She stares at the card Andrei gave her, at his name printed in bold official letters, Andrei Stepanovich Gordeev. Would anything be different now if he had told her what really happened on the day of the fire, what transpired later between him and his father-in-law? Would her knowing the truth have brought them closer together or torn them even further apart? Andrei and Kolya, the two names ingrained in her heart, the two Ivanovo revelations that now seem inherently connected. She rereads the handwritten pages of the letter several times until she, too, begins to question Kolya’s decision not to go home, until she begins to hate herself because this doubt diminishes her, makes her just like Grandpa, cruel and small-minded. What is it in Kolya’s letter that brings this doubt to the surface, makes it unfold like the petals of a poisonous flower? Why wasn’t his love for Nadia strong enough to make him return to look for her, not to give up after just one trip to the Liteyny prison? Why did it take the word of only one bureaucrat to end his search?

Andrei’s name stares back at her from the card, constricting her heart, making her wonder if what she feels for him is a disease, a stubborn virus she has been unable to clear from her system. Is that what has been feeding her toxic doubts about Kolya? Is that why she keeps returning to the question of how he could be in America, instead of searching for Nadia in the wastelands of their country? On a scale with love on one side and the Gulag on the other, shouldn’t love always outweigh fear? Shouldn’t love outweigh everything?

She lifts the receiver and dials Andrei’s number.

The car he sends for her flies along Nevsky Prospekt and then turns off toward the Smolny. It is a black Volga, the preferred apparatchik vehicle, a car that smells of gasoline and old leather. Borya, the chauffeur, who is close to his pension age, occasionally glances at Sasha in the rearview mirror, his broad face collapsing into a cascade of wrinkles when he smiles.

“Where do I know you from?” he finally asks.

The recent Gorky television production of The Philistines, probably, rather than the latest addition to the theater repertoire, The Shadow by Evgeny Schwartz, another play recently decreed as destined for closure by the Ministry of Culture.

“Yes, yes, the Gorky play.” Borya nods enthusiastically. “You were the merchant’s wife, the one who had an affair.” She nods. She is always the one who has an affair, or who is unkind to her stepchildren, or who is morally bankrupt in so many other ways. She is a character actress: a villain, or a bully, or a miser, or a simpleton. From Borya’s eyes in the rearview mirror, she can see he is completely satisfied with her character’s moral failings.