In the few seconds before the door opens, Sasha tries to conjure up the person on the other side, the person she hasn’t seen in almost two years, ever since he warned her that his ministry was closing her production of An Ardent Heart. The person whose dark secret is now lodged in her chest like a malignant lump. Although she cannot track his bureaucratic trajectory, she is almost certain he has been tracking her artistic one. Behind this door, she is certain that he watches over the entire city of Leningrad—shielded by a wall of bureaucracy everyone in the Theater can feel—controlling its exposure to culture, letting only those plays that won’t harm fragile psyches pass through the gates of his censorship. Or is it her anger surfacing, gearing up to distract her from listening to what he is reluctant to say? Would she have learned the truth about his father’s death from him rather than from her grandfather had she been ready to listen? Is she about to sabotage, again, the truth she can portray so well onstage?

As she hears the steps on the other side, Sasha takes a breath, trying to silence the pounding in her chest. Andrei opens the door and draws her inside, his arms carefully making their way around her shoulders, his breath a hot puff against her cheek. If anyone were watching them, they wouldn’t detect even a glimmer of impropriety in this embrace, the warm greeting of two old friends. He kisses her on the cheek, holds her at arm’s length, and peers at her, his hands still on her shoulders. They stand like this for at least a minute, studying each other for changes time may have carved into their faces, for signs that Ivanovo—with its field leading into the forest where their grass bed used to be, and its lilac bushes behind the fence where he stood waiting for her, and its unpaved roads covered with silky dust—is still there, gouged into their hearts.

His eyes have darkened since Sasha last saw him. They seem brown now instead of green; they swallow and trap the light instead of reflecting it; they are wary, guarded eyes. There are parentheses of wrinkles around his mouth, and the hair around his temples has turned gray, as though he has lived through a battle. The air between them is still cold, and neither of them wants to be the first to yield any emotional ground, to expose even a centimeter of vulnerability.

“It’s genetic,” Andrei says, catching her eye. “My father turned gray when he was only thirty-three, my mother told me.” All Sasha remembers of his father’s hair was wisps of white bristling from under a cap he never removed when he was outside.