“But I see no Russians!”

“No. The Poles have done this to themselves.”

“Did the American government know this was going to happen? Did Staz tell you?”

Cam said nothing.

Tanya took that for a yes. “Couldn’t Reagan do something to stop it?”

Cam looked as perplexed and disappointed as Tanya felt. “I thought he could,” he said.

Tanya could hear her own voice rising to a screech of frustration. “Then, for God’s sake, why didn’t he?”

“I don’t know,” said Cam. “I just don’t know.”

• • •

When Tanya got home to Moscow, there was a bunch of flowers from Vasili waiting for her in her mother’s apartment. How had he found roses in Moscow in January?

The flowers were a spot of brightness in a desolate landscape. Tanya had suffered two shocks: Staz had deceived her, and General Jaruzelski had betrayed the Polish people. Staz was no better than Paz Oliva, and she had to wonder what was wrong with her judgment. Perhaps she was wrong about Communism, too. She had always believed it could not last. She had been a schoolgirl in 1956 when the Hungarian people’s rebellion had been crushed. Twelve years later the same had happened to the Prague Spring, and after another thirteen years Solidarity had gone the same way. Maybe Communism really was the way of the future, as Grandfather Grigori had died believing. If so, a grim life was ahead for her nephew and niece, Dimka’s children, Grisha and Katya.

Soon after Tanya arrived home, Vasili invited her to dinner.

They could be friends openly now, they agreed. He had been rehabilitated. His radio show was a long-running success, and he was a star of the writers’ union. No one knew that he was also Ivan Kuznetsov, dissident author of Frostbite and other anti-Communist books that had been bestsellers in the West. It was remarkable, Tanya thought, that she and he had succeeded in keeping the secret so long.

She was getting ready to leave the office and go to Vasili’s place when she was accosted by Pyotr Opotkin, screwing up his eyes against the smoke from the cigarette between his lips. “You’ve done it again,” he said. “We’re getting complaints at the highest level about your article on cows.”

Tanya had visited the Vladimir Region, where Communist Party officials were so inefficient that cattle were dying on a huge scale while their feed rotted in barns. She had written an angry piece, and Daniil had sent it out. Now she said: “I suppose the corrupt and lazy bastards who let the cows die have complained to you.”

“Never mind them,” Opotkin said. “I’ve had a letter from the Central Committee secretary responsible for ideology!”

“He knows about cows, does he?”

Opotkin thrust a piece of paper at her. “We’re going to have to publish a retraction.”

Tanya took it from him but did not read it. “Why are you so concerned to defend people who are destroying our country?”

“We cannot undermine Communist Party cadres!”