Russian Spring (68 page)

But Ilya was . . .
Ilya
.

He was theatrically handsome, a dashing dresser, and younger than she was. Women couldn’t keep their eyes or their hands off of him, and he was hardly the sort to dissuade them. Ilya was ambitious, he dreamed of being Director of Red Star itself someday, and sooner or later that meant promotion back to the Red Star Tower in Moscow. For these reasons, and no doubt more, Ilya Pashikov had always steered well clear of monogamous relationships, serial or otherwise.

In retrospect, what was amazing was not that Sonya failed in the end to make this beautiful leopard change his spots, but that Ilya remained more or less loyal to her for the better part of six months, at least as far as she cared to let herself know, out of friendship.

Indeed it was Sonya herself who unwittingly forced him to disabuse her of her illusions.

They had taken a
TGV
to Amsterdam for the weekend and rented a two-room suite atop a small hotel overlooking a canal. The suite was done up more like a little apartment than a set of hotel rooms. The bed, with its gaudily quilted comforter, was a weathered old walnut antique, and there were nightstands and a wardrobe to match, along with scattered bric-a-brac and an oil painting of a windmill. The sitting room had an overstuffed couch and armchair, a fireplace, a small set of chairs and table out of somebody’s grandmother’s kitchen, a set of Delft china locked behind the glass of a breakfront,
and a bookcase filled with crumbling old volumes in Dutch and English.

It all seemed so cozily romantic in a homey sort of way as they sat there at the kitchen table sipping Genever and gazing idly out at the crazily leaning narrow buildings across the canal like an old married couple. It reminded Sonya of the early days with Jerry in their old apartment on the Île St.-Louis; not the place, and not the man, she told herself, but the feeling. A feeling of really belonging somewhere with someone that she had not felt for a long, long time, that she had thought was quite gone from her world.

“Have you ever thought about making a life with someone, Ilya?” she mused somewhat woozily. “Settling down? Getting cozy? Even getting married?”

Ilya froze in mid-sip with the expression of someone who had just discovered the hard way that his glass was filled with piss. He looked across the table at her and shook his head slowly, then forced a smile.

“Merde, no!” he said lightly. “What a disaster I’d be as a husband!”

“Not with the right woman,” Sonya told him. “You’re kind, you’re sensitive, you’re—”

“A hopeless philanderer, and we both know it!” Ilya declared. “And what is more, I enjoy it. Then too, I am a good Communist. From me according to my ability, which has not failed me yet, to the women of the world according to their need, which is boundless!”

“Oh, Ilya, you’re not really the shallow creature you pretend to be!”

“Oh yes I am!” he insisted. “Believe me, Sonya, I’m just another pretty face.”

“You haven’t been that way with me,” Sonya said. “You’ve been kind and understanding and gentle, and you’ve helped me through a bad period like a true friend. You’ve been a prince.”

Ilya rolled his eyes upward, still trying to make light of everything in his usual manner. “First you accuse me of being husband material, now I’m a Czarist reactionary!” he said in a tone of forced gaiety. “Next thing I know, you’ll be down on your knees with a ring and a rose proposing marriage!”

“Would that be so bad?” Sonya said softly.

Now Ilya’s expression finally did become serious, somber even. “You’re serious . . . ?” he said.

“I could be if you wanted me to be,” Sonya said truthfully.

Ilya sighed. “You are forcing me to be serious with you, Sonya,” he said, “and it’s entirely out of character. Why, after all, do you suppose I’m such a philanderer in the first place?”

“Because you’re constantly tempted?” Sonya suggested.

“Because despite all appearances, I do not wish to be a swine. I
do not wish to create illusions that are doomed to be shattered. I am not out to break hearts.”

“You could have fooled me,” Sonya said dryly, beginning to sense that she had pushed something too far, and trying to lighten up.

But Ilya’s mood had changed. He had become deadly earnest, maudlin even. Suddenly he looked ten years older, which was to say for the first time he really looked his own age.

“I’m a careerist, Sonya, and I freely admit it,” he said. “I am determined to become Director of Red Star, and who knows what after that. Which means that I will go where Red Star posts me. Which means that any wife of mine would have to trail along behind me like the good little victim of Slavic phallocracy. And such a woman I could never respect. So if I am to be true to myself and not become a domestic tyrant, I must go through life alone and console myself with the abundance of feminine distractions that the luck of my genes has fortunately provided me with.”

“And when you are old and gray . . . ?” Sonya said softly. It all sounded so sad.

“When I am old and gray, I will content myself with old gray women, no doubt,” Ilya said.

“Like me?” Sonya blurted. “Widows and spinsters and lonely divorcées?”

“You are neither old nor gray, Sonya,” Ilya said, reaching out to take her hand. “You are a comrade and a colleague and a friend. And you are more like me than you care to admit. You are precisely the kind of woman I would want to spend my life with. And precisely the kind of woman I dare not seek to have.”

“I don’t understand. . . .”

“Oh yes you do!” Ilya said knowingly. “You’re a careerist just like me. If you weren’t, you’d still be married to Jerry Reed. If tomorrow I were posted to Moscow and asked you to come back with me and be my bride, would you give up your life in Paris and your career to be at my side?”

Sonya could not meet his eyes.

Ilya patted her hand. “We are birds of a feather,” he told her. “That is why we are true friends. That is also why a marriage or an exclusive liaison between us would be a disaster. Sooner or later we would have to part or crush each other’s spirits. Or both.”

“Oh, Ilya . . . ,” Sonya moaned miserably.

“Oh, Sonya!” Ilya cried, visibly forcing himself back into character by an act of will. “It is stupid to be sad! For now, we have a true friendship, and we enjoy each other in bed. Is it really such a sad thing to have a true comrade to fuck? How many people do not even have that? Come on, ma chère, we’re just two lugubrious old Slavs
who have had too much to drink, let’s just forget this maudlin conversation and go on as before.”

And he had swept her up into his arms and dragged her into the bedroom and done his considerable best to prove the point. But after that, things had changed. Ilya continued to take her to dinner, but now it was only one or two nights a week. They continued to be lovers, if that was the word, but their assignations became less frequent. And Ilya made a point of attending some receptions with other women. And going off for the weekend with them.

In the end, their relationship settled into something not unlike what it had been when she was married to Jerry, shorn of the guilt. In the end, she would even accompany him to receptions and stand by without tears if he left with someone else.

It might not be much, but it made her life stable. If she was not exactly happy, she could persuade herself that she was content. She had the job she had always wanted, she had a tolerable sex life, she had a friend and confidant ready at hand, and from time to time, she had a visit from Franja, a daughter who on the one hand was living a strangely similar life, and who on the other reminded her of a younger version of herself.

Upon graduating from pilots’ school, Franja had taken a job as a Concordski pilot with Aeroflot, flying international milk runs. She had a boyfriend in Moscow with whom she shared an apartment in the Arbat, another Aeroflot pilot named Ivan Yortsin, and, at least to hear Franja tell it, they had an arrangement that was a more passionate and intimate version of Sonya’s friendship with Ilya.

With anywhere no more than ninety minutes from anywhere else by Concordski, pilots flew two or three hops a day four days a week, sometimes spending their days off back in Moscow, sometimes in a city a continent away. With Franja and Ivan both keeping the same kind of crazy transcontinental schedule, their times together in Moscow were random and occasional, and a scrupulously monogamous relationship would be entirely insane.

So they confined their monogamy to Moscow and did what they pleased elsewhere, which was to say that her daughter would seem to be living much the same carefree existence that Sonya herself had enjoyed long ago, when she was a card-carrying member of the Red Menace tripping the European life fantastic on her weekends off, only compressed and enhanced by the perpetual hypersonic speed on the one hand, and anchored by a kind of dynamically stable relationship on the other.

On Franja’s brief and occasional layovers in Paris, they talked more like girl friends than mother and daughter. Franja told tall tales of her adventures, sexual and otherwise, and Sonya told similar war
stories of her wild days as a member of the Red Menace newly arrived in the West. Franja talked about Ivan from time to time, and Sonya made perhaps a bit more of her affair with the glamorous Ilya Pashikov than there really was.

They avoided the painful subject of family matters, but every time Franja hopped in and out of Paris in those years, Sonya, much against her will, was left with thoughts of Jerry, the void at the center of their chatter when her daughter was there, the ghost in the apartment on Avenue Trudaine when she left.

It was then that Sonya started using her connections to follow the progress of his career.

She was surprised when Jerry renounced his American citizenship in favor of Common Europe. That was certainly not the Jerry she had known, who had adamantly refused to do the politic thing for twenty years out of twisted loyalty to the country that had betrayed
him
.

She was dumbfounded when Patrice Corneau hired Jerry as his deputy. The Jerry she had known would have been an utter disaster in such a bureaucratic position. Had the divorce really changed him that much?

But when word began to come through to her of the manner in which Corneau was using him, the situation started to become disgustingly clear.

Boris Velnikov was a bureaucratic threat to the project manager, and Corneau was forcing Velnikov to deal with him through Jerry. It was both a clever bureaucratic ploy and a nasty piece of personal vengeance. As a tactic for tormenting Velnikov and keeping his influence minimized, Sonya had to admire it.

But as a cynical use of an old friend as expendable cannon fodder in the bureaucratic wars it was a good deal less admirable, and it made her fearful for what would happen to Jerry when Velnikov moved up.

And Velnikov
was
going to move up, if Moscow had anything to say about it.

Forty percent of the
GTN
budget was being provided by Moscow, but only 27 percent of the subcontract money was coming home, and both the Bears and the Ethnic Nationalists were cynically using the issue as a club with which to batter President Gorchenko. Gorchenko was even under pressure from his own faction to do something about it.

Since the contracts were already let out, economic adjustments were out of the question. Gorchenko needed
something
to keep the lid on, and under the circumstances, that could only come from a symbolic change in personnel.

Sooner or later, Emile Lourade was going to move on to bigger things, and when that happened, there would be a shake-up.

Getting Velnikov appointed Director was out of the question; the inevitable choice would be Patrice Corneau. That would leave the
GTN
project manager’s job open. Velnikov was the logical choice, and Moscow would insist on his appointment, claiming, with justice, that failing to appoint him could only be due to anti-Russian discrimination.

If that happened, the Bears would demand a suspension of Soviet participation in the financing of the project, public opinion would be on their side, and real damage would be done to both the Eurorussian cause in the Soviet Union and the Soviet position in Common Europe.

So Moscow was going to push very hard for Velnikov’s appointment when the time came. There was going to be a very nasty power struggle, and poor naive Jerry was once more going to be ground to pieces in it. If Moscow lost, the whole project could fall apart. And if Moscow won and Velnikov became project manager, his vengeance on Jerry would surely be swift and merciless.

Sonya monitored the developing situation with growing helpless horror, but there was nothing she could see to do about it until word came through from Ilya’s connections in Moscow that Emile Lourade was up for appointment as Common European Minister of Technological Development. It was starting to happen. If she was going to do anything, she had to do it now.

“We’ve got to do something to protect Jerry,” she told Ilya. “His job is all that he’s got left.”

Ilya shrugged. “I understand how you feel,” he said, “but believe me we’re going to have enough trouble getting Velnikov appointed. They’re going to fight it tooth and nail.”

“Could they succeed in blocking Velnikov?”

“They would seem to think they can; they don’t seem to understand the domestic Soviet situation, or if they do, they simply don’t care,” Ilya told her. “Me, I don’t think so. Gorchenko has much more riding on this, politically, than the Western Europeans. He can’t afford to back down, even if it means killing the whole project. They can, and they’ll have to, but it could take them a long time to face up to the situation.”

“Isn’t there
something
we can do?”

Ilya grimaced. “About the only thing you can do is persuade Jerry to make his peace with Boris Velnikov,” he said.

“Jerry won’t even talk to me. And besides, he hates Velnikov. And the feeling would seem to be mutual.”

“Hmmm . . . ,” Ilya muttered thoughtfully. Then his eyes lit up and he smiled his best bureaucratic grin. “Perhaps
Velnikov
could be
persuaded that it would be in his best interests to make his peace with Jerry Reed!”