“So what do I do with Kolya being alive?”

“What do you want to do?”

She knows what she wants. She wants him to still be alive, twelve years after the letter. She wants to talk to him, to hear his voice. She wants to ask him about growing up in Ivanovo, about his paintings, about the war and what it did to him. About the betrayal of their motherland. Not his betrayal of their motherland but their motherland’s betrayal of him. She wants to see Mama through his eyes. She wants to ask him if he ever thinks of her, Sasha, the one he never met.

But she can’t, of course, because he lives—if he is still alive—on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, on the forbidden western side, behind a curtain that never lifts.

She looks at Andrei, who seems to be able to guess what she is thinking.

“To talk to him, is this what you want?”

Sasha nods and lifts her glass to acknowledge his insight.

“Life and fate, this is what it’s all about,” he says, quickly giving a snort of laughter at what he has just uttered. “There’s a Russian novel, Life and Fate. It’s as good as War and Peace, but it’s one of those books that will never be published in this country. The author traveled with the Soviet Army all the way to Berlin, just like your uncle. So if Kolya were a writer and not a painter, this is what he would have written. Life and fate.” Andrei gets up and walks over to the phone on his desk.

Sasha watches him from her chair, not knowing what he is about to do.

“Do you have Kolya’s address in New York?”

She has Kolya’s address, written in his own hand on an envelope stuffed into the inner pocket of her handbag. She unearths the envelope and hands it to Andrei, not sure what he plans to do with it, fearful that he could use it against him. Or, possibly, against her?