She tries to imagine Kolya on that morning in Berlin, forced to make a split-second decision that defined his life. By crossing the border between East and West, he had entered a life from which there was no return. There is no connection between the two worlds, the old and the new, between the two lives, before and after the decision. There is no bridge, no road, not even a footpath. For Kolya, that decision meant death. Kolya died at that moment, and his life in the West is an afterlife.

“I need to go outside.” She gets up. “To clear my head.”

“I’ll go with you,” Andrei says. “I’ll just walk by your side. We don’t have to say anything.”

What is going on behind the facade of his face? she wonders. Does his job require him to consider Kolya a traitor for making the decision not to return home, for questioning the sacred mercy of their motherland, for doubting the heroism and sacrifice of the war no one is allowed to doubt?

The little park in front of the Party building is filled with diffused light, and, as always in June, it is difficult to tell afternoon from night. Sasha doesn’t know how long they spent in Andrei’s office, how long she sat there staring at the phone after the call. It could be six in the evening, or it could be ten at night. They walk along the street toward the Neva, their silence matched by the unusual stillness of the city, interrupted only by gusts of wind from the river. It must be late, Sasha thinks, with most people home, windows lit by the pale light of white nights.

An occasional bus clangs by on the embankment as they cross the nearly empty street and lean on the brown granite banister. The light above the river is so white and thick that you feel you could hold it in your hand. With the baroque center of the city behind them, the view from here is rugged and industrial, necks of construction cranes hanging over the water, drawing long shadows onto its leaden surface with the sun sinking toward the Okhtinsky Bridge. This is the unbound time, the disconnected time, time that has lost its meaning, time where no time exists. Down below is the river—its surface rippling and sparkling in the sun, the image that Sasha knows is still burned into Kolya’s brain—its enormity and depth an extension of life itself.

“So what do I do now?” she asks. This is a complicated question, but if it has an answer, her chances of finding it are better here, by the river, in this milky light, at this unknown time.