Her name was Zasha, she told us. “Like Sasha, it’s short for Alexander or Alexandra—it means ‘defender of the people.’ Not an easy name to live up to,” Zasha said. The big woman was of indeterminate age. She seemed younger than Dr. Dave had been when he died, but Zasha spoke of him as if she’d known him as a child. She was paid a generous retainer by Dave’s parents; Zasha had her own bedroom and bathroom in their apartment. “I’m not only their driver—I’m more like the family servant,” Zasha wanted us to know. When we asked her how Dave’s parents were doing, and why the family servant was hanging around St. Vincent’s in the dead of night, Zasha told us how she was trying to live up to her name. “The people who leave St. Vincent’s late at night really need a ride,” was the way she put it. Like a genuine defender of the people, it didn’t matter to Zasha if her passengers could pay her or not. “Some riders overpay me—the ones with nothing pay nothing,” Zasha said, shrugging her big shoulders.

The Damaged Man, hatless and shaking with cold, had clearly heard what the Russian woman said, but from Don’s awed or stricken expression, he might have imagined that only the most militant prostitutes referred to their clients as riders—the snowshoer and I hoped not. We were getting Don a ride with Zasha; that’s all we knew.

I was overthinking how Zasha or Sasha could be a kind of nickname for both Alexander and Alexandra; I should have left the subject of Russian names alone.

“It’s a gender-neutral name, Adam,” the little English teacher told me.

“I’m not gender-neutral—I’m a girl,” Zasha told us; she wanted us to know there was no funny business about her. She’d accepted the pretty Mr. Barlow as a woman, but the snowshoer should have left the subject of Russian literature alone.

“Take Gogol’s barbed satire, or Chekhov’s portrayals of upper-class sadness,” Mr. Barlow began.

“I’m not really Russian,” Zasha said. “My parents came from Russia, but I was born and grew up in Brooklyn. I’ve never been in Russia,” she wanted us to know, but I knew there was no stopping the snowshoer now.

“Take Tolstoy—think of poor Pierre in War and Peace,” Elliot Barlow persevered. “Pierre tries to liberate his serfs; he only manages to make their lives worse.”

“It wasn’t that bad in Brighton Beach, but some of my Jewish friends had a hard time everywhere else, and there was a Ukrainian girl in my grade in school—her name was Bogdana, which means ‘gift from God.’ Talk about a hard name to live up to—poor Bogdana wasn’t God’s gift to anybody,” Zasha wanted us to know.