Just then, the door to a neighboring apartment opened a crack, held by a chain from the inside, and a young woman in an apron glared out. I had seen her before: we collided at the front door to the building a few times in the past when she clicked her way down the stairs on high heels in red lipstick and teased hair. “What’s all this racket?” she demanded. Her hair was peroxide blonde, and there was something waspish in her demeanor that warned me not to ask any questions. “No one lives there anymore; can’t you see that?” she said and gave me a long, scathing look to make sure that the message had sunk in. It had. “And if I were you, I wouldn’t hang around this place too long,” she added and banged the door shut.

I stared at the wax seal on Nadia’s apartment again. The landing smelled of old cigarette butts and yesterday’s soup. That was the moment when I realized, with horror, that I didn’t know any of Nadia’s family or friends. Her mother had a sister, Nadia’s aunt, living somewhere in Sverdlovsk; Naum Semenovich had no siblings. If Nadia had any grandparents left alive, she never talked about them. She and I were so wrapped up in our own world, we were reluctant to open its doors to anyone from the outside. We didn’t need anyone else, she used to say; all we needed was each other.

At the university, the secretary at the philology department where Nadia was studying leafed through the students’ files, and I watched as her fingers with short, bitten-off nails reluctantly walked through sheets of paper in the drawer. She finally stopped at one folder, stared at it for a while, then lifted her eyes to look at me. I held her gaze, suspicion mixed with disdain.

“She left school,” said the secretary curtly and looked down at the file to avoid my gaze.

I knew what this meant but wanted to press this bureaucrat further, to make her uncomfortable, as if she were complicit in Nadia’s disappearance. “When did she leave the school?” I asked. “And why?”

It was as useful as Evgeniya Iosifovna asking the men arresting her husband about the reason for his arrest.

“Recently,” said the woman, letting me know with her frown that the second half of my question was out-of-bounds. She pushed the filing drawer shut and straightened her spine, signaling that our conversation had come to an end.

I don’t remember going down the stairs and walking out of the university, but I must have walked over the Palace Bridge because soon I was on Nevsky Prospekt. The day was mercilessly long—in a couple of weeks, the sun would barely bother to touch the horizon before springing back up. Fog hung over the oily surface of the Griboyedov Canal, mixing with the low gray clouds, obliterating the sky.