“Max was an excellent journalist, but he can be what he wants to be, wherever he wants to be. Max is the next step in evolution: post-cold war Man. The Americans wanted someone who was knowledgeable about Soviet affairs. Actually, they wanted a Russian who sounded like an American, which is what he is. Why was Max interested in you?”

“I don’t know.” Arkady found vodka hiding behind bourbon.

Why do people drink? A Latin to be amorous, an Englishman to unbend. Russians were more direct, Arkady thought; they drank to be drunk, which was what he wanted to be now.

Ludmilla was already there. She emerged from the haze, all eyes and a velvet bow, and stole his glass away. “Everyone blames Stalin,” she said.

“That does sound unfair.” Arkady searched around the bottles and ice bucket for another glass.

“Everyone is paranoid,” she said.

“Including me.” There were no glasses anywhere.

Ludmilla lowered her voice, which was already a conspiratorial croak. “Did you know that Lenin lived in Munich under the name ‘Meyer’?”

“No.”

“You knew that it was a Jew that shot the czar?”

“No.”

“All the bad things, the purge and the famine, were done by the Jews around Stalin to destroy the Russian people. He was the pawn of the Jews, their scapegoat. It was when he started to move against Jewish doctors that he died.”

Stas asked Ludmilla, “Did you know that the Kremlin has exactly as many bathrooms as the Temple of Jerusalem? Think about it.”

Ludmilla backed away.

Stas filled a glass for Arkady. “I wonder if she’ll report that to Michael.” He cast a consumptive’s sardonic gaze around the room, not sparing anyone. “A mixed bag.”

The party blossomed into arguments. Arkady took shelter on the stairs with another misanthrope, a German dressed in intellectual black. A girl sobbed at the bottom of the stairs. At any decent Russian party there were arguments and a girl crying at the bottom of the stairs, Arkady thought.

“I’m waiting to talk to Irina,” the German said. He was in his twenties, with furtive eyes and nervous English.

“Me, too,” Arkady said.

There was a silence, comfortable enough to Arkady, until the boy blurted out, “Malevich was in Munich.”

“And Lenin,” Arkady said. “Or was it Meyer?”

“The artist.”

“Oh, the artist. That Malevich.” The artist of the Russian Revolution. Arkady felt slightly stupid.

“There is a tradition of contact between Russian and German art.”

“Yes.” No one could argue with that, Arkady thought.

The boy examined his nails, which were bitten to the quick. “The red square symbolized the Revolution. The black square symbolized the end of art.”

“Right.” Arkady downed half his vodka in a swallow.

The boy giggled as if he had remembered something worth sharing. “Malevich said in 1918 that ‘footballs of entangled centuries would burn out in the sparks of bubbling light waves.’ ”

“Bubbling light waves?”

“Bubbling light waves.”

“Amazing.” Arkady wondered what Malevich drank.