How do people fall in love? Maybe she was never attracted to Marik because they were too alike: he was intelligentny, he took piano lessons, and his mother was a teacher. He read the same books. Andrei, on the other hand, was always from a different group of blood, as her mother calls him. Is it his otherness that feels so thrilling, his green eyes that regard her with admiration, his hair the color of tar, innocent of barber conventions, his arms strong enough to lift heavy sacks of sugar or whatever else the freight train brings every afternoon to the railroad station where, after finishing school, Andrei unloads train cars for a ruble a day? Or is it her mother’s disdainful sighs at the mention of Andrei’s name that fuel the attraction?

She is only sixteen, almost two years after Marik’s death, when she can no longer resist Andrei. Does she trust him more than she trusts her mother? She is under the spell of literary trysts in moonlit orchards, and she needs a pledge that will demonstrate her love, a gift that will unite the two of them forever. What is the biggest, most sacred secret she can lay down at his feet?

She finds Andrei on the riverbank, standing on the little dirt beach, skipping stones into the brown water. He is as good at skipping stones as he is at skating, making fires, and just about everything else. She looks at his silhouette etched against the darkening sky, a body that fits so well into the perfect frame of nature, a body that intrigues and frightens her. She wishes that they could still play War, but in her soul, she knows those days are over.

He turns around and peers at her, his eyes all black because he stands against the light.

“It’s my uncle Kolya’s war journal,” she says, handing him the notebook. “The uncle who was an artist, whose paintings hang all over our house. The one still missing in action.”

She doesn’t know how Andrei will feel when he reads the journal. It is not the heroic war they learned about in history class, with soldiers humming patriotic songs and attacking under a red banner with a hammer and sickle to overwhelm the Fascists with the sheer willpower of their belief in the approaching future. What she hands to him is the opposite of myths concocted by the state to make them feel better when they leaf through history textbooks and read about the millions who died at the front or starved to death in besieged cities. The war narrative they learn in school, she now knows, is crammed with as many fairy tales as the stories in Grandma’s prerevolutionary book about saints they no longer believe in.

“Tell me about it,” Andrei says.