He turns to her, his face contorted with sudden anger. “You weren’t around, remember? I was alone, with nobody there. You left. My parents were dead, my house burned to the ground, and all you could think of was yourself and the theater.” He gets up and strides out of the courtyard. She follows, trying to catch his words. “I told my father-in-law things he could use against me. Things he could put me in the camps for. Stuff I did.”

Sasha grabs his elbow to prevent him from walking away. “What did you do?”

He struggles out of her grasp but stops. For a minute or so, they stand under the arch, silently, and she can hear him breathe hard. “What I did is too late to fix. Years too late. There is nothing anyone can do now.” He starts walking back to Nevsky Prospekt.

Without saying a word, they walk toward the blustery Neva that lets them know it is close as they tense against the heavy gusts of wind. They walk past rows of darkened windows, on the sidewalk that is already a gruel of dirty snow until the spire of the Admiralty becomes visible against the sky, until the Hermitage steps out of the dark like a photographic image floating in developing solution. They make their way to the river through the grip of an early winter, contemplating what has just transpired between them, thinking of their ruined lives.

“Did you arrange for my mother’s funeral?” she finally asks.

“Your theater arranged most of it. I only helped.” She thinks of Andrei at the cemetery standing at a distance, just as he did in Ivanovo, in the cloud of train smoke.

“So you’ve been watching me from your Party perch at the Smolny,” she says, “like the NKVD watched Kolya’s Nadia and her family. Like they watched everyone.” The words come out metallic and harsh, as if she wanted to hammer them into his temples, and maybe she does. Maybe she wants to grab him by the hair and dunk his face into what he does for a living, to force him to suck in the toxic sludge and choke. Maybe she was as wrong to tell him about Kolya’s journal as she was to love him in Ivanovo and Suzdal and Moscow, as wrong as she is still to love him now.

“Why don’t you ban me from existence, along with the play?” she asks. “I have no doubt you can make me disappear. I’ve said lots of subversive things. Enough to get me ten years under Stalin, according to my mother.”