He looks away, toward the forest, considering the heft of what he has just said. When he turns back to her, his face has lightened. “And they also tell me I look a lot like Mayakovsky,” he says and chuckles.

He does look like Mayakovsky, whose poems they were all made to memorize in eighth grade, a high-cheekboned poet who glared down from the wall of every literature classroom, with his piercing eyes and a square chin, handsome in his seriousness about the Revolution. She cups her hands over Andrei’s ears and peers into his face. “You have his coal-like eyes,” she whispers, drawing so close that she has no choice but to kiss him. They stay immersed in this tobacco-scented kiss until he pulls away, takes her by the shoulders, and separates their bodies carefully and deliberately, as if his was a stick of dynamite and hers a lighted match.

“And there is one more thing about my job,” says Andrei, as if to certify that he has changed the subject. “We have a special store with decent food.”

She doesn’t know why the Komsomol town committee workers have access to decent food when the rest of them stand in lines for bread and milk, but this is when Andrei unwraps a newspaper parcel he brought and pulls out a sweet roll. She has never seen a sweet roll so gleaming with glaze and studded with poppy seeds and raisins, so plump in its freshly baked glory. He orders her to take a bite, and she obeys with pleasure. The only sweets she has at home are cubes of sugar they drop into their cups of tea and a little glass vase with sucking candy Grandma keeps on the bottom shelf of the buffet. The roll melts in her mouth, warm from the sun, decadent and sweet, magnificent in its special Komsomol deliciousness.

She is grateful to Andrei for the poppy seed roll, for wrapping it in newspaper and bringing it here. She kisses his salty eyelids to thank him. She runs her fingers through his black hair; she presses her cheek into his damp neck. This is all she is ready for; this is all she wants so far. She knows this is all he wants right now, too. He is happy to tolerate her touch because he says he loves her.