They are separated from real life by the linen tablecloth that almost touches the floor. The jagged tear in the linoleum, in their imagination, is a river, and the torn edges of plastic are its banks. They just finished reading a book of Andersen’s fairy tales, and the story they are playing is about a one-legged tin soldier. The brave warrior survives a fall from a window and the raging waves of a waterfall, only to die in a fire at the end. He is silently in love with a paper ballerina, who, in the soldier’s mind, has only one leg, too. She has a pretty tinsel rose pinned to her dress. Does she know about the soldier’s love? The hole in the linoleum is the river that will rush forward and drag the tin soldier to its depths, the river that will sink his boat and deposit him into the stomach of a big fish.

Marik is the soldier, and Sasha is the paper ballerina. The soldier is terrified of the darkness inside the belly of the fish, but he is too proud to cry for help because he wears a uniform. Through the scraps of ripped linoleum, the river roars until it becomes a waterfall, the boat made from newspaper disintegrates, and the water finally closes over the soldier’s head.

“Farewell, warrior! Ever brave,

“Drifting onward to thy grave,” recites Marik from the book.

Marik is as brave and proud in real life as the tin soldier is in the story, and, Sasha knows, he doesn’t really believe that he is drifting to his grave.

Then, beyond the tablecloth, the din of voices quiets and the piano chords burst into the air before Grandma’s voice, trained in a prerevolutionary opera school and called a mezzo-soprano, begins to sing about fragrant bunches of white acacia flowers. The music swells, and Grandma’s voice does, too, soaring and then descending, the lyrics compelling her to remember her distant youth when she still naively believed in love.

Sasha now hears the clinking of dishes, which means the table is being cleared of the dinner plates to get it ready for tea and jam, so she knows she has to be fast. “And back in the same room, the soldier saw the ballerina, still balancing on one leg.” She extends her leg, like the dancer in the story, although she has to crouch not to hit the top of the table. “And then the boy threw the soldier into the stove. And the ballerina, caught in the draft, fluttered into the fire, too.” She pauses. “They both melted, by the flames or by their love, no one knew.”

There is applause on the other side of the tablecloth curtain and requests for more songs, accompanied by the clinking of teacups against the saucers.

“The ballerina was made from paper,” says Marik. “So there was nothing left of her.”