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Sheremetyevo Airport and the north. I asked Masha whether she enjoyed her job at the mobile phone shop.
    "It is work," Masha said. "It is not always interesting." She gave me a short ironic smile.
    "What do you do, Katya?"
    "I study MGU," she said. MGU meant Moscow State University, Russia's version of Oxford, but with bribes to get in and then out again with a degree. "I study business management," she said.
    I was impressed, as I was supposed to be. I started to tell them about my own college years in Birmingham, but Masha interrupted me.
    "Let's dance," she said.
    The band was playing "I Will Survive" at double speed, the musicians sounding like massed mourners at a Caucasian funeral when they joined in with the chorus. The only other dancers were an excited child and the tipsy father she had dragged out into the space in front of the band. Masha and Katya were all curves and pelvic thrusts, with a dash of the simulated lesbianism that was then de rigueur on Moscow dance floors, unself-conscious as only people with nothing to lose can be. That was something else about Masha that I liked: she could just be in the moment, cutting it off from before and afterwards in order to be happy.
    I shuffled and jerked, tried a little twist, then felt maybe I'd overdone it (I know I have to go to those lessons before we do our number on the day, I haven't forgotten). Masha took my hand and we did a couple of minutes of sub-ballroom stumble, me clinging on to her for cover. I was relieved when we made it to the end of the song and could retreat to the table.
    "You are beautiful dancer," said Katya, and they laughed.
    "To the women!" I said, a standard fallback toast, andsince in Russia the toastee drinks too, they clinked their stumpy vodka glasses against mine and we drank.
    I still wasn't sure what the proposition was, if there was one, and if it wasn't just curiosity and the chance of a free dinner. In Moscow the main event was usually the third date, like for us in London--I expect like on Mars--or maybe the second in the summer. I didn't know what was supposed to happen with Katya.
    "Maybe you want to see our photos?" Masha asked me.
    She nodded at Katya, who brought out her mobile phone. They loved photographing each other, the girls in Russia--something about the novelty of the cameras, I think, and the idea that they might matter enough to have their pictures taken.
    "From Odessa," Katya said. They had been there at the beginning of the summer, they explained. They had a relative there, apparently. More or less everyone seemed to have a relative in Odessa (a sort of cross between Tenerife and Palermo).
    We leaned into the middle of the table, and Katya gave us a slide show on the tiny screen of her phone. In the first photo they were in a bar, the two of them and another girl. Katya was looking away from the camera and laughing, like she was sharing a joke with someone out of the picture. In the second one they were on the beach, standing next to each other in bikinis, with what looked like an Egyptianpyramid behind them. The next was just Masha. It showed her taking a picture of her reflection in a wardrobe mirror: she was standing with one hand on her hip, the other hand holding the phone so it obscured a quarter of her face. In the mirror she was wearing red bikini knickers and nothing else.
    I sat back in my chair and asked whether they'd like to come to my apartment for some tea.
    Masha looked hard into my eyes and said yes.
    I waved at the waiter and wrote a little squiggle in the air with an imaginary pen, the international let-me-out-of-here signal that, when you're a teenager and see your parents make it, you think you never will.
    W HEN WE GOT outside it was colder. After three winters in Russia I knew this was the real thing: the big chill, the ice in the air that stays 'til April. The white smoke from the power plant down the river was congealed against the thick night. It was still drizzling, the droplets sliding down