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truck with all their earthly possessions was a week late and they had been living in a makeshift way, their base a mattress they laid directly on the parquet floor. A quilted coverlet spilled off the bed, but Arkady and Eva were warm because the building was a prodigy of heat. They had slept the day away next to a tray crammed with bread, strawberry jam and tea. The wind had died and snow fell in thick, feathery clumps that drifted as shadows down the curtains.
    Her body could have been a girl’s, her breasts small and her skin so pale and unlined that he half expected it to carry an imprint of him. With her black hair, she was the perfect creature of dusk. At night when she couldn’t sleep, which was often, she walked around the apartment in a robe and bare feet. Some rooms, like the office, they didn’t use at all, except for storing boxes of photographs of his father and Irina he had brought by car. At night the parquet floor would groan; she preferred sleeping in the daytime, when fewer ghosts were about.
    Eva didn’t need his ghosts, she had her own. She had been a schoolgirl in Kiev, marching in the May Day parade four days after the meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor station because the authorities assured the public that the situation was under control. A hundred thousand children marched into an invisible rain of radioactive plutonium, potassium, strontium, cesium-137. No one in the parade curled up and died on the spot, but she was labeled a survivor, it being generally understood that survivors, especially women, were both barren and contagious.
    In Moscow she had found a position at a medical clinic. Eva was good with the younger patients, especially those who couldn’t sleep. She recorded them and sent the tapes to their families. Her portrait, Arkady often thought, could be painted in just black and white, although lately more and more in black alone and with sharper angles.
    The further apart they grew, the more the bed was their mutual safe haven. Words were their enemy, the expression of failed hopes. Sex was performed in silence and it was difficult to say how much of their lovemaking was passion and how much the desperate scraping of a dead match.
    The phone rang. Neither Arkady nor Eva wanted to connect with reality, so the caller talked to the answering machine.
    “Where are you, Renko? We have a situation that has to be dealt with. If just anyone dead popped up on a Metro platform, it could be a hoax. Stalin is different. To use a likeness of Stalin is a clear provocation. Somebody is behind it. Why did you turn off your cell phone? Where the devil are you? Call in!”
    “That was Prosecutor Zurin. What was he going on about?” Eva asked.
    “Stalin has been seen a couple of times late at night at a Metro station.”
    “Stalin in the Metro? Really? Just what does this Metro Stalin do?”
    “Not much. He stands on the platform and gives passengers a wave.”
    “Doesn’t execute anyone?”
    “No, not a single one.”
    “What will Zurin do?” Zurin generally bored Eva, but now she hiked herself up on her elbows.
    Arkady was encouraged. This was more conversation than they’d had in a week.
    “Well, as the prosecutor says, Stalin is different. Stalin is a minefield and there are no good moves. Call anything about Stalin a hoax and Zurin will have superpatriots to deal with. Do nothing and let rumors spread and he’ll have a shrine on his hands. When the tsar’s bones were found, pilgrims showed up the following day. The Metro will be a mob scene and Zurin will go down as the man who brought the Moscow subway system to a stop. Or—Zurin’s third choice—embrace the situation, announce that the sightings are genuine visions and be left high and dry as a raving lunatic if no more sightings occur.”
    “And Zurin called you. So he wants to send you into the minefield first.”
    “Something like that.”
    “But you’re staying here? I didn’t know you were going to be here all