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WHAT SEEMED like an eternity, I pretended to be fascinated with staring at a nondescript office clock mounted on a wall.
    “Well,” I said at last, breaking the silence about Viktor and Mila’s present attitudes about the USSR.
    “Last we spoke, they said that they were really excited about Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika reforms,” I told the KGB man.
    This was either a pathetic faux pas or my saving grace, because few words uttered by Americans evoked more nausea from KGB-type Russians. Our naive smiles and adoration of Gorbachev, a man at best grudgingly tolerated by most Russians at the time, evoked a sensation similar to the regurgitation of curdled milk among many of them. It wasn’t that they were against reform, but Gorbachev’s Communist-style vernacular led many to doubt his sincerity.
    “Glasnost and Perestroika, yes,” Valery said, still smiling but barely able to contain himself. “Interesting, of course. Tell me, is there anything else that Americans can discuss about Russia other than Glasnost and Perestroika?”
    I did not need to answer but tried to make a rational assessment of my situation and found it wanting, pathetic.
    Fact: I was drinking cognac and eating caviar after business hours with a KGB man who wanted information about my Russian teachers-in-exile Viktor and Mila. Both were acid-tongued critics of the Soviet regime. Before his exile, Viktor was so reckless in his denunciations of the party that some of his closest friends thought he might have even been KGB himself, acting as an agent provocateur. He had been a contributor to a well-known underground (samizdat) publication, Tridtsat-Sem (“Thirty-Seven”). (Or Tridtsat Semitov , meaning “Thirty Semites,” as Viktor jokingly referred to it.) Mila, meanwhile, was in with a dissident women’s group and trade union activists, which the KGB wasparticularly nervous about in light of the “Solidarity” events in Poland. Even eight years after their departure, when Communism, if not the empire itself, was clearly collapsing, the KGB man was still following them. Valery had personally handled their expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1981, a fact Viktor confirmed when I described Valery to him. Possibly there had been some internal squabble over whether a labor camp or exile fit their crimes. Perhaps Valery had come down on the losing side of the argument and was still bitter; who knew?
    Second stupid fact: I had dredged up the already worn-out “Glasnost and Perestroika” theme. Even ordinary Russians were often disgusted by Americans’ naiveté, assuming that reforming the USSR would be a painless matter of injecting a little democracy. It must have been especially galling for a KGB type like Valery to have to listen to twaddle coming from the toothy smile of a silly American who in his estimation didn’t understand a thing about the consequences of an imploding empire.
    Last and most embarrassing fact: I had failed to react to Valery’s recruitment offer, if indeed the offer made to a clueless American kid in battered sneakers who was living in a communal associated with unspeakable dissidents had been made in earnest at all.
    Another uncomfortable pause descended on us, which was finally broken by Valery.
    “Tell me, my young American friend,” he asked rhetorically. “Do you know what it is to spend your entire life building a house, just to watch a gang of vandals come and try to tear it down?”
    I listened to his bitter soliloquy.
    “Let us presume that the house wasn’t a perfect house. Some of the beams were weak. Many mistakes were made in building this house. A fool designed the fireplace; it fills the rooms with smoke sometimes. A relative got electrocuted rigging up the electricity. But gradually, we learn. Yes, the house is not perfect. It leans to one side. But we live in this house, you see. It is our house.”
    I said nothing. Nothing needed to be said.
    “Is it better to let the vandals tear it down