“You’re a cool one, Nina, but your hands are shaking.”

She threw the dead match on the floor. “Well, how do you think I feel?” she said angrily. “I’m in this apartment all day with nobody to talk to but a baby and your mother. I wanted a dacha and you weren’t going to get us one!”

Dimka was taken aback. “So you admit that you prostituted yourself?”

“Oh, be realistic, how else does anyone get anything in Moscow?” She got the cigarette alight and drew on it hard. “You work for a general secretary who is mad. I open my legs for a marshal who is horny. There’s not much difference.”

“So why did you open your legs for me?”

She said nothing, but involuntarily looked around the room.

He understood instantly. “For an apartment in Government House?”

She did not deny it.

“I thought you loved me,” he said.

“Oh, I was fond of you, but since when was that enough? Don’t be such a baby. This is the real world. If you want something, you pay the price.”

He felt a hypocrite, accusing her, so he confessed. “Well, I might as well tell you that I’ve been unfaithful too.”

“Ha!” she said. “I didn’t think you had the nerve. Who with?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Some little typist in the Kremlin, of course.”

“It was just one night, and we didn’t have intercourse, but I don’t feel that makes it much better.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, do you think I care? Go ahead—enjoy it!”

Was Nina raving in her anger, or revealing her true feelings? Dimka felt bewildered. He said: “I never foresaw that kind of marriage for us.”

“Take it from me, there’s no other kind.”

“Yes, there is,” he said.

“You dream your dreams, I’ll dream mine.” She switched on the television.

Dimka sat staring at the screen for a while, not seeing or hearing the program. After a while he went to bed, but he did not sleep. Later, Nina got into bed next to him, but they did not touch.

Next day Nikita Khrushchev left the Kremlin forever.

Dimka continued to go into work every morning. Yevgeny Filipov, walking around in a new blue suit, had been promoted. Obviously he had been part of the plot against Khrushchev, and had earned his reward.

Two days later, on Friday, the newspaper Pravda announced Khrushchev’s resignation.

Sitting in his office with little to do, Dimka noticed that Western newspapers for the same day announced that the British prime minister had also been deposed. Upper-class Conservative Sir Alec Douglas-Home had been replaced by Harold Wilson, leader of the Labour Party, in a national election.

To Dimka in a cynical mood there was something askew when a rampantly capitalist country could fire its aristocratic premier and install a social democrat at the will of the people, whereas in the world’s leading Communist state such things were plotted in secrecy by a tiny ruling elite and then announced, days later, to an impotent and docile population.