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of her shirt before his widening eyes. Farewell Vidin, thou backwater. Hail to the new order, and if this belt does not come soon undone I shall rip it in half. He was, beneath it all, nineteen and alone and away fromhome for the first time in his life and he clasped her warm body like a life preserver, then proceeded to a happy drowning. A proletarian coupling, simple and direct, nothing fancy, and without precaution. Should a tiny artillery loader or fighter pilot chance to come tumbling out some months hence, he or she would be another soul pledged to revolution and glad of it. No dreamy slave of love, Marike closed her eyes only at the last, exhaled a huge purr of relief, then casually chucked him off. To work, it meant, enough of such frivolity, a hygienic relaxation had been achieved.
    As the winter lay down on the city, harder and harder through the month of November, her appetite grew. They did it in the attic, where the May Day portraits of Lenin, colossal things colored a vengeant Soviet red, were folded and stored. They did it behind the targets on the basement pistol range. They did it under the table in the kitchen while the cook snored asthmatically in the parlor. The pace and spirit of it never changed—a mad dash to the finish line, first one there wins, as though Revanchist Materialism waited just outside the door to gobble them up. He had heard, over the back fences in Vidin, that there were other paths through the woods, that one could also do this and that. But, on the one occasion when she was squiffed on Georgian brandy and he’d attempted to put theory into practice, his reward was a double whack on the ears. “Get off your knees,” she said, “that is an attitude of slavery!” So much for this and that, back to essentials. And the more they did it, the more aggressive she became in daily matters.
    Over the salt herring at the long plank dinner table: “Did you know that Dmitrov is in Moscow? I think I saw him coming out of the Rossaya Hotel.”
    “Dmitrov?” Khristo looked at her questioningly over his fork.
    “Oh no. This I refuse to believe. Georgy Dmitrov. The Bulgarian hero.”
    He shrugged. Voluta, a lean-faced Pole with black hair swept back from a high forehead, coughed into his hand with embarrassment.
    “Your very own countryman.” She shook her head, lips pressed in resignation at the utter futility of him.
    Goldman, a young man from Bucharest, stepped in to save him.
    “Dmitrov took part in the great patriotic burning of the Reichstag,” he said. “His speech at the trial is to be learned in the schools. Now he is in Russia.”
    “Oh,” Khristo said. “Our newspapers lie about such things or neglect them entirely.” As he struggled to learn all the new ideas, he learned also to cover what Marike called his political infantilism .
    Hitler’s speech on that occasion was one of many statements typed on paper slips and tacked to the dormitory wall, waiting in ambush for the wandering eye of the daydreamer: “This is a God-given signal. If, as I believe, the communists have done it, you are witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history.” In Germany and in Russia, it became clear to Khristo, they were itching to go at it, there remained only the question of time and provocation.
    Khristo struggled in his classes. English and French, an impossible snarl of alien noises. Political history and thought, a crosshatch of plots and counterplots, irredentist imperialism, Pan-Slavism, the sayings of Lenin, the revelations of Marx. The world was not as he’d thought.
    Tides of confusion pulled at him, but he somehow remained afloat. He was now firmly established in the dormitory on Arbat Street, where he’d been given two blankets and one towel, introduced to a milling crowd of Serbs, Poles, Croatians, Jews, Slovenians and whatnot, forty souls in all, including eight women who had their own sleeping quarters —please take note, comrades. He had been handed a