Free Russian Spring by Norman Spinrad

passed as quickly as clouds across the Spanish sun, as quickly as the sidewalks of St.-Germain refilled after a summer cloudburst, as quickly as the TGV sped through the banlieue and outskirts and showed her a quick vision of central Paris in the hazy distance beyond the ticky-tacky before plunging into the underground approach to the Gare du Nord.
    From this distance, Paris was a picture-postcard diorama, reminiscent, in a way, of the view of central Moscow she had once seen through the window of Vitaly Kuryakin’s office in the Red Star Tower.
    There she had looked down from on high on the red-brick battlements, cathedral, and gardens of the Kremlin compound, the gaily colored domes of St. Basil’s, the broad main avenues converging on Red Square, and across the sweeping blue curve of the river meandering through its city not unlike the Seine, knowing all too well that Moscow looked much better from this perspective than from down there in the quotidian streets of the real city, where life was all too prosaic and familiar and hardly a romantic fantasy even in the melting snows of the Russian Spring.
    But here, however, she was left with the image of the Paris skyline floating like a shimmering mirage above her as the train descended into the darkness of the tunnel, the white dome of Sacré-Coeur, the lacy Victoriana of the Eiffel Tower, the monolithic Tour Montparnasse, shining distantly in the sunlight like the fairy castles of the Magic Kingdom, and, like the signature skyline of the Disneylands and quite unlike the view from the Red Star Tower, promising carnival and magic in its enchanted streets.
    Oh yes, of all the cities Sonya Ivanovna had frolicked in in her year in Europe, Paris was the best of all, and not just because she spoke the language, for neither London nor Geneva nor Brussels nor even Nice so lifted her spirit as the City of Light.
    It was the greatest cliché of every tourist guidebook in the world, but nevertheless it was true. It was not just the sidewalk cafés and the gardens and the wonderful promenades along the Seine and the restaurants and the clubs and the museums, and certainly not the climate (which was quite inferior to Madrid or Athens or Rome), nor even the enticing food aromas everywhere.
    It was the Métro honeycombing the city with instant access toeverywhere and the oceans of wine and the intimate scale of things—the neighborhood market, the brasserie on the corner, the shops ringing every little square, and the way the streets were filled into the wee hours of the night, and the madhouse street fair surrounding the Beaubourg and the tawdry grandeur of the Boule Mich, the sheer compression of a city constructed on such a human scale, a city seemingly designed on the one hand completely for pleasure and on the other hand, bustling with the electric energy of Common Europe’s wheeling and dealing economic metropole.
    Paris made Moscow seem like Siberia, Vienna seem like a museum piece, London seem gray and glowering, Geneva like an old folks’ home, and Brussels like, well, as the French would say, like
Belgium
.
    By the time the train slid out of the underground darkness and into the cavernous grimy vastness of the Gare du Nord—noise, and bustle, and huffing passengers lugging baggage, and polyglot babble, and the mingled aromas of ozone, greasy fried merguez, dark tobacco smoke, petrol, and travel-sweat—Sonya’s atavistic moment of nostalgic Slavic melancholia had vanished back into the cold eastern steppes of memory from whence it came.
    It was summer, it was party time, it was two weeks of freedom to do with as she willed. She was young, the sun was shining, and it was Paris, and never could the little girl who had sat before the TV in a two-room flat in grim old Lenino, longing to dance down Main Street in the new French Disneyland with Mickey and Donald, have truly believed that one day this moment really
would
arrive, nor wished for anything