What is waiting for her there, on the other end of this thread? She tries to imagine a New York airport, but all she has at her disposal are images of airports in Tbilisi, Kiev, and Baku, where her theater company has recently been on tour. She tries to conjure up Kolya’s face, but what rises before her eyes is the prewar photograph from their family album, of him in Grandpa’s garden, holding a branch of an apple tree, laughing.

Beneath is a heavy blanket of clouds, a curtain flipped horizontally that sets them closer to the sun and obscures the earth below. The first rays of light are just beginning to leak from under the clouds as the sun rises above the curtain, a stage light that in only a few minutes will flood the cabin and make everything pink. She looks out as a stewardess, her hand glowing in the streak of light from the window, hands her a US customs form. Her newly minted passport for foreign travel is in her handbag, ready to oblige, and, leafing through a pocket dictionary, she writes the answers to the stern American immigration questions.

As the plane descends, it banks to the right and then the left, as if to show her from every perspective a new, other life waiting below. She looks down on the gray expanse of water held back by a barrier of stone rising higher than she has ever seen, spires etched against the sky, lit by the sun like a set for a play.

In her mind, Sasha sees herself handing the form and her passport to a border patrol agent in New York, someone who has the serious face of her theater’s administrative director. “What are your reasons for leaving Russia?” the agent will ask. “What are you running away from?” In her broken English, she knows what she will tell him, the unpracticed words that don’t require rehearsing. “From graves,” she will say. “From pretending.” He will listen carefully, even though he probably won’t understand. “From shame,” she will say. Then the agent will hand her passport back and fling open the metal gate into a new life.

In the waiting crowd, among hundreds of faces, she will immediately see Kolya. Although she has never met him, she will recognize him at once. Sasha is certain of this. It will only take her a second to make out Grandma’s soft, round face. It will only take her a moment to see Mama’s eyes.