Kazan Station was “The Gateway to the East.” The information hall had walls of flipping destination cards under a brick, mosquelike dome. A bronze Lenin, striding, right hand raised, looked strangely like Gandhi. A Tadzhik girl wore a brilliant scarf over braided hair and a dull raincoat over loose, multicolored pants. Gold earrings played at her neck. All the porters were Tatars. Arkady recognized Kazan mafia in black-leather jackets making the rounds of their prostitutes, pasty-faced Russian girls in jeans. A shop in the corner dubbed music on cassettes. As an inducement it played the lambada. Arkady felt like a fool carting the radio around. He had gone to his apartment and stared at it for an hour before forcing himself to return it to its rightful owner, as if it were the only one in Moscow that could receive Radio Liberty. He would get one of his own.

On the outdoor platforms, army patrols searched for deserters. In the cab of a locomotive Arkady saw two engineers, a man and a woman. He was seated at the controls, a muscular man stripped to the waist; she wore a pullover and coveralls. Arkady couldn’t see their faces but he could imagine a life on the tracks, the whole country passing by the window, eating and sleeping behind the momentum of a diesel engine.

He returned to the Dream Bar, crossing a waiting room that was so crowded and still that it could have been a madhouse or a prison. Row after row of faces were raised toward a silent, rolling image of folk dancers on a television screen. Militia prodded sleeping drunks. Whole Uzbek families bedded on huge pillowlike sacks that contained all their earthly possessions. By the bar, two Uzbek boys in knit caps played a Treasure Box. For five kopecks they manipulated a grip that controlled a robot hand within a glass case. The bottom of the case was covered with sand, and strewn on this miniature beach were prizes that could be, with luck, picked up and deposited to the winner in a sliding tray. A tube of toothpaste the size of a cigarette, a toothbrush with a single row of bristles, a razor blade, a stick of gum, a piece of soap. Each in turn slid out of the grasp of the hand. When he looked more closely, he could see that the prizes had been in the case for years. The yellow bristles, the curling wrappers, the veins in the soap were not so much treasure as trash occasionally sorted, never removed.

But the boys played enthusiastically, undeterred, since the idea wasn’t the getting as much as the grasping.

After an hour and a half, Arkady gave up. Jaak wasn’t coming.

Lenin’s Path Collective Farm was north of the city on the Leningrad Highway. Women bundled in scarves against the rain held up bouquets and buckets of potatoes to cars and trucks passing by.