“The world’s gone crazy,” I said. “I asked Sveta, she told me to bring whisky. And a healthy drinking man like you wants a jar of English honey!”

“I like tea with honey,” Semyon said impassively. “And an intelligent, loving man like you should think of a present for your wife yourself, and not ask what you should bring. Even a jar of honey would do.”

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

IT WAS A BAD LANDING AT HEATHROW. NO, THERE WAS NOTHING wrong with the plane, we were on schedule, we touched down on the runway gently, docked with the bridge quickly . . .

But a flight from somewhere in Southeast Asia had arrived at Terminal Four just ahead of us—maybe from Bangladesh, maybe from Indonesia. And a hundred and fifty Russian passengers found themselves queuing up for passport control behind two hundred swarthy Asians.

Each one of them was carrying a whole heap of documents. It looked from the papers as if they were all planning to study at Oxford or Cambridge, invest hundreds of thousands of pounds in the economy, or collect a multimillion-pound inheritance. Basically, the Bangladeshi-Indonesians had so many grounds for entering the country, it was immediately obvious that most of them would end up working in the restaurants or on the construction sites and farms of Britain. The officers at passport control—also, for the most part, not native Anglo-Saxons—understood this perfectly well, and they checked the documents with exacting precision. Every now and then a check ended with a passenger being led aside—for further investigation . . .

The stream of passengers from our flight who had British citizenship dribbled rapidly past a separate set of desks. Not such a very thin stream, though—it seemed to me that about twenty percent of the people who had flown to England with me were “servants of two masters.” The others lined up somberly between the queue guides. Men dreaming of a smoke after the flight fidgeted miserably. Children who had sat still for too long in the airplane were acting up. Women dreaming of “strolling along Piccadilly” and storming the shops of Oxford Street sent text messages and rummaged in handbags.

Of course, I could have jumped the queue altogether. One way or another. If it came to that, I could simply enter the Twilight and bypass passport control altogether—a young guy did that before my very eyes, although on the plane I hadn’t even suspected that he was an Other. In fact, if I hadn’t had a visa in my passport, I’d have done the same without the slightest hesitation.