The airplane seat is too small for his shoulders, but he’s wedged himself in gallantly and crossed his legs to keep them from straying against mine. Early this morning we flew from Rome to Vienna and then Vienna to Berlin, and at Schoenfeld Airport we boarded this Aeroflot for the final stretch. Now the clouds open up at last, just as we plunge through them and hurtle toward the airport, which is east of the city center. I peer eagerly at the roads and buildings and fields below me, but they don’t seem any different from the landscape outside New York or Rome or any other big, sprawling metropolis. There’s nothing that says this is incontrovertibly the Soviet Union, no Communist shade coloring the country. The grass is green, the clouds are gray, the cracks of sky are blue. The runway’s the same dirty slate as every airport runway, rising up to meet us with a solid bump that rattles my teeth.

I look at Fox, and maybe I wear an expression of terror on my face, because he leans forward and kisses me on the lips, and his mouth tastes like the mouth of any other man, the particular taste of kissing, except that it isn’t.

AS WE SAT TOGETHER in the studio over the course of two days, going over every possible detail, cramming months of training into a few spare hours, Fox told me that I should remember one thing above all: the KGB was always watching. There would be watchers at the airport, as soon as we presented our passports and visas and alerted the authorities that Mr. and Mrs. Fox had arrived as the particular guests of the Soviet people, who had graciously allowed sister to visit beloved sister as a gesture of goodwill between our two countries. (Some very clever diplomats have been at work on our behalf, you see.)