Where Arkady left the highway, the road turned immediately to a dirt lane that rose and fell through a village of dark cabins with painted eaves, newer houses of cinder blocks and gardens of tomato poles and sunflowers. Black-and-white cows wandered on the road and through the yards. At the end of the village the road split into two tracks. He chose the one more deeply rutted.

The country around Moscow was flat potato fields. Picking was still done bent over, by hand. Students and soldiers were ordered out for the harvest, straggling behind peasants who tirelessly filled sacks; at any time, scavengers could always glean a few potatoes from a field. But he saw no one at all, only mist, turned earth and a glow in the distance. He followed the road to a burning pile of cardboard boxes, burlap and corn husks. It was a dirty country habit to mix trash with brown coal for incineration. Not usually in the evening, though, and not in the rain. Around the fire were livestock pens, trucks and tractors, water and gas tanks, barn, garage, shed. Collectives were smaller farms where workers shared according to the time they put in. Someone should be on watch, but no one answered his horn.

Arkady got out and, before he was aware of it, stepped into water that overflowed the yard from an open pit. The sharp odor of lime overlaid ambient barnyard smells. In the pit, garbage, slops and animal bones stripped of skin floated in a stew that was pocked by rain. The fire was half again as tall as he was. It blazed in some sections and smoldered in others, individual flames blossoming around newspapers, gnawing on spoiled potatoes. A can rolled from the top of the pyre to the bottom, next to two neatly placed man’s shoes. Arkady picked one up and as quickly dropped it. The shoe was hot, literally steaming.

The whole yard glowed. The tractors were ancient models with rusty harrow disks, but both trucks were new, one the truck from which Jaak had bought his radio. Tractor attachments—reapers, balers, plows—were laid out along the shed; morning glories had grown around them, twined around tines, their petals folded for the night. Nothing stirred in the pens, no piggish grunts, no nervous clacking of a goat bell.

The garage was open. There were no working switches, but the light of the fire was sufficient for Arkady to see a white four-door Moskvitch with Moscow plates squeezed between oil cans and a tire vise. The car doors were locked.