“You don’t want to marry a cripple.”

“No,” she said. “But I want to marry you. And I will.”

His tone became bitter. “You can’t marry a man with no below-the-waist functions.”

“Listen to me,” she said fiercely. “Three months ago I didn’t know what love was. I’ve only just found you, and I’m not going to lose you. We’ve escaped, we’ve survived, and we’re going to live. We’ll get married, we’ll teach school, and we’ll love each other.”

“I don’t know.”

“I want only one thing from you,” she said. “You must not lose hope. We’ll confront all difficulties together, and we’ll solve all problems together. I can put up with any hardship as long as I’ve got you. Promise me, now, Bernd Held, that you’ll never give up. Never.”

There was a long pause.

“Promise,” she said.

He smiled. “You’re a tiger,” he said.

PART THREE

ISLAND

1962

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Dimka and Valentin rode the Ferris wheel in Gorky Park with Nina and Anna.

After Dimka had been called away from the holiday camp, Nina had taken up with an engineer and had dated him for several months, but then they broke up, so now she was free again. Meanwhile, Valentin and Anna had become a couple: he slept over at the girls’ apartment most weekends. Also, significantly, Valentin had told Dimka a couple of times that having sex with one woman after another was just a phase men went through when they were young.

I should be so lucky, Dimka thought.

On the first warm weekend of the short Moscow summer, Valentin proposed a double date. Dimka agreed eagerly. Nina was smart and strong-minded, and she challenged him: he liked that. But mainly she was sexy. He often thought about how enthusiastically she had kissed him. He wanted very much to do that again. He recalled how her nipples had stuck out in the cold water. He wondered whether she ever thought about that day on the lake.

His problem was that he could not share Valentin’s cheerfully exploitative attitude to girls. Valentin, at least until he met Anna, would say anything to get a girl into bed. Dimka felt it was wrong to manipulate or bully people. He also believed that if someone said no, you should accept it, whereas Valentin always took no to mean “Maybe not yet.”

Gorky Park was an oasis in the desert of earnest Communism, a place Muscovites could go simply to have fun. People put on their best clothes, bought ice cream and candy, flirted with strangers, and kissed in the bushes.

Anna pretended to be scared on the Ferris wheel, and Valentin went along with the charade, putting his arm around her and telling her it was perfectly safe. Nina looked comfortable and unworried, which Dimka preferred to phony terror, but it gave him no chance to get intimate.

Nina looked good in a cotton shirtwaist dress with orange and green stripes. The back view was particularly alluring, Dimka thought as they climbed off the wheel. For this date he had managed to get a pair of American jeans and a blue checked shirt. In exchange he had given two ballet tickets that Khrushchev did not want: Romeo and Juliet at the Bolshoi.