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Prince Yuri Dolgoruky, grandson of Harold, your own Anglo-Saxon King who was killed at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Here he built his citadel, which the boyars later strengthened in a vain attempt to keep away the Mongol Tartars. By the fifteenth century, when Moscow had become the heart of a centralised Russian state, the Kremlin had taken on the basic form you see today.’
    ‘You speak such marvellous English,’ said Nina. ‘Where did you learn it?’
    ‘Here, in 1812,’ continued Olga Fiodorovna, ‘Napoleon came and conquered, only to find that his victory was turned into tragedy and ignominious defeat. Here, in 1941, the armies of Hitler trundled to within thirty miles of the city and then, deflected, followed the Napoleonic road westwards.’
    ‘What does she mean by here ?’ asked Ashburner. There was nothing to see outside the windows save an immensely broad street under a thin crust of snow and several nondescript department stores.
    ‘The name Red Square,’ declared the interpreter, ‘has no special significance. It simply means beautiful. In the naughty old days the square was a market place in which vegetables and serfs were sold. Now of course it is a place for processions.’
    I’ll have half a pound of tomatoes, thought Enid, and that fellow with the big shoulders. She began to giggle quietly.
    ‘Are you able to hear me in the front, Mr Burns?’ demanded Olga Fiodorovna, apparently speaking to Bernard.
    He ground his teeth; having done his homework before he arrived he was irritated by the history lesson. ‘What does that say?’ he asked, pointing at a row of black letters, six feet high, erected on the roof of a nearby building.
    ‘Labour is glorious,’ translated Olga Fiodorovna.
    ‘Oh, a hospital,’ said Bernard, and wondered if he was brave enough to light a cigarette.
    Olga Fiodorovna told him that in this instance, labour meant work. In her country such slogans were an incentive to the workers. It spurred them on.
    ‘In my country,’ said Bernard thoughtfully, ‘a slogan like that would be an incentive to violence.’
    At that moment the car turned a corner and he saw ahead of him a butcher’s lorry stacked with carcasses, ribs striped with frozen blood, and beyond the lorry the white curve of the Kamenny bridge that spanned first the canal and then the Moskva river. When he craned forward to look out of the windscreen, there about a hilltop was a constellation of giant stars, ruby red, wheeling across the northern sky, and beneath them a cluster of cathedrals and bell towers and palaces with golden domes. A high wall, primrose-coloured against the snow, rose above an embankment planted with fir trees.
    ‘Look, look, look,’ shouted Olga Fiodorovna, unnecessarily.
    They drove past the Kremlin more than once. Ashburner, who had been almost on the point of sleep when she had cried out so triumphantly, feared that the driver was caught in a one-way system and that they were doomed to go round and round forever, gasping their appreciation and wonderment until the cows came home. Olga Fiodorovna held his wrist in a vice-like grip as she indicated the battlements, the graves of the Brotherhood, the onion domes tethered like balloons above the turquoise towers. She dug her pointed nails into his pulse as black crows flapped upwards through the Christmas trees.
    ‘Yes, it’s awfully pretty,’ he agreed, worn out by her enthusiasm as they drove up the hill yet again and circled St Basil’s cathedral for the umpteenth time.
    She even went so far as to tap Bernard on the shoulder because he wasn’t gazing in the right direction. ‘Look,’ she commanded.
    ‘I am bloody looking,’ he bellowed, and closed his eyes directly. When he opened them again the car was drawing to a halt outside the Peking Hotel.

7
    Something had gone wrong with the arrangements. Their reservations were in order, but their authorisation document couldn’t be found. Olga Fiodorovna scattered her papers in