For a minute, they are both silent. “But he knew that what you did was to avenge your mother’s death,” Sasha says quietly.

Andrei smirks. “At that point, who would have cared about this tiny detail? Not Vadim. Not the courts. Not anyone.” He exhales loudly, as if he wants to rid his body of every detail of the story he has just told her. “This was the beginning of the end—not my first downfall and not my last.”

In her mind, Sasha replays the day when she saw him crouched by the smoldering pile of wreckage that used to be his house. She didn’t know then that everything had been already set in motion, that their lives had been already placed on tracks running in opposite directions.

Andrei stares down at the stains from the food and wine, his hand wiping away the invisible detritus from the tablecloth, as if he hoped to make it white and crisp again.

“When my father got back from the camps, he told me stories of what it was like, stories I refused to believe back then. Back in Ivanovo, I told you some of those stories. He said that among his fellow inmates were former Party members who had interrogated prisoners and carried out horrific verdicts. Now, in a kind of cosmic mockery, they found themselves incarcerated for the same crimes for which they had tortured and executed others. Later I thought of it as universal retribution. But what struck me most about his stories was that the victims’ denouncers were not some foreign agents. The denouncers were their own neighbors and friends. Sometimes even their cousins, their own brothers and sisters.”

Sasha thinks of Kolya’s journal, of Kolya talking to the neighbor from Nadia’s landing, of her suspicious, incriminating gaze from behind the door held by a chain. She thinks of the university secretary with nails bitten down to the skin, looking for Nadia’s file, then finding it and telling him to leave, condemnation in her voice.

“Isn’t it ironic,” says Andrei, “that the executioner becomes the victim, and the victim becomes the executioner? Our system, if you think of it, is pure genius: executioners and victims are the same people. The engine of death has been in motion for decades, and no one is guilty, because everyone is guilty.”

They sit looking at each other, not moving. It is so quiet in the room that Sasha can hear the buzzing of a neon lamp over the kitchen door.