Having to consign Andrei to the emotional storage loft fills her with the same despair she felt when she found Kolya’s journal. Yet, in the absence of letters from Andrei, the war journal is the only tangible connection she has to him. She rereads the story of Kolya and Nadia they read together, the story of a happier love Sasha envies, as though her uncle’s words could rebuild the bond between the two of them, bring Andrei closer, make him open up to her and no one else. As though her uncle’s journal could shed a glimmer of light on Andrei’s baffling betrayal.

February 13, 1942

I saw Nadia only cry once, when she told me about her father’s arrest. There was a knock on the door of their apartment, a loud, demanding knock. A knock that always comes at three in the morning because this is the time when a person is in bed, undressed and most vulnerable.

After the arrest, I came to her apartment almost every day, and what I saw was a different house. It looked bigger and emptier, a place where every noise seemed to echo against the high ceilings as if there were nothing soft left in the apartment to absorb the sound, as if all that was left amounted to stone. Evgeniya Iosifovna’s face also seemed to have turned to stone, and so did Nadia’s. They sat in the kitchen in front of cups with tea that had turned cold, staring at the pattern of the oilcloth on the table, sunflowers smudged from wear. I think I was the only one who came to visit Nadia and her mother after Naum Semenovich’s arrest. Her house might as well have been stricken by the plague, and their friends and neighbors, those who were not informers, were afraid to catch the deadly infection.

It was April 1941, and to distract Nadia, I took her to look at the melting ice on the Neva, at the gray slabs being thinned and weakened by the zinc water whirling below. We stood on the Palace Bridge, the place where we met eighteen months earlier, staring at the funnels of whirlpools around the stone pillars of the bridge, pulling our wool hats over our ears to protect them from the icy gusts of Baltic wind.

“What would you do if something happened to me?” she asked, her voice so soft that I could barely make out the words, almost as though she didn’t want me to hear them.