Approaching the end of the scene, she has yet to understand what has thrust the room full of her impatient schoolmates into this quiet focus. But she can sense this force, even though she doesn’t know how to attach words to what is swirling inside her. She knows one thing: she has connected with the audience and made them watch her, made them listen. She has convinced her schoolmates to follow her despite their boredom, despite the sun slanting its last rays into the dirty windowpanes. She doesn’t yet comprehend the nature of this new power, but it feels like magic.

11

11

The three of them are in the forest that starts behind the end of the streetcar route, and both Marik and Andrei are wearing ushanka hats with flaps hanging down to the shoulders of their cotton-padded coats. It is the dawn of March, when the winter still insists that it is in charge despite the signs of receding snow wherever the sun can reach down through the canopy of firs. They are sitting around a campfire Andrei has built with branches and twigs they found sticking out of the snow, patches of dead grass and brown leaves radiating from their burning pile of sticks.

As they were searching for wood, Andrei had stumbled onto an unexploded shell, small and darkened by the years that had passed since the front turned west. From the tense curve of his back, as he was digging in the loam, Sasha knew that he had come upon something prized, something she and Marik would never find no matter how painstakingly they trained their eyes to search the porous snow. Why was it always Andrei who found forbidden things, who explored any place he wanted without curfews or rules, who was always the first one riding on the back of the streetcar? She stares at his open palm, red and blotchy, where the shell now sits covered in old dirt, pretending to be no more dangerous than an ordinary stone. Andrei carefully lifts and examines it before he offers it to Marik in an apparent show of sudden generosity.

She knows Marik shouldn’t lift the shell from Andrei’s palm, but he does, and now it’s his. Now he owns it. His fingers, swollen from the cold, embrace and welcome it, accepting Andrei’s risky find, now putting Marik in charge.

“Come on—throw it into the fire!” Andrei yells, whirling his arms as if he were a windmill. “Let’s see the fireworks.” The flames from the fire reflect in his eyes, like little dancing darts of orange on green.