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all he sees is frayed sleeve.
    Dozens of young people Lemuel takes for students scramble up narrow paths toward the campus, which clings to the side of the
     long hill that dominates the village. Colorful scarves trailing behind them, they move with that distinctive rolling duck
     walk he first saw when Word Perkins tried to high-five him the night before. Lemuel is struck by the fact that the students
     appear to want to get where they are going. He decides that Americans may walk strangely but, unlike their Russian counterparts,
     they are not put off by journeys that end in arrivals.
    Continuing on, Lemuel passes a post office, a drugstore, a pool hall, a bookstore. The buildings strike him as being on the
     puny side, groundscrapers where he expected sky. He scales a frozen snowdriftand picks his way across the sanded street. On the far corner he stops to inspect a low-roofed hangar with a gaudy neon sign
     that reads “E-Z Mart” suspended from a gallowslike structure planted in the frozen lawn. Lemuel remembers hearing rumors about
     hangars with interminable aisles. His son-in-law claimed to have gotten lost for several hours in such a hangar in a suburb
     of West Berlin, a story Lemuel took, at the time of its telling, as metaphor.
    Clutching his briefcase under one arm, Lemuel shoulders through the swinging door and catches sight of endless aisles. The
     heart he does not wear on his sleeve misses a beat, then accelerates. He is startled by a burst of hot air from a grill built
     into the floor. Flinging himself through the wall of heat, pushing through a turnstile, he sets off down an avenue of an aisle.
     Both sides, as far as the eye can see, are lined with shelves—and the shelves, without exception, are crammed with things
     to eat!
    If only the Great Headmaster could see this. Lenin always claimed that quantity could be transformed into quality, and here,
     in the aisles of a food store, was the living proof.
    Inspecting cans of corned beef and creamed corn and baked beans, Lemuel discovers that his fingertips have grown numb. Examining
     jars of low-calorie peanut butter and plastic containers of Hershey’s chocolate syrup and vats of Vermont maple syrup, he
     feels his knees begin to buckle. Suffering from what he suspects may be a terminal case of vertigo, he clings to a shelf,
     inhales and exhales deeply several times, brings a hand to his face, is relieved to find that his nose is cold and wet. Or
     (a sudden doubt) is that a sign of health only for dogs? Disoriented, he plunges on, fingering cellophane packages filled
     with spaghetti of every imaginable size and shape and color. His lips sounding out the letters, he reads the labels on jars
     of spaghetti sauce with or without meat, with or without mushrooms, with or without calories, with or without artificial coloring.
     It hits him that there are people in this miracle of a country who spend time and money
coloring
spaghetti sauce red.
    At the vegetable counter he fights back tears as he runs his fingers over a crisp iceberg lettuce. He starts to caress a cucumber,
     but drops it back into the bin when a stout lady with a mustache, pushing a shopping cart heaped with detergents, clucks her
     tongue at him. At the fruit counter Lemuel completely loses control of his emotions. Seizing a lemon—he has not laid his bloodshot
     eyes on a lemon inmore than two years—he brings it to his nose and sucks in a long, drunken draught of its perfume.
    Dazed, dazzled, blundering from side to side, Lemuel turns a corner so abruptly he almost collides with a dirty blond ponytail.
     He notices the young woman attached to the ponytail slip a tin of fancy sardines over her shoulder into the hood of her duffle
     coat.
    “What are you doing?” he blurts out.
    The girl, wearing tight faded blue jeans and ankle-length lace-up boots under the duffle coat, turns on him. “Yo! I’m scoring
     sardines,” she announces innocently. She bats enormous seaweed-green eyes