He holds my hand as we make our way up the aisle—we sat in the third row—and out the hatch into the hazy sunshine of early evening. The terminal building looks right out of America, all pale beige stone and clean, rounded art deco lines. At the bottom of the stairs, the men in boiler suits have already taken our luggage from the hold. They carry the suitcases to a large, clumpy black car that sits near the door to the terminal, engine running. Fox keeps a snug hold of my damp hand. My shoes click on the asphalt. I’m wearing a dress, which is not my usual costume, and I can’t get used to the way the skirt swishes around my legs as I walk.

We reach the car. One of the men opens the back door. Fox puts his hand to the small of my back and ushers me inside, then swings around to the other side and slides in beside me.

AS WE HURTLE INTO Moscow, I can’t tear my eyes from the scenes around me—the road signs with their strange letters—the building, building everywhere—gray, featureless blocks that seem to merge into each other, so you can’t tell one from another. I remember reading the desperate newspaper dispatches from the Battle of Moscow, ten years earlier—how the brutal cold and the brutal fighting nearly broke both armies, Soviet and German, and yet you wouldn’t ever imagine all this annihilation to see it now. Life goes on—the country rebuilds in ambitious, gigantic projects that rise from the ancient earth.

We don’t say much, just hold hands and look out the windows. I glimpse people in flashes—walking down sidewalks, queuing up outside shops, sitting on benches to scatter crumbs for pigeons. When the car turns a corner and scoots to a stop outside the façade of an enormous fin de siècle building, I have to shake myself free of a trance.

To stand before the National Hotel in Moscow, you would never imagine you had traveled deep inside the beating heart of world communism. You would think yourself transported to maybe Paris before the calamity of war, everything that was decadent and cosmopolitan, chock-full of the aristocratic and the celebrated and the just plain rich—just picture the shining Packard limousines and the furs, the glimpses of ankles in white stockings, the black silk top hats and the swirling capes, all thronging in and out of these revolving doors, staring between the curtains of these pedimented windows. Inside the lobby, a man’s waiting for us. Like the men at the airport, he wears a dark suit. He seems about forty years old, starting to bald, medium height and stocky. His wide, Slavic face stretches to an expression of welcome.