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By Root 1477 0

sister the splendors of America. Lest even now direct communication from her endanger Nora with the Soviet authorities, she turned to the U.S. State Department for advice. A plan was hatched: The USIA magazine dispatched a brief reply to Nora, signaling between the lines that Rand had received her sister’s letter. Soon afterward, the women were able to write to each other, the more easily because of Nora’s fluency in English. Then phone calls flew back and forth, and, to everyone’s surprise, when Nora and her husband applied for foreign travel papers the Soviet government granted a permit with relatively little fuss. (Later, it came to light that the government was all too willing to rid itself permanently of retired residents such as Nora and Fedor, who were collecting government pensions.) Rand rented a furnished apartment in her building and had it cleaned and fitted out with telephones and a television set. She stocked the refrigerator with Western treats unavailable in the Soviet Union and placed long-treasured objects Rand had carried from St. Petersburg in the rooms to make Nora feel at home, including one of her sister’s early Art Deco—style drawings. She considered buying the couple a little house in a Russian-American community in New Jersey, if they agreed to defect and resettle, as she hoped they would. In letters, she rejoiced in her and her sister’s similarities. When Nora wrote about her love for her husband, Rand replied, “Everything you wrote about Fedya, I can say (and often have said) about Frank, even using the same words. … Our friends say we have an ideal marriage.” In another letter, she told her darling Norochka that “I have not changed at all, except to age,” and she imagined that Nora hadn’t, either.

At Kennedy Airport, Rand spotted her sister and brother-in-law sitting on a bench in the waiting room, looking lost, foreign, shabbily clothed, and anxious. Nora’s large, dark eyes set among thick features gave her face a striking resemblance to Rand’s, but she was taller and heavier. The women clung to each other and wept in greeting. Frank and Fedor shook hands. But even before the two couples reached home in the chauffeured limousine Rand had hired for the occasion, there came a first discordant note. Nora, having lived all but a few years of her life under a Communist system in which neighbors and shopkeepers might be government agents, whispered to Rand that their driver was an informant planted by the U.S. government to monitor their movements and conversations. Rand explained that spying on visitors wasn’t a feature of American life, but Nora and Fedor were insistent. Once at home, they were pleased with their apartment but showed no response to Rand’s girlhood mementos or the sight of Nora’s drawing; this upset Rand, because she considered the drawing emblematic of the best part of Nora. During a welcoming dinner in Rand’s apartment that evening, Nora and Fedor were afraid that Eloise Huggins, Rand’s cook and housekeeper, was also an informant. And they were so sourly suspicious of Leonard Peikoff, who joined the group after dinner, that they answered his polite questions in monosyllables. Their hostess, who possessed her own streak of paranoia that had deepened with age, began to take it amiss that they couldn’t or wouldn’t recognize that America was a free country. For their part, the Drobyshevs were disappointed in Rand’s standard of living. They had expected a “rich, noble lady” in a three-story house, Nora later said.

If Rand hadn’t fundamentally changed, Nora had. Rand remembered her as a spirited girl of sixteen who admired Western fashions, loved to draw, and worshipped her older sister. Now she appeared to be an average, aging Russian woman, satisfied to be cared for by the state. She and Fedor were childless, and they lived in a one-room apartment that was regarded as luxurious in a period when many Russian families had to double or triple up. After teaching for a few years, Nora had made a career in display design. Fedor had invented a piece of factory equipment that earned him