The cassette inside his shirt, Arkady went out and ran across a boulevard to the train station, which had the mammoth scale of a modern museum on the outside. Light filtered through frosted glass and pigeon netting on the inside. No gangs of Kazans in black jackets, no somnolently flipping television screen, no Dream Bar. Instead, bookstores, restaurants, wine shops, a theater with erotic films. A kiosk sold maps with translations in French, English, Italian, none in Russian. With the English version, Arkady headed back for the street and followed a crowd out the main entrance.

The smell of a café’s good coffee and chocolate almost dropped him to his knees, but he was so unused to restaurants or even to eating at all that he kept moving forward in hopes of seeing an approachable ice cream wagon. He focused not on shop windows, but on the reflections in their glass. Twice he entered stores and immediately came back out to see if anyone was waiting for him. A tourist sees the sights. Arkady, however, had a tunnel vision that excluded crowds, fountains and statues for the sake of spotting a telltale Soviet face, rolling walk or habit, like wearing the wedding band on the right hand. The sound of German around him was a babble of surf. It was like waking up to notice that he had arrived in a wide plaza surrounded by handsome buildings patterned in brick, with stepped gables that climbed to spires of red tile. On one side of the square was a town hall of gray Gothic stone. Hundreds of people strolled or rested at tables with steins of beer or stared up at the hall’s carillon of life-size clockwork dancers and musicians. Arkady turned around. Businessmen wore muted suits and silk ties. Women wore a stylish, not a grieving, black. Boys sported the T-shirts, shorts and backpacks of summer vacation. The volume of their voices swelled. There was a bookstore on a corner with three floors of books. Another shop had the sweet reek of tobacco. The yeasty bouquet of beer issued from this doorway and that. A golden Madonna looked down from a marble column.

He bought ice cream in a waffle cone, pantomiming his choice rather than testing his command of German. The ice cream was so rich that it tasted like frosting. He spent four marks on cigarettes. All the same, he had engaged with Munich now. He ran down into the plaza’s subway station, bought a ticket and jumped onto the first train returning the way he had come.

Hanging on to the bar on either side of Arkady were a pair of Turks, each with a faraway gaze. Filling the seat before him was a woman holding a ham that rocked back and forth on her knees like a baby.