“Hmp.”
“They were never active in Indian affairs and neither was I. If it weren’t for my grandfather I’d be more white than you are. He taught me to understand my heritage, to accept it without hating anybody.”
“But Malater, she hates me.”
“Not you, Mikhail. She hates the idea of Russians. She doesn’t see you as an individual. In her eyes you’re part of an inhuman system that hanged her grandfather and forced her grandmother to run away from her native land.”
Vosnesensky muttered, “That is not much help.”
“Just like people who don’t see individuals among the Indians, or even tribes,” Jamie went on. “There’s a lot of whites who still see ‘the Indian’ instead of individual men and women. They don’t understand that some people want to live in their own way and don’t want to become white.”
“And you? How do you want to live?”
Jamie no longer had to think it over. “I’m the descendant of Indians. My skin is darker than yours. But if you take our brains out of our skulls, Mikhail, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between them. That’s where we really live. In our minds. We were born on opposite sides of the world and yet here we are together on a totally other planet. That’s what’s important. Not what our ancestors did to one another. What we’re doing now. That’s the important thing.”
Vosnesensky nodded somberly. “Now you must give that little speech to Malater.”
Jamie nodded soberly. “Okay. Maybe I will.”
“It won’t do any good.”
“Probably not,” Jamie agreed. “But there’s no harm trying.”
“Perhaps.”
A new thought struck Jamie. “Mikhail-is that why you decided to come out on this traverse with me, instead of letting Pete do it? Just to get away from Ilona?”
“Nonsense!” spat the Russian with a vehemence that convinced Jamie he had hit on the truth. Ilona’s hurting him, Jamie realized. She’s really hurting the poor guy.
DOSSIER: M. A. VOSNESENSKY
“Why can’t you be reasonable, like your brother?”
Mikhail Andreivitch had heard that cry from his father all his life, it seemed. Nikolai was the older of the two boys, the paragon of the family. He studied hard at school and won excellent marks. He was quiet; his favorite pastime was reading books. His friends were few, but they were as studious and well mannered as Nikolai himself.
Mikhail, the second son (there was a younger daughter), sailed through school hardly even glancing at his textbooks. Somehow he got good grades; not quite as good as his older brother’s, of course, but good enough to send him to the engineering college. Instead of studying, Mikhail listened to music, imported American rock mostly. The noise drove his father wild. Mikhail had lots of friends, girls as well as boys, and they all liked to listen to loud rock music and dress in blue jeans and leather jackets like bikers.
And he gambled. “The curse of the Russians,” his father called it. His mother wept. Mikhail played cards with his friends and, sometimes, with older men who dressed well and had faces of stone. His parents feared the worst for him.
“You’re turning your mother gray!” his father shouted when Mikhail announced he was going to buy a motorbike. He had worked for two years in secret, spending his afternoons in a garage helping the mechanic instead of attending classes. Somehow he had still managed to pass his examinations at school. Even so, two years’ wages were not enough to buy the handsome machine he coveted. Mikhail had risked every ruble on a card game, vowing that if he won he would never gamble again. He won, mainly because he had been willing to take greater risks and had more money to put up than the other gamblers that night.
True to his self-imposed discipline, he never gambled again. He bought the bike over his father’s objections and his mother’s flowing tears. It did not matter to them that Mikhail could now drive from their apartment to his college classes without spending two hours a day on city buses. They only saw him zooming along the streets of Volgograd with pretty young girls shamelessly showing their legs as they rode behind Mikhail, clutching him tightly.