“No. I won’t go.”

He half-expected her to rise and leave the bench. He would follow her; what else could he do? She stayed. She let him light another cigarette for her. “A bad habit,” she said. “Like you.”

Despair saturated the air. Cold penetrated his thin jacket. He heard his heart echo across the water. A walking collection of bad habits was what he was. Ignorance, insubordination, lack of exercise, dull razors.

So many birds arrived, some dropping wholesale in flocks, others wheeling individually out of the mist, that Arkady was put in mind of the factory ship he had spent part of his exile on, and how gulls had mobbed the air above the stern for the overflow and refuse from the nets. He remembered standing in the breeze above the stern ramp fieldstripping a cigarette and a gull snatching the paper from the air and carrying it away as its prize. “Find the Russian duck,” he said.

“Where?”

“The one with dirty feathers and a crooked bill smoking a cigarette.”

“There is no such thing.”

“But you looked, I saw you. Imagine when Russian ducks really do hear about this lake, a lake with pretzels, they’ll come here by the millions.”

“The swans too?”

A line of swans glided imperiously through the ducks. When a mallard resisted, the lead swan stretched out its long and creamy neck, opened its bright, yellow bill and snorted like a pig.

“Russian. He’s already infiltrated,” Arkady said.

Irina sat back to study him. “You do look terrible.”

“I can’t say the same for you.”

She bent the light her way. Mist sat on her hair like jewels. “I heard you were doing so well in Moscow,” she said.

“Who did you hear that from?”

She hesitated. “You’re not what I expected. You’re what I remembered.”

They walked slowly. Arkady was aware that she walked a critical millimeter closer and that their shoulders occasionally grazed.

“Stas was always curious about you. I’m not surprised you’re friends. Max says you’re both artifacts of the cold war.”

“We are. I’m like a piece of marble you find in an ancient ruin. You pick it up, turn it around in your hand and ask, ‘What was this? Part of a horse trough or part of a noble statue?’ I want to show you something.” He took out an envelope, opened it and showed her the paper and the one word scribbled inside.

“My name,” she said.

“It’s my father’s writing. I hadn’t heard from him in years. This must have been almost the last thing he did before he died. You actually talked to him?”

“I wanted to reach you without causing trouble so I tried your father.”

Arkady tried to imagine this. It sounded like a dove flying into a furnace, though his father had been a fairly cold furnace in his last years.