Read Online Russian Spring by Norman Spinrad - Free Book Online

afford to wait around while one of them decides what to do.”
    He smiled, he shrugged. “Or think of it as a test,” he said. “We’re socialist entrepreneurs here at Red Star, we deal with high-speed capitalist jet-setting wheelers and dealers, and we have to be able to wheel and deal just a little faster than they do. We deal in options and currency-rate fluctuations and the electronic economy, where if you stop to think too long you’ve already blown it. We don’t want the kind of obsolete Russian who thinks slowly and carefully and paranoically, as if the KGB is watching every moment. We want the
new
Russian, Sonya Ivanovna, the Eurorussian—worldly-wise, decisive, instinctive, even a little impulsive.”
    He stood up and peered down at her with the big window at his back looking down on the Kremlin and Red Square and the river and southern Moscow beyond, all small and unreal from this vantage in the cloud-dappled bright sunshine, like a diorama of a toy city illumined by spotlights from above in a children’s palace.
    “Yes or no,” Kuryakin said. “Brussels or the foreign service academy? The New Europe or the old Russia? Rubles or valuta?” He laughed. “If you find
that
a difficult decision to make, you’re certainly not for us!”
    Put that way, what
could
Sonya say? It wasn’t as if she was so in love with Yuli that she really wanted to spend the rest of her life as his wife, she had never been sure she loved him, and if she couldn’t be sure, it must mean she really didn’t, and if she didn’t really love Yuli enough to throw away the instant fulfillment of the dream of her lifetime for him, then what other reason was there for stupidly turning down such a golden opportunity?
    “You have a point, Comrade Kuryakin,” she said, “and you have hired yourself a translator for Brussels, and you still have time to visit the toilet.”
    And in the end, it was as easy as all that after all.
    Though telling Yuli was another matter.
    Sonya’s stomach tightened as the memory of that night rose up unbidden, and she took a quick swallow of Côtes-du-Rhône, and tried to concentrate on the countryside whipping past the train window.
    But the TGV was slicing through the awful, banlieue housing blocks northeast of Paris now, huge monolithic towers of workers’ apartments all too reminiscent of the arrondissement she had grown up in, in Lenino, and there was nothing quaint about that, only another reminder of the past, and even the taste of Bordeaux wine in her mouth seemed to conspire against her, for, she suddenly remembered, she had brought two bottles of château-bottled Médoc to his room and insisted they polish off the first one before she told Yuli the reason for this unprecedented extravagance.
    When she had finally had wine enough to blurt it all out, Yuli carefully placed his wineglass on the floor and just sat there across the bed, staring at her in immobile stony silence.
    “Well, aren’t you going to say something?” Sonya demanded.
    “What would you have me say?” Yuli said woodenly.
    “That you hate me? That I’m a coldhearted self-centered careerist bitch?”
    Yuli managed a little laugh. “I’ve always said I’m not a
perfect
hypocrite,” he said, breaking her heart with his gallantry. “Which I would be if I pretended that
I
would give up my life’s ambition for
you
.”
    “True,” Sonya said, strangely enough loving him more in that moment of cynical admission than she ever had before.
    “And of course, this always has been your real life’s ambition, Sonya, hasn’t it?” he said in a harder voice. “Life in the West witha nice supply of valuta, that’s always been enough for you. Everything else, your studies, the foreign service, has always just been a means to that end. . . .”
    “Not you, Yuli,” Sonya moaned miserably.
    And his expression softened again just as suddenly. “Of course not, Sonya,” he said, touching a hand to her cheek. “In some ways, we