Somewhere in backwoods Georgia—their Georgia, even hillier than ours—we visited a monastery, a showpiece of religious tolerance. The skeleton crew of monks glided around with us in their grim stone rooms. The place had that depressing stuffy holy smell, old candle wax and chrism and furniture polish, I had last sniffed thirty years ago, in the storage closet of a Baptist basement Sunday school. Among the monks with beards down to their bellies was a young one, and I wondered how he had enlisted himself in this ghostly brotherhood. Demented or a government employee, I decided. He had silky long hair, like a princess captive in a tower, and the sliding bloodshot eyeballs of a spy. He was one kind of human animal, and I was another, and when we looked at each other we each repressed a shudder.

Outside, a little crowd of shepherds and sheep, neither group looking any too clean, had gathered around the automobiles, and when Nadia made our identities and friendly mission clear to them, the shepherds invited us to dine with them, on one of the sheep. I would have settled for some cabbage soup and blini back at the Tblisi hotel, but the Nevinses looked stricken, as though this chance at authentic ethnicity and bridge-building would never come again, and I suppose it wouldn’t have. Their duty was to see that I did my duty, and my duty was clear: consort with the shepherds, scoring points for the free world. I looked toward Nadia and with one of her unsmiling nods she approved, though this hadn’t been on her schedule. Or, who knows, maybe it had been. By now I saw her as an ally in my mission to subvert the rule of the proletariat, no doubt deluding myself.