Arkady stayed seated because he didn’t trust himself to walk. He felt he had come a long way to be run over by a truck. Tables were filling all the time, and he wanted the beer garden to close in over him. Here, beer had a sedative effect leading to calm, reasoned conversation. Couples young and old enjoyed civilized steins. Men with fierce eyebrows poured their concentration onto chessboards. The tower with the oompah band was about as Chinese as a cuckoo clock. No matter; he had wandered into a village where he was not known, neither welcome nor rejected. He would settle for invisible. He sipped the good beer.

What was really terrible, truly frightening, was that he did want to see Irina again. Humiliating though the experience had been, he realized he would accept more of it to be with her, which revealed a capacity for masochism that he had never known he had. Their encounter had been so grotesque as to be comic. This woman, this memory he had carried like an extra chamber of the heart and found after so long, seemed to barely recall his name. Well, there was a disproportion of emotion that was—to use her word—amusing. Or evidence of insanity. If he was wrong about Irina, perhaps he was wrong about the history he thought they shared. Reflexively he touched his stomach and felt the groove of scar tissue through the shirt. Though what did that prove? Maybe he had punctured himself with an umbrella one day on the way to school, or been pinned by a statute of Lenin as it fell. In half his statues Lenin pointed toward the future. It was a well-known dangerous finger.

“What’s so hilarious?”

“Pardon?” Arkady came out of his reverie.

“What’s so hilarious?” The place across the table had been taken by a large man with a florid face and crisp white shirt. A small wool hat perched on a head as bald as a kneecap. He held a beer in one hand and protected a whole roast chicken with the other. Arkady noticed that the entire table was elbow-to-elbow with people hoisting drumsticks, ribs, pretzels, golden beers.

“You’re enjoying yourself?” the man with the chicken asked.

Arkady shrugged rather than unveil a Russian accent.

The man’s eyes darted to his Soviet coat. He said, “You like the beer, the food, the life? It’s nice. We worked forty years to have it so.”

The rest of the table paid no attention. Arkady realized he hadn’t eaten anything except an ice cream. The table was so awash in food that he almost didn’t need to. The band slid from Strauss to Louis Armstrong. He finished the beer. Of course there were beer bars in Moscow, but there were no steins or glasses, so patrons filled cardboard milk cartons. As Jaak would have said, “Homo Sovieticus wins again.”