matryoshka who was guarding the floor — one of those robust and gritty women clad in a horrendous paramilitary uniform responsible for the supervision and control of guests. I asked her if I had left a book there when I asked for the key five minutes earlier. Not a single facial feature changed, only her hard eyes opened until becoming round like those of a sinister doll, she opened the desk drawer without taking her eyes off me and pulled out two Finnish pornographic magazines — one was obviously Tom of Finland, the magnificent line of the figures was unmistakable. On the cover two young policemen are entertaining themselves in horseplay; one is unbuttoning the pants of his partner’s uniform with one hand while removing from his own fly with the other a tool capable of destroying an elephant’s vagina. The two cops’ eyes are shining as they lick their lips with pleasure. The face of that monument to the police force before me turned a shade of purple, like a huge dark tomato, as she looked at the cover, and in a faint but sharp voice that did not at all match the stature and strength of her body — instead of the booming deep bass voice one would expect — she said that the police were to be respected, and anyone who spreads subversive propaganda in the Soviet Union, especially when it intends to degrade the courageous men and women who make up the security of the State, has to pay the appropriate penalty for his criminal effrontery. She concluded: “So were you the one who left them in the room? And you still have the nerve to claim them! Give me your key, give me the key to your room, if you resist you will regret it. Give it to me.” She addressed me with ty, the Russian pronoun that denotes familiarity or, in this case, impertinence, with a delicate but firm voice and soldierly expression. “Either you give it to me willingly, or I’ll break your neck.” She stood up and held out her hand. To say I was terrified would be an understatement. I realized that they had set a cruel trap for me. The next day my picture would be splashed across the newspapers enveloped in a cloud of scandal; I would be expelled from the country amid terrible humiliation. All this for wanting to go to Georgia and not to the celebrations for Turgenev? Or for having behaved rudely the day the president of the Writers’ Union invited me to lunch? I gave her the key. The monster saw the number, showed a look of surprise, changed her tone, and asked my name, which I gave to her. She fell into her chair with an expression of bewilderment. She asked me with extreme courtesy for an identification other than my passport. Thank God she was no longer addressing me with ty. She covered the Tom of Finland magazines with a towel. She carefully studied my diplomatic card, and then said in a voice that had become a fearful trilclass="underline" “Forgive me, citizen, there has been a mistake. You say that you came to pick up a book; but no one has given me a lost book, this is the time when all the tourists vacate their rooms and leave them in a mess — the beds, the furniture filled with books of anti-Soviet propaganda, yes, and in every language of the world.” Just then, there appeared in the corridor an elderly couple, very elegant people, the woman wearing an extremely luxurious fur coat, with a carriage and gestures that were indisputably from le grand monde; he, a little weathered, was supporting himself on an orthopedic cane, and at his side a translator, or secretary, also very well dressed. They stopped at the table, with wide smiles, as if they were very satisfied with their stay, and spoke Finnish with their companion. He said something dry and authoritative to the woman, and she handed them the pornographic magazines. The interpreter spoke to her with a tone of implacable authority; when she meekly surrendered the publications, he smirked, patronizingly, almost with contempt, and she, the terrible guardian of order who had so frightened me, acted like a little girl, a reprimanded pupil, and raised her shoulders slightly, as if to apologize. And I didn’t understand anything. Who were these elderly people? Why did they claim those magazines? What powers did they have? Mysteries of the great beyond. I remembered a novel by Highsmith, of whom I am quite fond lately: A Dog’s Ransom, in which a young policeman is terrorized by a thug, a poor sinister devil, who accuses him, the policeman, once his crime is discovered, of demanding from him a percentage of everything he got in his acts of villainy. And I thought how vulnerable someone, anyone, can be when someone else makes an absurd accusation, spreads a slanderous lie, and maintains it without backing down. I lay on the bed again and took a sedative, all I wanted then was to return to Prague as quickly as possible, by train in the event there were no seats available on a plane, and I thought that dancing with Catalina D’Erzell had given me a frightful case of bad luck. Perhaps in life she had been jinxed, and during the course of that seemingly never-ending dance she had infused me with an essence that was pure gettatura—the evil eye. My bags were ready; I only needed to put away the medicines on the bedside table and some books. The interpreter called to tell me not to worry because the passage was booked; no, he did not know exactly what time we should leave the hotel, but I should please stay in the room, someone would go by the agency to collect the tickets and accompany me to the airport. Everything is set. What a relief! A ticket to where, I wondered after hanging up the phone. Would they be such sons-of-bitches as to return me to Prague? And why didn’t they tell me exactly what time they would collect me? I could still see a thousand things in the city! Go to the Russian Museum, which was a step away, or closer, if only to see the façade; or the house where Anna Akhmatova lived and suffered, which to my knowledge is also very close, on the Fontanka. The last thing I read yesterday, for several hours, was the phantasmagoric Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka by Gogoclass="underline" I read and reread that prodigious story titled “Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt,” written after the author had just arrived to Petersburg from a village in Ukraine, a young man whom everyone mocked, and rightly so, because all he did was make foolish remarks and act a little off in the head, but with that story (and he would never know) he anticipated by at least a century and a half the best avant-garde literature. Every time I read it, I become intoxicated with joy and amazement. It is unique in its genre. He wrote it during adolescence; the other stories that accompany it in the book are entirely foreign to it. It’s a pity that I didn’t read his Evenings until last night when I should have started them on my arrival in Leningrad. Doing so would have opened a parallel and antagonistic track to my travels. Witches, bloodshed everywhere, dementia, ghosts aplenty and of various kinds, the entire wicked lineage of evil. It would have been an effective anaphrodisiac to avoid falling to my knees in love with the city’s extreme perfection. Just to think that these stories were conceived right there is enough. And not just in Leningrad should I have begun with Gogol, but from the very moment I boarded the plane that took me to Moscow…I would love to write a small book, five effigies against the backdrop of the imperial city: Pushkin, Gogol, Blok, Akhmatova, Bely — five personal hells. Or another, on diverse and very free topics, such as Mandelstam’s casual notes on Armenia, which are digressions on a thousand different things that more often than not have nothing to do with Armenia, and remember the monumental figure of Marietta as she enters the auditorium of the International Library of Moscow, where I read my lecture, the corners of her lips, her sneer, the indifference she displayed to the world, and the pursuit of her husband’s work, where, according to her, there were wonders unknown to anyone about feasts in Mexico, archaic rituals, among which the most exciting had to do with a child’s defecation, an authentic rite of spring, a rebirth of the world.