He loved his mother, but he did not obey her in everything: she disapproved of the motorcycle, the blue jeans, and Valentin. However, he would do anything reasonable to please her, so he invited Nina to the apartment.

At first Nina refused. “I’m not going to be inspected by your family, like a used car you’re thinking of buying,” she said resentfully. “Tell your mother I don’t want to get married. She’ll soon lose interest in me.”

“It’s not my family, it’s just her,” Dimka told her. “My father’s dead and my sister’s in Cuba. Anyway, what have you got against marriage?”

“Why, are you proposing to me?”

Dimka was embarrassed. Nina was thrilling and sexy, and he had never been anywhere near so deeply involved with a woman, but he had not thought about marriage. Did he want to spend the rest of his life with her?

He dodged the question. “I’m just trying to understand you.”

“I’ve tried marriage, and I didn’t like it,” she said. “Satisfied?”

Challenge was her default setting. He did not mind. It was part of what made her so exciting. “You prefer being single,” he said.

“Obviously.”

“What’s so great about it?”

“I don’t have to please a man, so I can please myself. And when I want something else I can see you.”

“I fit neatly into the slot.”

She grinned at the double meaning. “Exactly.”

However, she was thoughtful for a while; then she said: “Oh, hell, I don’t want to make an enemy of your mother. I’ll go.”

On the day, Dimka felt nervous. Nina was unpredictable. When something happened to displease her—a plate carelessly broken, a real or imagined slight, a note of reproof in Dimka’s voice—her disapproval was a blast like Moscow’s north wind in January. He hoped she would get on with his mother.

Nina had not previously been inside Government House. She was impressed by the lobby, which was the size of a small ballroom. The apartment was not large but it was luxuriously finished, by comparison with most Moscow homes, having thick rugs and expensive wallpaper and a radiogram—a walnut cabinet containing a record player and a radio. These were the privileges of senior KGB officers such as Dimka’s father.

Anya had prepared a lavish spread of snacks, which Muscovites preferred to a formal dinner: smoked mackerel and hard-boiled eggs with red pepper on white bread; little rye bread sandwiches with cucumber and tomatoes; and her pièce de résistance, a plate of “sailboats,” ovals of toast with triangles of cheese held upright by a toothpick like a mast.

Anya wore a new dress and put on a touch of makeup. She had gained a little weight since the death of Dimka’s father, and it suited her. Dimka felt his mother was happier since her husband had died. Maybe Nina was right about marriage.

The first thing Anya said to Nina was: “Twenty-three years old, and this is the first time my Dimka has ever brought a girl home.”