He sits at his desk, shakes a cigarette out of a pack, and rolls it between his fingers. The ashtray is full of cigarette butts he has smoked when he sat there for hours this afternoon, before the trip to the airport. He doesn’t remember how long he sat there. His mind wandered, and his thoughts strayed, images rushing through his head, flooding, just as they are now, again. He sees their Ivanovo courtyard, a well with a creaky handle, chickens wading through the dust, the tar roof over the dump where he, Marik, and Sasha met after school. He sees the lilac bushes stretching their branches through the slats in the fence on the corner where he waited for her to return from a piano lesson. He sees the field where they lay among the tall grass, on the last day she came there before she left, rain falling in the distance, drawn toward the dark forest, like a heavy curtain.

He sits and smokes. His heart feels constricted, and he takes deep breaths of tobacco, inhaling as much as he can, filling his chest with cigarette smoke, as if it could ease the pressure of the cage around his heart. He thinks of his father lying on the ground in front of the burning house, watching him with one eye, of the rage compressing his chest. He thinks of the forest in Ivanovo, the fire they made eleven years ago, the shell he placed into Marik’s hand. The guilt he never admitted to anyone. Sasha was the only one who knew. He thinks of Sasha, of her love for him, of his love for her. Of her, Sasha, who is now on her way to another life, while he is still here, being sucked deeper and deeper into the vortex of the past.

He fumbles in the inner pocket of his jacket, wraps his fingers around a small key, and opens the desk drawer. The revolver glares with a matte finish tarnished by time. He won it from his father-in-law’s NKVD friend on a bet, claiming he could down a glass of undiluted spirits twice as strong as vodka. It was May 9, 1965, the twentieth anniversary of Soviet victory over the Nazis, and they were all drinking at the dacha. The NKVD friend took his loss stoically, sliding the gun and a case with bullets across the table, although his jaw tightened and his Adam’s apple silently gasped. “Cherish it,” he said to Andrei in a dim voice. “This gun has a history.”