A driver was waiting. He introduced himself and put the incriminating suitcase into the trunk of a two-tone green-and-white Wartburg 311 limousine.

Tanya fell into the backseat and slumped, as helpless as if she were drunk.

She began to recover as the car took her into the city center. Leipzig was an ancient crossroads that had hosted trade fairs since the Middle Ages. Its railway station was the biggest in Europe. In her article Tanya would mention the city’s strong Communist tradition, and its resistance to Nazism, which continued into the 1940s. She would not include the thought that occurred to her now, that Leipzig’s grand nineteenth-century buildings looked even more gracious beside the brutalist Soviet-era architecture.

The taxi took her to the fair. In a large hall like a warehouse, publishers from Germany and abroad had erected stalls where they displayed their books. Tanya was shown around by the director. He explained to her that the main business of the fair was the buying and selling, not of physical books, but of licenses to translate them and publish them in other countries.

Toward the end of the afternoon she managed to get away from him and look around on her own.

She was astonished by the enormous number and bewildering variety of books: car manuals, scientific journals, almanacs, children’s stories, Bibles, art books, atlases, dictionaries, school textbooks, and the complete works of Marx and Lenin in every major European language.

She was looking for someone who might want to translate Russian literature and publish it in the West.

She began to scan the stalls for Russian novels in other languages.

The Western alphabet was different from the Russian, but Tanya had learned German and English at school, and had studied German at university, so she could read the names of the authors and generally guess at the titles.

She spoke to several publishers, telling them she was a journalist for TASS and asking them how they were benefiting from the fair. She got some quotes useful for her article. She did not even hint that she had a Russian book to offer them.

At the stall of a London publisher called Rowley she picked up an English translation of The Young Guard, a popular Soviet novel by Alexander Fadeyev. She knew it well, and amused herself by deciphering the English of the first page until she was interrupted. An attractive woman of about her own age addressed her in German. “Please let me know if I can answer any questions.”

Tanya introduced herself and interviewed the woman about the fair. They quickly discovered that the editor spoke Russian better than Tanya spoke German, so they switched. Tanya asked about English translations of Russian novels. “I’d like to publish more of them,” said the editor. “But many contemporary Soviet novels—including the one you’re holding in your hand—are too slavishly pro-Communist.”

Tanya pretended to be prickly. “You wish to publish anti-Soviet propaganda?”

“Not at all,” the editor said with a tolerant smile. “Writers are permitted to like their governments. My company publishes many books that celebrate the British Empire and its triumphs. But an author who sees nothing at all wrong in the society around him may not be taken seriously. It’s wiser to throw in a soupçon of criticism, if only for the sake of credibility.”