Imogene was planning where we would live, how she would dress in her seat of honor at my concerts, what she would do for me in the bedroom and the kitchen to keep my love at its present sky-high pitch. Thinking we were in for a lifetime together, she filled me in on her family, her mother that she had maligned but who wasn’t all bad, and her father who was scarcely in her life enough to mention, and her brothers and sisters that sounded like the worst pack of losers and freeloaders on the DelMarVa Peninsula. Her outpourings would catch, my fear was, the vigilance of the KGB, X-raying right through the diplomatic pouch. I would lose face with Nadia, that steel-true exemplar of doing without. Those innocent-eyed gymnasium students would sense my contamination. The homely austerity of Soviet life, with that undercurrent of fear still humming from Stalin, made the amorous delusions of this childish American woman repulsive to me. As my month approached its end, and the capitalist world put out feelers to reclaim me, Imogene’s crazy stuff got mixed in with business cables from my agency and colorless but loving letters from my wife with enclosed notes and dutiful drawings from my children: this heightened my disgust. I would have sent a cable—CUT IT OUT, or YOU AIN’T NO BLUE-EYED SWEETHEART OF MINE—but by some canniness of her warped mind she never gave a return address, and when I tried to think of her apartment all I got was that black-and-white feeling, the way she fed me her breasts one at a time, the very big radio, and the empty street with the Capitol at the end like a white-chocolate candy. I had simply to endure it, this sore humiliation.

They had saved Leningrad for me to the last, since it was where the Communists, still remembering the Siege, were the toughest, and I might run into the most hostility from an audience. But as soon as my Gibson began talking, the picked strings all rolling like the synchronized wheels, big and little, of the Wabash Cannonball, the smiles of mutual understanding would start breaking out. I am not a brave man, but I have faith in my instrument and in people’s basic decent instincts. St. Petersburg, as we call it again, is one beautiful city, a Venice where you least expect it, all those big curved buildings in Italian colors. The students in their gloomy old ballrooms were worried about Goldwater getting elected, and I told them the American people would never elect a warmonger. I was always introduced as a “progressive” American folk artist, but I had to tell them that there wasn’t much progressive about me: my folks had been lifelong Democrats because of a war fought a hundred years ago, and I wasn’t going to be the one to change parties.