Read Online Russian Spring by Norman Spinrad - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Norman Spinrad
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senseless like honest drunken peasants!”
And so they did.
Under the circumstances, it seemed the only thing to do. They screwed and screwed and screwed without either of them coming until they passed out in each other’s arms. And when Sonya awoke in the morning with an awful headache and a sour taste in her mouth, she knew it was over.
Three weeks later, she found herself at the Crimean seaside, swimming in the Black Sea before breakfast, studying “information technology” until five, another swim before dinner, and more often than not uncomplicated sex on the beach afterward with someone she knew she would never see again.
It was a perfect transition. The weather was balmy, the food was good, the alfresco sex was bracing and athletically unemotional, and the studies not at all taxing when compared to what she had longbeen used to in the university, consisting mainly of familiarization with computer hardware and software, with a perfunctory pass at actual programming.
Three weeks after that, there she was living her new life in Brussels, with a studio apartment all her own that might not be much by local standards but which seemed immense compared to her room in her parents’ flat in Lenino.
True, her job as “translator” had proven to be mostly deadly tedium, as day after day she sat there before a screen and keyboard in a big boiler room with ten other “translators,” rewriting agrammatical AI babble into decent English and French, enlivened only by the occasional random humor emerging from the translation software.
True too that she was endlessly fending off the drippy advances of her supervisor, Grigori Pankov, a timid old goat who
would
take no for an answer, but who doggedly insisted on submitting himself to the humiliation of her coy rejections on a regular basis just the same.
But there was no homework, no mandatory Komsomol meetings, no worries about black marks on her kharakteristika, no parents. For the first time in her life, Sonya’s nonworking hours were entirely her own.
Brussels was not exactly London or Paris or even Amsterdam, but by plane or even cheaper high-speed trains, it was a weekend jaunt from everywhere that was anywhere, which was to say that she was indeed in
Europe
, and it was spread out before her, and it was everything she had dreamed of and more as she tripped the weekend life fantastic.
She learned to ski in Zermatt and water-ski in Nice. She gambled in Monaco and went to an actual orgy in Berlin. She partied in Paris and went to the theater in London and got disgusted at the Oktoberfest in Munich and went to the races at Le Mans and the bullfights in Madrid and smoked hashish on a canal boat in Amsterdam and drank retsina in the Plaka in Athens, and, yes, even went to Disneyland, and contrived to do most of it at someone else’s willing expense.
For she was young and attractive and openheartedly eager to give herself freely to simpàtico companions in fun and adventure, and she was a member in good standing of the Red Menace, the tide of liberated young Eurorussians like herself rolling through Common Europe, an innocent sort of wild bunch who hadn’t gotten to party like this for a hundred years and were determined, in their wide-eyed and charming enthusiasm, to make up for it at once. Her major ambition in life, a common obsession of both Red Menace sexes, was to collect lovers of every European nationality as she had once collected stamps, and there were girls at the office who actually stuck pushpins in a map.
Only at rare moments like this, alone in a train or a plane in a hiatus of transition, with too much time to think, and a random resemblance of a face across the aisle, or an overheard snatch of political passion in Russian, or the taste of Bordeaux wine in her solitary mouth calling up an old memory of Yuli Markovsky, of the road not taken, of the way they had parted, did she give any thought to the possibility of any morning after.
But those shadows
And so they did.
Under the circumstances, it seemed the only thing to do. They screwed and screwed and screwed without either of them coming until they passed out in each other’s arms. And when Sonya awoke in the morning with an awful headache and a sour taste in her mouth, she knew it was over.
Three weeks later, she found herself at the Crimean seaside, swimming in the Black Sea before breakfast, studying “information technology” until five, another swim before dinner, and more often than not uncomplicated sex on the beach afterward with someone she knew she would never see again.
It was a perfect transition. The weather was balmy, the food was good, the alfresco sex was bracing and athletically unemotional, and the studies not at all taxing when compared to what she had longbeen used to in the university, consisting mainly of familiarization with computer hardware and software, with a perfunctory pass at actual programming.
Three weeks after that, there she was living her new life in Brussels, with a studio apartment all her own that might not be much by local standards but which seemed immense compared to her room in her parents’ flat in Lenino.
True, her job as “translator” had proven to be mostly deadly tedium, as day after day she sat there before a screen and keyboard in a big boiler room with ten other “translators,” rewriting agrammatical AI babble into decent English and French, enlivened only by the occasional random humor emerging from the translation software.
True too that she was endlessly fending off the drippy advances of her supervisor, Grigori Pankov, a timid old goat who
would
take no for an answer, but who doggedly insisted on submitting himself to the humiliation of her coy rejections on a regular basis just the same.
But there was no homework, no mandatory Komsomol meetings, no worries about black marks on her kharakteristika, no parents. For the first time in her life, Sonya’s nonworking hours were entirely her own.
Brussels was not exactly London or Paris or even Amsterdam, but by plane or even cheaper high-speed trains, it was a weekend jaunt from everywhere that was anywhere, which was to say that she was indeed in
Europe
, and it was spread out before her, and it was everything she had dreamed of and more as she tripped the weekend life fantastic.
She learned to ski in Zermatt and water-ski in Nice. She gambled in Monaco and went to an actual orgy in Berlin. She partied in Paris and went to the theater in London and got disgusted at the Oktoberfest in Munich and went to the races at Le Mans and the bullfights in Madrid and smoked hashish on a canal boat in Amsterdam and drank retsina in the Plaka in Athens, and, yes, even went to Disneyland, and contrived to do most of it at someone else’s willing expense.
For she was young and attractive and openheartedly eager to give herself freely to simpàtico companions in fun and adventure, and she was a member in good standing of the Red Menace, the tide of liberated young Eurorussians like herself rolling through Common Europe, an innocent sort of wild bunch who hadn’t gotten to party like this for a hundred years and were determined, in their wide-eyed and charming enthusiasm, to make up for it at once. Her major ambition in life, a common obsession of both Red Menace sexes, was to collect lovers of every European nationality as she had once collected stamps, and there were girls at the office who actually stuck pushpins in a map.
Only at rare moments like this, alone in a train or a plane in a hiatus of transition, with too much time to think, and a random resemblance of a face across the aisle, or an overheard snatch of political passion in Russian, or the taste of Bordeaux wine in her solitary mouth calling up an old memory of Yuli Markovsky, of the road not taken, of the way they had parted, did she give any thought to the possibility of any morning after.
But those shadows
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