Vladimir took a seat just as a second mint julep was brought out by the waitress, smiling soberly at her countrymen's meeting of the minds. Vladimir polished off his first beer and placed it on the outgoing tray. "Another?" she said.

"Please."

"Nuts?"

"No nuts."

"Lemon?"

"Sans lemon."

"On me," said the writer, impressed by the brevity, the honesty of the exchange. Now they were in Raymond Carver territory. "Drinking up a storm?" he said to Vladimir as the latter reached for the julep.

"Jet lag. I'm out of it," Vladimir said. Think. Carver dialogue. Deceptively simple yet profound. "I haven't got it all together yet," Vladimir said, as he looked away mysteriously.

"You find a place to live?"

"My boss gave me a flat in the suburbs."

"Boss?" The writer's mouth came open revealing Yankee orthodontia at its best. He shook his head, his mane rippling; it felt very natural to just reach out and touch the silky thing. "You mean you got a job? With whom?"

The iconoclast scribbler seemed to perk up nicely at this mention of the material world. Vladimir imagined a background of worried parents, angry transatlantic phone calls, pouches full of law-school applications being dragged through the streets of Prava by exhausted Stolovan postmen. "A development firm," Vladimir said.

"Development firm? What are you developing? My name's Perry, by the way." He stuck out a hand. "Perry Cohen. Yes, it's a surprising name. I'll have you know that I'm the only Iowa Jew ever."

Vladimir smiled, thinking: what happens if there's another Iowa Jew in the room when he introduces himself as the sole specimen? The embarrassment! He filed that one away for future leverage. "How'd you Jews get all the way out to Iowa?" he asked. ("I'm a Jew, too," he added for reassurance.) "My father's the Jew," Perry explained. "My mother's the mayor's daughter."

"And the mayor let her marry a Jew. How nice." There. He was catching the vibe. The expat, in-your-face vibe. "Your father must be blond like you. And assimilated, too."

"He's Hitler with a circumcision," Cohen said. And as he said it, something uncalled for, perhaps even unscripted, took place: his head bent forward so that his mane naturally covered his face, and beneath the mane Vladimir noticed--what? A quick nasal exhalation to forestall a whimper? A rapid blinking of the eyes to shoo away the moisture? Teeth biting hard into a quivering lip to bring it back in line? But before Vladimir had a chance to ponder the question of whether this was a true display of emotion or a performance for his benefit, Cohen brushed his hair back, ahemed loudly, and regained his composure.

"Hitler, yes," Vladimir said, eager to appear blithely unconcerned. "Do tell."

And so Cohen told Vladimir the story of his father. The two men had known each other for two minutes now; a pen had been transferred from one to the other; ethnic backgrounds had been established; a few sallies had been launched. Was that all it took--the equivalent of two dogs sniffing out each other's rear--to get the writer Cohen to tell the story of his father?

Could this story have been Cohen's trademark then? His theme? One thing Vladimir had learned from his years of wandering and self-invention was that it was important to have a theme. A coherent story you could riff off when the opportunity presented itself. A chance to more firmly establish yourself in other people's minds. Cohen's story, ironically enough, wasn't even his own; it was his father's. But Cohen was desperately trying to make it his own.

He even had visual aids to help him along! A Polaroid of his father, an especially pink and heavy American Jew, tiny eyes partly covered by an enormous brow drenched in sweat, the rest of him stuffed into a green checkered suit, his arm around Richard Nixon in front of a sign reading, "Des Moines Business Caucus--1974." Both men smiling at each other as if this was not 1974 but just another undistinguished year in the course of the American presidency.

"Da-ddy," Cohen said, rubbing his thumb on his father's bald dome, aping the voice of a three-year-old. And quite a papa he was. On Perry's thirteenth birthday, when, according to Hebrew scripture, Perry was supposed to be saddled with the dubious responsibilities of manhood, his father presented him with a gift. "I'm changing your name," his father declared. "You shouldn't have to go through life as a Cohen." He gave his son a ream of paperwork to sign. His name would now be Perry Caldwell.

Now, Cohen had had intimations of this self-hate business before. He was named Perry, after all. On high holy days, the only times when his father would take Perry into faraway St. Louis for services, he would make a habit of referring to the rabbi as Reverend Lubofsky. "Hope the Reverend lays off the Gipper this year," he'd say, crumpling his big, sad, fleshy-lipped face in frightened anticipation of any Iowa local seeing them pull into the little synagogue's parking lot.

And so Cohen found himself at the progressive Midwestern liberal arts college (a sister institution to the one Vladimir attended), a college where communal father-hatred was the norm, and where Cohen excelled particularly. In the early nineties the school also served as a kind of way station for hundreds of unhappy Midwestern young men and women on their way to the redemptive land of Prava. Cohen, angry and confused, took the cue by junior year. And here he was.

SO THAT WAS his story! That was Cohen's theme! His father was a rich asshole. How shocking. Vladimir was ready to attack Cohen with his own background, from the Jew-baiting of Leningrad to his years as a Stinky Russian Bear in Westchester. Assimilation, my ass. What do you know of assimilation, spoiled American pig? Why, I'll show you . . . I'll show you all!

Oh, and the way Cohen had told the story. Lowering his voice during the bit about the Gipper, trying to sound hurt but brave when recalling his father's transgressions. Crocodile tears, my suburban friend. Your father could be a deforester of forests and a murderer of Hutus, but in the end what determines your fate is the size of your trust fund, the slope of your nose, the quality of your accent. At least his daddy wasn't accusing him of walking like a Jew. God damn it! Vladimir could just kill this Cohen! But instead he shook his head mournfully and said, "My God. It's hard to believe such things can still happen in this day and age."

"I can't believe it either," said Cohen. "I hope you don't mind me sharing it with you." My sharing it with you, Vladimir mentally corrected him (idiot Americans didn't even know their own language). And no, as long as there was hard currency down the road, he did not mind.

"My relationship with my father is something that really informs my work," Cohen continued. "And I thought you're the kind of person . . ."

Oh? What kind of person was he?

"You seem very wise and world-weary."

"Ah," Vladimir said. Wise and world-weary. Well he got that right, the son of a bitch. But then the supercilious Girshkin softened a little. Come to think of it, wise and world-weary was possibly the kindest thing you can say to a twenty-five-year-old. And then the Iowan was, as we have said, a big, attractive fella, a grungy lion (if only Vladimir could look more like him), confident enough of himself to share his intimacies over the course of a single beer. Plus, he had nice, heavy rural hands, the hands of a man, and had probably slept with all kinds of women. Vladimir, too, had designs on manhood, and to that end, Vladimir wanted to be Cohen's friend. The need for friendship and closeness was not something Vladimir imagined would rekindle so soon after his ignominious flight from the States, but it was certainly there; Vladimir was still a social animal with the need to rub up against fellow creatures. And he had before him this lion. This goofy wandering beast.

Cohen finished by asking Vladimir if he could see his mother poem. "It's not ready yet," Vladimir said. "I'm sorry."

A long silence followed his apology. Cohen may have felt rebuffed after his own fifteen minutes of candor. But soon the pit-barbecued pork arrived and the waitress cleared her throat to remind them that they had a waitress.

"Oh, you never told me what your company develops," Cohen said finally.

"Talent," Vladimir said. "We develop talent."

VLADIMIR AND COHEN walked off the pork as the sun prepared for its bedtime swoon into the river. Over the Emanuel Bridge they went to the tune of buskers playing saxophones behind Bata shoe boxes lined with velvet; a blind accordion player and his wife belting out German beer-hall songs with great aplomb and to the jingle of the largest coins; a rendition of Hamlet by a pair of peppy young California blondes drawing stares and whistles from young Stolovan men but little coinage from their embarrassed conationals. With all this low-tech commerce and entertainment, the bridge felt to Vladimir like the oldest crossing imaginable, a stone carpet unfurled from the castle overhanging the scene like a one-piece skyline. It was lined on both sides with statues of saints, grimy with coal dust and contorted into heroic positions. "Look," Cohen said, pointing out three indistinct figures lost in the robes of two of the grander saints. "That's the devil, that's a Turk, and that's a Jew."

Ah, so we were back to Cohen's grand theme again. Vladimir tried to put together a smile. He was feeling happy and pleased with himself after their lunch, but knew that his mood was malleable under the depressant weight of alcohol and didn't want the tragic curve of history to put him in a state. "Why are they underneath the saints?" he asked out of obligation.

"They're supporting them," Cohen said. "They're the support team."

Vladimir didn't want to press it further. It was some sort of medieval humor, but what did those stalwarts of Christendom know, with their earth flat and reason always falling off the edges? This was 1993, after all, and with the exception of the nascent slaughter in the Balkans, the African Horn, the ex-Soviet periphery, and of course the usual carnage in Afghanistan, Burma, Guatemala, the West Bank, Belfast, and Monrovia, the world was a sensible place.

"Now I'm going to take you to my favorite place in this city," Cohen said. And then, without warning, the restless man broke into a power walk, so that momentarily they quit the Emanuel Bridge and gained the embankment. Navigating past the churches, the mansions, and the singular powder tower that had chosen to decamp on this side of the Tavlata, they ran into a cozy lane, which ascended the city's heights alongside the castle. Here, squat merchant's mansions were marked by mosaics of ancient occupations and family quirks: three tiny violins, a goose fat from centuries of inertia, an unhappy-looking frog. Vladimir was on the lookout for a gherkin; perhaps his family had had a Prava past as well.

It was a struggle maintaining his pace up the hill. The pollution was deadly; life itself seemed to reek of coal. Cohen, however, was making good time, although now that his friend wasn't seated, Vladimir noticed that he carried a heavier-than-average load at the bottom, and his thighs, too, had benefited from the city's pork masterpieces.

Cohen ducked into a lane even more narrow than the last, which soon exhausted itself into what could no longer be termed a lane, rather a confluence of the pastel backsides of four buildings. He seated himself on one of a series of steps leading to a phantom doorway that had long become a wall, and told Vladimir that this particular skylit cubicle was the most special corner of Perry Cohen's Personal Prava. This was where he came to write his columns and poems for one of the town's English papers, the woefully misnamed Prava-dence.

So this was Cohen's special place? They had run up and down the four hills of Prava for this? While the rest of the city (minus the Foot) was an endless stretch of panoramic vistas, Cohen had chosen the tightest, most prosaic corner of Eastern Europe . . . Why, Vladimir's panelak had more character. Wait a second. Vladimir took another look. He must learn to think like Cohen. This was the key. A century ago he had taught himself to think like Francesca and her urban-god friends. Now he must adapt once more. What makes this place special to Cohen? Look closely. Think like Cohen. He likes this place because . . .

Got it! It's special because it's not special, and hence it makes Cohen feel special for choosing it. Special and different. He was different for coming to Prava and now he had validated his difference once more by choosing this place. Vladimir was ready to proceed. "Perry, I want you to make me a writer," he said.

Cohen was instantly on his feet again, towering over Vladimir with his hands raised expectantly, as if any moment now they were going to hug over some declaration, ruffle each other's hair over a mutual understanding. "A writer or a poet?" he asked, his breathing now as rapid as that of an older, corpulent man.

Vladimir thought about it. Poetry would probably take less time per unit. Surely that was why Cohen had chosen it. "A poet."

"Have you read much?"

"Well . . ." Vladimir entertained a poetic list that would have made Baobab proud: "Akhmatova, Wolcott, Milosz . . ."

No, no. Cohen didn't want to hear about them.

"Brodsky? Simic?"

"Stop right there," Cohen said. "See, like too many poets starting out, you've already read too much. Don't look at me like that. It's true. You're overread. The whole point of coming to the Old World is to chuck the baggage of the new."

"Oh," Vladimir said.

"Reading has nothing to do with writing. The two are diametrically opposed, they cancel each other out. Look, I need to know, Vladimir, do you really want me to be your mentor? Because if you do, you should be aware that it will involve some risk-taking."

"Art without risk is stasis," Vladimir said. "I told you that I wanted to be a poet, so I shall place myself in your hands, Perry."

"Thank you," Cohen said. "That's very kind of you to say. And very brave. May I . . . ?" They had the hug for which Cohen had been preparing, Vladimir hugging back with all his might, pleased that the day had already netted him two good friends (Kostya being the first). Indeed, caught in the fine-smelling Cohen's embrace, Vladimir decided to put the Iowan Jew in the basement of his pyramid scheme's pyramid, down where the dollars and Deutsche marks were to be stacked beneath the promissory notes.

"Perry," he said. "It is obvious we will be friends. You've taken me into your world, now I must reciprocate. As it happens to be, I am a fairly rich man and not without some influence. I wasn't kidding when I said my company was developing talent."

The next two cryptic lines had come to him during the biznesmenski lunch. He had had the good sense to jot them down inside his palm. "Talent, Perry, may be an ocean liner with only a few staterooms, but I can't let people like you spend your life in steerage. Will you allow me to make you wealthy?"

Cohen was moving closer in preparation for another hug. My God, another one! So this was Cohen when he wasn't sitting around Eudora's, deriding arrivistes for having less than two pens and suckling off the maternal teat--Cohen the gentle literary lion, the sweet-tempered dawdler of Stolovaya. Vladimir was suddenly happy to have submitted to his mentoring. Was that all it took to turn Cohen into an affectionate sap? Had Vladimir just single-handedly validated the young man's place here in a tight, banal corner of Prava? Did he just make a friend for life?

At this point, the writer nearly had his arms around him, but when it was clear that no hug was forthcoming (Vladimir had his limits, after all), Cohen patted his shoulder instead, and said: "All right then, my financial Sherpa. Let's go downtown and I'll introduce you to my crowd."

THEY TOOK A tram down the hill, so that the castle loomed above them once again. Now its palace facades were floodlit in artificial yellow while the cathedral extended its spires and crosses in a spectral green--two lovers that didn't speak the same language.

Vladimir asked for a geography lesson as the tram rocked them back and forth on its journey across the Tavlata, heaving them into the neatly groomed old-timers who were entitled to their tram seats by law and derived a great, silent pleasure from watching the two standing foreigners tumble to their knees.

Cohen, like Kostya, was glad to play tour guide. He pointed at the passing landmarks, his fingers leaving nicotine smudges on the tram windows. There, on the hill, to the left of the castle, where they just talked "the talk" as it would later be known, where the roofs were tiled red and where the most important embassies and wine bars were clustered, that was called Malenka Kvartalka. "The Lesser Quarter!" Vladimir said, pleasantly surprised whenever his birth language intersected with Stolovan. But why this demeaning name for such a magnificent neighborhood? Cohen had no answer to that.

And where they were going--the "sea of spires" as seen from the morning's first descent into the city, that was the Old Town. And to the south of the Old Town, the part of the city where the spires thinned out a bit and the roofs glimmered with more restraint, and the giant galosh of the Foot lorded over the proceedings like a phantom rubber commissar, was the New Town--which wasn't so new, Cohen explained, dating back merely to the fourteenth century or so. "So what's in the New Town?" Vladimir asked.

"The Kmart," Cohen whispered with mock reverence.

AFTER CROSSING INTO the Old Town, they drank many coffees in the plush if worn interior of the Cafe Nouveau, which ran amok with all the excesses of its namesake period: gilded mirrors, seats and carpets smothered in red velvet, the indispensable nymph of white marble. It was a long evening of listening to the ramblings of the young American on the subject of present-day poetry and art, the total of which left Vladimir feeling fortunate that he himself had no literary proclivities, harbored no bone-headed artistic intentions, else his meandering life would truly come to a bad end. After all, look where the delusional Cohen now found himself, and Cohen was a rich dandy, not some dismal Russian whose life chances were pretty lousy from the get-go.

AS VLADIMIR WAS thinking these thoughts and nodding along to Cohen's discourse, their environment began to improve. A Dixieland jazz ensemble (composed entirely of Stolovans) took to the stage, the joint began to swing, the pretty marble tables soon filled up with pretty boys and girls, and Cohen's corner emerged as a popular destination.

Subsequently, it became hard for Vladimir to remember how many of America's finest sons and daughters he met that particular night. Throughout the evening, he remembered being especially cold and aloof while lots of hands were given for him to shake as Cohen presented Vladimir Girshkin, international magnate, talent scout, and soon-to-be poet laureate.

Few knew what to make of him; Vladimir accepted this. And what did Vladimir make of them? Well, to start with, they were a fairly homogenous group--white middle Americans with a fashionable grudge, that was the lowest common denominator. Native-born folks who never had to struggle with the dilemmas of an alpha peasant or a beta immigrant because five generations down the road every affluent young American was entitled to the luxury of being second-rate. And here in fairyland Prava, bonded by the glue of their mediocrity, they stuck together as if they had all been born in the same Fairfax County pod, had all suckled the same baby-boomer she-wolf like so many Romuluses and Remuses. The rules were only different for obvious outsiders like Vladimir who had to perform some grand gesture--conduct the Bolshoi, write a novel, launch a pyramid scheme--to gain a modicum of acceptance.

He noted their clothes. Some were dressed in the flannels, which, Vladimir had noticed, were spreading by way of Seattle during his last month in the States. But the glam-nerd look, Francesca's most tangible gift to Vladimir, was in evidence as well. The shirts way too tight, the sweaters too fluffy, the glasses too horn-rimmed, the hair coiffed either with seventies' extravagance or fifties' restraint. But look how much younger than Vladimir these specimens were! Twenty-one, twenty-two, maximum. Some probably couldn't get served in American bars. He was old enough to be their teaching assistant.

Nevertheless, he would persevere. Wisdom came with age. Already, Vladimir could see himself declared an elder statesman. Another way to look at it: Despite their relative youth, the nouveau-nerds were hobbled by their unremarkable suburban demographics, while Vladimir, as a former New Yorker, was a freak by nature. But he was not the only freak. Others who tried particularly hard to stand out included Plank, a thin and nervous man who carried a yapping bite-sized dog--some kind of cross between a Chihuahua and a mosquito--in a little homemade pouch that was wrapped with silver lace. Women passing by took turns telling him how cute his dog was, its grimy, sorry little head constantly peeking out from its mobile home like a furry earflap with two eyes. But Plank, true to the game, wouldn't smile or acknowledge them beyond a nod, knowing how out-of-season such sentiments could be. Cohen told Vladimir that Plank bred these customized minidogs in his panelak for the old Stolovan ladies, but Plank did not warm to Vladimir, stating: "There's not much money in it, you know." Oof, was that an antibusinessman slur? Did he not realize that Vladimir's true love was the muse?

Vladimir did better with Alexandra: tall, slender, dark-haired, with a round, full Mediterranean face and a small, intelligent curve of bosom. In fact, she was (dare Vladimir think it) not unlike Francesca except her face was too conventionally pretty with its high cheekbones and long natural lashes stretching upward in two parabolas. With Fran you had to find the beauty and fall in love with the blemishes, while Alexandra's ready-made good looks seemed the perfect physical match for Cohen. The way Cohen's eyes were firmly fixed on the silhouette of her body, sheathed in nothing but a tight-fitting black turtleneck extending into matching hose (no glam-nerd threads for her, thank you), certainly confirmed as much on his part.

Before Vladimir could be formally introduced, Alexandra grabbed his head and pressed the furry thing into the soft, bare crux of her neck. "Hi, honey!" she said. "I've heard all about you!" She had? But how? Vladimir had only met Cohen three hours ago.

"Come! Come with me!" She draped her arm around his and was leading him toward a kind of Art Nouveau tapestry hanging from a velvet wall--long swirls of multicolored swan feathers encircling what seemed to be a stylized Pieta. Yes, dear old Art Nouveau, thought Vladimir. Thank heavens, Abstract Expressionism and Co. had slain that gaudy beast. "Look! Look at this!" Alexandra shouted in her throaty, smoky voice. "A Pstrucha!"

A what? Oh, who cares . . . She was heavenly. That collarbone. You could see it through the turtleneck. She was like a swan herself. Red lipstick, black turtleneck. A haiku right there.

"Are you familiar with Adolf Pstrucha? I've got Pstrucha on the mind. Look at my book bag. Look at it!" It was, indeed, crammed with a dozen or so colorful books on the P-fellow. "Now Pstrucha wasn't really Stolovan. He belonged to Slovene Moderna. Are you familiar with Slovene art? Oh, my dear boy, we must take a trip to Ljubljana. You mustn't deprive yourself any further. Anyway, our man Pstrucha was practically laughed out of Prava. It was such a reactionary place in the early 1900s, the shithole of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But . . ."

She lowered her head conspiratorially and brushed her collarbone against Vladimir's shoulder, so he could feel the immense weight of it, her body armor, her naturally occurring breastplate. "But personally I think the Stolovans were laughing at his name. Pstruch. It means 'trout' in Stolovan. Adolf Trout! It's too much! Don't you agree? Say, have you ever been trout-fishing? I know you Russians love to fish. I went fishing in the Carpathians with this French guy who knows Jitomir Melnik, the prime minister, and I just know the frog would be interested in your PravaInvest. Would you like me to introduce you? Would you like to have dinner? Or we could do lunch if you're busy. Or, nowadays, I'm trying to wake up in time for breakfast."

Yes, yes, yes. Yes on three counts, Vladimir thought. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And then maybe we can take a nap together. No, best to keep her awake and talking. Her words, so soft, so light, the consistency of a flan . . . Vladimir wanted to reach over and eat her conversation. Follow it right into her little mouth. But, horror of horrors, Alexandra had a boyfriend, or what passed for one--a chubby Yorkshire fellow named Marcus who looked like he could have been a rugby player before all this Eastern Bloc a-go-go stuff happened. While Alexandra pleasantly queried Vladimir on his writing ("About your mother? Oh, how interesting!"), her boyfriend loudly attacked the cafe's other patrons with his hip Briton-on-the-edge routine (Wot? Wot did you say? C'mere y'cunt!), eliciting forced laughter from Cohen and Plank. It was clear that everybody looked up to this Marcus runt; they looked up to him because he was dating Alexandra, the crown jewel of Prava.

Then there was Maxine, introduced as a student of American culture, dressed entirely in polyester and sweating accordingly in the warm caffeine haze of the Nouveau. Her short hair had been gelled into one blond upward-pointing clump that seemed ready to take off for the stars, and she had moist blue eyes that looked at everything, including Vladimir, with amazement. She was also a diplomatic conversationalist, talking to everyone in turn, first Cohen, then Plank, then Marcus, then Alexandra, then finally Vladimir. "I'm writing a treatise on the mythopoetics of Southern interstates," she said to him. "Have you ever been?"

Vladimir liked her expressiveness and the warmth of her hand. He told her of his experiences with Midwestern interstates. How driving behind the wheel of his Chicagoan girlfriend's Volvo in college he had nearly killed a family of chipmunks. It was a safe and pointless conversation, certainly safer than Vladimir's driving, until gutsy Vladimir dared ask her why, as a self-proclaimed student of American culture, she was living in Prava. She lifted her latte to cover her mouth, and mumbled something about needing distance. Ah, good old distance.

Overall, Vladimir felt he scored well at the cafe portion of the popularity contest, despite Marcus and Plank's uniting to grumble about rich little pissers, meaning, well, Vladimir. But Vladimir would not succumb. His mental reflexes, sharpened by the afternoon's initial sparring with Cohen, saved the day once more as he announced what he planned to do with his riches. Why, of course, he was going to start a literary magazine. Cohen at first seemed offended at not being told of the endeavor beforehand, but soon the whispers of "lit mag" suffused the room and, before they knew it, the regulars at Cohen's corner were doing their condescending best to shoo away the literary hopefuls at the gates.

Vladimir, still amazed at his own idea, played it down. How the hell was he going to sell this one to the Groundhog? But then he remembered that the students at his Midwestern college used to have not one but two literary magazines, so how hard would it be to start up a little press in Prava? Besides, they were already doing glossy brochures for the "company." It wouldn't take too much more to print up a few hundred copies of something half-decent on the side. "Does anyone have editorial experience?" he asked his new crowd. Of course they all did.

AFTER THEY HAD drunk enough coffee to keep them floating at an arm's length from the ceiling for a week, the crew retired downstairs where a primitive-looking disco was pounding out something not entirely avant-garde. "How Cleveland," sneered Plank at last year's music, yet no one turned their backs on the scene (was there any alternative?), venturing instead to their own rickety side table, one of many bracketing the amorphously shaped dance floor. "Beer!" cried Maxine. And soon bottles of Unesko lined the table--an additional line of defense against the bodies moving without grace or surety in the revolving police-car beams and the lethargically thumping strobe lights. "This is all we have," Plank said to Vladimir, Vladimir having clearly grown on him since the announcement of the literary magazine. "I hope you weren't expecting New York on the Tavlata."

"Well, we'll see what we can do about that," said the emboldened Vladimir. "Yes, we shall see."

Alexandra was tugging on his ear, anxious to give him a census of the place. "Look at the backpackers! Look how big they are! Oh, that frat-hog with the Ohio State T-shirt! Oh, he's priceless!"

"What's their function?" Vladimir said.

"None," Cohen said, wiping beer off his chin. "They are our mortal enemies. They must be destroyed, torn apart by the babushkas like a ham on Christmas, dragged by the trams through the twelve bridges of Prava, hung from the highest spire of St. Stanislaus."

"And where are our people?" Vladimir shouted to Alexandra above the din.

She pointed around to the back tables, which, Vladimir now realized, were reserved for their fellow artists, slopping beer calmly amid the suburban feeding-frenzy.

An ambassador from one of those tables, a tall young buck in a Warhol T-shirt, brought a sleek blue water pipe filled with hashish. Vladimir was now introduced as "magnate, talent scout, poet laureate, and publisher." They smoked the sweet and peppery hash, refilling the pipe enough times for their fingers to become brown and sticky, for this was the moist and lethal kind of hash that could only result from Turkey's proximity. The fellow offered it to Vladimir for six hundred crowns a gram, but Vladimir was too tweaked to deal with both crowns and the metric system. He bought two thousand dollars' worth anyway and made another lifelong friend in the process.

There was little he would remember after the hashish entered the picture. There was the dancing with Maxine and Alexandra and possibly the boys. A wide swath of floor was cleared of backpackers by brown-shirted disco personnel, and Vladimir's crowd was invited to get up and boogie. At this point a serious fracas broke out. A sorority sister crying foul jumped on Vladimir, of all people. Stoned beyond capacity, Vladimir thought he was being romanced, what with all that sweet-smelling American flesh around him and a pair of manicured claws dug into his sides. Only when Alexandra started to drag the sister off by the hair did Vladimir realize that he was at the center of some kind of class antagonism.

She did this hair-pulling with aplomb and Vladimir, free of his burden, must have thanked her profusely because he remembered her saying "Aww" in the purple-gray-green haze of disco lights and hash smoke, and kissing him on both cheeks. Then he felt good about the whole clumsy incident since it had further polarized the crowd into "us" versus "them" and in the space of one short evening he had placed himself squarely in the "us" column of the register.

Then, sometime during the taxi ride up to his compound, he remembered poking the dozing Cohen and trying to point out the city below, its floodlights put out, but the yellow moon still traveling along the bend of the Tavlata, the airplane warning lights blinking off the cuff of the Foot, a lone Fiat huffing its way past the silent embankment. "Perry, look at how beautiful," Vladimir said.

"Yes, good," said Cohen and fell back asleep.

Finally, he was looking up at the walls of his panelak castle, remembering how imposing Casa Girshkin had seemed during the high school days of returning from Manhattan late at night, intoxicated, incoherent, and unresponsive to his ever-vigilant mother's queries in both Russian and English. He walked into the lobby where Gusev's men had fallen asleep, some with their playing cards still in their hands. Empowered by the smell of the lobby, he crawled upstairs in search of his bed, missing his floor twice. At last he found his room, then his bed.

She was a pretty one--Alexandra, he thought, before sprinkling himself with minoxidil and quietly passing out.

21. PHYSICAL CULTURE.

AND HER ADHERENTS.