His face convulses into a grimace, and he shakes his head, as if what she has just said is a perfect example of her inability to bend. “I can’t start over. I wish I could.” For a moment, he closes his eyes, as though she didn’t hear a word he said. “It’s like when you try to carry a load that’s too heavy. At first you manage to lift it, but after you’ve lugged it for a while, you can no longer carry it any farther. I know this feeling from when I unloaded freight trains. You try to carry the weight, you try to balance it and steady yourself, but it pushes you down further and further and it finally breaks your back. It’s broken me, this load. It’s too late for me to stop doing what I do. It’s been too long.” His hand rises to his throat, and his fingers fumble to undo the top two buttons of his shirt. “My back has been broken. I can no longer move forward. I’m now deep in this muck, up to my ears, drowning.”

This late-night talk laced with wine and cognac, in this surreal, empty place, seems as close as they will ever get to their moment of truth, and Sasha has to try one last time. She needs to exhume her guilt of leaving Ivanovo for Moscow, surrender it to him.

“I know I’m naive, but this is our only chance. I left you at a terrible time. It is my fault that you’ve been drawn into this swamp, and I want to pull you out. Please. Let’s leave together and start over.”

She peers into his face, waiting. He doesn’t say anything, but she can read the answer in his eyes. There is no light left there, no life. His silence is his answer. He hesitates, as if he were ready to say something, but it is only a hesitation, a bullet jammed in the throat of a gun.

Sasha has to turn away from the death of everything she sees in his eyes. Is this who she has been waiting for all these years, a man with dead eyes, a married Party functionary, a censor of her art?

“We should go,” she says.

She gets up, and the waiter, with an expression of relief on his face, rushes to their table with a bill.