Then, just as I was about to get back onto Aeroflot, Khrushchev was pushed out of power, and all the Soviets around me tightened up, wary of what was going to happen next. This whole huge empire, think of it, run out of some vodka-soaked back rooms by a few beetle-browed men. Nadia—my voice, my guide, my protector, closer to me for this month than a wife, because I couldn’t have done without her—complimented me by confiding, somewhere out on the Nevskii Prospekt or in some hallway where no bugs were likely to be placed, “Eddie, it was not civilized. It was not done how a civilized country should do things. We should have said to him, ‘Thank you very much for ending the terror.’ And then, ‘You are excused—too much adventurism, O.K., failures in agricultural production, and et cetera. O.K., so long, but bolshoi thanks.’ ”

There would be a moment, toward the end of a long public day in, say, Tashkent, when her English would deteriorate, just sheer weariness from drawing upon a double set of brain cells, and her eyelids and the tip of her long white nose would get pink. We would say good night in the hotel lobby, with its musty attic smell and lamps whose bases were brass bears, and she would give me in her handshake not the palm and meat of the thumb but four cool fingers, aligned like a sergeant’s stripes. And that was the way we began to say goodbye in the airport, until we leaped the gulf between our two great countries and I kissed her on one cheek and then the other and hugged her, in proper Slavic style. Her eyes teared up, but it may have been just the start of a cold.

Bud told me in the airport, so casually I should have smelled trouble, “We took you off the APO number two days ago, so your mail won’t show up here after you leave. It will be forwarded to your home.”

“Sounds reasonable,” I said, not thinking it through. I suspect Bud foresaw the complications, but he was a diplomat, a pro at saying no more than required.

Coming back, the last leg, out of Paris, I had an experience such as I’ve never had in all my miles of flying. We came down on the big arc over Gander and Nova Scotia and, five miles up, I could see New York from hundreds of miles away, a little blur of light in the cold plastic oval of the plane window. It grew and grew, like a fish I was pulling in. My cheek got cold against the plastic as I pressed to keep it in view, a little spot on the invisible surface of the earth like a nebula, like a dust mouse, only glowing, the fuzzy center of our American dream. Just it and me, there in the night sky, communing. It was a vision.