“Naturally. Your bottom should touch nothing but foreign leather.” Jaak implored her, “Help me. Not for cars or ruby rings, but because I didn’t send you home the first time we took you off the street.” He explained to Arkady, “The first time I saw her she was wearing gumboots and a mattress. She’s complaining about Stockholm and she came from somewhere in Siberia where they take antifreeze to shit.”

“That reminds me,” Julya said, unfazed, “for my exit visa I may need a statement from you saying you don’t have any claims on me.”

“We’re divorced. We have a relationship of mutual respect. Can I borrow your car?”

“Visit me in Sweden.” Julya found a page in her magazine that she was willing to deface. She wrote three addresses in curly script, folded the margin and tore it along the crease. “I’m not doing you a favor. Personally, Kim is the last person I’d want to find. You’re sure I can’t buy you lunch?”

Arkady said, “I’ll just treat myself to one more cube before we go.”

“Be careful,” Julya told Jaak.

On the way out, Arkady caught another glance of himself in the bar mirror. Grimmer than he thought, not the kind of face that woke up expecting sunshine. What was that old poem by Mayakovsky? “Regard me, world, and envy: I have a Soviet passport!” Now everyone just wanted a passport to get out, and the government, ignored by all, had collapsed into the sort of spiteful arguments that erupted in a whorehouse where no customers had come to call in twenty years.

What could explain this store, this country, this life? A fork with three out of four tines, two kopecks. A fishhook, twenty kopecks, used, but fish weren’t choosy. A comb as small as a seedy mustache, reduced from four kopecks to two.

True, this was a discount shop, but in another, more civilized world, wasn’t this trash? Wouldn’t it all be thrown away?

Some items had no discernible function. A wooden scooter with rough wooden wheels and no pole, no bars to hang on to. A plastic tag embossed with the number 97. What were the odds someone had ninety-seven rooms, ninety-seven lockers or ninety-seven anything and was only missing the number 97?

Perhaps it was the idea of buying. The idea of a market. Because this was a cooperative shop and people wanted to buy … something.