The mention of his mother thaws the air, and he leads her toward the two armchairs that sit around a coffee table by a safe, an intimidating-looking cabinet of steel. This is a perfect place for top official secrets, Sasha thinks, imagining the inside of the safe stuffed with dissident files, plans for nuclear attacks on the West, and lists of books and plays that are to be banned. This is, she imagines, where Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and the works of Solzhenitsyn are stacked in neat, forbidden piles, next to the names of film and theater directors whose productions have been pulled from screens and stages because of their insufficient patriotism or the lack of optimism in the lead characters’ objectives.

“Do you want some cognac?” Andrei asks before he sits down. It is around four in the afternoon, and she rarely turns down cognac, especially official Party cognac that they never see in stores.

Out of the top drawer of his desk, he produces a small key, turns it in the lock, and the safe door opens noiselessly. Inside, where Sasha imagined dissident files and plans to obliterate the West, presides a round bottle of cognac surrounded by a coterie of small glasses. He fills two of them and raises his glass in a toast, the same honey-colored alcohol they drank in her apartment what seems like a century ago, when she felt happy and light-headed, when she thought their life together was finally about to begin.

“To another reunion,” he says—another reunion is what their life seems to have come to—and he empties his glass in one gulp with the effortlessness of a regular drinker. Sasha sips the contents of her glass, as though she could fool anyone into thinking that she wasn’t one. He pours again, and they drink, and from his quick pace, she knows he is waiting for her to explain why she is here, in this vast office, helping reduce the liquid contents of his Smolny safe.

“Three weeks ago, Grandma died.”

She sees him scrunch his face and shut his eyes for a moment, as if her words have struck him on the head. His eyes are even darker when he opens them, as black as Grandpa’s well.

“I didn’t know,” he says, “otherwise I would’ve helped with the funeral.” This seems to be his main function in her life, arranging funerals for her family. “Are you all right?” he asks, although he knows that if she were all right, she wouldn’t be sitting in an armchair across from him in the middle of the afternoon with a glass of cognac in her hand.

“Do you remember Kolya’s journal?”

He nods. Of course, she knows he remembers.

“I found a letter from Kolya. From America. Dated 1956.”

Andrei puts down his glass and straightens in his chair.