“Guilty about me?”

“You went to America and missed it all,” Grigori said.

“I have no complaints,” said Lev.

“I even got Katerina, though she preferred you.”

Lev smiled. “And all I got was a hundred million dollars.”

“Yes,” said Grigori. “You got the worst of the deal. I’m sorry, Lev.”

“It’s okay,” said Lev. “I forgive you.” He was being ironic but, Tanya thought, Grigori did not seem to realize that.

Uncle Volodya came in. He was on his way to some army ceremony, wearing his general’s uniform. Tanya realized with a sudden shock that this was the first time he had seen his real father. Lev stared at the son he had never met. “My God,” Lev said. “He looks like you, Grigori.”

“He’s yours, though,” said Grigori.

Father and son shook hands.

Volodya said nothing, seeming in the grip of an emotion so powerful that he could not speak.

Lev said: “When you lost me as a father, Volodya, you didn’t lose much.” Keeping hold of his son’s hand, he looked him up and down: gleaming boots, Red Army uniform, combat medals, piercing blue eyes, iron-gray hair. “I did, though,” Lev said. “I guess I lost a lot.”

• • •

As she left the apartment Tanya found herself wondering where the Bolsheviks had gone wrong, where Grandfather Grigori’s idealism and energy had been perverted into tyranny. She went to the bus stop, heading for a rendezvous with Vasili. On the bus, thinking over the early years of the Russian Revolution, she wondered whether Lenin’s decision to close all newspapers except the Bolshevik ones had been the key error. It meant that right from the start alternative ideas had had no circulation and the conventional wisdom could never be challenged. Gorbachev in Stavropol was exceptional in having been allowed to try something different. Such people were generally stifled. Tanya was a journalist, and suspected herself of egocentrically overrating the importance of a free press, but it seemed to her that the lack of critical newspapers made it much easier for other forms of oppression to flourish.

It was now four years since Vasili had been released. In that time he had shrewdly rehabilitated himself. At the Agriculture Ministry he had devised an educational radio serial set on a collective farm. As well as the dramas about unfaithful wives and disobedient children, the characters discussed agricultural techniques. Naturally the peasants who ignored advice from Moscow were lazy and shiftless, and the wayward teenagers who questioned the Communist Party’s authority were the ones who were jilted by their boyfriends or failed their exams. The serial was a huge success. Vasili returned to Radio Moscow and was given an apartment in a block occupied by writers approved by the government.

Their meetings were clandestine, but Tanya also ran into him occasionally at union events or private parties. He was no longer the walking cadaver that had returned from Siberia in 1972. He had put on weight and regained some of his former presence. Now in his midforties, he would never again be movie-star handsome; but the lines of strain on his face somehow added to his allure. And he still had buckets of charm. Each time Tanya saw him he was with a different woman. They were not the nubile teenagers who had adored him in his thirties, though perhaps they were the middle-aged women those teenagers had become: smart females in chic clothes and high-heeled shoes, who always seemed able to get hold of scarce nail varnish, hair dye, and stockings.