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my glasses and blurring my vision, making everything seem even more fantastical than it already did. Masha was wearing her cat-fur coat, and Katya had put on a purple plastic raincoat.
    I stuck out my arm for a lift, and a car that was already twenty metres past us braked and reversed back up the street and into the curb. The driver asked for two hundredroubles, and even though it was daylight robbery I agreed and got into the front seat. He was a fat resentful Russian, with a moustache and a crack in the middle of his windscreen that looked like it had been made by a forehead, or a bullet. He had a miniature television jerry-rigged up to the cigarette lighter, and he carried on watching a dubbed Brazilian soap opera as he drove us along the river. Ahead of us were the throbbing stars on top of the Kremlin towers and the fairy-tale domes of St. Basil's at the back of Red Square, and next to us the soupy Moscow River, not yet frozen and curling mysteriously through the wild city. Behind me Masha and Katya were whispering to each other. The fat Russian's car was a mobile heaven, a ten-minute paradise of hope and amazement.
    I F YOU LOOKED closely at the ceiling of my flat you could just make out a grid of intersecting creases, which told the apartment's history like the rings of a tree trunk or the wrinkles on a poet's face. It had been a
kommunalka
, a communal flat, in which three or four families had lived together but separately. I used to imagine how people must have died and been discovered by their flatmates, or had died and not been discovered. Like millions of others they must have taken their individual toilet seats down from the wall when they went to crap, argued about the milk in the communal kitchen, informed on each other, and savedeach other. Then in the nineties someone had knocked through all the old bedroom partitions and turned the whole place into a rich man's pad, and from that past life only the lines on the ceiling where the walls used to meet it were left. There were only two bedrooms now, one for the guests who almost never came, and the bad history and my good luck made me feel guilty, at least to begin with.
    They took off their shoes in the way Russians are trained to and we went through into the kitchen. Masha sat on my lap and kissed me. Her lips were cold and strong. I looked over at Katya and she was smiling. I knew they might be taking me for something but there was nothing in my apartment that I wanted more than I wanted Masha, and I didn't think they'd kill me. She took my hand and led me to my bedroom.
    I went to the window to close the curtains--they were a sort of rich ruched brown, and looked as if they should have opened to reveal an opera set--and when I turned round Masha had taken off her jumper and was sitting on the edge of my bed in her short skirt and a black bra. Katya was sitting in a chair, smiling. She never did it again, but that night she sat there all the way through, maybe for security, I don't know. It was kinkily disconcerting, but then the whole thing felt surreal, and the vodka took the edge off.
    Masha was different from girls in England. Different from you. Different from me too. Less polite about it, lesslike she was acting or pretending. She had a kind of basic earthy energy, gripping and encouraging and laughing, keen to please and to improvise. Whenever I looked up, Katya was just there, grinning, close enough for me to see even without my glasses, fully clothed like she was watching a science experiment.
    Afterwards, when we were spooning and Masha was breathing heavily, not awake but not all asleep, she shook the hand I had stretched across her to hold her hand as if it was a defective toy--to make me hold her more tightly, or to prove that it and me were real, as if the hand and me were things she needed. Or that's how it seemed to me then. At the other end of the bed, part of us but also miles away, she hooked her leg around my leg, I remember, so I could just