Tanya scooped up the cat and they went out.

As they were leaving, a man with a briefcase came into the lobby. He nodded as he passed them on the stairs. Dimka hoped the light was too dim for him to have seen their faces properly.

Outside the door, Tanya put the cat down on the pavement. “You’re on your own, now, Mademoiselle,” she said.

The cat walked off disdainfully.

They hurried along the street to the corner, Dimka trying ineffectually to conceal the typewriter under his jacket. The moon had risen, to his dismay, and they were clearly visible. They reached the motorcycle.

Dimka handed her the typewriter. “How are we going to get rid of it?” he whispered.

“The river?”

He racked his brains, then recalled a spot on the riverbank where he and some fellow students had gone, a couple of times, to stay up all night drinking vodka. “I know somewhere.”

They got on the bike and Dimka drove out of the city center toward the south. The place he had in mind was on the outskirts of the city, but that was all to the good: they were less likely to be noticed.

He drove fast for twenty minutes and pulled up outside the Nikolo-Perervinsky Monastery.

The ancient institution, with its magnificent cathedral, was now a ruin, disused for decades and stripped of its treasures. It was located on a neck of land between the main southbound railway line and the Moskva River. The fields around it were being turned into building sites for new high-rise apartment buildings, but at night the neighborhood was deserted. There was no one in sight.

Dimka wheeled the bike off the road into a clump of trees and parked it on its stand. Then he led Tanya through the copse to the ruined monastery. The derelict buildings were eerily white in the moonlight. The onion domes of the cathedral were falling in, but the green tiled roofs of the monastery buildings were mostly intact. Dimka could not shake the feeling that the ghosts of generations of monks were watching him through the smashed windows.

He headed west across a swampy field to the river.

Tanya said: “How do you know about this place?”

“We came here when we were students. We used to get drunk and watch the sun rise over the water.”

They reached the edge of the river. This was a sluggish channel in a wide bend, and the water was placid in the moonlight. But Dimka knew it was deep enough for the purpose.

Tanya hesitated. “What a waste,” she said.

Dimka shrugged. “Typewriters are expensive.”

“It’s not just money. It’s a dissident voice, an alternative view of the world, a different way of thinking. A typewriter is freedom of speech.”

“Then you’re better off without it.”

She handed it to him.

He moved the roller rightward to its maximum extension, giving himself a handle by which to hold the machine. “Here goes,” he said. He swung his arm back, then with all his might he flung the typewriter out over the river. It did not go far, but it landed with a satisfying splash and immediately disappeared from sight.