“There is something I have to tell you,” she said. “I’m not very practical. I’m not like other women. I can’t sew, and I’m a terrible cook. Even standing in lines is a skill I haven’t fully mastered. Like my father, I was born without elbows. I feel more comfortable in a lecture on Cervantes than on a crowded bus.”

I stroked her hair shining in the light of a streetlamp, and she leaned her head into my palm. I kissed her cheek, then her lips. She didn’t resist.

“Maybe we are both misfits,” I said, “because I have a warning for you, too.” Her eyes were lowered, as if she were watching my mouth wrapping itself around the words. “I am not as strong and confident a man as you deserve. I’m only an artist. I can paint, but I can’t beat people up.”

“Why would you need to beat people up?” she asked.

“To protect you. So that they won’t take you away from me.”

She smiled and straightened my glasses. Then she lifted them off my nose, and her face lost focus and became blurry, similar to Dora Maar’s in the portrait Picasso had just painted, the unsocialist portrait my professor recently showed our small class surreptitiously and without comment. Nadia’s lips were cold and salty, like tears, like the Baltic water under the Palace Bridge.

Sasha lifts her eyes from the pages and takes a deep breath of the stale air of the storage loft. The dust of time, of war, of knotty love settles in her lungs. In their house and at school, where everything seems to be based on lies, is she a misfit, too?

It is December, and the three of them are at an ice field in the park behind the end of the streetcar route, tying skates to their valenki boots with ropes. “Tighter,” she says to Marik, whose right skate wobbles when he steps on the ice. She doesn’t have to say anything to Andrei: his knots are exacting, and he is the first to race to the other side of the field, his skates cutting through the ice with resolute lines. Marik and Sasha step onto the field with caution. It is their first outing of the season, and it feels as though they are trying to make sure that their grown arms and legs still remember the moves.

“Hey!” Andrei yells from the other side of the field. “Come over here and we’ll have a race.”