“What was I going to save it for? Beets?” He poured her a glass that she downed in one swallow. “I don’t think you really wanted borscht, anyway,” he said.

“That lousy body. Once you know what happened, it’s worse, not better.” She tried long, deliberate breaths. “That’s why I went outside. Then I saw the food lines and joined the nearest one. No one makes you go back to work if you’re shopping.”

At the bar, the waitress dug under her apron for a lighter, lit a cigarette and exhaled with a sensuality that hooded her eyes. Arkady envied her. “Excuse me,” he called. “What kind of clinic is this? A café with leather seats and soft lighting, it’s rather fancy.”

“It’s for foreigners,” the waitress said. “It’s a diet clinic.”

Arkady and Polina shared a glance. There must be hysteria in the air, he thought, because she seemed ready to laugh and cry at the same time, and he felt the same way himself. “Well, Moscow is certainly the right place,” he said.

“They couldn’t come to a better place,” Polina said.

Arkady saw color return to her cheeks. It was interesting how quick recovery was in someone young, like roses. He poured her another glass and one for himself. “It’s insane, Polina. It’s Dante’s Inferno with breadlines. Maybe there’s a diet center in hell.”

“Americans would go,” she said. “They’d do aerobics.” There was a real smile on her face, perhaps because there was a real smile on his. It merely took appreciating insanity together. “Moscow could be hell. This could be it,” she said.

“Good cognac.” Arkady poured two more glasses. It had a terrific impact on an empty stomach. “To hell,” he added. He could feel the damp in his clothes rising like steam. He called to the waitress, “What kind of food is on this diet?”

“Depends.” She screwed her lips around the cigarette. “Whether you’re on a fruit diet or a vegetable diet.”

“Fruit diet? Do you hear that, Polina? Like what?” he asked.

“Pineapples, papayas, mangoes, bananas.” The waitress rattled them off casually as if she were intimately acquainted with them.

“Papayas,” Arkady repeated. “Polina, you and I would be willing to stand in line for seven or eight years for a papaya. I’m not sure I even know what a papaya looks like. They could give me a potato and I’d probably be happy. Then I wouldn’t lose weight. Luxury is wasted on people like you and me.” He asked the waitress, “Could you show us a papaya?”

She studied them. “No.”

“She probably doesn’t even have a papaya,” Arkady said. “She just says it to impress her friends. Feel better?”

“I’m laughing, so I must feel a little better.”

“I’ve never heard you laugh before. It’s a nice sound.”