In the summer of 1959, her first summer in Moscow when she was admitted to study at the drama school, a miniature America sprouted up in Sokolniki Park outside the city, the American National Exhibition that Sveta and Sasha waited three hours to enter. They had already read what Khrushchev said to the US president three weeks earlier, when the Expo opened. In another seven years we will be on the same level as America. When we pass you along the way, we’ll wave to you. With the rest of the curious crowd, they gawked at the world they were promised in only seven years: cars laden with chrome, cameras that dispensed instant pictures, films that were not banned, stainless steel refrigerators, robot vacuums, and a machine that washed your dirty dishes in less than thirty minutes. They stared at a blonde woman modeling a dress, which Sveta considered for a minute and said she could sew one just like it, if only she could get her hands on three square meters of decent fabric. Sasha didn’t know then that seven years later, just when they should have caught up with America, Sveta would lock herself in a hotel room in Kiev, where her theater was on tour, and pour down her throat a vial of drugs that were not supposed to exist in the healthy Soviet world.

But in 1959, with Sveta still alive, they stopped in each of the four model kitchens to watch a baking demonstration and then, when the American women in aprons, whether by accident or by design, turned their backs on their plates of finished little cakes called brownies, they grabbed as many as they could, like everyone else around them, and, their hands sticky with chocolate and sugar, raced to the next exhibit. Sveta’s image rises before her eyes, her blonde hair in a long braid, her index finger raised didactically, as if she were admonishing Sasha with another scrap of wisdom about life in the theater. Sasha would call if Sveta were still alive to ask whether she remembered the America they saw nine years ago, to ask what Sasha should do about America today.

When we pass you along the way, we’ll wave to you. Well, two years have passed since we were supposed to overtake America, and she hasn’t seen one dishwasher or a single brownie. Is this what America looks like, that Expo? A model house for every model family, shelves filled with books that no one tries to censor, plays that no one decrees to ban?

Or is it a country where people sleep in cardboard boxes under bridges, as Pravda constantly reminds them? A place plagued by hurricanes and guns, where round-bellied capitalists in top hats, who glare from posters glued to newsstands, multiply their fortunes by exploiting men in chains? A place where human beings are disconnected and alone, stooped under the weight of questions that have no answers?