“I don’t think she’s married.”

“Well, what’s her story?”

“I don’t know. She doesn’t seem in any great rush to tell it. We had four or five dates before she got around to telling me where she came from.”

“I remember. For a while the best you could do was narrow it down to Europe.”

“It’s not as though I didn’t ask her. It’s not an impolite question, is it? ‘Where are you from?’ I mean, that’s not like asking to see her tax return or hear her sexual history, is it?”

“Maybe it’s a sensitive subject in Anatruria.”

“Maybe.”

“You want to know something, Bern? I never heard of Anatruria.”

“Well, don’t feel bad. Most people never heard of it. See, it never used to be a country, and it still isn’t. I heard of it, but that’s because I collected stamps when I was a kid.”

“It never used to be a country, and it still isn’t, but they issued stamps?”

“Around the end of the First World War,” I said. “When the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires broke up, a lot of countries declared themselves independent for about fifteen minutes, and some of them issued stamps and provisional currency to increase their credibility. The first Anatrurian stamps were a series of overprints of Turkish stamps, and they’re pretty rare, but they’re not worth all that much because overprinted stamps have always been easy to counterfeit. Then there was an actual series of Anatrurian stamps printed up during the winter of 1920-21, with the head of Vlados I in a little circle in the upper right corner and a different scene on each stamp in the series. Churches and public buildings and scenic views-you know the kind of things they put on stamps. They were engraved and printed in Budapest.”