Mother Russia by Robert Littell

neatly buttoned to the neck, his collar turned down.
    “Ice cream, mama,” the fifty-year-old man whines, tugging at his mother’s hand.
    “Dear Madam, it is twenty minutes past seven in Greenwich, England, and twelve minutes past eleven here in Moscow,” Pravdin informs her.
    “But how is that possible?” the woman demands.
    “What I see is what I know,” Pravdin snaps, hurtles, head angled like a bull’s, on down Gorky. At the AU-Union Institute for Household Technology, a heavy-set woman sips mint-flavored milk and listens, her features sagging in apathy, to the Q-Tip spiel.
    “The Q-Tip is an idea whose time has come,” Pravdin argues passionately. “Before you can build communism you must construct socialism. Before socialism, an advanced industrial society. And whoever heard of an advanced industrial society without Q-Tips!”
    The woman fingers the Q-Tip as if it has sexual possibilities, shakes her head regretfully, says nothing can be donewithout careful examination of the medical implications by the Department of Medicine at Moscow University.
    So that the morning isn’t a total loss Pravdin delivers a diamond-tipped Shure cartridge and two Beatle records to a disc jockey at the radio station, a set of National Geographies to the wife of a member of the Supreme Soviet, a year’s supply of West German birth control pills to a famous folk singer, then takes the Metro back to the Kremlin and walks over to the Hotel Moskva where he presents himself at a luncheon honoring the author of a new book that explores the possibilities of time travel.
    “Pravdin, R. I.,” he announces to the near-sighted spinster editor fanning herself with the guest list, “at your beck and call.” Leaning closer he tells her:
    “Absolutely no autographs—except for you, elegant lady.” He uncaps his felt-tipped pen and scrawls across her guest list, “To my dear friend—” He looks up questioningly.
    “Natalia,” the spinster replies. “Natalia Mikhaylova.”
    “—Natalia Mikhaylova, the mere glimpse of whose lascivious eyes and luscious body have permanently wrecked my hormonal balance.” With a flourish he signs, “Robespierre Isayevich Pravdin.”
    Flashing his crooked smile, Pravdin bows from the waist and brushes past the stunned woman into the luncheon hall.
    Friedemann T. stands with his back to a mural depicting prosperous peasants during a bountiful harvest, a glass of slivovitz in one hand, a wedge of cold quiche in the other, nodding noncommittally to a bald man with bad breath. The bald man retreats as Pravdin approaches.
    “What are we here?” Friedemann T. whispers desperately.
    “What we are here is time travel,” Pravdin informs him.
    Friedemann T.’s features relax. “Time travel.” He ponders this for a moment. “That’s a new one.” He rocks on theballs of his feet, shrugs his cape back onto his shoulders, raises his voice. “Frankly, I’m skeptical. If time travel is possible, why haven’t we been visited by people from the future?”
    Pravdin deftly snags a sandwich from a passing tray. “Maybe there is no future,” he ventures. “Maybe we are the point of time.”
    “Statistically unlikely,” Friedemann T. dismisses the suggestion.
    “Someone has to be the point of time,” Pravdin insists.
    “Even that’s not clear,” says Friedemann T. “The trouble with you is you’re a prisoner of logic. Why should every event have a cause, and why should every cause precede its effect? How do we know that the atom doesn’t consist of the radiations that it gives off? Where is it ordained that a window can’t break before the ball is thrown at it?”
    Pravdin thinks about this for a moment. “What tortures me,” he says—he waves across the room to nobody in particular—“is: if I travel back in time I may disrupt events so that they create a future that doesn’t contain me, so I don’t exist to travel back in time.”
    Friedemann T. laughs at a thought.
    “What’s