MOSCOW'S Sheremetevo Airport, in the heart of the former 'Evil Empire'. This dim arrivals hall was the foyer to John Le Carre's city of Karla and Moscow Centre.
What assignations had been kept in those forests we had just flown over? What agents had waited, hearts pumping, at these immigration booths while, by the light of sallow bulbs, officers (this officer?) stared at their visas? People were speaking Russian. In films you only heard Russian when you needed to know that someone belonged to ''the other side''. There were signs in Cyrillic script, another of the film-makers' unambiguous signals of menace.
So suddenly surrounded by all the icons of the old demonology, one was hardly conscious of the illuminated hoardings for Visa cards and the advertisement for Moscow's first American restaurant.
I had chosen not to spend my weekend in a hotel but with a Russian family. It is now possible to arrange bed and breakfast in homes in Moscow and St Petersburg through some travel agents.
The agent's representative, Igor, met me, and we pushed through the crowds to his car, a pale Lada, rusting and dented, its wiper blades removed to prevent them from being stolen. It took an hour to reach the apartment, along a six-lane highway on which the lanes were hardly marked, passing monolithic apartment blocks which rise in plantations on the outskirts of the city.
My family's apartment was in a quiet street in the south of the city, across the river from Red Square. It was a building without any adornment or decoration. A brick porch led into a narrow hallway lit by a single unshaded bulb and panelled with metal lockers for the mail.