The translator who travelled with me varied but usually it was Nadia, a lean thin-lipped lady over forty who had learned her English during the war, in the military. She had lost two brothers and a fiancé to Herr Hitler, and was wed to the Red system with bonds of iron and grief. She looked like a skinny tall soldier boy herself, just out of uniform—no lipstick, long white waxy nose, and a feathery short haircut with gray coming in not in strands but in patches. Blank-faced, she would listen to me spiel, give a nod when she’d heard all she could hold, and spout out a stream of this language that was, with all its mushy twisty sounds, pure music to me. The more she and I travelled together, the better she knew what I was going to say, and the longer she could let me go before translating, and the more I could hear individual words go by, little transparent phrases through which I seemed to see into her like into the windows of a town as your train whips through. We travelled on trains in the same compartment, so I could look down from the top bunk and see her hands remove her shoes and her mustard-colored stockings from her feet. Then her bare feet and hands would flitter out of sight. I would listen, but never hear her breathing relax; she confessed to me, toward the end of my stay, that she could never sleep on trains. The motion and the clicking stirred her up.

An inhibiting factor was Bud Nevins being in the compartment with us—there were two bunks on two sides—and if not Bud, another escort from our embassy, and often a fourth, an underling of Bud’s or a second escort from the Soviet side, who spoke Armenian or Kazakh or whatever the language was going to be when we disembarked. Sometimes I had more escorts than would fit into one compartment; and I expect I often got the best night’s sleep, with everybody watching everybody else. Nadia was as loyal a comrade as they made them but seemed to need watching anyway. As I got to know her body language I could tell when we were being crowded, politically speaking.

After a while my tendency became to bond with the Communists. When we arrived at one of our hinterland destinations, Nadia and her associates would bundle me into a Zil and then we would share a humorous irritation at being tailed by an embassy watchdog in his imported Chevrolet. When we all went south, Bud came along with that willowy strawberry blonde of his. Libby had, along with her worried look, a plump pretty mouth a little too full of teeth. For all their three children, they hadn’t been married ten years. Out of wifely love and loyalty she wanted to join in what fun the Soviet Union in its sinister vast size offered.