Night of the New Russian, Page 2

window.

  "A minute ago you wanted to run for Parliament," said Tanya dryly.

  "But the United States! America! Think what it means!"

  "You're jet-lagged," said Tanya. She placed her papers on the sofa and smoothed her skirt. "I'm going in the bath." She had her sights set on a district judge's post. Land boundary disputes and quarrels over goat-grazing rights were no longer enough. She was thirty-seven and ambitious, but her ambitions were to sit in judgement over her compatriots, not to scratch around doing God only knew what, probably legal translation, in a foreign country.

  "Wait," said Sergey. "America's not the Great Satan these days, you know. It's not the Evil Empire, full of capitalist exploiters. It's a land of opportunities."

  "I never said it was an evil empire," Tanya said. "I never said it was full of capitalist exploiters." She placed her spectacles carefully on the coffee table. "You did."

  "When?"

  "When you were a Pioneer."

  "Oh, God." Sergey swished the golden liquid around the diamond-cut tumbler. "That was twenty-five years ago. I was Misha's age. We all said it then."

  "I've know you a long time, Serioshka," said Tanya coolly. "I'll call you when I want my back washing."

  Of course he'd said. Of course he'd believed it in 1973. The world had been different. "The world was different!" he shouted after her.

  "Sure," came the mocking voice. "Nixon was enslaving the youth of America."

  Bitch. Sergey's own words, written in his high school journal in '73. Pieces of his past came floating back through the foggy ruins of Time - an exhortation he had given in 1979 to the boys at his old school to go to Afghanistan to make their mothers proud - he himself was reading Economics at Moscow State University - his application to join the Communist Party and his burning ambition to become an apparatchik, a bureaucrat in, ironically, the Tax Office, his inflammatory Slavophile articles in Pravda and other papers condemning the British assault against Argentina and gloating over the massive increase in unemployment presided over by Thatcher, and the denunciation to the KGB of an economics lecturer who had argued that nuclear disarmament was the only way to release capital for the re-ignition of the stagnant Soviet economy. Sergey had experienced a momentary guilt as the KGB had escorted the lecturer away to the Lubyanka Prison but that guilt had melted like snow on a boiler upon the presentation of his Party badge and an invitation to lunch with the Head of the Economic Planning Department at the Central Bank of the Soviet Union.

  At twenty-four, Sergey Petrovich Priapin, journalist, economist, assiduous Party worker, had a golden future. Then, Gorbachev. Perestroika. Glasnost. The slow, painful destruction of Sergey Priapin conducted by a senior party official and a KGB investigator. Another chunk of Sergey's past emerged from the mists, a slight, willowy figure called Ilya Davidovich, the 14 year old son of a bread factory worker, whose lightness of body had borne no resemblance to the burden of guilt Sergey still bore.

  "Anyone'd think I'd killed him," Sergey had growled at his interrogators.

  "It would have been kinder," the KGB answered.

  Sergey willed the image of Ilya Davidovich into the shadows. "Little bastard," he snarled.

  "Serioshka!" Tanya was calling. "Serioshka!"

  Wash your own damn back, he thought. Maybe you'll slip and drown and I'll be rid of you at last.

  Once they had almost been close, Tanya and Sergey, almost in love, just after Misha's birth, but twelve years of marriage and two children had driven them increasingly apart. They had married shortly after Sergey had left the Communist Party. Tanya had been pregnant with Misha. They had lived in Moscow for four years, had Aleksandr, moved to Volgograd two years later when Sergey left the bank for the board of the TV company. They had been happy for a time, watching the children grow up, taking them to the zoo and the circus, building their home, building their lives together as a family. Tanya, Tatiana Maximova, had been beautiful, cool, poised, with a penetrating intellect, but now the looks were fading, the hips expanding, the breasts sagging, the lines deepening, the mouth hardening, the eyes hardening, the heart hardening. Sergey found himself craving the firmness, the lean youthful willowiness, the boyish grin that had first drawn him to her. But these things too were lost in the mist. He couldn't remember the last time he'd found her attractive. Privately, her colleagues called her the Ice Maiden. He'd laughed when they'd told him.

  He placed the golden whisky on the table next to Tanya's notes for the public prosecutor and went to check on the boys. They were both in bed. Misha lay in the top bunk. He was staring at the ceiling, his hands behind his head. Sasha was in the bottom bed reading a Tom and Jerry comic.

  "What are you doing, Mish'?"

  "Thinking." The boy was so detached for twelve years old. Everyone noticed it, especially Tanya's parents. Cool, reflective, like his mother, cold and brusque like his father. He'd inherited her icy blood and his frozen heart.

  "The lines in the ceiling look like cracks in ice," Misha remarked. "Look."

  Sergey peered at the white plaster. There should be no cracks at all. The decorator had charged them a small fortune. "I don't think so, Misha."

  "Come up here and see." Misha shifted sideways under the racing car duvet to make room for his father. Sergey swung himself up onto the top bunk and lay beside his son. He was very conscious of the boy's warmth, his gentle breathing, the smell of toothpaste.

  "It looks like snow, doesn't it?" Misha said dreamily, "The snow on the river."

  Sergey glanced at his son's honey-blond head, then back at the ceiling. "I still can't see any cracks," he said.

  "Ice, Dad. Think 'ICE', then look. You'll see it in your mind." Misha's blue eyes were far away.

  Sergey focussed his thoughts, and failed. He twisted on to his side, careful not to screw up his Armani trousers, and looked at Misha's serious, doleful expression.

  "You know ..." He faltered. "I love you, Mikhail." On impulse he went to kiss his son's face.

  "Dad..." Misha squirmed aside. "Don't."

  Sergey felt a pang of disappointment. On a second impulse, he announced "We're going to America."

  "America?" Sasha's childish treble thrilled with excitement. "When?"

  "Soon."

  "Why?"

  "Because in America," He swung himself down from Misha's bed. "You can be free. You can be yourself. You can be whatever you want to be." He peered at Sasha's owlish features. "And that's what freedom is."

  "Klassna!" yelled Sasha. "America! Will I meet Mickey Mouse?"

  "Mickey Mouse doesn't exist, stupid," said Misha. "He's just a picture."

  "Does exist, stupid," Sasha returned. "I've seen him walking about on the TV."

  "It's a man in a suit, stupid."

  "It's not."

  "Is too."

  "Papa, tell him!"

  "Mickey Mouse exists," Sergey said ponderously. "If your imagination wants him to. Like your cracks in the icefield."

  Just then Tanya came into the boys' bedroom, her hair buried in a large white towel, her white and gold kimono hanging open to reveal her cleavage. Sergey shuddered. Not in front of the boys, he thought.

  "Mama!" cried Sasha. "Papa says we're going to America!"

  "I hate to pour cold water on your excitement, dear." Tanya was cold and frosty. "Papa's talking nonsense." She shot him an icy glare. "He often does, you know. He talks and talks but never actually does anything."

  "Dad says that in America you can be free," said Misha.

  Tanya turned her cold blue eyes on her husband. "You, Serioshka, will never be free, wherever you go."

  Sergey's heart froze.

  "Goodnight, boys." Tanya switched off the light.

 
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