Her response was so instinctive as to be almost banal. She put a hand on his. “I’m so sorry.”

“I returned at once. A waste of time, of course-it was all over. Just a headstone in Minsky Park Military Cemetery. My father used his influence to make things look respectable. She was already dead when he’d got in touch with me in London, so he’d trapped me into returning. I got my revenge on him when I went downtown and joined the paratroopers. He was stuck with that. To pull me out would have looked bad in Communist Party circles.”

“Then what?”

“If you’ve read the opening chapters of On the Death of Men, you already know. There was no time to learn how to jump out of a plane with a parachute. I got three months’ basic training, then I was off to Afghanistan. It was ’eighty-nine, the year everything fell apart, the year we scrambled to get out, and lucky to make it.”

“It must have been hell.”

“Something like that, only we didn’t appreciate that Chechnya was to come. Two years of that, and that was just the first war.”

There was a long pause, and he poured another vodka with a steady hand. She said, “What now-what next?”

“I’m not sure. Only a handful of writers can achieve great success, and any writer lucky enough to write the special book will tell you the most urgent question is whether you can do it again or it was just some gigantic fluke.”

“But you answered that question for yourself with Moscow Nights.”

“I suppose, but… I don’t know. I just feel so… claustrophobic now. Hemmed in by my minders.”

She laughed. “You mean the bear-on-the-chain thing? Surely that’s up to you. When Svetlana cast off her chains and refused to return to Moscow, she had to defect. But things are different now. The Russian Federation is not dominated by Communism any longer.”