So maybe she didn’t spend three years in Moscow for nothing after all, learning the art of real make-believe, as opposed to the phony pretense of their history books with their heroic valor and pretend radio broadcasts Grandpa probably still listens to every morning. Maybe she has actually learned something: maybe she has learned to act by pretending to be someone else, and this pretending, paradoxically, has become more truth-telling than their real life.

In the three years they haven’t seen each other, Sasha has learned a lot about make-believe and Andrei has learned a lot about real life, or is it the other way around?

He pours what’s left in the bottle, and it fills their glasses one more time. After the performance, after reuniting with Andrei, after reliving the fateful day in the woods, there is an emptiness inside her, just like after every performance, and she is grateful they have cognac to fill it. The alcohol, now warm, oozes down her throat, makes her dizzy, and fills the void. She is in her kitchen with Andrei, who smells just as he did back in Ivanovo, who has just allowed her a glimpse of his pain.

They drink, and then there is silence, but not the easy silence of the past few hours. This new silence makes her tense because it has become deliberate, with a strained presence of something heavy and unsaid hovering in the air.

“There is something I need to tell you,” Andrei says before he gets up and walks to the entrance hallway, where she hears him fumble through his clothes. He returns with a new pack of Bulgarian cigarettes called Stewardess, shakes one out, and reaches for a box of matches on the ledge of the stove. He motions the pack toward her, but something makes her shake her head, as if she cannot afford a distraction, no matter how small, as if she needed all her senses focused on what he is about to tell her.

“This is difficult,” he says, shaking his head, and from the pause that follows, she knows to expect the worst. It is indeed the worst, the most devastating news, an atomic bomb dropped out of the sky.

“I got married a few months ago,” he says, staring at the radiator under the window, deeply inhaling the cigarette and breathing out a cloud of smoke as though he wished it to spread over the kitchen so that he could hide inside it.

His words slam her forehead with the force of a truncheon; they make her heart stop; they empty her lungs of air. They make her as sober as she was when only hours earlier they fumbled for each other in the hallway, when she thought, like an idiot who never learns, that the pain of longing was over and they would finally be back together again.