Is it really possible to cross to the other side? Is there a bridge between the two lives that seem to be so far apart, installed on opposite poles of the earth? Or are they—those living on this side—too burdened by their past and haunted by their memories: the physical and moral devastation of the Leningrad Front, of Nadia’s disappearance, of Mama’s scribbling spy reports on her professor? Is their past always going to hold them back, on this side of the Iron Curtain, wrapped—like babushkas in their kerchiefs—in their version of reality, always heroic and uplifting, always right, until they age and shrivel and become the grime of history? Or can she excise the images of this reality from her mind, rip them out of her heart, by the roots? Must Sasha clear her head of the past so that she can advance into the future?

She often sees Mama young, the way she looked in a photograph in Ivanovo before Sasha was born, her hair swept back in the style popular before the war, her smiling eyes still crinkled and ironic. This is how she now comes to Sasha in dreams, when she tries to hold fast to the diaphanous image of her mother in the first few moments of waking up. The mother she’d never known, the mother who still remembers Kolya in Ivanovo. Her mother, standing tall and straight, alone, outside time.

Maybe, after all, there is no solid demarcation between the living and the dead but rather a thin veil, more porous than they could know. Or maybe this thought is nothing but Sasha’s pitiful attempt to soothe the wound of guilt, of not being next to her mother when her heart was failing, when she was lying in the hospital, most likely in the hallway, on a bed without sheets, frightened and alone. Maybe this thought is nothing but her feeble effort to alleviate the grief of allowing her mother to die. It still festers, this wound, spewing guilt. With time, will it dry up? Will this wishful thinking transport her mother solely into their memory, hers and Kolya’s, where she will always be radiant and young, having achieved the impossible feat of slowing down the current of time?