Lee stood in front of Robert's house and watched his mother approach. She looked shorter, rounder, her hair gone gray and worn in a bun. She was working as a practical nurse and showed up in uniform, all white, with dark-rimmed glasses and the little bent hat that nurses wear. It was the official uniform of motherhood and she looked like the angel of terror and memory sweeping down from the sky.

She embraced him crying. She held his face in her hands and looked into his eyes. She searched for her lost son in the tapered jaw and thinning hair. All this love and pain confused him. This blood depth of feeling. He felt a struggling pity and regret.

She was writing a book, she said, about his defection.

One day they were living with Robert, the next day with his mother. He didn't know how it happened. She took an apartment large enough for all of them, although she had to sleep in the living room. It was like growing up with her all over again, the bed in the living room, and one night they stayed up late, mother and son, after Marina and the baby were asleep.

"She doesn't look somehow Russian to me."

"She is Russian, Mother."

"Well I think she is beautiful."

"She admires you. She says the place is so clean and neat. She likes your soft hair, she says. But no book, Mother."

"I went to see President Kennedy. I have done my research. I had a lot of extenuating circumstances because of your defection."

"Mother, you are not going to write a book."

"It is my life as I was forced to live it because of not knowing if you were alive or dead. I can write what's mine, Lee."

"She has relatives there that would be jeopardized."

"Jeopardized. But you have given a public stenographer ten dollars to type pages for your own book."

"That is a different book."

"It is Russia and the evils of that system."

"It is a different book. The {Collective.' It deals with living conditions and working conditions. I will change people's names to protect them. Don't think we don't appreciate that you have bought clothes for the baby and that you're cooking and feeding us, so forth."

"It was the ten dollars I gave you that you gave that woman for the typing."

"It is a book of observations, Mother. I owe money to the State Department for getting me home. Robert paid our airfare from New York. I am only looking for ways to pay back my debts."

"I have a right to my book," she said. "The President was not available at that time but I spoke to figures in the government during a snowstorm who made promises that they would look into the matter."

"It is only an article, not a book. I am having notes typed for an article. It is so many pages."

"How many pages did she type?"

"Ten pages. That's all I had money for."

"A dollar a page I call a rooking."

"I smuggled those notes next to my skin right out of Russia."

"Marina watched a daytime movie with Gregory Peck with me sitting right here and she knew Gregory Peck."

"So what, he is well known everywhere."

"We have to use the dictionary to talk."

"Little by little she'll get the hang."

"I think she knows more than she's letting on," his mother said.

He found a job as a sheet-metal worker, drudge and grime and long hours and low pay. They left his mother's and moved to their own place, one-half of a matchstick bungalow, furnished, across the street from a truck lot and loading docks. This was the shipping and receiving entrance of a huge Montgomery Ward operation. Marina went to the retail store. She walked the aisles. She told Lee about the cool smooth musical interior.

All the homes on their street were bungalows. Everybody called it Mercedes Street. The lease for the apartment said Mercedes Street. Lee's map of Fort Worth said Mercedes Street. But the sign on a pole at the corner said Mercedes Avenue.

He sat on the concrete steps out front, next to a baby yucca, reading Russian magazines.

His mother came with a high chair. She came with dishes. Lee told her he didn't want anyone's charity. She came with a parakeet in a cage. It was the same bird in the same cage he had given her in New Orleans when he worked as a messenger.

It is the shadow of his prior life that keeps appearing.

"No more," he told Marina. "You keep the door closed."

"How can I do that to your mother? She is kind to us."

"Keep the door closed. Or she'll move in on us. Absolutely keep her out. She comes with a camera to take pictures of our baby."

"She Is the grandmother."

"It is the first phase to moving in."

"It is a picture, Alek."

"This is how she insinuates. This is conniving her way into our house."

"You don't want her coming around but at the same time you try to take advantage of her at every chance."

"That's what mothers are for."

"This is a cruel thing."

"I'm only kidding and don't call me Alek anymore. This is not Alek country. June is not Junka. People will think you don't know your own family by their right names."

"It doesn't sound like kidding when you raise your voice to her."

"You have to learn American kidding. It's how we talk to each other."

"All your life she worked very hard."

"She told you with the dictionary. You and Mamochka."

"I know this. It's very obvious to me."

"Very obvious is only half the story."

"What's the other half?"

He hit her in the face. An open-hand smash that sent her walking backwards to the stove. She stood there with her head tucked against her left shoulder, one hand raised in blank surprise.

A man spoke to him from the other side of the screen door. Lee looked at his bloated face peering in above the set of credentials he held under his chin. Freitag, Donald. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Dark eyes and five o'clock shadow. They agreed to talk in his car.

There was another man in the car, an Agent Mooney. Agent Freitag sat in the front seat with Mooney. Lee sat in back, leaving the rear door open. He thought of a word, Feebees, for FBI. It was dinnertime and sweltering.

"What this is, we want to know about your period of time in the Soviet Union," Agent Freitag said. "And being back here, who has contacted you at any time that we should know about."

"So if I have something sensitive I know about, they would want to hear it."

"That's correct."

"I assemble ventilators. This is not a sensitive industry."

"You would be surprised how many people link the name Oswald to turncoat and traitor."

"Let me state I was never approached or volunteered to Soviet officials any information about my experiences while a member of the armed forces."

"Why did you travel to the Soviet Union?"

"I don't wish to relive the past. I just went."

"That's a long way to just go."

"I don't have to explain."

"Are you a member of the Communist Party of the United States?"

"No."

Agent Mooney took notes.

"Are you willing to talk to us hooked up to a polygraph?"

"No. Who told you where to find me?"

"It wasn't hard."

"But who told you?"

"We talked to your brother."

"He told you where I live."

"That's correct," Freitag said with some satisfaction. There was a line of beady glisten above his lip.

"Am I being put under surveillance?"

"Would I tell you if you were?"

"Because I was watched in Russia."

"I thought everyone was watched in Russia."

Agent Mooney laughed quietly, his head bobbing.

"My wife is holding dinner," Lee said.

"How is it you were able to get your wife out? They don't let people out just by asking."

"I made no arrangements with them to do anything."

They covered several subjects. Then Freitag made a faint gesture to his partner, who put away his pen and notebook. There was a pause, a clear change in mood.