She glances at his profile, waiting for him to answer. His hair is completely black in the dappled red neon from the Kavkazsky restaurant sign, still open.

“This only tells me that we still have a lot of work to do,” he says, and she can’t tell if he is being sarcastic. He doesn’t smile, so she must allow for the possibility that he believes what he has just said, even though it sounds too suspiciously close to what he would say to someone at work. How is it possible that she detests him as much as she does at this moment, and at the same time is searching for a pretext to stroke his hair?

“We all live surrounded by three rows of fences, in a courtyard with a stump behind which you get fucked,” she says. “Just like the characters in this play you’re closing.”

They both know that the scene from Ostrovsky is a metaphor not only for life in their motherland but also for the dead end of their own nonlife together. Maybe she should tell him she no longer believes in the sentimental nonsense about connected souls and unbreakable bonds. Several years of working in repertory theater have successfully wiped out all vestiges of that hope.

He stops to peer into her face, and they stand there for a few moments, bathed in red, searching for a trace of something in each other that may still be there. Then he lowers his eyes and reaches for a pack of cigarettes in his coat pocket. They are Marlboros, the American brand they hear about only from jammed broadcasts of the BBC, and it occurs to Sasha that he must be climbing the Party ladder. He offers her one, and for a few minutes, they walk silently, inhaling capitalist tobacco so scandalously better than their own.

“Maybe you were right to leave Ivanovo when you did after all,” he says, stopping in front of a courtyard that seems to shimmer under an ordinary-looking archway, so painfully beautiful that for an instant, Sasha wonders if she has been blessed with a mirage. A wrought-iron bench glistens under a tree, and a marble statue, white and seemingly glowing, stretches its arm in their direction, in a puzzling gesture of either invitation or forbiddance. “Are you happy?” he asks. “Now that you’ve become an actress?”