“In Budapest?”

He shrugged. “Of course it was absurd. She was captured immediately and returned to Russia. She was immediately expelled from the all-Soviet team to the team of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, the L.S.S.R. Now, instead of touring the world, she plays matches with the teams of the other Soviet states. She does not leave Russia. She can never leave Russia. It is prohibited. She remains in Riga, and I remain in the States, and we go on loving each other and yet we can never be together.” He took a long pull of cognac. “And that is my tragedy, Evan,” he said. “That is my unhappy little love story, that is my tragedy.”

We drank, we cried, we drank, we sobbed, we drank. We discussed the utter impossibility of his situation, the unlikelihood of his ever finding another woman to replace Sofija, the slim chance that his love for her would ever fade away.

And at last he had an idea. “Evan, my brother,” he said, “you are able to travel, are you not? You are skilled at that sort of thing?”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, that you can slip in and out of this Iron Curtain. You have been to Macedonia, have you not?”

“To all of Yugoslavia,” I said proudly. “And to Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. Never to Rumania or Albania or Poland. Or East Germany or Russia, of course.”

“And never to Latvia?”

“No.”

“But could you get to Latvia? They say that it is very difficult.”

Blame it, if you will, on the cognac. For what I said was, “For the determined man, my brother Karlis, there is no such thing as a frontier. I have had some experience at this sort of thing. What, after all, is a border? An imaginary line that fools have drawn across the face of a map. A strand of barbed wire. A customs checkpoint. An experienced man, a capable man, can slip through any border like water through a sieve.”