GOSPEL FOR THE BARNARDS
The Reverend Ike Ackerman announced today that he was consulting with other leading evangelical ministers for the purpose of chartering a nonprofit nondenominational corporation to raise funds to beam the Gospel to Barnard’s Star.
“If there really are intelligent beings on the fourth planet, they too must be children of God, with souls in need of saving,” he declared. “If the Russians can send them their message, so can we, and not just here we are, but here Jesus Christ has been also, hear the Good News, and rejoice in the Lord.”
—Valley News
X
It was frayed around the cuffs from obsessive wear, the lining had been restitched around the armholes twice, and the original zipper had had to be replaced, but the blue-and-white satin Los Angeles Dodgers team jacket that his father had given him for his sixteenth birthday was still Robert Reed’s fondest possession. He wore it on hot summer days, he wore it over bulky sweaters in the dead of winter, he wore it in the rain, wore it despite Franja’s taunts and his mother’s pleas, and he still wore it to school even though it got him called “gringo.”
He loved the jacket as he loved his father for ordering it for him all the way from far California. For there on the left breast, in fancy white embroidery mirroring the style of the team logo on the back, was the name “Bob.”
Ever since he could remember, Robert Reed had wanted to be called Bob. But this was a sound that did not exactly slide trippingly off the French tongue, and it was an aggressively gringo name besides, as bad as Joe or Tex or Al, and so his teachers insisted on Frenchifying his full name into “Robaire,” as did the kids in school whenever they wanted to bait him, for they knew that he hated it.
His mother called him “Robaire” too when she spoke to him in French, which was usually when she was pissed off at him, otherwise it was Bobby. What friends he had called him “Bob-bee,” which was the path of least linguistic resistance to the French palate. That was also what Franja called him, but she had a way of putting a whining accent on the second syllable even in English when she was needling him. He even called himself Bobby inside his own head when he wasn’t watching what he was thinking.
Only from Dad did he get a good old American “Bob.” Only Dad understood what it meant to him. Only Dad understood what a bum-out it was to be an American in Common Europe.
America had been an object of contempt in Europe since long before Bobby was old enough to understand why. Dad had tried to explain it to him as best he could when Bobby first began to realize there was something different about him, something that made kids he had done nothing bad to, sometimes kids he really didn’t even know, hate him, and tease him, and call him nasty names.
“Are you a gringo, Dad?”
“I’m an American, Bob. ‘Gringo’ is a bad word people call Americans when they don’t like us, like we used to call people niggers and spicks and frogs back in the States. Nice people don’t use words like that.”
“Am I an American?”
“Not exactly, Bob, but when you’re old enough to decide for yourself, you can be one if you want to.”
“Is it bad to be an American?”
“No, Bob, it isn’t bad to be an American, it isn’t bad to be a Frenchman or a Russian either, but . . .”
“Then why don’t people like Americans?”
Dad got the strangest faraway look on his face. “Because . . . because sometimes the United States of America does bad things, Bob,” he said.
“Do other countries do bad things too?”
“Oh yeah, other countries have done some really bad things, worse than anything America has done, much, much worse. . . .”
“Then why don’t people hate them the way they hate us?”
Dad peered at him really weirdly and didn’t answer for quite a while. “That’s a damned good question, Bob, and I wish I had a good answer for you,” he finally said. And then his eyes got all teary and it looked like he was going to cry.
“Everybody loved America once,” he said. “America saved Europe from some very bad people. America forgave its enemies and rebuilt ruined countries with its own money. And Americans did the most wonderful thing, Bob, we were the first people to go to the Moon. They loved us, they admired us, we were the light of the world. . . .”
Dad rubbed at his eyes before he spoke again. “And then . . . and then something happened to America, and . . . America stopped doing all these wonderful things and . . . started doing bad things . . . no worse than what other countries did, maybe, but . . . I don’t know, Bob, I’m not really good about these things. It’s like . . . it’s like everyone loves Père Noël, so if one Christmas instead of giving out presents, he was to get drunk and beg money on the streets instead . . . well, that would be worse than if it was someone else doing it, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t understand, Dad. . . .”
And Dad had just shrugged his shoulders and given out a great big sigh. “Neither do I, kiddo,” he said, “neither do I.”
Dad always used to buy him models of classic American spacecraft when he was a little kid, one corner of his room was still a dusty and forgotten museum of them, the Apollo, the Saturn V, the Eagle, the space shuttle Columbia, and all the rest. Bobby had never really been into this stuff, but he loved his father, and when he was ten, he took the bulk of the money he had saved up from his allowance and bought Dad a really neat model of the Terminator hypersonic bomber for his birthday, all metal, retractable landing gear, swing wings, and even fully detailed spring-loaded missiles that fired from their pod when you pressed down on the cockpit.
Bobby had burst into tears when Dad unwrapped the gift and started cursing. “You don’t like it . . . ?” he wailed.
Dad gathered him up in his arms and dried his tears. “It’s a beautiful model, Bob,” he said, “and the damned real thing is a beautiful piece of hardware too, you’ve got to give the bastards that. And I love you very much for buying it for me. But . . . but maybe you’re old enough now to understand . . . about what I do and why I’m here and why I got so upset when I saw your present. . . .”
And Dad told him. About watching the first men landing on the Moon, about watching Americans landing on the Moon, as a little kid. And his Uncle Rob. And the Challenger disaster. And Battlestar America. And how it had somehow turned the wonderful country that had gone to the Moon into something bad. About how the Terminator could have been a real spaceplane like the Concordski instead of a weapon. About how he had moved to France to work on real spacecraft. And the great idea he had for a spaceliner that they wouldn’t let him work on because he was an American.
There was an awful lot of it that the ten-year-old Bobby didn’t understand, but his ten-year-old heart understood what counted.
Once, Americans had been the greatest people on Earth and done a wonderful thing, and Dad had tried to help America do even more wonderful things. And then something or someone called Challenger or Battlestar America had tricked America into doing bad things instead, things that hurt his Dad so bad that he had to leave America to do his work, and so he came to France to build spaceships, but they wouldn’t let him do that because they hated Dad for being an American.
It was Bobby who gave his father a great big warm hug when he was finished. “I hate America too, Dad!” he declared. “America is bad! Why don’t we become French people? Or . . . or we could become Russians, just like Mom!”
“No, Bob,” Dad told him firmly, “you shouldn’t hate America. Don’t you ever forget that it was once something special and wonderful to be an American. We were the first humans to set foot on another planet, and no one can ever take that away from us. We’re the real Americans, you and me, kiddo. When we forget that, the bastards that killed the dream win again.”
That was when Dad started giving him old American science-fiction novels and sent away for baseball cards from the United States and bought him a bat and a ball and a glove. Dad got him subscriptions to American sports magazines and brought him discs of old American movies. He got him the Visual Encyclopedia Americana on disc for his computer and game programs for baseball and American football. And a marvelous software atlas of the United States that windowed full-color pictures of almost any point in America at the touch of a mouse.
Bobby’s room filled up with Americana, with a wall map of the United States, and a Statue of Liberty rug, and a star-spangled bedspread, with posters and picture cards of ballplayers he had never seen, with untidy stacks of American sports magazines and old comic books, with models of classic Cadillacs and old Buicks, with bits and pieces of Harley chic, to the point where his mother began fighting with Dad about it.
He overheard them arguing about it once when he was about thirteen.
“It’s unnatural, Jerry, you’ve got him living in some kind of fantasy America out of your own adolescence, twenty years and more out of date, an America that even then never was.”
“It’s his heritage, Sonya, what about all that Russian stuff Franja is into all the time?”
“Those are books and magazines and discs that are really teaching her something, not a roomful of obsessive old Russian pop-cult kitsch! His mind’s been filled with too much of this stuff to get rid of the obsession, perhaps, but if he’s doomed to be obsessed with America, at least let me give him some things that will give him some historical perspective on the United States, instead of this random collection of old junk, of—how would you have been saying it twenty years ago—‘golden oldies.’ ”
“Just as long as it isn’t a bunch of anti-American propaganda!”
“Oh, really, Jerry!”
So Bobby’s Russian mother began giving him things to read about the United States, and if none of it was anti-American propaganda, none of it was the rabid anti-European power fantasies spewing out of Festung Amerika these days either. There were novels by Twain and Melville and Salinger and Kerouac and Mailer and Robert Penn Warren. Biographies of Lincoln and FDR and Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Eugene V. Debs. Histories by de Toqueville and Halberstam and Rattray. Treatises by Jefferson and Paine. Discs of old American films like Abe Lincoln in Illinois, PT-109, All the President’s Men, and Born on the Fourth of July.
Bobby gobbled it all up and went back for more on his own, plowing through Naked Lunch, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, I Reach for the Stars, Profiles in Courage, Bug Jack Barron, Less Than Zero, and anything else he could lay his hands on at the English used-book stores. He dug out ancient tapes of Easy Rider, Candy, and Dr. Strangelove, American Graffiti, and Beach Blanket Bingo. He collected moldy old copies of Time and Playboy and Rolling Stone.
So Bobby grew up with a peculiar montage image of America as seen from afar, compounded of his father’s vision of an America which had had a golden age that put men on the Moon and then sold it out for a mess of military hardware, his mother’s reading list, what he learned in a French school, and the random results of his own packrat curiosity.
By the time he was about fifteen, he thought he had it all figured out.
America had indeed once been the light of the world. It had given the world democracy and modern industrial technology and the telephone and the airplane and movies and the phonograph and jazz and rock ’n’ roll. It had fought a terrible war to save Europe from the Nazis. It had rebuilt Japan and Western Europe after the war with its own money and protected the shattered countries from Stalinist Russia with its own troops and atomic bombs. Without America there would be no Common Europe now, and maybe there would never have been a Gorbachev or a Russian Spring either. Once it had been a great and wonderful and prideful thing to be an American; the people of the world had loved America, and not without good cause.
But it all started to slide downhill when the CIA assassinated John F. Kennedy.
Kennedy was the father of the American space program. He had promised to put an American on the Moon before 1970, and America did it. But it was the last great thing that America did.
The CIA and the Pentagon and the Military-Industrial Complex hated Kennedy. The CIA was in the drug-running business in Southeast Asia, the Pentagon was pissed off because Kennedy wouldn’t let them invade Cuba, and the Military-Industrial Complex wanted to make a lot of money selling weapons, so they all wanted the little war in Vietnam to turn into a big one that would last a long time. They knew that JFK wouldn’t allow this, that he wanted to spend the money on a space station and a Moon colony and an expedition to Mars instead, so they had him assassinated.
They got their nice long war, but a generation of Americans not much older then than Bobby was now had seen through the jingoistic propaganda, they were listening to their own rock ’n’ roll, which was telling them a different story. They refused to fight, and they marched against the war, and in 1968 they hounded Lyndon Johnson out of office. They would have ended the war that year and saved America’s economy and its honor by electing JFK’s brother Bobby, but the Military-Industrial Complex wasn’t having that either, so they had Bobby killed too.
The hippies tried to start a revolution in Chicago and Kent State and Woodstock. The military put it down easily, but it made the country paranoid enough to elect Richard Nixon, the biggest paranoid of all, who almost succeeded in making himself dictator.
The war finally ended after Nixon was overthrown, but by that time America was broke and no longer the light of the world, and all that was left of the civilian space program was the shuttle. And then because the Ayatollah Khomeini wanted to destroy the United States economically, he held American hostages during the whole election campaign while Jimmy Carter was tortured and humiliated on television, and so the Military-Industrial Complex was able to elect its own President again, a professional actor named Ronald Reagan who was very good on television.
Reagan did what he was elected to do. Even though the Vietnam War was over and he wasn’t able to start a new one, he still managed to buy lots of expensive weapons, but because the country was broke from Vietnam, he had to borrow huge amounts of money to do it and kill the civilian space program, which was why the American economy was still such a mess after all these years that no one knew how to keep it going without a war somewhere, and why Dad had to come to Common Europe to work for ESA.
Meantime, Common Europe had been formed, and America got shut out of what was the world’s biggest market, and had to keep devaluing the dollar to stiff its European creditors and fight the Forever War in Latin America to keep the crumbling U.S. economy afloat.
And now that the Soviet Union was talking about entering Common Europe, the United States was trying to stop it by threatening to abrogate its overseas debt in Europe if that happened, rather than enrich the people who sold out democracy to the Communists.
And that was why Dad couldn’t work on his spaceships and why he was catching such shit from the real French kids for being a gringo, and from Robert Reed’s fifteen-year-old perspective, it had become hard to blame them.
That was the year that Bobby went through his brief anti-American phase. He took to calling himself “Robaire” and speaking French exclusively, even to his father. He tried to learn to play soccer. And when the United States invaded Panama again, he even marched in an anti-American demonstration.
When Bobby came home from that one and monopolized the dinner table with an endless incoherent anti-American tirade, that was finally too much for his father, and Dad sat him down at the dining room table afterward for a man-to-man.
“Look, Bob—”
“Robaire! Et en français!”
Dad actually seized him by the shoulders and shook him. “We’re Americans, damn it, Bob,” he said, as angry as Bobby had ever seen him, “and we will damn well discuss this as Americans, in English.”
“I was born in France,” Bobby told him sullenly. “When I’m eighteen, I want a Common European passport and French citizenship!”
“Look, Bob, I’m not very good about this political crap,” Dad said much more gently. “But . . . let me show you something. . . .” And he led Bobby out of the dining room, through the living room, and down the hallway to his own room.
Despite his current anti-American phase, Bobby had never bothered to redo his room. It was all still there—the Statue of Liberty rug, the star-spangled bedspread, the models of American spacecraft in the corner bookcase, the piles of Rolling Stone and Playboy, the books, the huge baseball-card collection, even the big wall map of the United States, marked up with little scrawled baseballs for major-league cities, rocketships at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg, routes of his fantasy trips traced along the road networks, peace signs drawn over San Francisco and Chicago and Woodstock and Kent, Ohio.
“How come you haven’t gotten rid of all this stuff, Bob?” Dad asked.
Bobby shrugged. “Je ne sais pas. . . .”
“I’ll tell you why, son,” Dad told him. “Because you collected all this stuff and put it together over your whole life, ever since you were a little kid. It’s . . . it’s a model, like one of those spacecraft, but what it’s a model of is the inside of your head, and it didn’t come as a kit, you built it from scratch. It’s the America inside you, Bob. Battlestar America, the invasion of Panama and Peru and Colombia, the dollar devaluations, what the Pentagon did to me and Rob Post, Vietnam, piss tests, debt abrogation, economic blackmail, all that crap, that’s politique politicienne, and it’s right to hate all that. . . .”
Dad paused. He waved his arms as if to encompass the whole room. “But don’t start hating this, Bob!” he said forcefully. “Don’t hate Project Apollo and the High Sierras, don’t hate the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Statue of Liberty, don’t hate the Boston Celtics and Highway One, and Mardi Gras, the redwood forests and Mulholland Drive and Donald Duck, don’t hate three hundred million fucked-over people with the same stuff inside their heads as you have. That’s the real America, Bob, and if you start hating that, you’re gonna end up hating yourself.”
Dad’s passion subsided and he looked directly into Bobby’s eyes with a much softer expression, sad, and lost, and a little confused. “I’m not real good at this stuff, Bob,” he said with a little shrug. “Do you understand what I’m telling you, kiddo?”
“Yeah, Dad,” Bobby found himself saying. “I do believe I do.”
And so he did. From that moment on, America wasn’t the wonderful time-warped Disneyland version of itself that he had never seen, or the evil and paranoid “Festung Amerika” of the French media; it was neither, and it was somehow both.
It was a mystery, and that mystery, Bobby realized from that moment on, was inside of him as well. And from that moment on, he knew that he had to go to America to solve its mystery for himself. For it was in some way the mystery of himself, and he knew he would never know who he really was, let alone what he wanted to become, until the mystery within confronted its mirror image without on the American shore.
And that was the beginning of his campaign to go to college in America. He had announced it at the dinner table about three weeks later. Franja had sneered, but Franja sneered at everything he did or wanted to do, of course. Mom had been noncommittal, she didn’t really take it seriously at the time. But Dad had nodded, and let him know he understood.
“I hear Berkeley and UCLA and Cal Tech are still pretty good schools,” he said.
“You can’t really be serious, Jerry. . . .”
“What’re you going to study in America, Bob-bee?” Franja whined. “Baseball?”
“What’re you going to study in Russia, spacehead, zero-gravity pipe-jobs?”
“Robert!”
“I’m going to be a cosmonaut! What are you going to be in America, an imperialist blackmailer or just more cannon fodder?”
“Franja!”
And so it went. Franja ragged him mercilessly about it, Mom tried not to take him seriously, but Bobby persisted, and Dad encouraged him, and Bobby’s marks even began to improve. And on his sixteenth birthday, Dad gave him the Dodgers jacket.
“You’ll need this when you see your first ball game in Dodger Stadium,” the enclosed card said.
The Dodgers jacket had been his emblem and his battle flag ever since, and ever since he had first put it on, the battle had turned serious, had become more and more of an open conflict between Dad and Mom.
“We can’t let our son waste his college education in some backwater school in the United States,” Mom would declare.
“We’re going to let our daughter study in the Soviet Union,” Dad would counter, for by now Franja was quite serious about cosmonaut school.
“That’s different!”
“What’s so different about it?”
“It’s Yuri Gagarin, Jerry, it’s a very prestigious place!”
“It’s a Russian school, that’s what you mean, isn’t it?”
“Do you really want your son to have a third-rate education?”
“In a third-rate country, isn’t that what you mean, Sonya?”
“You said it, Jerry, I didn’t!”
“But you thought it!”
“Well, isn’t it true?”
“How would you know, Sonya, you’ve never been to the United States.”
“And neither have you, for almost twenty years!”
“So neither of us can tell Bob anything at all about what America is all about. That’s why he has a right to see for himself!”
It had gone round and round like that for two years now, with neither of them giving ground, but now that Franja had actually gotten into cosmonaut school, Bobby was becoming confident of victory.
For Franja needed Dad’s signature on her admission papers, and Bobby had long since persuaded him, or so at least he hoped, not to sign them until Mom agreed that he could go to college in America. It was only fair, now wasn’t it?
And this morning, when he looked in the mail, there was a big packet of papers for Franja from the Yuri Gagarin Space Academy in the Soviet Union, which could be only one thing.
If he knew his older sister, and by now, alas, he certainly did, Franja would waste no time in presenting the admission papers for the necessary parental signatures, meaning at dinner tonight.
Bobby went to his closet and took the Dodgers jacket off the padded hanger where he always carefully placed it when he finished wearing it. He laid it out on the bed, sprayed the satin with the special cleanser, wiped it off with a chamois cloth, put it back on the hanger, and hung it on the edge of the bookcase, where he could see it while he played an ancient Bruce Springsteen chip and waited.
Dinner was not exactly a formal event in the Reed family. But Robert Reed was going to dress for it tonight.
UNCLE JOES GET PIE IN THEIR MUSTACHES—
AND WORSE!
It was quite a scene on Saturday afternoon in Gorky Park when Pamyat hooligans tried to break up an outdoor picnic of the Moscow Socialist Feminist Society. The ladies had anticipated just such a Bear attack, tipped off the police, and armed themselves with what must have been at least three hundred cream pies. While police and militia stood by laughing uproariously, they pelted the aggressors with them.
Several police and militia persons had brought their own pies, eager to take it out on the Uncle Joes who have long since become their number-one headache.
No custard-cream humor for these earthy guardians of the public order, however. Their pies were filled with pig manure.
—Mad Moscow
Franja Gagarin Reed had not quite gone to the point of calling herself Franja Gagarin, even though her mother did use her own famous Russian name professionally. Reed might be a loathsomely American name, and an American name might be a burden, but Jerry Reed had made that burden an honor too, and she loved him for it.
Anyone who wanted to go to Mars and beyond as passionately as Franja did could hardly be ashamed to have Jerry Reed for a father, a father who not only shared, but served the same dream.
It was Bobby, of course, his personal favorite, whom Father had tried to give the dream to when they were both small, Bobby who got the expensive models for his birthdays and Christmases, while Father got her stupid dolls and his weird concept of little girls’ clothing, Bobby whom he told his best stories to, Bobby whom he fed all that chocolate ice cream.
But there had been a certain rough justice built into the universe of her childhood, and not just because Mother made Franja her favorite, her little confidante, her fellow Russian in willing exile, sharing as much of her work life as Franja could understand, spinning tales of her girlhood in an awakening Soviet Union, even hinting at a previous life as a notorious member of the legendary Red Menace.
For Bobby, despite Father’s ardent wishes, refused to become the little space cadet that Father longed for. The little ingrate blew it.
When she was about twelve, and had learned enough from Mother about the art of bureaucratic manipulation to take matters into her own hands, and even Father had begun to face the fact that his efforts with Bobby were hopeless, she began to ask her father questions about space. Intelligent questions. Questions she studied to prepare and framed carefully. Questions designed to pique his attention, to show him that he at least had a daughter to pass the torch along to.
“Do you think the Barnards have starships, Father?” she asked him one day. “Do you think they might mount an expedition when they get our message?”
Father looked at her peculiarly. “Starships?” he muttered.
“It would seem that there are artifacts scattered throughout the Barnard system, large ones too, as if they’ve built something like the old O’Neil colonies. Wouldn’t that imply the technology to take the next step? A generation ship expedition, or at least an automated probe?”
Father got a distracted faraway look in his eyes, the one Mother called his outer-space stare. “We’ll both be gone before anyone knows the answer to that,” he muttered.
“Maybe not. Maybe they’ll answer our message. If they do, I’ll still be around to hear it. And if they do answer, by that time, won’t we be ready to mount an expedition to them?”
“You’re probably right,” Father said. “They do seem to have occupied more of their solar system than we have, and we probably could mount an expedition thirty or forty years from now.”
“With a little luck, we could both live to see it!”
Father laughed. “I’m afraid I’d need a lot more than a little luck to last that long,” he said. “But you, Franja . . .”
He had looked at her with new eyes then, with a new awareness; he was deep into his outer-space stare, but now it was focused intently on her for the first time. She could feel things shifting. She could feel the world changing.
“You, Franja . . . ,” he said again.
“Me, Father,” Franja said softly, outer-space staring back at him, measure for measure.
And after that, it was Franja who got the telescope, Franja whom Father encouraged to pursue a career in space, Franja to whom Father poured out what Mother called his space babble, father and daughter who found each other through a shared vision.
“We’re like the ancient Polynesians sailing our first little outrigger canoes from island to island across the unknown Pacific,” Father told her. “And one day one of our tiny little boats is going to sail into the harbor of some galactic city a million years of evolution grander than anything we could have dreamed. And you could be on it.”
Franja believed that, she really did. She did more than believe it. She set it up before her as the shining goal of her lifetime, and she worked to fulfill it. She studied hard. She became something of a grind. She watched her nutrition carefully and kept herself in shape with long hours of swimming, which also, she had heard, was the best exercise to prepare her reflexes for zero-gravity locomotion.
She was going to get there. She was going to be a cosmonaut. She would do what she had to to get into Yuri Gagarin, the only real space academy in the world, where Russians who had been to the Moon and Mars trained what was by far the largest cosmonaut cadre in the world.
But when she finally proudly told Father of her intentions, she was stunned by his reaction.
“You don’t want to go to Yuri Gagarin,” he told her. “You don’t want to end up stuck in the Soviet program. Not when ESA is someday going to open up the whole solar system with my Grand Tour Navettes. ESA’s the place for you, Franja, where I can help you, where someday you can go to Mars on a ship that I built. Won’t that be something? Who knows, I might even get to ride along.”
What could she say to that? Certainly not the bitter truth, she knew even then.
“But Father,” she told him instead, “Soviet cosmonauts are going to Mars already! Who knows when ESA will really build Grand Tour Navettes? It’s the Soviet Union that has the real space program. Tell the truth, Dad, if you could, wouldn’t you become a Soviet cosmonaut right now?”
But Father refused to believe that the Soviet space program had been a visionary one from the start, as far back as Tsiolkovsky’s dreams of exploring the solar system and Yuri Gagarin himself, a thing of the romantic Russian heart.
The Americans had gone to the Moon for political prestige, and then their space program degenerated into a militarist nightmare. Common Europe could think of nothing grander to do than expend all its energies on building a glorified resort hotel for senile plutocrats. The Japanese cared for nothing but orbital factories and power stations.
But the Soviet Union had had a vision all along. Why couldn’t Father see that it was his vision too? Of exploring for life on Mars, or on Titan, or even in the superheated sea beneath the Uranian ice. Of eventually extending the search to the stars. And of building in the meantime a solar system–wide civilization that would be worthy of sailing its canoes into the galactic main as equals.
Why couldn’t Father accept that as good enough reason to go to Yuri Gagarin and not tempt her to cruelty?
Surely Father knew the bitter truth that Mother had explained to her in words of many painful syllables. Surely Franja could have won this argument once and for all by forcing him to acknowledge it.
Surely she could never do it, no matter how frustrated with him she became, no matter how sorely she was tempted.
How could she tell her own father that being his daughter would be the political kiss of death to her at ESA?
She couldn’t. She didn’t. She couldn’t stoop to winning the endless argument with that any more than she could rid herself of her American family name by calling herself Franja Gagarin at the cost of what was left of her father’s pride.
Not that she exactly made a point of using her family name these days, either. An American name did not exactly endear anyone to the powers that be in the French educational system, nor was it worth the risk to be caught lying about her father being English when his name appeared in the back pages of the newspapers at unpredictable intervals.
At school, she was Jerry Reed’s daughter, and she was stuck with it, and if that meant a certain pointed pronunciation of her name from time to time, she had to admit that there were also times when it was a badge of honor.
But when it came to her social life, what there was of it, being Franja Reed was quite another matter.
Franja was a good Russian name, and it was a fine thing to be young and Russian and in Paris. Not only was the Soviet Union greatly admired, Paris was embracing styles and trends and things Russian, and the French were eager to embrace what Russians they could find, in every sense of the word.
The sons and daughters of Embassy staff and Red Star personnel who formed the core of her small circle of friends joked about it among themselves, and made a wry point of doing so in thick Russified French, but that didn’t stop any of them from dressing up in stylized cossack gear and playing the second coming of the Red Menace for appreciative French audiences.
Oh yes, it was fun being a Russian named Franja in Paris!
Being an American named Reed was something else again.
There were boys who eyed her from afar, only to flee in the other direction when they learned her full name. There were self-styled men of the world who professed not to care until their parents forced them to end it. There were cretins of both sexes forever trying to force her into the position of actually defending the loathsome policies of the United States so they could vent their wrath upon a convenient target.
The old Russian solution would be to substitute the patronymic whenever possible, but “Franja Jerryovna” was hardly an option.
It was the rising tide of socialist feminism that rolled in with a modern Russian solution.
In the Soviet Union, a fashion arose among the enlightened youth of the Russian Spring for giving yourself a new patronymic of your own choosing; as a declaration of generational perestroika if you were a socialist feminist chafing under the linguistic yoke of tired old Slavic phallocracy, and if you knew what was good for you when paying court to same, even if you were a hairy unreconstructed phallocrat among the boys.
One chose the name of someone one admired, someone famous, someone you were telling the world you wished to emulate. For Franja, of course, the choice of a pop patronymic was obvious and perfect.
Who could deny that Yuri Gagarin was a worthy exemplar of socialist virtue and Russian pride? Who better personified everything she wished to become?
So she chose to call herself “Franja Yurievna Gagarin Reed,” “Franja Yurievna” period, when she could manage, and if there were those who called her “Franja Yurievna Gagarin” let them make of it what they would, and preferably to her advantage; she did not encourage it, now did she, and she had never used anything but her full legal name on any document.
Including the application for admission to the Yuri Gagarin Space Academy.
And there it was in full, “Franja Gagarin Reed” all over the admission forms that had arrived in the mail this morning.
Not that she could have hidden behind any pop patronymic with the Yuri Gagarin Space Academy. Jerry Reed might be an American, but he was still her father, and under Soviet law, she could no more attend Yuri Gagarin without her father’s written consent than she could claim her Soviet citizenship without it until she reached her legal majority.
And Father, who had every reason to want to sign these papers, who had encouraged her career so strongly, who wanted so much to see his daughter go where he could not, was being manipulated by Bobby into withholding his permission until Mother agreed that her brother could go to college in his beloved America.
As far as Franja was concerned, ruining his life by getting a third-rate education in a country that was loathed by the civilized world would only be what Bobby deserved. Let them draft him into their Foreign Legion and ship him to some Latin American jungle if that’s what he wanted.
But with all the scruples and honor of the devious paranoiacs in Washington who were trying to sabotage the Soviet entry into Common Europe, Machiavellian little Bobby had weaseled himself into a position where he held her admission to the Soviet space academy hostage.
If she had a right to go to Yuri Gagarin in the Soviet Union, then he had a right to go to college in America. That was the way Bobby saw it, and that was the way he had manipulated Father into seeing it.
Father would never pretend to be balking at letting her go to Gagarin if Bobby hadn’t persuaded him that linking the issues was the only way to persuade Mother to let Bobby go to America.
What Father would really do if Mother called his bluff, Franja didn’t want to think about.
“Dinner is ready,” Mother’s voice called from the kitchen.
Franja grimaced, and not just because Father and Mother had been in the kitchen together by themselves since they came home, which usually meant a private argument and a truly revolting concoction on the table, for she had the feeling that the dinner conversation was likely to be even more unpalatable than the battleground cuisine.
When Franja walked down the long hallway past Bobby’s room, the door was ajar and the room was empty. Just like him to make sure he got there first, as if . . . as if he had sneaked a look in the mailbox this morning before she got there and seen the packet from Moscow.
And indeed, he was already seated at the dining table when she arrived, greeting her with a fatuous smile and knowing eyes that told her that was exactly what he had done.
It was not like Jerry Reed to come staggering home from work drunk like some nikulturni muzhik, so Sonya did not have to be a Pavlov Institute psychic to guess that his meeting with Emile Lourade had not exactly been a triumph.
She was in the kitchen cutting up the beef when he arrived and plunked down a bottle of some dreadful-looking Barolo on the long wooden counter under the window, his acumen clearly adversely affected by what he had already drunk before purchasing it at some Felix Potin instead of their regular caviste.
“Somehow I sense that the news was not exactly good, Jerry?” she said as he began cutting onions off the string beside the spice rack with a paring knife as if this were the most normal day in the world.
“Well, as the famous old American saying goes, there’s good news and bad news,” Jerry said sardonically, angrily slicing off the ends of onions as if they were the heads of enemies. “The good news is that the Director of the European Space Agency had a few drinks at the corner brasserie after work with the newly appointed project manager of the newly funded Grand Tour Navette Project. . . .”
“Why that’s marvelous, Jerry!” Sonya exclaimed, and moved down the countertop to give him a hug.
“The bad news is that I was there too,” Jerry told her, freezing her in her tracks. “Does that answer your question?”
“La merde, Jerry, what happened?”
As Jerry stood there cutting up onions and spitting it all out through the sniffles and tears, the dreadful realization came over her that she was in the process of acquiring precisely the information that Ilya Pashikov was after for the Space Ministry without having decided whether she wanted it.
Knowing what Emile Lourade had cooked up now would probably allow the Space Ministry to hammer out a deal on a combined space budget about 10 percent better than what they’d get if Lourade controlled the timing of its revelation to them.
What had been done to Jerry was appalling, though in retrospect hardly surprising. But what was somehow at least as appalling was the pettiness of the moral quandary she had now been put in.
If she told Pashikov what she now knew, it would save the Soviet Union about 10 percent of the combined space budget, a modest bureaucratic coup that would look good on her kharakteristika and make the economic strategy department look good, and not much more.
If she kept this to herself, she might not be blamed for being unable to come up with the information, but it would not exactly enhance the confidence of the Moscow Mandarins in her political loyalty. Nor would it exactly enhance her working relationship with Ilya, who would lose bureaucratic points with the Moscow Mandarinate too.
Under the circumstances, she was not about to tell Jerry about her day at the office with Ilya Pashikov and the bureaucratic vengeance they could take on Lourade, since as far as he was concerned Lourade was not the villain, but the more Jerry blamed it on Soviet pressure, the angrier she became at the treacherous Emile Lourade, and the sweeter the opportunity to deal him a little justice seemed.
It was in these dissonant but equally distracted moods that the two of them had cooked dinner, and she didn’t need Franja’s turned-up nose as she put the tureen down on the table to tell her that the linguini à la Romanoff showed it. The pasta had been overboiled into a sticky mess while they weren’t watching it, and the crème fraîche had been simmered long enough to fall apart into a runny goo, in which floated slices of overcooked beef and undercooked lumps of raw tomatoes.
But with Robert dressed in his ludicrous baseball jacket, always a bad sign at the dinner table, and with Franja fingering the packet of papers on her lap nervously, Sonya had the awful feeling that it was somehow going to be fitting fare for tonight’s table talk.
THE AMERICAN BLUFF
Despite the current posturing in Washington, it is hard to find anyone in the City who seriously believes that the impending entry of the Soviet Union into Common Europe will really result in a so-called unilateral junk bond rescheduling of the American overseas debt.
They simply can’t do it, so the smart thinking goes. Even if they suspended interest payments entirely, the American Federal Budget would still be deeply in deficit, and the need for overseas borrowing would still be there. And who would be willing to lend more money to a nation that had totally destroyed its financial credibility?
The United States would in the end only be committing financial suicide, and while the current American administration may indeed be foolish enough to do almost anything, the American financial and industrial establishment, which would be left to face the grim consequences as its overseas financing quite dried up as well, will never permit the politicians to carry their self-defeating policies to such a terminal extreme.
When the discount on American paper reaches 40 percent, institutional bond traders are set to leap into the market and gobble it up.
—Financial Times
Mother put a horrid-looking meal on the table that Franja recognized all too well—a huge dish of overcooked spinach pasta and a tureen of beef and mushrooms stewed in a tomato and crème fraîche sauce that she called “linguini à la Romanoff.”
Father emerged from the kitchen with the wine, plunked it down on the table, collapsed into his chair, and then just sat there leaning on his elbows staring into space with the most desolate look on his face. His eyes were bloodshot, and there were deep circles under them.
There was an unspoken rule at the dinner table that no one was to discuss anything but culinary matters until everyone had food on their plate and wine in their glass. Since what Mother had placed on the table appeared to be something that no one wanted to pay any more attention to than necessary, the loathsome linguini was dished out in silence while Franja squirmed in her seat, impatient for an opportune moment to present her papers for parental signature and get things over with.
But brother Bobby wasn’t going to allow that.
“What’ve you got there, Franja?” he said, as soon as everyone had begun the distasteful task of getting this ruined dinner down. No doubt he was just delighted to see Father in some kind of funk, under the circumstances, it would make it all that much easier for Bobby to play on his emotions.
“What are you talking about, Bobby?”
“The papers on your lap,” Bobby said disingenuously. “You’re not careful, you’re gonna spill sauce on them, why don’t you just put them on the table.”
“What do you have there, Franja?” Mother said, and now there was nothing to be done but go through with it as planned.
Jerry Reed stared at the packet of papers that Franja had laid out on the table as if they were a pile of dog turds. “Jesus Christ, Franja,” he moaned after she had finished her little speech, “why do you have to hit me with this stuff at a time like this?”
“At a time like what, Father?” Franja said, furrowing her brow.
And now he had gone and done it! Now he was going to have to tell his kids about what the damn Russians had done to him! Well, he was going to have to tell them sooner or later, and now at least, he thought as he took a huge gulp of wine, I’ve got a head start on getting drunk enough to do it.
“Those sons of bitches!” Bobby exclaimed when Dad was finished. “You can’t let them get away with that, Dad!”
“What am I supposed to do, Bob, call up the American Embassy and ask for a Terminator sortie against Moscow?”
“Maybe you should call up the Embassy,” Bobby found himself saying. “Maybe they’d let you build your own Grand Tour Navettes for America, so the Russians won’t end up owning the solar system. . . .”
“Bobby, Bobby,” Dad said in a little sad voice, “the people running the United States these days aren’t interested in exploring the solar system. Besides, the way they see it, I’m the guy who gave Common Europe American sat-sled technology. If I show up in Downey asking for my job back, they’ll ship me to Leavenworth and throw away the key.”
“Then why can’t you understand that Yuri Gagarin is the place for me, Father?” Franja butted in.
“Merde, Franja, how can you still be thinking about sliming into the Russian space program after what the bastards have done to your own father!” Bobby snapped at her.
“Because it’s obvious that being the daughter of Jerry Reed is not exactly going to open doors for me at ESA!” Franja shouted back.
“Franja!” Mother shouted. Not that she had to, for Franja was regretting the words almost in the act of shouting them, furious at Bobby for having goaded her into it.
But Father just sat there waving his wineglass woozily, nodding his head slightly, and looking at her with only sadness in his eyes.
“No, Sonya, she’s right,” Father said. “I can’t even open the door to the men’s room at ESA. . . .”
“Dad . . .”
“Jerry!”
“Then you will sign my papers?” Franja said, reaching into a pocket, pulling out a pen, and laying it down on top of the packet.
Jerry Reed stared at the papers before him in somewhat Scottish befuddlement.
Why had he really been against his daughter going to Yuri Gagarin anyway? With his dream of being Franja’s fairy godfather at ESA shattered, Jerry had to admit that Gagarin was the place for Franja. The two programs were going to be merged anyway in some fashion, and Common Europe had nothing like Yuri Gagarin; careerwise Gagarin graduates would have the fast track.
He reached down somewhat clumsily and picked up the pen.
“Wait a minute, Dad,” Bobby blurted, “what about me?”
Dad’s pen hand froze in midair. “What about you, Bob?” he said, staring at Bobby perplexedly.
“It isn’t fair! Why should Franja get to go to school in Russia if I can’t go to college in the States?”
“Oh no, not that again!” Mom moaned.
“Yes, that again, Mom! It isn’t fair! If Dad’s gonna let Franja go to Russia, you’ve got to let me go to the United States!”
“Have you been putting him up to this again, Jerry?” Mom said, looking at Dad, not at him.
“Putting him up to what?” Dad said confusedly.
“It’s Bobby who’s been putting Father up to it!” Franja whined.
“Shut up, Franja!”
“Shut up yourself!”
“Shut up everyone who says shut up!” Dad roared at the top of his lungs. He shrugged, threw up his hands. “Including me,” he added in a much smaller voice. And he led the laughter at his own expense.
And all at once, Bobby could see that Dad had taken charge of the table, not by outshouting everyone, but by making them laugh. And in the act of so doing, seemed to have recovered his full faculties.
“It seems to me we’ve had this discussion a few million times before,” Dad said.
“But not with Franja’s admission papers handed over to be signed, Dad,” Bobby told him, and then he found himself telling an inspired lie, which he would certainly turn into the truth tomorrow morning. “I’ve already written away for applications to Berkeley and UCLA, because if I want to get in for next fall’s term, I’ve got to apply before this one is over. . . .”
“He’s got a point, Sonya,” Dad said. “We’re going to have to decide where he goes to school sooner or later, so it might as well be now—”
“So that the two of you can blackmail me with Franja’s admission papers to Gagarin?” Mom said angrily.
“That isn’t fair, Sonya. . . .”
“No, Jerry, it certainly isn’t! You never really objected to Franja’s going to Gagarin. It’s been a bluff all along! You’ll sign Franja’s papers no matter what I do, because you love your daughter too, and you’re not mean enough to destroy her life as an act of vengeance against me.”
Dad shrugged. “You do know me,” he said.
“Dad!” Bobby cried, feeling it all starting to slip away.
“Your mother’s right on this one, Bob,” Dad told him. “You really wouldn’t want me to ruin Franja’s life to punish her for your not getting what you wanted, now would you? How would you feel if you were in her shoes?”
“Just like I feel now,” Bobby moaned miserably.
“Well, I’m going to give you a chance to feel a little better, Bob,” Dad said, picking up his wineglass and sipping at it lightly, but never taking his eyes off Bobby’s. “I’m going to leave it up to you. You tell me whether to sign Franja’s papers or not. I won’t sign them until you give your permission—”
“Jerry!”
Dad held up his left hand for silence, but he didn’t even look at Mom. His bloodshot eyes kept staring into Bobby’s until Bobby felt that his father was staring right down into the center of his soul.
“It’s simple, Bob. Would you feel better doing what those Russian bastards just did to me or would you rather feel like an American?”
Bobby stole a sidelong glance at Franja, and for a moment their eyes met. There was nothing he could read in his sister’s eyes but the intensity of their focus on him. What must she be thinking? Cringing inside knowing that now he had his shot at vengeance? Fear that he was going to take the dream of her lifetime away from her?
That he was going to do to her what Mom was doing to him?
Bobby sighed. Franja had tormented him for as long as he could remember and certainly had never done anything noble for him. Was it really possible to love such a sister?
But that wasn’t the point, was it? Nor was vengeance, however sweet, however richly deserved.
Dad was teaching him a hard, loving lesson about himself that he would never forget.
Clean vengeance was one thing, but a deliberate act of naked injustice was just something he couldn’t make himself commit.
“Sign the papers, Dad,” he muttered unhappily.
“Spoken like a man, Bob,” Dad said, gathering up Franja’s admission papers. He turned his gaze on Mom for a long silent moment. “Spoken like a real American.”
Never before had losing felt like having won.
Sonya sat there marveling at her husband as Jerry signed the papers. After what had been done to him today, he was still able to see his way through to the fair thing and make Robert show it to himself in the bargain!
During the last few years of travail and conflict and career stagnation, she had in her darker moments seen Jerry as a lead anchor, whom she had somehow had to marry to get transferred to Paris.
But moments like this reminded her that she really had married Jerry Reed because she loved him, for they reminded her of why. This was the Jerry Reed who had left his country for love and a dream. This was the Jerry Reed who had kept his faith all these long years of bitter disappointment.
And understanding that anew, she also knew that Emile Lourade was indeed Jerry’s friend, that in a sense he had understood Jerry better than she had lately. He might be too much of a bureaucratic infighter to make a futile gesture that would endanger his position, but he had given Jerry the only thing he could, the chance, at whatever cost to his pride, to work on the dream of his lifetime.
And knew too that she could never report tonight’s conversation to Ilya Pashikov, though she couldn’t quite fully understand why. Did she really care that much about betraying Lourade, when all it would do was change some figures in a treaty by a few percentage points? Because it would be a betrayal of Jerry even though it did him no harm?
Or was it for the same reason that Jerry had put the decision to sign Franja’s papers in Robert’s hands? The same reason that made Robert tell him to sign them? She was sure that was true.
But she couldn’t quite put her finger on what that reason was.
Nevertheless, she knew she had to act on it anyway, even though it was going to make trouble with Pashikov and put her even further out of favor with the Moscow Mandarins.
Sometimes even a professional bureaucrat had to follow her own heart.
Franja couldn’t help herself from stealing a glance at Bobby while Father was signing all the forms. No, he didn’t look any different. He was still wearing that idiotic jacket, and a halo had not magically appeared in the air over his head.
She couldn’t for the life of her see what he had hoped to gain by doing what he had done. She found it hard to believe that he had done it out of a suddenly developed sense of brotherly love.
That left only one other possibility that she could think of, no matter how improbable it seemed. He had done it because even Bobby knew damn well that it was the right thing to do.
Was it possible? Was Bobby really capable of violating his own petty self-interest to do the right thing like a true Socialist Idealist?
She glanced at him again. Well, yes, all the right features were in all the right places, she had to admit that they were members of the same species, members of the same family, when you came down to it.
Maybe her little brother was a human being after all.
Jerry Reed put the pen back in its holder and slid the papers back across the table to Franja. “Now it’s Bob’s turn to have his college plans finally decided,” he said, looking at Sonya, on whose face he was surprised to see a radiant smile of a sort she hadn’t turned on him in years. “He’s certainly earned the right to go to America as far as I’m concerned.”
Sonya’s smile turned to a hectoring frown. “It’s not that I’m not very proud of Robert for what he’s just done, and it’s not that I have any intention of denying him a right to choose,” she insisted. “If he doesn’t want to go to the Sorbonne, he can go to any university in Common Europe that will admit him, and if he wants to study in English, there are much better schools in Britain than anything in the United States.”
“Britain!” Bob cried. “Everyone there talks like they’ve got a pencil up their nose! And they play cricket instead of baseball!”
“I wasn’t aware that you were planning to major in baseball, Robert,” Sonya said dryly.
“You know damn well that I’m gonna major in history, Mom!”
“And the British are very good indeed at teaching that. And no place is better than the Sorbonne.”
“American history, not a bunch of crap about dead kings and who conquered what when!”
“I simply cannot agree to let my own son receive an education in a country where the history presently being made is which Latin American country needs to be invaded next! You can’t seriously expect to learn anything about history in a country that won’t even remember history long enough to pay its own debts.”
“Very funny, Mom.”
“I’m serious, Robert. You can’t get a decent education in an atmosphere like that, and what’s more, it may be dangerous. There’s quite literally no way of predicting what the madmen in Washington might get it into their heads to do next.”
“What do you think is really going to happen to me in America, Mom? Am I gonna be drafted into the Army or lynched by rednecks or eaten by alligators in the swamp? You really think I’m going to be in physical danger?”
“No, but—”
“Brainwashed by the CIA? Turned into a Republican?”
“He’s got a point,” Jerry said. “What are you afraid of? The only reason you’ve given for not letting Bob go to college in America is because you don’t like its politics!”
“No rational person likes its politics!” Sonya snapped back at him. “Do you?”
“Screw politics!” Jerry told her angrily. “I didn’t let politics stop me from signing Franja’s papers to go to school in goddamn Russia, did I? And Bob didn’t let politics stop him from doing what was right.”
Jerry stared into his wife’s eyes and wondered who was looking back now. The Russian? The career bureaucrat? The girl who had called herself Samantha Garry on a wild tour of Paris all those years ago? All of them? What was she seeing now? The man she loved? A failure? An American who wanted to turn her son into one of them?
“You know why Bob and I did that, Sonya?” he said. “Because it was the right thing to do. The fair thing. The American thing to do. Being an American used to mean that too, Sonya. Maybe to some people it still does. Maybe some of that’s still alive over there. . . .”
“And if it isn’t?”
“Then I have a right to find that out for myself, don’t I?” Bobby said.
“What about a little of the famous romantic Russian spirit, Sonya?” Jerry said. “What about a little of the socialist justice they’re supposed to have these days in Moscow? Or are we Americans the only ones who know anything about it?”
“Now who’s playing cheap chauvinist politics, Jerry Reed!”
Franja had tried to disappear into the meal before her as Father and Mother argued over Bobby’s fate, but the congealed mess on her plate did not exactly invite careful attention, and what was being done to Bobby made it hard for her to just sit there in the glow of victory.
It just wasn’t right. Having just won her own freedom of choice, she could not avoid knowing all too keenly how she would have felt if Father had refused to sign those admission papers, meaning that whether she liked it or not, she could not avoid knowing precisely how Bobby felt now.
Against her will, despite her better judgment, and to the further erosion of her appetite, Franja found herself taking the side of her brother inside her own head.
Bobby, after all, had just been her ally for the first time in his life. And now it was costing him.
It just wasn’t fair.
Maybe all that stuff about being a real American was jingoistic blather, but Bobby had believed it, and believing it had actually made him act like a real brother for the first time.
Maybe such a thing as an American concept of virtue was actually possible. Maybe it really wasn’t that much different from the concept of socialist morality, from the idea that the community existed to promote the welfare of the people through the bonds of fraternal solidarity among its individuals as a family of equals.
And if that were so, socialist morality, honor, and simple human decency, which was what this was really all about, demanded that she stand up for justice for her brother now.
After all, she told herself unconvincingly, you’ll forever be in the little monster’s debt if you don’t, and that would really be unbearable.
“Father’s right, Mother,” she found herself saying. “You’re wrong. Bobby has a right to live his own life too. And you have no right to stop him.”
Sonya gaped at her daughter in astonishment. “Et tu, Franja?” she cried.
Franja stared straight into her eyes, and in that moment, she somehow seemed more like a sister to Sonya than a daughter, an adult equal in every sense of the term.
“Aren’t you the one who taught me that a society only thrives when its citizens are free to follow their own hearts?” that adult equal told her firmly. “Where’s our Russian Spring if we act like unreconstructed old Stalinists with our own family? Doesn’t socialist morality begin at home?”
Sonya looked away from this new Franja, looked at Jerry, who was smiling like the doubly proud father now. She looked at Bobby, who had manfully sacrificed his own pragmatic advantage to do what was right for the sister he had seemed to despise, Bobby, who was looking at that sister now with a new respect, with as much love for her as he was capable of.
Finally, she looked back at Franja, at this daughter who presumed to lecture her on socialist morality.
And she saw that the same spirit united the three of them in a way that it never had before.
She felt proud. She felt defeated. She felt ashamed. She felt very much on the outside looking in. Her mind could not be changed, but in the end her heart could only be melted.
She sighed, she shrugged her shoulders, once, twice. “I still think we are making a terrible mistake,” she finally said. “But clearly I have been outvoted. So I guess I really do have to accede to the will of the majority, don’t I? Because I have no right to do anything else. Merely the power. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, Sonya,” Jerry said softly. “That’s what it’s all about.”
“Well then you have my permission, Robert,” Sonya sighed. “It’s not so easy to admit that your child has a right to a will of his own. Do you understand that, Robert? Do you understand how I feel?”
Bobby looked back at her and smiled a tender little rueful smile. “Yeah, Mom,” he said, “I do believe I do. I think we all do.”
There was a long moment of silence, but there was nothing awkward about it; Sonya felt it as a moment of grace, a moment of completion, a moment of familial unity she had never quite experienced the like of before, a moment so tender as to be almost embarrassing.
Sonya came blinking out of it looking at what was on the dinner table before them and found herself surveying a loathsome uneaten mess of congealed pasta covered with thoroughly decomposed crème fraîche sauce and forlorn bits of cold, tough meat.
“We are going to poubelle this stuff and go down to Le Magnifique,” she declared. “It may not be exactly the best brasserie in Pigalle, but even they can do better than this. And this decision, at least, will not be subject to a majority vote of the Supreme Soviet!”