Andrei picks up the receiver and dials some numbers on his phone. “I need to be connected to Nicholas Kuzmin, 41 Grand Street, New York City, the United States. K-u-z-m-i-n,” he spells to the operator. He is told to wait, she guesses, because he holds the receiver away from his ear, as if it were a weight. Sasha doesn’t know if this is real or if it’s a sick Party joke Andrei has learned in his job at the Smolny. They can barely place a call to Moscow, let alone the West, so she is keeping her eyes on him, taking puffs on a cigarette, ensconced in her armchair, tired and tipsy and resigned to finish the cognac in her glass. She doesn’t believe that it is possible to pick up a receiver and be connected to someone in New York. They all know there is an indestructible barrier that stops any attempts to make such calls. A thick curtain between them and the rest of the world that prohibits all communication. But as the minutes pass and these thoughts grind through her head with crushing slowness, it dawns on her that they are in the Smolny, the control center for the dreaded barrier. It dawns on her—something she should have realized much earlier—that the barrier may be standing right in front of her, a telephone clutched in his hand.

Andrei must hear something on the other end because the phone is now pressed to his ear. “Yes, go ahead,” he says, walks over to where she sits, and hands her the receiver. “It’s him,” he says. “It’s Kolya.”

His words make no sense. Her uncle’s name, the name of someone who has been dead her whole life, used with present-tense immediacy, stuns her senses and renders her mute. This is a Party office in Leningrad in 1968, and it can’t be Kolya on the other end of the line, Kolya who has been missing in action since the war, who has been in limbo all this time, not listed among the dead or the living. The possibility of this unimaginable connection has warped the reality around them and emptied her of words. Andrei puts the phone into her hand, cradles his fingers around hers. “Talk to him,” he says.

Sasha slowly lifts the receiver to her ear. “Hello,” she mumbles, as if falling from a roof.

The voice on the other end is vulnerable, frightened. “Who is this?” he asks in the fragile tone Grandma used whenever there was a knock on the door of their Ivanovo house.

“It’s eight in the morning there,” Andrei whispers. “We woke him up.”

“Uncle Kolya,” she says, the words scraping out of her throat that suddenly feels parched. “It’s me, Sasha. The one you never met.” She doesn’t recognize her own voice, a voice he has never heard.