Andrei turns to her, and his eyes are dark green again, the eyes of their Ivanovo childhood. They are so close that she can no longer make out his whole face: his features have disintegrated and shifted, like she imagines in the Picasso portrait that she has never seen, the one Kolya described in his journal. They stay like this for what feels like several minutes—his chest rising when Sasha takes a breath, the two of them melded into one—their faces only centimeters away from each other, deconstructed and warped. What is she hoping for? That he will announce he is going to divorce his wife and quit his job so that he can be with an actress?

This thought breaks the magic of the moment, and they separate, his features assembling back to normal, his eyes turning brown again.

“I can do something for you that no one else can do,” says Andrei, and from the deep place his voice emerges, she knows this is serious. “After all I’ve done to you, I hope you will accept this as a gift with no conditions.” For a minute, he stares at the ripples of water below. “I know I hurt you, and we both know I can’t undo what I did.” His voice is hoarse, and she can see only one side of his face, a blue vein pulsing under his temple fringed with white hair. “But I can get you on a plane to see your uncle in America.”

To go on a plane and see Kolya in America? Did he really say what Sasha thinks he said? She knows he can’t be serious, or maybe she didn’t hear him correctly, too busy staring at the blue vessel on his temple. Everyone knows that the two words, go and America, are as incompatible as acting and lying. No one can simply visit an uncle on the other side of the world, the Western, capitalist side. Even her mother, with her spotless record, wasn’t allowed to go to Bulgaria to visit the medical students she had taught, despite receiving an official invitation to meet their parents in Sofia. After a stack of letters vouching for her character, after months of meetings and committees, her request was turned down because the visit was deemed unnecessary. And that was Bulgaria, their southern communist neighbor who believes in their shared shining future. No one Sasha knows has ever crossed over to the other half of the earth. They are all huddled here, on this side of the Iron Curtain, blissfully ignorant about the rest of the world, helplessly content.

Andrei must see the confusion in her face, because he doesn’t press her for an answer. “Let’s go somewhere we can sit down and talk,” he says. “I know a place that’s open late.