“I have to be.” From a drawer he took a ball of string, bit off an arm’s length and put it and Pravda in his jacket. “I’ll walk you out. I was on my way to lunch.” Bureaucrats survived on the butter, bread and sausage they took home from cafeterias. The jacket was loose and its pockets were jowls dappled with grease.

Vagankovskoye Cemetery was lovingly but casually tended. A coverlet of wet leaves lay unswept around limes, birches, oaks; dandelions were allowed to line the walk, and overall spread the soft embrace of natural decay. Many of the gravestones were busts of Party stalwarts hewn from granite and black marble: composers, scientists, writers of Socialist Realism with broad brows and commanding gazes. More timid souls were represented by photographs set like cameos on their stones. Since the graves were surrounded by iron fences, the faces on the tombstones seemed to peer from black bird cages. Not all, though. The first grave inside the gate belonged to the roughneck singer-actor Vysotsky, and was heaped so high with daisies and roses freshly watered by the rain that it stirred with the hum of bumblebees.

Arkady found his father’s funeral procession halfway down the central path. Cadets bearing a star of red roses and a cushion covered with medals were followed by a porter pushing a handcart and coffin, then a dozen shuffling generals in dress dark-green uniforms and white gloves, two musicians with trumpets and two with dented tubas playing a funeral march from a sonata by Chopin.

Belov was in the rear guard, wearing civilian clothes. His eyes lit when he saw Arkady. “I knew you would come.” Solemnly he pumped Arkady’s hand with both of his. “Of course you couldn’t stay away, it would have been disgraceful. You saw Pravda this morning.”

“Being used as food wrap.”

“I knew you’d want this.” He gave Arkady an article that seemed to have been meticulously torn from the newspaper with a ruler.