He stops and shakes his head, as though he were a patient teacher and Sasha, a brazen student bent on challenging authority. “I would never do anything to hurt you, Sashenka,” he says, peering into her face. “Remember that.” She stares back, and as he looks away, he adds, under his breath, almost as if he wasn’t the one uttering the words, “Although I could.”

He didn’t have to say this. She knows he could, and she is as grateful for his assurance of her safety as she is revolted by the sheer stretch of his power. They have reached the Palace Bridge, and the wind makes her stop and grasp the wrought-iron railing, forcing her to pull her hat down over her ears and hold it from being blown away.

“This is where they met, Kolya and Nadia, isn’t it?” says Andrei.

Sasha looks down at the black water hissing around the pillars of the bridge, seeing in her mind Nadia’s yellow hat bobbing on the waves. This is where they met. Right here, where they are now standing, probably on the same spot. This is the railing Nadia grasped a quarter century ago, looking down on the same angry waves charging at the granite below. Sasha wishes she could feel as unequivocally about Andrei as Nadia felt about Kolya. What if her mother was right about him after all? What if he is indeed of a different group of blood?

“I’m sorry about the play closing.” Andrei runs his fingers across her cheek and steps back. “I just wanted to let you know, before you heard about it from the theater administration.”

“Thank you. That was very helpful. Now, with An Ardent Heart closed, I won’t have to yank my guts out to play Matryona and scatter the bloody mess across the stage for the audience to applaud. At least there’s comfort in that.”

He doesn’t answer. A streetcar clangs across the bridge, probably the last one for the night, a small firework of sparks sizzling around its wire above. Andrei knows nothing about acting, so she is not sure he understands what she meant about scattering her blood and guts onstage.

“Do you still read Mayakovsky?” she asks.

He leans on his forearms and looks down into the water, then quietly, just so she can barely hear him, recites a few lines of the poem they memorized in Marik’s mother’s class in Ivanovo. Most of them learned it by heart simply because this poem was about love, hopelessness, and disappointment, unrevolutionary things that excluded it from the required reading list.

“My love is

an arduous weight,

hanging on you

wherever you flee.”