Sasha imagines herself as Lisa and Andrei as Lavretsky. It is nighttime, and they are in the orchard—all classical Russian novels have an orchard as vast and dense as a forest—and Andrei is kneeling at her feet. Her shoulders begin to twitch, and the fingers of her pale hands press even closer to her face. Andrei, of course, understands what these twitching shoulders and tears mean. “Is it possible that you love me?” he whispers. “I am frightened,” she says, looking at him with moist eyes. “I love you,” he says. “I’m ready to give up my life for you.” She trembles and lowers her eyes; he quietly stands and pulls her toward him, and her head falls on his shoulder. He moves his head away and kisses her pale lips.
How do people fall in love? Maybe she was never attracted to Marik because they were too alike: he was intelligentny, he took piano lessons, and his mother was a teacher. He read the same books. Andrei, on the other hand, was always from a different group of blood, as her mother calls him. Is it his otherness that feels so thrilling, his green eyes that regard her with admiration, his hair the color of tar, innocent of barber conventions, his arms strong enough to lift heavy sacks of sugar or whatever else the freight train brings every afternoon to the railroad station where, after finishing school, Andrei unloads train cars for a ruble a day? Or is it her mother’s disdainful sighs at the mention of Andrei’s name that fuel the attraction?
She is only sixteen, almost two years after Marik’s death, when she can no longer resist Andrei. Does she trust him more than she trusts her mother? She is under the spell of literary trysts in moonlit orchards, and she needs a pledge that will demonstrate her love, a gift that will unite the two of them forever. What is the biggest, most sacred secret she can lay down at his feet?
She finds Andrei on the riverbank, standing on the little dirt beach, skipping stones into the brown water. He is as good at skipping stones as he is at skating, making fires, and just about everything else. She looks at his silhouette etched against the darkening sky, a body that fits so well into the perfect frame of nature, a body that intrigues and frightens her. She wishes that they could still play War, but in her soul, she knows those days are over.
He turns around and peers at her, his eyes all black because he stands against the light.
“It’s my uncle Kolya’s war journal,” she says, handing him the notebook. “The uncle who was an artist, whose paintings hang all over our house. The one still missing in action.”
She doesn’t know how Andrei will feel when he reads the journal. It is not the heroic war they learned about in history class, with soldiers humming patriotic songs and attacking under a red banner with a hammer and sickle to overwhelm the Fascists with the sheer willpower of their belief in the approaching future. What she hands to him is the opposite of myths concocted by the state to make them feel better when they leaf through history textbooks and read about the millions who died at the front or starved to death in besieged cities. The war narrative they learn in school, she now knows, is crammed with as many fairy tales as the stories in Grandma’s prerevolutionary book about saints they no longer believe in.
“Tell me about it,” Andrei says.
She can’t do justice to the story by retelling it, but Andrei listens intently as the words tumble down her tongue, just as she knew he would, as only a soul mate would listen. She pauses and looks at him: he is serious and pensive, his eyes deep and dark, his hand curling around her wrist and making her breathing fast and shallow.
She tells him about Nadia, and as she speaks the words, she sees herself standing on the bridge across the Neva the way she imagines it to be, the color of zinc, wind tossing the water against the stone pillars, snatching her yellow wool hat off her head and blowing its cold breath through her hair. She sees the water churning under the bridge, her hat bobbing on the spines of the waves. She sees the pale building of the University of Leningrad’s philology department on the embankment on the right and a little farther, the yellow facade of the Leningrad Academy of Arts. The wind dives and soars and shrieks in her ears, so she raises the collar of her coat and winds the scarf tighter around her neck. The iron bridge railing is cold, so she leans on her forearms and stuffs her hands inside the coat sleeves. Although Sasha has never been to Leningrad, she sees what Nadia saw on that October night, like frames of a movie rolling before her eyes, making the story alive, acting it out for Andrei, making it theirs.
She tells him about Uncle Kolya’s paintings hanging in their house, the paintings Andrei has never seen because he is not allowed inside. A portrait of Sasha’s young mother, her lips curled in an ironic smile, the way she used to be before the war wiped all the joy off her face and made her serious and orderly. A portrait of her grandparents in their dining room: Grandma in an armchair, her face turned slightly toward Grandpa, who stands with his hand clasping her shoulder. His blue-eyed stare is straight and resolute, as though if he weren’t holding her down, the armchair would float up into the air and out the window—over the lilac bushes, over the birches of the park and the firs of the woods that stretch as far as her eyes can see—sailing with Grandma into the gray-blue palette of the Ivanovo sky.