“Ceausescu wanted to destroy the old. He break down villages, move thousands of peoples to city places like Victory of Socialism Boulevard in Bucharest . . . kilometers and kilometers of tall apartment buildings. Only buildings, they not finished when he tear down and move peoples there. No heat. No water. No electricity . . . he sell electricity to other countries, you see. So village peoples, they have little house out here, be in family three, maybe four hundreds of years, but now live on ninth floor of bad brick building in strange city . . . no windows, cold wind blow in. Have to carry water a mile, then carry up nine flights of stairs.”

He took a deep bite of the onion and nodded as if satisfied. “Systematization.” He moved on down the smoky aisle.

The mountains passed in the night. I began to doze again . . . I had slept little the night before, dreamlessly or otherwise, and I had not slept on the plane the night before that . . . but awoke with a start to find that the Professor Emeritus had taken the seat next to me.

“No goddamn heat,” he whispered, tugging his muffler tighter. “You'd think with all these goddamn peasant bodies and goats and chickens and what have you in this socalled firstclass car, that they'd generate some body heat in here, but it's as cold as Madame Ceausescu’s dear dead tit.”

I blinked at the simile.

“Actually,” said Dr. Paxley in a conspiratorial whisper, “it's not as bad as they say.”

“The cold?” I said.

“No, no. The economy. Ceausescu may be the only national leader in this century who actually paid off his country's foreign debt. Of course, he had to divert food, electricity, and consumer goods to other countries to do it, but Romania has no foreign debt at all now. None.”

“Mmmm,” I said, trying to remember the fragments of the dream I'd had in my few moments of sleep. Something about blood and iron.

“A onepointsevenbilliondollar trade surplus,” muttered Paxley, leaning close enough that I could tell that he'd also had onion for dinner. “And they owe the West nothing and the Russians nothing. Incredible.”