The Groundhog munched, both cheeks bulging. "Beautiful job with that Canadian donkey," he said once his squid was finally dispatched. "That's right, why not start out big? Why not a quarter million?"

"This money is good," Vladimir said. "The world owes us for the last seventy years. This money is very good."

They drank bottles of Chardonnay, beaming at each other in the unspoken argot of success. By the fourth bottle, and with the braised hare in pimiento reduction well on his way, the Groundhog got sappy. "You're the best," he said. "I don't care who you are, what tribe you came from. You're just the greatest."

"Stop it."

"It's true," the Groundhog said, working fast on the complimentary bread and horseradish paste. "You're the only one I don't have to worry about. You're an adult, a businessman. Do you know what trouble I have with Gusev's men?" He flipped the Russian bird--the thumb stuck between the index and middle fingers--to a table by the kitchen where members of his bouffant-haired, pinstriped security team were slumped over their empty Jim Beam bottles.

"Oy, tell me," Vladimir said, shaking his head.

"I'll tell you," the Groundhog said. "You know I got problems with the Bulgarians, right? With the whole stripping and prostitution racket on Stanislaus Square? So these men of Gusev's, these fucking cretins, they go to the Bulgarians' bar and the usual nonsense starts about the girlfriends, the questions of who fucked who first, and who sucked who where. And when it's all over they got this one guy, Vladik the Dumpling, that's the Bulgarians' number two, actually . . . They got him strung up by his feet over the bar, and they cut off his dick and his balls, and they bleed him to death! That's fucking Gusev's men for you! No brains, no skills, nothing. They cut off a man's dick and his balls. I said to them, 'Where do you idiots think you are--Moscow?' This is Prava, the waiting room to the West, and they're going around cutting--"

"Right," Vladimir said.

"They're cutting--"

"Yes, the mutilation of genitals. I hear you," Vladimir said. "Where's the bathroom?" he asked.

After assuring himself of the wholeness of his scrotum and padding it with a layer of crispy Stolovan toilet paper (as if that would stop the revenge-minded Bulgarians!) Vladimir felt the return of good cheer swell up across his nether region. By the time he staggered back to the table he was nearly ebullient. "You've got to have a talk with Gusev!" he shouted across the table. "We're businessmen!"

"You have a talk with him," the Groundhog said, throwing up his hands. "You tell him, 'This is how we do business in America, and this is how we do not do business in America.' A line has to be drawn for those simpletons."

"Correct, correct, Groundhog," Vladimir said, quickly toasting with a glass of schnapps. "Only, trust me, you should be the one telling them. They're not scared of me."

"They will be scared of you," the Groundhog said. "As scared as they are of God. Which reminds me, here's a toast to Kostya and his mother's health."

"To a speedy recovery."

The Groundhog suddenly looked serious. "Volodya, let me speak from the heart. You and Kostya are the future of this organization. I see that now. Before it was fun, sure, run around, blow up a few diners, cut off some dicks, but we got to get serious. This is the nineties. We're in this . . . 'informational age' . . . we need 'Americanisms' and 'globalisms.' Do you know where I'm coming from?"

"Oh, yes," Vladimir said. "I say we call a meeting, the whole organization."

"Whores and all," said the Groundhog.

"We're going to teach them America."

"You're going to teach them America."

"Me?" Vladimir said, swallowing a cognac.

"You," the Groundhog said.

"Me?" Vladimir feigned surprise yet again.

"You're the best."

"No, you're the best."

"No, you."

What happened next was as good an argument for temperance as any. "You're the top," Vladimir sang, squeezing in a shot of pear brandy between the lyrics. "You're the Colosseum."

He must have been louder than he thought, for the pianist instantly shifted out of his Dr. Zhivago repertoire and struck up Vladimir's tune. The pianist was, like nearly everyone in Prava, open to suggestions.

"You're the top," Vladimir continued even louder, with the Germans around him smiling appreciatively, thrilled, as always, at the prospect of free foreign entertainment at tableside. "You're the Louvre Museum."

"Get up and sing, Tovarisch Girshkin!" The Groundhog kicked him hard under the table for encouragement.

Vladimir staggered to his feet, then fell over. A further prod from his employer brought him up again. "You're the melody from a symphony by Strauss! You're a Bendel bonnet, a Shakespeare sonnet, you're Mickey Mouse!"

The Groundhog leaned in, his expression quizzical, and pointed to himself. "No, no, you're the Groundhog," Vladimir whispered reassuringly in Russian. The Groundhog pretended to sigh with relief. Hey, the Hog was a fun fella!

"You're the top," Vladimir crackled. "You're a Waldorf salad. You're the top. You're a Berlin ballad . . ." The waitstaff was trying hard to position a microphone in his direction.

"You're the purple light of a summer night in Spain . . . You're the National Gallery, you're Garbo's salary, you're cellophane." He wished he could translate one of the lines into German to get an extra kick from the red-faced deutsches Volk, maybe hit them up for a tip or a date. "I'm a lazy lout who's just about to stop . . ."

Oh, what a ham you are, Vladimir Borisovich.

"But if baby . . . I'm the bottom . . . You-ou-ou're the top."

There was a standing ovation greater than at the Joy on poetry night. The Groundhog's security detail regarded their master uncertainly, as if waiting for the secret code to spring into action and spray the whole room with bullets so that no witnesses to this little musical number would remain. There was cause for alarm, as the Groundhog, doubled over with laughter, slipped under the table like a surfer caught in the undertow, and remained there for some time laughing and hitting his head against the table's bottom. Vladimir had to coax him out with the lobster claws which, true to the menu, really did sit atop a lime-green spread of kiwi puree.

25. THE HAPPIEST.

MAN ALIVE.

HE DECIDED TO date Morgan, the nice girl the crowd had picked up at the Joy.

It wasn't a political decision and not so much an erotic one, although he was attracted to her form and pallor, and, maybe, just maybe, she would make a good Eva to his Juan Peron. But his romantic stirrings extended even beyond public relations. He was lonely for a woman's company. When he arose from an empty bed, his mornings seemed strange and disjointed; at night, passing out into the comforter, as soft and licentious as it was, was somehow not enough. It was hard to understand. After all the complications that American women had put him through (and would he even be here in Prava if it weren't for his Frannie?) he still depended on their company to make him feel like a young mammal--so vital, affectionate, and full of sperm. But this time around he would take charge of the relationship. He was beyond the "appendage" stage of following Fran around and swooning at the mere mention of semiotics. It was time for someone innocent and pliable like this Morgan, whoever the hell she turned out to be.

There were several courtship options for him. A great deal of them involved various permutations of chance meetings in clubs, poetry readings, strolls across the Emanuel Bridge, or during the hours spent queuing up at the town's only laundromat--a hub of expatriate activity. At each of these venues, he, Vladimir, would prove himself superior in intellect, grace, conviviality, and name-dropping, thereby accumulating enough social points to be later cashed in for a date.

Or he could do things the old-fashioned, proactive way and call her up. He decided (since, according to Alexandra, his social coordinator, everything was set for the Eagle to land) to try the latter and rang her from the car phone. But the Stalin-era telephone exchange would not connect the two lovers-to-be; instead of Morgan he kept getting a venerable babushka who by the fifth call rasped that he was a "foreign penis" and should "fuck off back to Germany."

And so Vladimir buzzed Alexandra instead. She and Morgan had twice done the "girls night out" thing and were becoming fast friends. From Alexandra, yawning and likely in Marcus's arms, he got Morgan's address out in the boonies and a few bon mots concerning a young girl's virtue. He longed to orient his car's compass in the direction of Alexandra's suburbs, and to ask her to the movies or wherever it was people went on dates. But he pressed forward, way beyond the river and the preliminary factoryscape, to a quiet stretch of asphalt and a lone and lonely apartment house which seemed as if it had been blown several klicks downwind from its panelak brethren by some bureaucratic storm.

Morgan lived on the seventh floor.

He took an elevator smelling comfortably of kielbasa, whose iron door required his whole being to open and shut (the exercises with Kostya were already proving useful), and knocked on the door of apartment 714-21G.

There was stirring within, a slight creak of springs set against the quiet jabber of television, and Vladimir was instantly afraid that he had been preceded by some large American boy, which would explain both the creaking springs and the television being on on a Friday night.

Morgan opened the door without asking who it was (the way non-New Yorkers have an appalling tendency to do) and she was, to Vladimir's welcome surprise, alone. In fact, she was extremely alone, with two dumpy television anchors doing the news roundup in Stolovan; on the coffee table a small pizza from the New Town shop where they piled up such daring combinations as apples, melted Edam cheese, and sausage gravy; and on the windowsill a bored cat, a hefty Russian blue, mewing and scratching at the freedom beyond.

Morgan was sporting a pink starfish-shaped rash on her forehead (a distant cousin of the wine-dark splotch on Gorbachev's head), which she had slathered with a thick layer of cream, and was wrapped up in a lavender terry-cloth robe several sizes too small, the kind one expects to receive upon being consigned to a cut-rate nursing home. "Hey, it's you!" she said, her round American face smiling perfectly. "What are you doing all the way out here? Nobody ever comes to visit me."

Vladimir was caught short. Seeing her as she was, he was expecting several minutes of embarrassment from her over the state of her wardrobe and forehead. Embarrassment which, he hoped, would make him look good by comparison and help him press the case for why she should go out with him and fall in love with him too. But here she was, happy to see him, actually willing to admit that she didn't get many visitors. Vladimir remembered her unsolicited honesty at the Joy when she had first met the Crowd. Now she was coming through with several more heapings of the stuff. What fresh pathology was this?

"Sorry to barge in unannounced," Vladimir said. "I was in the neighborhood on some business, and so I thought . . ."

"That's all right," she said. "I'm so glad you're here. Please, entrez. What a mess. You'll have to excuse me." She made her way to the couch, and, with the benefit of the snug bathrobe, Vladimir now noticed that her thighs and backside, while not particularly large in and of themselves, were somewhat larger than the rest of her.

Now, why wasn't she rushing to change out of that ridiculous bathrobe? Didn't she want to impress her guest? Hadn't she told Alexandra that she found Vladimir exotic? Of course, Ravi Shankar was exotic, and how many women of Vladimir's generation would sleep with him? Vladimir briefly entertained the thought that Morgan was comfortable being who she was in her own house, but then dismissed such outlandishness. No, something else was going on.

She closed the pizza box, then dropped a magazine on top of it. As if that would conceal the damning proof of her solitude, thought Vladimir. "Here," she said. "Make yourself at home. Sit. Sit down."

"We're modernizing a factory near here," Vladimir said, pointing vaguely to the window where he assumed another factory in need of a tune-up lay in wait. "It's very dull work, as you can imagine. Every couple of weeks I have to come in and argue with the foreman about cost overruns. Still, they're good workers, the Stolovans."

"I wasn't doing much myself," she shouted from what must have been the kitchen, for Vladimir heard water running. She was likely dealing with the creamy buildup on her forehead. "I live so far from the center. Leaving this place is such a bother."

Such a bother. An older person's phrase. But said with a young person's carelessness. Vladimir recalled this kind of paradox from the young Middle American natives he encountered during his college year, and the recollection relaxed him. After they were both settled on the couch and she had brought out a sad little local wine and a paper cup for Vladimir to drink from (the splotch on her forehead remained!), a question-and-answer period followed, one which Vladimir found as familiar as the words to the "Internationale."

"Where's your accent from?"

"I am Russian," Vladimir said, in the grave voice which that admission called for.

"That's right, Alexandra told me something about that. I studied a little Russian in college, you know."

"Where did you go?"

"OSU," she said. "Ohio State." It sounded perfectly reasonable coming out of her mouth, but it made Vladimir think of the "frat-hog" at the Cafe Nouveau whose Ohio State T-shirt had made Alexandra laugh.

"So Russian was your major?"

"No, psychology."

"Ahh . . ."

"But I took a lot of humanities classes."

"Ohh . . ."

Silence.

"Do you remember any Russian?"

She smiled and straightened out a growing partition in her robe, which Vladimir had been watching carefully, feeling piglike and uncouth in his voyeurism. "I just remember a few words . . ."

Vladimir already knew what those few words were. For some reason, Americans undertaking his impossible language were compelled to say "I love you." Perhaps this was a legacy of the Cold War. All that suspicion and lack of cultural exchange fueling the desires of young, well-wishing American men and women to bridge the gap, to dismantle those nukes by falling into the arms of some soulful, enigmatic Russian sailor, or his counterpart, the warm and sweet-tasting Ukrainian farmer girl. The fact that, in reality, the soulful Russian sailor was smashed out of his mind half the time and held to a rather loose definition of date rape, while the sweet-tasting Ukrainian farmer girl was covered in pigshit six days out of the week, was fortunately concealed by that gray and nonporous entity, the Iron Curtain.

"Ya vas loobloo," she said on cue.

"Why, thank you," Vladimir said.

They laughed and blushed and Vladimir felt himself naturally moving across the couch to be closer to her, although a very safe distance remained. The way her unfashionably long brown hair was coiled limply around her neck, the way it ended in tangles across the faded lavender of the bathrobe made Vladimir feel sorry for her; it aroused him too. She could be so beautiful if she wanted to. Why wasn't she then?

"So, what are you doing tonight?" he said. "Feel like taking in a movie?"

A movie. That sacred rite of dating which he had never performed. Not with his college girlfriend, the Chicagoan (straight to bed); or Frannie (straight to bar); or even Challah (straight to nervous tears and hiccuping).

And how about "taking one in"? You couldn't go wrong with a boy who used language like that and probably waved earnestly and said, "Take care, now, hear," when Uncle Trent took off for the Rotary Club. Accent be damned, you were safe with Vladimir Girshkin.

She squinted at her tiny watch and tapped it purposefully, as if she was on a tight schedule which Vladimir had rudely thrown off-kilter with his dreams of cinema and maybe one of his skinny arms around her shoulders. "I haven't seen a movie since I got here," she said.

She scooped up the latest Prava-dence, and leaned toward Vladimir to hold the paper aloft for them both. Despite her being disheveled and marooned on a Friday night, a clean smell emerged from the crux of her uplifted arms. Was there ever a time when American women weren't so extraterrestrially clean? He really wanted to kiss her.

According to the paper, Prava was awash with Hollywood movies, each stupider than the next. They finally settled on a drama about a gay lawyer with AIDS, which was apparently a big hit in the States and was approved by many of that nation's sensitive people.

Morgan excused herself to the bathroom to change (finally!) while Vladimir took in her room, lovingly filled with mass-manufactured knickknacks from both the New World and the Old, which lined several plywood "instant" shelves: a fading charcoal drawing of Prava's castle, a tiny moss-green mermaid statue from Copenhagen, a cracked beer stein from some place called the Great Lakes Brewing Company, a blown-up photo of a fat, disembodied hand dangling a striped bass (Dad?), a framed flyer advertising an industrial noise band named "Marty and the Fungus" (old boyfriend?), and a copy of Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat. The only incongruous item was a large poster illustrating the Foot in all its Stalinist glory leaning precariously over the Old Town Hall. Beneath it, a Stolovan slogan: "Grazdanku! Otporim vsyechi Stalinski cudovisi!" Vladimir could never be sure of the funny Stolovan language, but translated into normal Russian this could be an exhortation along the lines of "Citizens! Let us take the ax to all of Stalin's monstrosities!" Hm. That was a little unexpected.

He closed his eyes and tried to take all of her in--the warm round face, the serious gaze, the awkward little mouth, the soft body bundled in terry cloth, the harmless errata on her shelf. Yes, there were probably quirks and inconsistencies in her personality with which Vladimir would eventually have to contend, but, at present, she certainly made for a wonderful demographic. Vladimir, too, could make himself into a pretty good demo: his recent income ranked him in the upper ten percent of U.S. households, and he believed in monogamy with a sad kind of romantic fierceness that would certainly put him ahead of most men in the polls. Yes, the numbers were right; now the magical American love thing had to happen, which it usually did when the numbers were right.

And then he noticed that she was out of the bathroom and talking to him about something . . . What was it? The Foot? He had been looking at the Foot poster. What was she saying? Down with Stalin? Up with the people? She was definitely saying something about the Foot and the long-put-upon Stolovan nation. But despite her insistent tone, Vladimir was too busy thinking about a strategy to make her love him to hear the particulars of what she was saying. Yes, it was time for the love thing to happen.

WELL, SHE DID look good after her makeover! She was dressed in a little silk blouse which, she must have been aware, defined her contours closely, and had her hair completely up, save for a few stray wisps that fell out of the bun adorably, after a fashion he had seen in contemporary New York subway ads. Perhaps later he could take her to Larry Litvak's cocktail party--to which he had been invited by phone, postcard, and several gooey encounters with the man himself--and, once there, show her exactly where Vladimir Girshkin was lodged in Prava's social firmament.

The theater was in the Lesser Quarter, meters from the Emanuel Bridge and close enough to the castle to be in audible range of the bells of its cathedral. Like all real estate of its caliber the theater was crammed with young foreigners, the bulk of them wearing black-and-orange down jackets and baseball caps with logos of American sports teams worn backward. This was the year's fall fashion-statement for that hideously sterile human mass expanding via satellite from Laguna Beach to Guangdong Province--the international middle class--and it made Vladimir yearn for winter and heavy overcoats and the end of the tourist season, as if there would ever be an end.

On the plus side, the global men all stared at Vladimir's date as if she was the living embodiment of the reason they slaved away night and day at their engineering textbooks and accounting software, and the looks they reserved for him, that goateed shrimp of a poet, were enough to demonstrate for those of a Catholic disposition envy's place among the seven deadly ones.

As for the women, bah! all those jangling gold bracelets and tight V-neck sweaters were for naught--no one, not the Bengali heiress nor the lawyer from Hong Kong wore her finery with such confidence and familiar grace as the candidate from Shaker Heights, Ohio. (During the anxious ride into the center, he had learned the name of the particular Cleveland suburb where Morgan grew tall and fair.) Right! No matter which gender he encountered that night it certainly seemed that this whole enterprise, this date, had gotten off on the right foot, and to celebrate Vladimir bought at the concession stand a minibottle of Becherovka, the hideous Czech liqueur that tasted of burnt pumpkin. And for the lady, a little flask of the Hungarian booze called Unicom, which, despite its lingual similarity to a United Nations relief agency, was the source of innumerable atrocities to the stomach and its sensitive lining.

"Cheers!" They clinked their drinks and, predictably, Morgan gagged and coughed as would any mortal this side of the Danube, while Vladimir comforted her with improvised manliness, even touched her sweaty hand a little, out of concern, and wanted for a brief second to live forever in such circumstances (i.e., being manly; being envied; touching her, if only at the extremities). But then the lights went down and the mating ritual, such as it was, became a bit murky for Vladimir since there was little opportunity for him to try out his witticisms and even less occasion to put on the moves. How could he, after all, with half the audience sniffling and bawling as the attractive hero on the screen became more and more emaciated with the progression of the awful disease, eventually to lose his hair then pass away by the closing credits?

What a scene there was then! By the time the curtains went down noses were trumpeting throughout the theater as if the castle walls outside belonged to ancient Jericho. But Morgan's face was placid, if a little glazed over, and they stumbled wordlessly to the exit sign and into the street. They stood, still silent, watching the Fiat taxis being commissioned by departing moviegoers while the first drunken processions of Italian university students loudly made their way past the ominous shadow of an adjacent powder tower to some disco wonderland beyond.

Vladimir couldn't wait to vent. "I hated it!" he shouted. "Hated it! Hated it!" He did a little dance in the shadows of the flickering street lamps, as if to demonstrate the primordial force of his hatred. But it was time for some kind of intellectual breakdown, so he said: "How trite. How revoltingly simple-minded. To turn AIDS into yet another courtroom drama. As if the only way Americans can express anything anymore is through legal proceedings. I'm so utterly underwhelmed."

"I don't know," she said. "I think just making this movie was a good thing. So many people have issues. Especially where I come from. My little brother and his friends can be such homophobes. They just don't know any better. At least, this movie talks about AIDS. Don't you think that's important?"

What? What the hell was she quacking about? Who gave a fuck what her brother thought about queers. The point was the movie failed as a work of art! Art! Art! Weren't the Americans here in Prava for art? Why the hell was she here? A little reasoned rebellion before grad school? A chance to show off to the suburban losers in Shaker Heights: "That's me and my Russian ex-boyfriend in front of the hotel where Kafka took an important crap in 1921. See that plaque by the door? Pretty nifty, huh?" He hadn't even bothered to ask Morgan what she was doing here in Prava, but the sad alternatives--teaching American English to local businessmen or waitressing the breakfast shift at Eudora's--were all too obvious. Oh, there was so much he needed to show her. So much she needed to know about the society in which she had landed. Yes, he would go the extra kilometer for this sweet Cleveland cutie. Those hale little cheeks. That nose.

"Well," he said after a little while had passed and a weak-willed burst of rain had made them a little wet. "I certainly need a drink after that turkey."

"How about Larry Litvak's cocktail party?" she said.