There is no doubt in her mind that Kolya knew about the life of make-believe, the life of art. Sasha is convinced he would not question her desire to go to Moscow and apply to the best drama school in the country, a plan she has harbored in her soul since she was seven and hasn’t mentioned to anyone yet, a plan that will undoubtedly cause a seismic tremor when her mother and Grandpa hear about it. As she stares at the pages of the journal, she sees Kolya’s face, as round and soft as Grandma’s, his eyes smiling from behind the glasses, looking at her from a photograph in the family album, from the depth of time. She wishes she had been born a few years earlier, before the war, when he was still here. She wishes she had a father like him—not like the blond man in the photograph no one wants to talk about; not like Dr. Zlotnikov, who fixes her mother with his eyes behind a pince-nez when she talks to him about her dissertation; and certainly not like Andrei’s father. She wishes Kolya were here now to tell her about the life of make-believe, the life he understood because he lived it.

To give Andrei a sense of the real Kolya, she opens the journal and reads a few pages.

March 22, 1942

Seryoga and I are pulling a cannon, harnessed like the horses in Ivanovo that used to pull loaded carts along the main road when I lived there. Only here, the ground is maimed with bomb craters and pocked with shrapnel, and no horse would be able to make its way forward. The whistle of mines and the louder roar of artillery shells rip through the air, and we roll into a trench, into something viscous on the bottom. From the explosions, we are almost buried by the falling dirt, but we are still alive. I try to move my arms and legs, still there. I can see Seryoga digging himself out, spitting out dirt, wiping his eyes of the muck from the bottom of the trench. We’ve survived this time. We get up.

The sticky stuff on the bottom of the trench is someone’s guts and blood, but it isn’t ours. The wind rains shrapnel, and we bend to get back into our harness when the lieutenant crawls out of a bomb crater next to us. His face is black from dirt, the fringe of his coat is burned over his knees, but he is brandishing a handgun.

“Attack!” he yells, pointing forward, like the statue of Lenin in front of the Finland railway station. We both look at where he is aiming. Three German tanks are crawling from behind a grove of trees, rattling over the maimed earth, their clatter filling the air.