It wasn’t hard at first.He’d made friends enough to shelter him as he traveled first out through the city and satellite towns and then toward the mountains.He feels curiously safe here.And a regime cannot, in general, turn overnight from one thing to another.Bureaucracies are slow.People take their time.The old man must be kept on to show the new women how the paper mill is soused down, or how the stocktaking check on the flour order is made.All over the country, there are men still running their factories while the women mutter among themselves about the new laws and wonder when something will happen to enforce them.His plan was to travel for a few weeks, and simply record what he saw.He heard rumors that the most extreme events had been in the mountains.No one would say what they’d heard, not precisely.They talked grimly of backward country folk and of the darkness that had never quite receded there, not under any of a dozen different regimes and dictators.Peter, the waiter from Tatiana Moskalev’s party, had said, They used to blind the girls.When the power first came, the men there, the warlords, blinded all the girls.That is what I heard.They put their eyes out with hot irons.So they could still be the bosses, you see?And now?Peter shook his head.Now we don’t go there.So Tunde had decided, for want of another goal, to walk toward the mountains.In the eighth week it began to be bad.He walked, hungry, through the streets on a Sunday morning until he came to a bakery with open doors, a fug of steam and yeast leaking deliciously into the street.He proffered some coins to the man behind the counter and pointed at some puffy white rolls cooling on a wire rack.Having conscientiously examined it, he made the papers sign again, a little panic rising in his face.Tunde smiled and shrugged and tipped his head to one side.Come on, he said, though there was no indication the man spoke any English.It’s just some little rolls.These are all the papers I have, man.Until now, this had been enough.Usually someone would smile at this point at the absurd foreign journalist or give a little lecture in broken English about how he must be properly certified next time, and Tunde would apologize and give his charming grin, and he would walk out of the store with his meal or supplies.This time the man behind the counter shook his head miserably again.He pointed toward a sign on the wall in Russian.Five thousand dollar fine for anyone found to have helped a man without papers.Tunde shrugged and smiled and opened his palms to show them empty.I won’t tell anyone.The man shook his head.Clutched the counter, looked down at the backs of his hands.There, where his cuffs met his wrists, he was marked with long, whorled scars.Scars upon scars, older and newer.Where his neck pulled away from the shirt were the marks, too.He
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