As she hears the steps on the other side, Sasha takes a breath, trying to silence the pounding in her chest. Andrei opens the door and draws her inside, his arms carefully making their way around her shoulders, his breath a hot puff against her cheek. If anyone were watching them, they wouldn’t detect even a glimmer of impropriety in this embrace, the warm greeting of two old friends. He kisses her on the cheek, holds her at arm’s length, and peers at her, his hands still on her shoulders. They stand like this for at least a minute, studying each other for changes time may have carved into their faces, for signs that Ivanovo—with its field leading into the forest where their grass bed used to be, and its lilac bushes behind the fence where he stood waiting for her, and its unpaved roads covered with silky dust—is still there, gouged into their hearts.
His eyes have darkened since Sasha last saw him. They seem brown now instead of green; they swallow and trap the light instead of reflecting it; they are wary, guarded eyes. There are parentheses of wrinkles around his mouth, and the hair around his temples has turned gray, as though he has lived through a battle. The air between them is still cold, and neither of them wants to be the first to yield any emotional ground, to expose even a centimeter of vulnerability.
“It’s genetic,” Andrei says, catching her eye. “My father turned gray when he was only thirty-three, my mother told me.” All Sasha remembers of his father’s hair was wisps of white bristling from under a cap he never removed when he was outside.
The mention of his mother thaws the air, and he leads her toward the two armchairs that sit around a coffee table by a safe, an intimidating-looking cabinet of steel. This is a perfect place for top official secrets, Sasha thinks, imagining the inside of the safe stuffed with dissident files, plans for nuclear attacks on the West, and lists of books and plays that are to be banned. This is, she imagines, where Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and the works of Solzhenitsyn are stacked in neat, forbidden piles, next to the names of film and theater directors whose productions have been pulled from screens and stages because of their insufficient patriotism or the lack of optimism in the lead characters’ objectives.
“Do you want some cognac?” Andrei asks before he sits down. It is around four in the afternoon, and she rarely turns down cognac, especially official Party cognac that they never see in stores.
Out of the top drawer of his desk, he produces a small key, turns it in the lock, and the safe door opens noiselessly. Inside, where Sasha imagined dissident files and plans to obliterate the West, presides a round bottle of cognac surrounded by a coterie of small glasses. He fills two of them and raises his glass in a toast, the same honey-colored alcohol they drank in her apartment what seems like a century ago, when she felt happy and light-headed, when she thought their life together was finally about to begin.
“To another reunion,” he says—another reunion is what their life seems to have come to—and he empties his glass in one gulp with the effortlessness of a regular drinker. Sasha sips the contents of her glass, as though she could fool anyone into thinking that she wasn’t one. He pours again, and they drink, and from his quick pace, she knows he is waiting for her to explain why she is here, in this vast office, helping reduce the liquid contents of his Smolny safe.
“Three weeks ago, Grandma died.”
She sees him scrunch his face and shut his eyes for a moment, as if her words have struck him on the head. His eyes are even darker when he opens them, as black as Grandpa’s well.
“I didn’t know,” he says, “otherwise I would’ve helped with the funeral.” This seems to be his main function in her life, arranging funerals for her family. “Are you all right?” he asks, although he knows that if she were all right, she wouldn’t be sitting in an armchair across from him in the middle of the afternoon with a glass of cognac in her hand.
“Do you remember Kolya’s journal?”
He nods. Of course, she knows he remembers.
“I found a letter from Kolya. From America. Dated 1956.”
Andrei puts down his glass and straightens in his chair.
“He wasn’t killed in the war, like we all thought. He made it to Berlin and then, instead of coming back home, he went in the other direction. He lives in New York now. Or at least he lived in New York twelve years ago.”
Her sentences come out short and hesitant, almost reluctant, as if her mouth refuses to wrap around the strange words and validate them with sound.
For a few moments, Andrei is silent, processing the news, his face expressionless, a functionary’s face. She doesn’t know what is brewing behind this Party mask and its practiced lack of emotion. Is he going to tell her that having a relative abroad has now placed her into the category of traitors? That she is now an enemy of the people, just like all those arrested and sent to the camps?