One of the guests talked about the visit she paid to the Soviet Union in the 1970s. It had not been connected to any work. She’d just thought it would be a fascinating place to visit. However, the fact that she worked in the American media had made her instantly suspect, and she’d encountered a good bit of questioning from the Soviets while she tried to arrange the trip. On her flight into the country, she’d spoken with an Englishman who told her about the “Bird Market,” an open-air market in the Russian countryside. She decided she had to see it. Her Soviet guides objected, either for political reasons or because they didn’t like the idea of a single woman who spoke barely any Russian wandering so far afield, but she had decided to go to the Bird Market, so she did. She told us about the Russian women wrapped up in their babushkas, the men in their hats and hip boots, the maggots sold as bird food, which came rolled up in newspaper cones. Since she spoke no Russian and nobody spoke any English, she’d communicated with them and they with her by drawing pictures.

In Leningrad, she’d gone to the opera, which got out so late there were no taxis in sight. Her attempts to find out about buses went nowhere because nobody could understand what she was saying. It was dark, and it was late, and it was a long way to her hotel. Suddenly, two young men, neither of them much older than thirty, appeared and answered in the affirmative when she asked if they spoke English. They were intrigued once they knew she was an American. First, they wanted to know if she could change rubles for dollars. Then they wanted to know if she had any blue jeans. Then they asked her if she had any paperback books. She said, well, yes, she had one at the hotel, but she doubted if it was by anyone they’d ever heard of. It was an American author named Kurt Vonnegut.

Kurt Vonnegut! They were enraptured. It turned out that the only way they were exposed to American literature in their schools was through paragraph-long synopses of American novels, and it happened that Kurt Vonnegut was one of the authors they’d encountered this way. An agreement was reached. They would give her a ride to her hotel, dropping her off two blocks away, since Russians were not allowed near hotels used by foreigners. The following day, they would leave their car parked at a certain place and time with a window rolled partly down. She would walk past an slide the Vonnegut book through the window for them.

She did it, but she was genuinely afraid, she told me. Any Russians who saw her might suspect her of concealing microfilm or something in the book.