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got some stories to them. Writers! ”
    It was a kitchen of writers—Karel and Vera, Daniel, even Miroslav, and more—and I wanted none of them. All I’d wanted was Georgi, a quiet talk, and then some sleep. But Georgi couldn’t do anything quietly tonight. His Frenchman was in town. His French communist poet—an existentialist, no less.
    The Frenchman sat up and said a few words of a love poem by Paul Eluard that I did not understand, something about wasps flowering and a necklace of windows. When he paused long enough we knew he was done, so we clapped. He beamed. Karel got up, and I took his chair. Louis said, “Now that you’re sitting I can face you!”
    Vera and Ludmila laughed, and when they quieted, I saw Vera’s big, drunken eyes holding on to me. Her black hair hung loosely down her back.
    “They told me about it,” he said. “This book of yours.”
    “Oh great.”
    “I hear it’s autobiographical. That so?” He spoke our language surprisingly well.
    “Everything’s autobiographical, isn’t it?”
    Louis laughed expressively, as though he were on a stage and had to project to the back rows. “Very good, very good!”
    I hadn’t said it to be funny, but they were all laughing with him, even Georgi, and I didn’t know if this was because it actually was funny, or if they were trying to stay in France’s good favors.
    “I just finished an epic poem on the most glorious of all human desires: revenge. I swear, there is nothing more sincere. What about your book?”
    “It’s about my time during the war.”
    The Frenchman stopped laughing and put on a very serious face. “And what did you do during the war?”
    “Killed people, of course.”
    Louis winked. “Me, I hid under my mother’s skirt!”
    Everyone laughed again, and even I cracked a smile.

11
     

     
    The conversation was literary before it became political. It started with some French poets I hadn’t read, then some Italians I’d read in translation, and finally came back home. Karel, Vera’s husband, brought up August Menish, who had been released from internal exile two months before and was busy editing his prison memoir. “It’s going to be incredible,” he told us.
    “That’s what you told us about Brest’s camp book,” Vera said as she put out her cigarette. “And that ended up worthless.” The smile on her gaunt philosopher’s face was directed at me.
    “Menish has the books behind him—he’s got the evidence,” said Karel. But no one was listening to him anymore.
    Louis talked about the bus strike going on in Montgomery, Alabama, in the United States. A couple people waved his comments away, because we’d heard enough of the story from The Spark —further evidence of capitalism’s racist underbelly—but Louis insisted that we listen. “You should hear this reverend they’ve got leading them. His name’s King —a doctor, in fact. He’s one hell of a speaker. He’s putting nonviolent resistance on the map.”
    “That was Gandhi,” said Ludmila. “The Americans would have you think they invented water next.”
    “Didn’t they?” said someone I didn’t know.
    Miroslav pulled out a pack of cards to start the games, so I moved to the deflated sofa in the living room and half listened to Vera provoke Louis into a debate on existentialism—she questioned his credentials, which was something Vera loved to do. I stopped listening. On the far wall was Georgi’s old poster for the Fifth Soviet Five-Year Plan, of kerchiefed women working in fields, below the enormous face of Stalin filling the sky, a chalk-scribbled beard over his wide chin. Georgi had been drunk when he defaced it, and everyone over that night—myself included—had applauded.
    Georgi Radevych was known as a drunk and, briefly, as the author of a small volume of state-published poetry that made his name. He had used that momentary fame to secure his position as an arbitrator of all things literary. He gathered writers in his home and