On those evenings when they do not participate in mass scenes at the theater, Sasha and her roommate Lara sit on her bed and talk. Lara is from Pskov, a town to the northeast of Ivanovo, a place as small as Sasha’s hometown, a place often paired with the adjective provincial. They are the same age, both children of the war, both fatherless. Lara’s father was killed in Poland in 1944, when the tide of the war had already turned and Russian troops were advancing west, when the word victory had already begun to form on people’s lips. “1944, when no one should have been killed,” Lara whispers, looking down as she straightens the corner of the duvet cover with her hand.

Does she feel a connection to Lara because they both grew up in small towns in the provinces and both left for the capital? Did the two of them sense that Ivanovo and Pskov were too suffocating, that both wanted more than their homes could offer? Is Sasha’s search for a different life in Moscow simply an extension of her looking for a father, someone noble and heroic, someone whose name wouldn’t make Grandma frown? Has Lara, all this time, been looking for a father, too? It is probably to fortify the growing bond between them that Sasha tells her the story from her childhood.

Sasha’s mother, who told her that her father died during the war, never specified how he died, and this vagueness created a vacuum that, in her seven-year-old mind, gradually filled with plots of nobility and valor. Some men in her fantasies turned out more heroic, tossing a grenade at a tank and dying in an explosion of flames, while others perished more slowly, like partisans living in the woods in the middle of winter, sleeping in log-reinforced trenches below the ground, hidden under a meter of snow.

She doesn’t remember when she realized it was useless to wait for her father to return, but at seven, Sasha knew one thing: if she wanted a father, she had to take matters into her own hands and find him.

So the next time her mother took her to the town park on Sunday, Sasha didn’t waste time on the sandbox or the swing. Leaving her mother on a bench under a tree, she ran around the park looking for a handsome, brave man to be her father. It took her only ten minutes to discover that there weren’t many handsome men around. Another few minutes revealed that there weren’t many men of any kind.