The broadcaster talked calmly about riots in Tashkent and Baku. She reported new findings on the poison gas used in Georgia, more thyroid cancer from Chernobyl, battles along the border with Iran, ambushes in Nagorno-Karabakh, Islamic rallies in Turkestan, miners’ strikes in the Donbas, railroad strikes in Siberia, drought in the Ukraine. In the rest of the world, Eastern Europe still seemed to be rowing its lifeboats away from the sinking Soviet Union. If it was any consolation, the Indians, Pakistanis, Irish, English, Zulus and Boers were making hells of their parts of the globe. She finished by saying that the next news would be in twenty minutes.

Any reasonable man would have been depressed, yet Arkady checked his watch. He got up, assembled cigarettes and took the next vodka straight. The program between newscasts was about the disappearance of the Aral Sea. Irrigation for Uzbek cotton fields had drained the Aral’s rivers, leaving thousands of fishing boats and millions of fish foundered in slime. How many nations could say they had wiped out an entire sea? He got up to change the water for the daisies.

The news came on at the half hour for only one minute. He listened to the blissful chirping of Belorussian folk songs until the news returned again at the hour for ten minutes. The stories didn’t change; it was her voice he sat forward to attend to. He laid his watch on the table. He noticed he had lace curtains. Of course he knew his windows had curtains, but a man can forget these niceties until he sits still. Machine-made, of course, but quite nice, with a floral tracery fading into the pale light outside.

“This is Irina Asanova with the news,” she said.

So she hadn’t married, or else she hadn’t changed her name. And her voice was both fuller and sharper, not a girl’s anymore. The last time he had seen her she was stepping across a snowy field, wanting to go and wanting to stay at the same time. The bargain was that if she went, he stayed behind. He had listened for her voice so many times since, first in interrogation when he was afraid she had been caught, later in psycho wards where his memory of her was grounds for treatment. Working in Siberia, he sometimes wondered whether she still existed, had ever existed, was a delusion. Rationally he knew he would never see or hear her again. Irrationally he always expected to see her face turning the next corner or hear her voice across a room. Like a man with a condition, he had waited every second for his heart to stop. She sounded good, she sounded well.

At midnight, when programming started to repeat, he finally turned the radio off. He had a last cigarette by the window. The church spire blazed like a golden flame against the gray, under the arch of the night.