She can’t do justice to the story by retelling it, but Andrei listens intently as the words tumble down her tongue, just as she knew he would, as only a soul mate would listen. She pauses and looks at him: he is serious and pensive, his eyes deep and dark, his hand curling around her wrist and making her breathing fast and shallow.

She tells him about Nadia, and as she speaks the words, she sees herself standing on the bridge across the Neva the way she imagines it to be, the color of zinc, wind tossing the water against the stone pillars, snatching her yellow wool hat off her head and blowing its cold breath through her hair. She sees the water churning under the bridge, her hat bobbing on the spines of the waves. She sees the pale building of the University of Leningrad’s philology department on the embankment on the right and a little farther, the yellow facade of the Leningrad Academy of Arts. The wind dives and soars and shrieks in her ears, so she raises the collar of her coat and winds the scarf tighter around her neck. The iron bridge railing is cold, so she leans on her forearms and stuffs her hands inside the coat sleeves. Although Sasha has never been to Leningrad, she sees what Nadia saw on that October night, like frames of a movie rolling before her eyes, making the story alive, acting it out for Andrei, making it theirs.

She tells him about Uncle Kolya’s paintings hanging in their house, the paintings Andrei has never seen because he is not allowed inside. A portrait of Sasha’s young mother, her lips curled in an ironic smile, the way she used to be before the war wiped all the joy off her face and made her serious and orderly. A portrait of her grandparents in their dining room: Grandma in an armchair, her face turned slightly toward Grandpa, who stands with his hand clasping her shoulder. His blue-eyed stare is straight and resolute, as though if he weren’t holding her down, the armchair would float up into the air and out the window—over the lilac bushes, over the birches of the park and the firs of the woods that stretch as far as her eyes can see—sailing with Grandma into the gray-blue palette of the Ivanovo sky.

She tells him about two later works, painted when Kolya came from Leningrad, during a break between semesters at the art academy, the time when the word front had already begun to gather strength during the war with Finland: a painting called Ration, a slice of black bread and a small dried fish, scaly and parched, lying on an open page from Pravda and an oil painting of a soldier throwing a grenade at a tank, the soldier’s back tense and determined, the tank halted by yellow flames waving at the sky.