It is 1986, and the Soviet Union is immortal. My phone rings. The caller's voice seems so distant that I imagine the wind is carrying it. And, indeed, he says he is calling from Kirghizia. I am not sure where that is, but I recall hearing that it is a vast and nearly empty Soviet space somewhere along the Chinese border. The voice becomes clearer. He is a novelist I had met in Moscow a year or two earlier, Chingiz Aitmatov. He is inviting me to a writers' forum in a town called Issy-kul. I dread the thought of attending another Soviet gabfest designed to lull foreign writers into believing they are terribly important and beloved by the Soviet culture apparatus.
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