I draw Nadia as I remember her: narrow hands with elongated fingers, a pianist’s hands; high cheekbones, a drop of Tatar blood in everyone born in Russia; thick eyebrows, the right slightly higher than the left, which gave her face a surprised look, as though she were in constant wonder. She lived on Herzen Street in a three-room apartment that was not communal, an obvious luxury for a family of three. Her father, Naum Semenovich, taught physics at the University of Leningrad, and, in her words, she inherited none of his scientific mind. Only his nose, she used to say with a sigh.

Sasha pauses to look at the drawing on the bottom of the page, a girl’s thin face marred by a burn on paper. Was it a cigarette that Kolya was smoking? Or a spark from the fire that kept him alive in a frozen trench?

We met on the Palace Bridge, the only place we could have met: she lived on the left bank of the Neva, and I lived on the right. It was the end of October, with winter making an early entrance that year, blowing black clouds into the city sky, churning the water around the pillars of the bridge. She stood by the banister leaning over the river, looking down at where the wind tossed a knitted yellow hat with a pom-pom in the waves, her face as unprotected as her head, stunned by the sudden force that so suddenly had ripped her hat from her. I stopped. I had to stop: there was too much fragility in her posture to pass her by, too much need. She looked at me and smiled a sad smile, accepting the loss of her hat, shrugging, pulling her scarf up to her ears. If I’d been a real man, I thought, a character from one of our heroic Soviet books, I would have torn off my coat and jumped into the waves. I would have snatched her hat out of the wind’s jaws and fought my way against the current back to the granite steps where she would be waiting for me, awed by my bravery and physical strength, grateful. Instead I looked into her face, her eyes the color of tarnished gold, and said something foolish, the first thing that came to my mind. “It’s gone,” I said, and she nodded. “I know.”