Although Sasha can’t deny a rush of pleasure at hearing the words she has hoped for since drama school, she is not quite sure what they mean. Has her mother finally accepted Sasha’s choice? This is the first time she has attached words of praise to theater, but what exactly is she praising? Sasha’s acting career or the apartment that came with it?

Sasha lifts her suitcases onto the divan and helps her mother unpack. She has brought her good dress, white with a red apple print; her photo album with pictures of Sasha in a white apron on the first day of school, of Grandma and Grandpa staring into the photographer’s camera on their fiftieth wedding anniversary, and of her pressing stethoscopes to the bare chests of eight-year-olds at her first job in the summer camp called the Dawn of Socialism.

She has also brought Kolya’s original journal.

March 14, 1942

I don’t know why I am writing all this, and for whom. I suppose I am still clutching at the hope that this war will end before I get killed, that these pages will somehow find their way to my mother and sister even though no censor will let them pass through. But if I don’t write and if I don’t draw, I will become like my sergeant. I would invalidate every painting on the walls of the Hermitage. I would betray the milky air of Leningrad’s streets, and the softness of Nadia’s arms, and her foolish trust in my promise to save her.

A hunk of sealing wax with a round stamp across their front lock, a stamp that branded Nadia’s apartment the property of the state.

I stood in front of that sealed door, in a state of shock so complete that I could see myself from the outside: my frozen limbs, my jaw hanging open in a stupor, my eyes squinting to make out the letters stamped on the wax. I stood there, helpless and defeated. Then I began banging on the door with my fists and then with my feet, as if those who took away Nadia and her mother might still be inside, waiting for an accomplice to whatever crime they have concocted.