The bus drew up at the Austrian crossing and pulled to the side of the road. The Czech guards were talking back and forth. People began filing out of the bus, and even at this distance Nick could see the tennis shoes and bright colors that meant a tour group. He imagined them crowding the interrogation room, exchanging money, flooding the counters with passports. The guards were imagining it too, their conversation a mix of groans and anticipation. The tourists stood to one side of the striped crossing gate, taking out cameras and aiming them directly up the hill at the iron curtain. Nick and the guards stood there, zoo animals. Then, pictures taken, the tourists got back on the bus. In a few minutes it turned around and, like a mirage, was gone.

Nick saw the disappointment on the guards’ faces and wanted to laugh out loud. Nothing was wrong. An American passport, an English car–they had been the only event of the day. The tourist buses, memories of the busy months last year when the border was porous, passed them by now. It wasn’t about him and Molly. Here, in this Cold War diorama, dressed up with the old symbols, the players had nothing to do.

At last they were allowed to pass. Beyond the Czech frontier, Nick could tell the difference immediately. The road, a major one, developed ragged shoulders, asphalt crumbling away at the sides. There were no houses, no billboards, few road signs of any kind, and even the landscape itself began to look rundown, dingy and ill kept around the edges. In only a few miles they were in another world. The road became the main street of villages, the way roads did before they were highways, passing mud puddles and ducks and women in babushkas, the timeless Eastern Europe of the folk tales. There were few cars. The villages depressed Nick–peeling plaster and old electric wires and a rim of dust extending up from the bottoms of the buildings, as if the whole town had been in a bathtub that drained, leaving a ring. People looked up as the car passed. The propaganda was true –nobody smiled.

“Do you want me to drive?”

“What?”

“I said, do you want me to drive? You seem a little preoccupied.”

“I’m fine,” he said, brushing it off. “How do we contact him?” He was staring straight ahead, edging away from an oncoming truck.

“We call him up,” she said, smiling. “It’s a city. Phones. Garbage. Everything.”

But he didn’t want to play. “I thought you said all the phones were tapped.” He drove quietly for a minute. “What if he’s not here? I mean, it’s been a month. What if he left?”

“Where would he go? You can’t just walk down to Cook’s and buy a ticket.”

“Back to Moscow. He could go back to Moscow.”

“Will you stop?” she said, rolling down the window. “Look, the sun’s coming out. Spring.”

There were in fact blossoms now, not just buds, and the countryside was coming to life, as if the border had been a poison leaching into the soil. Here and there Nick saw an old manor house, a steepled church, left over from engravings of old Bohemia, but he found it impossible to imagine himself back in time. The grim present was always around them–the housing blocks of damp concrete, the dusty streets, the pervading sense that he was somewhere foreign, on the other side. He knew this was silly–an American wouldn’t be in any danger–but he felt vulnerable and aware at the same time, as if he were walking down a dark street at night. Things were different here, as arbitrary and whimsical as a policeman’s goodwill. He felt like a child. Maybe the Czechs did too, made wary and fretful by unpredictable authority. Even in the spring sunshine it seemed to him a country of shadows. They were in Prague before they realized they had entered it. In America, the skylines offered a sense of arrival, but here there were simply more houses, then street signs, red with white lettering, and tram rails, everything getting denser as they moved toward the center. They came down a long hill, running along the wall of a park, and found themselves circling a World War II Soviet tank at the bottom before the road shot off toward the river. It was here, finally, that the city opened up to a vista, Kafka’s castle high on the hill to their left, yellow buildings with tile roofs, the graceful bridges, the sky spiked everywhere by steeples.

They drove toward the cobbled streets of the Malá Strana, and Nick could see that beneath the dust and the scaffolding the city was beautiful. There was no color–no ads, no splashy shopfronts, not even the usual variety of cars in the street–so the buildings themselves became more vivid. Their Baroque facades of light mustard and green and terra cotta dressed the town. The architecture seemed to have been put down in layers, one period after another, until the unremarkable hills along the river had become an astonishing city, one of those places where Europe rises to its high-water mark, rich and complicated. Mozart had introduced operas here. In the afternoon light, the city was a painting, full of brushstrokes and perspectives and lovely forms. It was also falling apart. Up close, some of the wonderful houses were buckling, the lemon plaster torn with cracks. The scaffolding he saw seemed like a fingerin-the-dike attempt to shore up the years of neglect. The buildings, unmaintained, were slowly dying. How the Russians must hate it, Nick thought. The whole city was a beautiful reproach. The gifts of centuries were wasting away in a system that could not even produce salad.

They crossed the Vltava, past the imperial National Theater and the nineteenth-century streets of the New Town to the hotel on Wenceslas Square. To Nick’s surprise, there was a doorman and an old man to help with the luggage, a service class he thought did not exist. The room was heavy and ornate, deep red that wouldn’t show the dirt, wardrobes instead of closets. The old porter lingered, pretending to adjust the drapes, clearly expecting a tip. Their windows faced the street, and Nick could hear the tram bells outside.

“Did I give him enough?” Nick said after the man left. “He looked disappointed.”

“He was hoping for dollars. Technically, they’re not supposed to get anything, so don’t worry about it.” Molly started walking around the room, looking at it. “Well, here we are. God, I’m dead. Aren’t you? All that driving.”

Nick shook his head. “Now what? It’s still early. Should we call my—”

She put a finger to his lips, then raised it and pointed around the room.

“You’re kidding,” he said.

“I don’t think so. The Alcron was popular with journalists. They all stayed here last year. So we have to assume—”

Nick stared at her, not sure whether to laugh or be frightened.

“The phone too?”

“That for sure. How about a little air?” she said, moving toward the window. Traffic sounds floated in with the spring air. When he came over, she leaned close to him. “I’ll call,” she said to his ear. “Just be careful. No names. You’ll get used to it.” He felt her breath, warm and smooth, on the side of his face, and it startled him, as if she had just whispered an erotic secret. He pulled back. “What?” she said.

He shook his head, to make the feel of her go away. “Nothing.”

She went to her purse and took out a small address book, then started toward the phone. The tapping on the door surprised them both, as if someone had been watching them. But it was only a difficulty about the car, a few minutes of Pan Warren’s time, if he would come down to the desk. Nick followed the old man, feeling, crazily, that he was being taken away.

The difficulty turned out to be an extra fee for the garage–he could not park in the street. Nick was so relieved that he forgot to be annoyed. “I’m sorry for all these bothers,” the desk clerk said, and Nick found the English charming. He paid and looked around the lobby, imagining it buzzing with reporters just a few months ago. Now it was nearly deserted, an elderly couple having tea and a man hidden behind a newspaper, so obvious that Nick thought he couldn’t actually be a policeman. Outside some students were gathering in the street, walking in a half-march toward the university. He didn’t care about any of it.