She remembers she was at the river with Grandma, rinsing a load of laundry, when a thunderstorm came out of nowhere, and they hid in a shack where someone, long dead, had kept his rowboat, now all crumbly and rotten through, a dark skeleton from old times. They stood inside the shack and waited for the storm to end as a ball of lightning heaved through an empty window cut out of the wall but never enclosed with glass. Afraid to move, she looked at Grandma, her frozen profile, her stiff vertebrae, the corner of her petrified eye. The ball of lightning sailed across the room and lingered over the boat, sighing and glowing, like an enormous egg yolk suspended in the air. They flattened themselves into the splintery wood of the wall, afraid to stir, watching it crackle with electricity. Then the ball of fire dipped, almost touching the bottom of the boat; heaved its glowing mass to the windowsill, as if it had seen enough of what it came to see; and rolled out.

Sasha still remembers the feeling of overwhelming powerlessness, of being at the mercy of that fireball, of knowing what would have happened had it decided to veer a few centimeters off its path. She still holds in her bones the feeling of being paralyzed by the lightning’s lethal intensity, of being held captive, just as she is now, in Andrei’s embrace.

When they separate, Andrei holds her at arm’s length and peers into her face.

“Where have you been?” she asks.

“Staying at my boss’s house until I can get back on my feet.” He pauses, as if unsure whether he should say anything else.

“I didn’t know where to look for you,” she says. “There was no one I could ask.” She notices that his features have hardened, marks of grief gouged into his face, making him look several years older.

“Let’s get out of here.” He points to the street where they met after her piano lessons.

They walk past the neighbors’ houses, past the lilacs struggling to escape from behind the fences.

“Why are you staying with your boss?” she asks.

For a moment, he is silent, as though thinking about how much he should reveal.

“I don’t know why Vadim has been so good to me. He feeds me; he shares his home with me. He talks to me and promises me a good future.” Andrei stops but then decides to continue. “We drink vodka at night after work. Just the two men, hozyaeva, as Vadim calls us, the masters. The masters of his apartment, of Ivanovo, and, by the time the bottle is empty, the masters of the entire world. The masters who will soon build this glorious dream, he says, an idea so grand that it will make our skin crawl.”