Every day I think of Nadia, of the hollow of her collarbone where the skin seems almost transparent, where a web of tiny vessels is like a blueprint into a wondrous world inside her. I was glad she lived in Leningrad and not Ivanovo so I didn’t have to bring her before my family yet. I knew Mama would embrace her, take her by the elbow, and lead her to the armchair in the corner of the dining room, an honorary place where she greeted all important guests. It wasn’t Mama who darkened my mind when I thought of introducing Nadia as the woman I loved, my future wife. I thought of my father, who would only need one look at Nadia’s curly hair and skinny arms to know she was Jewish, to know that his son could do much better than entwine his life with an offshoot of the rickety intelligentsia that the Revolution of 1917 had succeeded in deposing. My father has always been a man of concreteness, not unlike the sergeant who detested fiction, and his lack of elevation from the mundane, his self-proclaimed earthiness, is what grounded him as a Bolshevik. “Collectivization and industrialization are what has made this country great,” my father would announce every time we sat down to dinner, as if reciting this slogan before a meal were his way of saying grace.

When my father learned I had applied to the art academy in Leningrad, his face contorted with fury. I thought he was going to hit me when I said I wanted to be an artist, and it was only Mama, by silently sliding into the leaden air between us, by standing in the middle of his wrath, who saved me from his blow. The knowledge that I would be studying painting—instead of engineering, like him, or medicine, like my sister—seemed to wound him almost physically. I have a suspicion that my father was pleased when I was mobilized into the army and sent to the front in September 1941, since in his eyes the war has plucked me out of the sissy world of art, the untrustworthy world of make-believe, and dropped me into the trenches, where everything is real.

On the day Nadia and I met, the day of her hat bobbing in the waves under the Palace Bridge, I walked her back to her apartment because I knew the moment I saw her that she was going to be part of my life, when she suddenly stopped before the Admiralty and said that I should know something right away, before it was too late. It was already too late, but what was the purpose of telling her? She put her schoolbag down on a bench under a naked poplar tree and lowered her scarf from her face down to her neck.