“I remember.” Andrei gives a little chuckle and takes a sip of the cognac glowing in his glass like honey.

She recites the lines they all had to learn by heart:

“Of Grandfatherly gentleness I’m devoid,

There’s not a single gray hair in my soul!

Thundering the world with the might of my voice,

I go by—handsome,

Twenty-two-year-old.”

“Back then, I thought I could’ve written it myself,” says Andrei. “To be handsome and twenty-two, with not one gray hair in your soul—that was the dream. No, it was even more than a dream: it was a goal, a manifesto.” His eyes grasp hers for a moment, then return to his glass, to their Ivanovo past. “Back then, I wanted to be a fighter, too. A revolutionary. Rising above the muck of that courtyard, the outhouse and the chickenshit, the moonshine my father brewed behind the shed so he could muster enough courage to hit my mother. To make a better life.” The honey depths of cognac must hold a great deal of Andrei’s Ivanovo childhood for him to stare into his glass as long as he does. “Mayakovsky was like a mayak—a lighthouse. He was everything I wanted to be.” Andrei pauses. “And everything I’m not.”

They take sips of the cognac and chew on servilat, the bitter and salty tastes mixing on her tongue.

“To fight, that was the goal. It sounded so heroic, the opposite of the filth we all waded through. Remember the poem Mayak wrote when Yesenin killed himself?

“In this life

It’s not difficult to die.

To make life

Is more difficult by far.”

She remembers. They all read it in Marik’s mother’s literature class, Andrei two years prior to her. Their teacher ranked Yesenin’s poetry higher than Mayakovsky’s, maybe because her son preferred it or maybe because Yesenin’s writing was more lyrical and less confrontational, a bandage for a woman’s heart, as Grandpa used to call it.

“Do you ever think about Marik?” she asks, because she knows that mentioning Yesenin has brought Marik up in his mind, too.

For a minute or so, Andrei doesn’t answer, frozen over his glass.

“I think of him all the time.” She answers her own question. “Of that day, of how if I had stopped him, he would still be here. That day still haunts me. I’ve blamed myself; I’ve blamed you. I’ve even blamed Marik. But maybe it was just the war, those shells buried under the loam, I don’t know. Or maybe it was all of our faults.”