“Is it the actress?” says Borya, a question he has earned the right to ask by six years of not asking too many questions. Andrei doesn’t answer, and by not answering, by staring into the windshield, he acknowledges what Borya, who saw her get out of the taxi and enter the door of the small international wing, is asking. The actress, the airport, the final separation. All corroborated by his driver, who knows her from TV; all validated by the Aeroflot clerk who recognized her from one of her plays. They saw her leave, just as he did. They are witnesses. His feverish mind didn’t make it up. She is now waiting to get on the plane, past the passport control, in the neutral zone between the countries’ borders, unaffiliated with either land, free. She is free of him, finally. Ready to place the enormity of the Atlantic Ocean between them, as a confirmation. And is he free of her, as he has promised his father-in-law?

Borya pulls in front of the Smolny entrance and turns off the engine. Andrei opens the door and, with one foot on the pavement, fumbles in his pocket, takes out his silver lighter—the one shaped like a handgun, a birthday gift from his coworkers—and hands it to his driver. “Keep it,” he says and nods Borya good night, sending him home.

The Smolny hallways are echoey; the offices behind the closed doors are empty, deserted for the night. In the whole building, he is alone. He unlocks the door to his office, creaks it open, and turns on the light. Everything is the same way he left it this afternoon, the same way he found it six years ago when he asked to be transferred to Leningrad to be close to her. All is the same except for one thing locked in the desk drawer, something small and weighty, something he placed there after the dacha talk with his father-in-law about all those enemies of the people murdered in NKVD cellars.