This was like the old days, Tanya thought, feeling comfortable as the champagne relaxed her. Back in the early sixties, before Vasili was jailed, they had often sat around like this, talking and arguing about politics and literature and art.

She told him about the phone call from Mikhail Gorbachev. “He’s an odd one,” Vasili said. “We in the agriculture ministry see a lot of him. He’s Yuri Andropov’s pet, and he seems to be a rock-solid Communist. His wife is even worse. Yet he backs reformist ideas, whenever he can do it without offending his superiors.”

“My brother thinks highly of him.”

“When Brezhnev dies—which can’t be far distant now, please, God—Andropov will make a bid for the leadership, and Gorbachev will back him. If the bid fails, both men will be finished. They’ll be sent to the provinces. But if Andropov succeeds, Gorbachev has a bright future.”

“In any other country Gorbachev, at fifty, would be just the right age to become leader. Here, he’s too young.”

“The Kremlin is a geriatric ward.”

Vasili served borsch, beetroot soup with beef. “This is good,” Tanya said. She could not help asking: “Who made it?”

“I did, of course. Who else?”

“I don’t know. Do you have a housekeeper?”

“Just a babushka who comes to clean the apartment and iron my shirts.”

“One of your girlfriends, then?”

“I don’t have a girlfriend at the moment.”

Tanya was intrigued. She recalled the last conversation they had had before she went to Warsaw. He had claimed to have changed, and grown up. She had felt he needed to show that, not just say it. She had been sure it was just another line of chat intended to get her into bed. Could she have been wrong? She doubted it.

After they had eaten, she asked him how he felt about those royalties piling up in London.

“You should have the money,” he said.

“Don’t be silly. You wrote the books.”

“I had little to lose—I was already in Siberia. They couldn’t do much more to me, except kill me, and I would have been relieved to die. But you risked everything—your career, your freedom, your life. You deserve the money more than I do.”

“Well, I wouldn’t take it, even if you could give it to me.”

“Then it will stay there until I die, probably.”

“You wouldn’t be tempted to escape to the West?”

“No.”

“You sound sure.”

“I am sure.”

“Why? You’d be free to write whatever you like, all the time. No more radio serials.”

“I wouldn’t go . . . unless you went, too.”

“You don’t mean that.”

He shrugged. “I don’t expect you to believe me. Why should you? But you’re the most important person in my life. You came to Siberia to find me—no one else did. You tried to get me released. You smuggled my work out to the free world. For twenty years, you’ve been the best friend a person could have.”

She was moved. She had never looked at it that way. “Thank you for saying that,” she said.