jingo louts, waving beer cans, mugging at the camera, holding giant burning sombreros on the ends of poles, sticking up American flag posters on the windows of closed shops and restaurants, singing “God Bless America” in beered-out unison.

“Doesn’t it make you proud to be an American?” Claude muttered bitterly.

“A peaceful victory demonstration . . .”

“By every drunken asshole in town!” Karl shouted at the screen.

“. . . was disrupted by a small group of agitators . . .”

“Oh shit,” Nat Wolfowitz moaned, as the camera suddenly zoomed down Telegraph Avenue into a tight shot on a small group of demonstrators, no more than two dozen of them, and Reds by the look of their clothing. They were carrying a black wooden coffin, and they were marching behind a big American flag hung upside down from a clothesline strung between two poles.

“. . . believed to be members of an extremist Marxist group known as the American Red Army . . .”

“Bullshit!” Marla Washington shouted. “There’s no such thing!”

“Tell me about it. . . .” Wolfowitz grunted.

The demonstrators marched slowly up the street beneath a hail of beer cans and paper cups. Some jerk in a white T-shirt and running shorts ran up to the front rank and spat in a girl’s face. Then it all started to happen at once. Mobs of Gringos rushed the demonstration from both sides and the front. Fistfights broke out. Someone grabbed one of the poles holding the flag. Someone grabbed the other pole.

The camera reverse-zoomed, then the tape jump-cut to another angle. The jingos had the flag. A huge mob of them paraded down the sidewalk behind it, pumping their fists in the air and screaming.

“. . . forcing patriotic Americans to rescue Old Glory from desecration.”

“Those poor stupid brave bastards . . . ,” Nat Wolfowitz said.

“And in New York, Lance Dickson pitched a no-hitter for the New York Yankees against the Boston Red Sox, pulling them to within a game and a half of first place—”

“I think we can do without the fucking ball scores,” Jack Genovese said, and turned off the videowall.

There was a long moment of silence. People just sat there staring at each other, saying nothing.

“Well, Bobby,” Marla Washington said grimly, “you still want to go to college in good old Berkeley?”

“Yeah, maybe you oughta go back to Paris while you can.”

“
You’re
not stuck here in Gringo Jingo Land. . . .”

“Not yet, anyway. . . .”

“What about it, Bobby, you sure you wouldn’t rather go home and be a Frenchman?”

“And take us with you?”

Bobby realized much to his surprise, and no little discomfort, that all eyes were now on him. Even Nat Wolfowitz was staring at him with the strangest expression on his face.

“What about it, kid?” Wolfowitz said. “You gonna fold this hand and go home to someplace sane like a smart player? Or stay here in the game like a sucker?”

Bobby realized that he had to say something.
What are you now, Bobby Reed?
they all seemed to be asking him.
You’re the only one here who gets to choose. You still want to be an American?

Bobby thought about what he had just seen. He thought about those agonizing phone calls with his parents, the last call from Dad in particular. He thought about Franja’s letter, and the postcard he had sent in reply. He thought about his golden days with his new friends here in Berkeley. And in his mind’s eye, he saw another mob, and the American Embassy smeared with blood and shit.

“So call me a sucker, Nat, ’cause I’m staying,” he said. “I only wish I had been out there with them, marching behind that flag.”

“Out there getting the crap beat out of you on television?” Marla said.

“Somebody had to do it,” Bobby told her. “The goddamn jingos may have smeared blood and shit all over
our
flag, but when those people hung it upside down and marched up Telegraph behind it, they washed it clean, they made it something to be proud of again.
They showed the world that there are still some
real
Americans.”

“Now is the time for futile gestures?” Wolfowitz said sarcastically. But his eyes told quite another story.

“Hey, Nat,” Bobby said, staring straight into them, “so it’s a lousy hand we’ve been dealt. But these are the cards, and this is the only game in town, so we gotta play ’em.”

Q: How many Russians does it take to shave the hair off a wild Bear?

A: One hundred thousand and three. Two to hold him down, one to wield the razor, and 100,000 to elect the result to the Supreme Soviet.

—
Krokodil

HERO OF SOCIALIST PARKING

When Moscow police towed off Ivan Leonidovich Zhukovsky’s brand-new Mercedes for triple-parking on Tverskaya Street, Ivan Leonidovich decided not to take things lying down. Instead, he stole a welding laser from his place of employment, broke into the police garage at 3:00
A.M.
, fused the transmissions of seventeen city tow trucks, turned himself in to the authorities after boasting of his exploits in a long drunken phone call to this newspaper, and demanded his right to a trial by jury under Soviet law.

“Let’s see if the bastards can find a panel of patriots who will convict me!” he declared. “I’m guilty of nothing but what every red-blooded Russian motorist wishes he had the courage to do himself!”

—
Mad Moscow

XVI

For better and for worse, life in the Soviet Union was not quite what Franja Yurievna Gagarin Reed had anticipated.

The better of it was that, with the Soviet Union now economically integrated into Common Europe, Moscow was already quite another city from what she remembered from her girlhood visits.

The bustle was still there, people still casually elbowed you aside in the Metro and the streets, there was still that feeling that this was the center of the world and everyone knew it, people still sold everything
and anything on the sidewalks, but Moscow was evolving almost overnight into a truly European city; you could watch it happening, as all the spring flowers sprung up in neon profusion through the melting snow.

With all economic barriers lifted, the biggest new consumer market in the history of the world had suddenly opened up in the form of three hundred million Soviet citizens who were being offered easy credit for the first time in their lives. Consumer goods of every conceivable description were pouring into the Soviet Union as Common European companies fought for a piece of the action. To each according to his credit limit at 15 percent per annum, from each in small monthly payments.

Billions of
ECU
were lavished on advertising campaigns to sell everything under the sun, utterly transforming the Moscow cityscape with billboards and neon signs and videowalls and garish storefront displays. Every bus was festooned inside and out with advertising posters, cabs sold ad space, trees, walls, lampposts, were plastered with advertising stick-ups. A huge videowall had even been erected on the façade of the
GUM
facing poor Lenin’s tomb across Red Square, and Tverskaya Street had been turned into a kind of scaled-down Champs-Élysées, with neon signs, instant sidewalk cafés, animated videowalls, lavish display windows, sleazy souvenir shops, fast-food restaurants, pickpockets, and gawking tourists from Japan and Central Asia.

The traffic jams were horrendous, and streets, alleys, and courtyard parking lots were jammed with parked cars, legal and otherwise, as every Muscovite’s unfulfilled dream of a car or a moto was suddenly and instantly granted with no money down and easy monthly payments. The militia traffic wardens were to be seen everywhere, waving their white batons, mostly futilely, for the New Breed of Soviet motorist for the most part heeded not the old signal to pull over and meekly accept a ticket from a mere pedestrian official and had to be chased down by the new scooter police. Traffic signals seemed to be in the process of going up at every major intersection, and none too soon for anyone trying to cross against any driver’s sacred right to make a right turn. The broad main avenues were fender-bending nightmares as automotive traditionalists persisted in attempting recently outlawed mid-block U-turns across multiple lanes of creeping cars.

Dozens of new movie houses, video rental stores, nightclubs, theaters, discos, saloons, and restaurants seemed to be opening up every week. Brand-new bookstores and art galleries were everywhere. Twenty new hotels had already been built and more were on the drawing boards. There was a casino near the Park Kulturi, and live
sex shows around the corner from the Foreign Ministry on the Arbat Strip. The quantity of alcohol—hard liquor, wine, and beer—available was now limited only by the seemingly bottomless capacity of the populace, and the city was awash in drug dealers from all over Common Europe.

Hookers worked the crowds in plain sight of Lubyanka on Dzerzinski Square, and the Arbat had become a St.-Germain. You could get drunk on the sheer energy of the crowds around the Arbatskaya Metro station even at 2:00
A.M.
with the system long closed, as club-crawlers continued their revelry en plein air amid peddlers and gambling games and street entertainers.

After over a century of lip service to dour socialist morality, Moscow was learning how to boogie openly, and taking the crash course in a mad effort to make up for all that lost time. It was Mad Moscow, indeed!

The worse of it was that Franja found little time to enjoy it.

Yuri Gagarin University had grown up around the old Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Academy at Star City, out in the banlieue, and while the Metro went straight from Star City to the centre ville, she found that a Saturday night now and again was about all the time she had to spare for fun and games in the city.

As a highly motivated teenager in Paris, Franja had been a stellar student. Here, she was surrounded by thousands of other former star students just like herself, all competing for a comparative handful of openings in the actual Cosmonaut school.