Russian Spring by Norman Spinrad Read Free Book Online Page B

cognac that was the best he could afford, and become the other Yuli, the one who had grown up as the son of a steelworker in Sverdlovsk, who had fought his way to the center, and who was determined never to be relegated to the periphery again.
    “From me according to my enormous ability to fulfill our national destiny,” Yuli would declare. “To me according to my equally enormous need for a Black Sea dacha and a whole floor on Tverskaya Street and a helicopter and a chauffeured Mercedes-Benz!”
    “What a perfect hypocrite!”
    “No one is perfect,” Yuli would say, rolling over onto her, “but admittedly, I do try.”
    And he certainly did, in bed and in the classroom and in the Komsomol, and in what went on at the right school parties, where Eurorussian-minded professors and outside intellectuals mingled with the favored students. And he took Sonya with him. By their final year they were considered “little Pioneers,” who would become “Komsomolya” when they got engaged upon graduation and eventually take the nuptial vows of “full Party membership.”
    While Sonya was not yet quite ready in her own heart to tie her fortunes to any man before she had even tasted the unknown worlds of Europe, she went along with this illusion, for despite all the enlightened socialist feminism in intellectual circles these days, this was still Russia, where the power of the patriarchy was bred in the bones, and where the paternal regard for the favorite son of same could be easily enough spread to his future choice of wife.
    Sonya had the grades to get into the foreign service academy, even if they weren’t quite up to Yuli’s, and her kharakteristika was exemplary if unexceptional, but when push came to shove, and especially for a woman, it paid to be an adopted favorite daughter of the Eurorussian intellectuals who were trying to clean out the foreign service bureaucracy from the bottom on up by installing a like-minded new generation, even if it was by putative marriage. And indeed both she and Yuli were formally admitted a few weeks before graduation.
    Sonya was content, if, strangely enough, not quite ecstatic. She was three steps away from achieving the life’s ambition of the little girl who had so wished to go to the French Disneyland. Two more years of schooling to gain entry into the foreign service, a year or two at a desk in Moscow, a first posting to some nikulturni disaster area like Bangladesh or Mali, and with any luck, she’d get a chance to serve in Common Europe before she was thirty.
    This was the scenario she had been following all along, but what she had not counted on was Yuli Markovsky’s place in it. It was not so much that she resented entering the foreign service academy with the aid of his connections, but that she now found herself tied to a man, as she had found herself in the Pioneers and the Komsomol, without having the chance to make the choice of allegiance, as a result, somehow, of the collective will of others.
    And that suddenly began to rankle a bit for the first time.
    It wasn’t so much that she didn’t love Yuli as that somehow she had been robbed by pragmatic circumstances of ever really being able to tell whether she loved Yuli or not. On the one hand, it was hard to really love him because loving him was clearly so expedient, and yet on the other hand, perhaps that was the only thing that actuallykept her from loving him, in which case she was being a perfect idiot not to love him. . . .
    And so forth, until the thought finally occurred to her that once they were both in the foreign service academy, things would have a chance to sort themselves out naturally, even if they did become engaged Komsomolya as she knew Yuli wanted.
    Because, after all, she would have two years to decide whether she really wanted to be the wife of Yuli Markovsky, and when she did, the choice would be that of the heart alone.
    As it turned out, she was quite wrong.
    Two weeks before graduation, she