Winter

For Alexei Navalny and Paul Klebnikov

The last days of September are slow, lingering, and gold. Evenings blue and still. The smells of damp soil, thunderstorms, maple leaves burning sweet and smoky. To drift through it lightly, gradually, with straining tips of tree branches skimming bare shoulders. To gather armfuls of twigs and leaves and stir hot cider with cinnamon sticks. To let summer age gently, gently.

But she mistrusted endings. Clinging to August, she wore full, white dresses and straw hats, clinking ice cubes in tall glasses of lemonade. She went swimming, shivering in the brisk water. And she insisted on holding her graduate literature seminars outdoors, beneath the red and orange oak trees.

The students complained. “It’s too cold to sit on the ground.”

She pushed back her sunglasses. “Then stand.”

They muttered and buttoned jackets and called it stupid, but they stayed. Anna Orfanova’s classes filled instantly, a dozen students on the waiting list. A merciless professor, she shrugged at lost assignments and dead grandmothers. She could fail the best students without compunction, and she ignored the others. But they stayed.

Weary of schedules, attendance policies, and analysis, students enrolled in her classes so they could learn to love reading again. And she wove spells, resurrecting their childhood passion for books. It was because she did not simply read. She inhabited literature, and it lived through her.

Pacing, gesturing, her dark eyes exultant, she summoned landscapes and people to overflowing life. Beneath fluorescent lights, amid rows of identical desks, she roused the plush and decadent interiors of French salons, the seraglios of Turkish harems, the smoky squalor of Russian peasant huts. Her rich, dark voice melted like copper when she read the monologue of Portia at Belmont, rose convulsively when she conjured Ahab striding the deck of his doomed ship, and ached with loneliness when she described Raskolnikov’s last dream. Shelley’s monsters and Homer’s heroes became conscious of themselves through her, felt her eager blood pulsing through their fingers.

As she beckoned through centuries of novels, poems, and plays, her students felt language as a physical force. They could taste Byron’s bitterness and rejoice in Ginsberg’s ecstatic howls. When she spoke in class, she was transformed, lightened, spiritualized. Leaving her lectures, it seemed impossible that this woman in her fifties, with long scars across her impassive face, had been suffused with a supernatural beauty. Students failed her exams and hated her, but they never forgot her. Years after graduating, they continued to send gifts, notes, holiday cards with fat, happy babies.

To her, they were a continuous stream of faces, questions, raised hands. She forgot them quickly, startled if they came to her office years later, asking for letters of recommendation. They were all the same. Well, all right, not all. This semester, there was the one with the peculiar name. Nauris. Just a boy, his name from the sea. He was the terribly clever type, interrupting lectures with well-timed jokes. Everyone laughed, but it was too early to tell if he was stupid. It was an advanced Henry James seminar and most of the graduate students were aspiring English teachers, serious and focused. Nauris sat in the front row, his long legs crossed in the aisle, and did not take notes.

Today, Anna stood beneath the oak trees in the receding September light. She held a creased, beloved copy of The Ambassadors. The class was almost over. The distant windows of a church blazed a burnished yellow while she repeated from memory, “‘He felt it in fact, he had it beside him; the old arcade indeed, as his inner sense listened, gave out the faint sound, as from far-off, of the wild waving of wings.’”

At her feet, students sat folded into groups, scribbling in notebooks. Propped on his elbows, in ripped jeans and a rumpled navy sweater, Nauris lay on his back. His bright hair, pushed messily behind his ears, caught the fading sunlight.

She scanned the students. “Chapter five. Strether is losing himself. Why?”

A reedy young woman tried first. “Because everything he likes as an American is totally unimportant in Paris?”

“Sure. Why’s that a problem?”

“Because nobody agrees with his opinions?”

Anna tapped her fingers on the cover of the book. “Does he?”

The young woman didn’t understand. “Does he what?”

“Does he agree with his own opinions?”

“I guess so?”

Anna was not kind, but she was patient. “Let’s think a little deeper. Does Strether find himself in conflict with Parisian values?”

Shaking his hair from his forehead, Nauris sat up. “He doesn’t.”

“No?”

“It isn’t Parisian values he’s got a problem with. It’s his own.”

“Say more.”

He spoke boldly, easily. “Strether’s job is to save Chad from the French woman’s bad influence and bring him back home. He’s got real strict ideas about right and wrong. Like, he thinks it’s wrong to live with a woman without being married, and to not have a career, and to just lounge around Europe all day long. But then he sees that instead of ruining Chad, the woman is improving him. She’s sort of turning him into an actual human being.”

Well. The boy had caught the threads of literary nuance and wove them round his fingers.

Anna spoke to him only. “American values were puritanical. Self-denial, clear ethical boundaries, pursuit of wealth. In Paris, Strether recognizes sensual pleasure in architecture, music, flowers. He discerns beauty in conversation and social intercourse. He has, perhaps for the first time, an aesthetic experience. But these things take time. They need leisure. How can he drag Chad back to a cramped office on Main Street now?”

Nauris nodded. “Chad wouldn’t go!”

The sun had set. Anna was cold. The students rose, gathering papers. As she walked through the dusk, her nostrils twitched to the lush notes of evening.

And then, the boy was beside her. A bag bulged over his shoulder, and a knitted gray scarf was wound impatiently beneath his chin. It looked homemade, and Anna imagined the woman who had knit it for him. A grandmother with bad eyesight. A sister. Or a pretty girl, young like him, who laughed and rose on her toes to throw it around his neck. Had she ever had men to knit things for? But, after all, she didn’t have that kind of time.  

His voice was fair and musical. “Great lecture.”

Anna, who had seen students following other professors to their offices and asking questions, had never encouraged it herself. “You made some good observations.”

“Because I’ve got to live like that.”

“Like what?”

“With books and homesickness.”

She decided to take him more seriously. “And how will you do that?”

“By going everywhere. Seeing everything. Talking to everyone and falling in love. And always being disarmed, completely disarmed. You know, like, leaving the doors and windows wide open so the wind can get through. But you can tell me all about that. You live like that.”

She stopped. “What do you mean?”

“You teach because you know how, right? Anyway, I’ve got friends waiting and I’m ‘bout to miss the bus. I’ll catch you in class next week.”

He jogged away, the gray scarf streaming, the gold halo of hair darkening into the night. He had friends waiting. Later, flicking off the light in her office, she imagined leaving the door wide open so the wind can get through. 

~

On her way home, she sometimes stopped at Pascal’s Charcuterie to order a bottle of Italian merlot and a wedge of Devon Garland cheese. In the cramped shop, she lingered over berry cakes arranged on white paper doilies beneath ropes of cured sausages. The Russian butcher, a broad man raised on Soviet salami, clasped her narrow hand in his huge, red fist, bellowing, “Anya! How are things?”

He was the only person with whom she spoke Russian anymore. “Dear Anton!”

Beaming, he carefully weighed four ounces of cheese. “Well, well? What are you teaching the hooligans this semester?”

“Henry James.”

“English?”

“American.”

He didn’t like it. “Have them read Gogol and Tolstoy. They should know about long Russian winters.”

Anna watched the glinting, stainless steel scales. “What for?”

“What for?” he boomed. “For truth!”

“Oh, Anton, don’t be so fanatical.”

“Fanatical? There is some of that. The Russian spirit is a universal fact. It’s in you. Teach about your own country, your own people.”

She took the cheese wrapped in white paper. “Maybe next time.”

He shook his bear’s head regretfully. “Next time is for cowards.”

At the register, as Anna glanced up from her wallet, she caught a woman’s gaze quickly flit away from the scars on her face. She had forgotten.

~

But had once been beautiful. From the Cossacks, she had black brows like the upward thrust of wings. From the Mongols, she had wide cheekbones and a dark, sensitive mouth. From her ballerina mother, she had lithe, graceful gestures. From her artist father, she had a quiet intensity. In the tiny city of Loretsk, among yellow and white buildings, she was fussed over and spoiled. She was Anna because her great grandmother, the dark-eyed coquette in the painting by the front door, had been Anna.

There had once been piano teachers and a small, yapping dog and sledding on gray afternoons. A red rug in the narrow hall. The first winter frost, cold and breathless and silver. Her father’s canvases, still drying, leaning against the wooden legs of the kitchen table. He painted deep blue lakes and tree branches tumbling down to the water. One December night when she was three years old, he taught her to read. His narrow fingers, dry paint beneath his nails, patiently traced the lines of a children’s fairy tale. She remembered it. The New Year tree, tinsel glowing blue from the television screen, was on the left. “If you have good books,” he had told her, “You will never be alone.” After he died, she learned it wasn’t true.

She studied literature at the Pedagogical Institute. Then, there had been dances, satin dresses, nervous young men who brought chrysanthemums, and her mother’s weary eyes when she came home too late. There were red posters of Lenin and rows of empty shelves at the bakery and sneaking vodka in tin flasks.

And then, there was Nick.

When she was twenty-four in the summer of 1994, she sat with her mother in the bright kitchen, stirring sugar cubes into a cup of tea, and explained that from now on, there would always be Nick.

She met him on a dusty, creaking bus in a green June. Noticing Henry James’s The Golden Bowl open on her lap, he asked if she spoke English. He had one of those improbable American smiles, with endless rows of white teeth.

Her English wasn’t good. “Yes.”

“Then maybe you can help me out. See, I’ve got a friend who’s trailing me in a little Lada. I thought I’d invite him to dinner.”

“I am sorry. I do not think—I do not think I understand well.”

He was still smiling. “You understand just fine.”

Now that there was no more Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, few tourists visited Loretsk. The city’s faltering economy needed them, but they didn’t come. Americans, in colorful shorts and visors, with their casual feet up, pointing their fingers at everything, were scarce.

She hadn’t met anyone like him. When he sat beside her, she felt the sweep of his excellent health. Laughing together in the back row of the bus, she taught him phrases to repeat to the FSB agent who had been following him for two weeks. She was curious about his accent, his eagerness, his body. The sleeves of his white windbreaker were pushed up, and she gazed with bewilderment at the black, wiry hairs on his tanned arms and the pale curls falling across his forehead. Showing splendid white teeth, he laughed like someone who has never been unhappy.

When the bus driver announced her stop, she rose hesitantly.

He leaned forward. “I’ll walk you home.”

Anna realized she was holding her breath. “Why?”

“Because I want to.”

“Why?”

“Let’s go.”

He walked with bold, conceited carelessness. But that was how he did everything.

He grew up in Manhattan, in the circle of exiled intelligentsia. Having fled Russia in 1917, the noble descendants of czars guarded the relics of their lost civilization. They spoke the language of classical Russian literature, knelt beside the wan faces of icons in the Orthodox Church, and repeated stories about bogatyrs galloping along the Don river. He was the great-grandson of an Imperial Army general. Beneath the nebulous gaze of Russian priests, he was submerged in holy water when he was christened Nikolai Orfanov. But he preferred Nick.

His parents brought him up on Rachmaninoff and Pushkin. They taught him to drink grape-distilled vodka, gamble, perch easily atop an Orlov Trotter horse, and give money with reckless generosity. With tales of saints and wars, they inculcated in him a superstitious love of the Russian land. But no matter how many Faberge eggs or Chekhov monologues he was trained to admire, his American-born exuberance could not grasp their historical melancholy. The dark sorrow of the Russian spirit could find no solace in his straight and simple nature. He contained no contradictions.

After finishing his dissertation on the 1825 Decembrist uprising, he became a reporter at Eastern-European Review, a foreign policy journal. Assignments for the magazine flung him from St. Petersburg to Khabarovsk, reporting on the post-Soviet transition to a market economy. The first trip did it. He had expected to encounter his parents’ memories: old men selling crates of kiwis and the scent of lilacs near the Red Square. He got squalor, hyperinflation, vacant shops, and a disintegrating police force that wouldn’t answer any questions. Nobody could afford kiwis. He wanted to understand it.

Always expecting good luck, he made his first contact in a Manhattan hotel bar. The man, sickly despite his expensive gray suit, was once the owner of the hotel. “Then the thugs took over,” he said dismally, and began buttoning his coat to leave. Patting, soothing, Nick bought him a drink. Then he bought four more. Willingly, the man unwound an exaggerated tale of the mafia’s involvement with the remodeling and repurchasing of his property. With a quavering finger, he pointed to three dusky, slim Italians laughing beside the bar counter.

That’s when Nick learned that losers always want to talk. Ex-wives, ousted CEOs, former colleagues, bosses, and friends repeated rumors and revealed names with gleeful resentment. “Now the joke’s on them,” the elderly man hiccuped when he heard that Nick was a reporter. His smile trusting and naïve, that night Nick shared an aperitif with the three members of the Cosa Nostra.

With messianic determination, his articles exposed the clandestine deals and bribes of government officials, businesses, and gangs. Relying on his tenuous connection with the Sicilian mafia, Nick asked to be introduced to the members of Russian gangs who immigrated to America. Then he found their Moscow haunts. His instincts were sharp. Presumptuous and cheerful, he roved in slums, knocked on doors, scrutinized tax records, and raised shot glasses with drug bosses. He shared a platter of black caviar with a man who wound a straw wrapper between fingers tattooed with Cyrillic letters. He wrote about a powerful car dealer’s complicity in murder, about heroin smuggled from a poppy field near Chernobyl, and about a money laundering operation through a Chicago bank.

In airless bars, he looked young and harmless. Criminals trusted him, and he never betrayed them. When they snapped, “Don’t print this,” Nick raised his hands playfully and cried, “You don’t have to look so serious!” He didn’t print it. Quietly, taking satisfaction in perverse details, mob bosses described their precarious ascendancy, nodding that it was on the record. Nick knew they were anxious to control their public image. Afterward, they passed his articles among one another with swaggering content.

But he knew better than to trust their tameness. And when the death threats started coming, he laughed. In the corridor of the newsroom, his editor suggested police escorts. “Come on, Nick, this is getting out of hand. You’ve got to take it seriously.”

But he didn’t take anything seriously. Grinning, he zipped a white windbreaker while striding briskly to the elevator. He didn’t have time for police. He was flying to Loretsk in a few hours to track the members of a local crime family.

The editor called after him, “They won’t like it, Nick!”

Turning and walking backward, he said, “Let them eat defamation lawsuits!”

He had been in Loretsk for two weeks and was used to the beige Lada behind him. He rented a gleaming BMW to torment his surveillance. Swerving in traffic, he jerked the steering wheel and veered sharply around corners, chuckling as the dented Lada chugged on, losing him. Gallantly, he offered cigarettes to the rigid, expressionless men in civilian clothes who loitered beside his hotel. It was a game. His sunlit spirit was bewildered by the grave and the earnest. He believed that no significant unpleasantness could ever reach him. And if it did, he’d surely get by with luck or wits or money. Other people suffered, sure. But that was different. Other people weren’t him. The great embroidered shield of his childhood was security enough against cynicism or wisdom.

He wanted to follow Anna because he’d never seen anyone so beautiful reading something so boring. After exiting the bus, they walked past rushing trolleybuses and women in tan trench coats. Anna spoke with precision, repeating phrases from English grammar books. “What line of work do you do?”

He walked with his shoulders pulled back, as though weighted by enormous, invisible wings. “I’m a reporter.”

“Oh!” She wasn’t sure if reporters wore headphones and listened to transistor radios or sold medical supplies. “And is that—is that nice?”

“Very nice. I meet strange people.”

Anna decided it must be the transistor radios. “It is interesting.”

Nick didn’t correct her. Her error made him feel more bold and handsome. “What were you reading on the bus?”

“The Golden Bowl. Henry James. Do you read him?”

And Nick, who thought lying was cowardly and who had never felt deficient in any way, found himself fibbing quickly, “Of course. All the time.”

Near the wooden door of her yellow apartment building, she began to be afraid of losing him. “Why is FSB following you?”

But he was already walking away, pronouncing in a Russian without accent, “Because I’m going to be the hero of our time.”

“Wait! You speak Russian?”

He turned back once, and his white smile was dazzling.

Anna spent that night crouched on the edge of the bed, shivering in a white nightgown. She told herself that he must have come from a book. But, after all, who is not an amalgamation of collected selves? Of overheard conversations and shaken hands and characters in old novels? Of bodies forgotten and half remembered in a new mood, with different lighting, as memory erases a birthmark, darkens the hair, prolongs the curve of a fingernail? Of solitary walks along a great coolness of night mixed up with the names of old boyfriends and neighbors’ cats? He, too, was a creature conjured. He was made up of her father’s loose gait, summers on the Black Sea, and a nature which her imagination polished with the coarse muscle of Hemingway’s heroes. She had sought a man who was overflowing—oh, not with her. With himself. She did not want to pour herself into the waiting vessel of someone else’s solitude. She wanted to come up against a hard and expansive fullness of being. She wanted a fervent, roaming life to overwhelm her own.

But in return, she could offer only incompleteness. She knew passion when it sang with the univocity of European literature. She recognized an emotion only where Balzac or Melville told her to look for it. A storming landscape lent itself to her experience only if she read about it first. She objectified the world, transforming it into an idol of aesthetic contemplation. But he! With blood and skin and maybe even hunger, he transcended the stories she was raised on.

She didn’t know how to talk about him. Her closest friend, Marina, had long auburn braids and a lot of advice. “Americans are rich, you know, but they aren’t serious.” They walked together to the 24^th Academy, where Anna taught English literature and Marina seduced the dean.

“But he isn’t really American.”

“What is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ask him. If he comes back.”

“He will.”

She tried to explain it to her downstairs neighbor. Anna met Slava six years before. Forty days after her father’s death, she and her mother transferred one sofa and two mattresses to the cheapest neighborhood of the city. In the dim apartment with blue wallpaper, they unloaded crates of books and her father’s unsold paintings. Anna was seventeen and silent, with a black braid falling past her hips. Slava, who was a year older and lived two flights down, brought a plate of potato cakes, introduced himself, and asked if he could help unpack. The next day, he walked with her to the Pedagogical Institute. He waited for her after class. Soon, she found letters and sonnets left at her door: My love for you will flow like a stream down a hill. During a Homeric poetry session, when the professor wasn’t looking, Anna passed the sonnets to Marina. Marina gurgled, hissing, “A stream down a hill! Is he peeing?” Slava, who sat two rows ahead, twisted in his seat and looked at Anna. Young, chaste, and cruel, she sputtered with laughter. Slava did not turn around again.

But he didn’t give up. He brought damp branches of lilacs. He brought bars of chocolate. Once, he even took her on a train ride to the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. But Anna liked Dmitry, an ashen-haired giant who missed classes to wrestle in the gymnasium and prowled the hallways with a wolf pack of hooting, jostling boys. She couldn’t talk to him about books, it was true he was too stupid, but she sensed unrestrained life in him, and it easily substituted for dialogue. Slava was gentle and, worst of all, he needed her. Anna did not want to be needed. Even at seventeen, she expected to complete someone else’s picture of the world. An impetuous musketeer was better than all the brooding Hamlets lumped together and thrown from the Tower of London, for all they cared. And if she must consider real people, well, she imagined marriage to Marcus Aurelius or Hannibal Barca would have been very nice. Someone whose triumphs she could tally into her own empire, from whom she could take dictation and advice.

Even better than Dmitry or dances, Anna had liked to walk slowly through the pastel-colored streets of the city, spit sunflower seed shells, and re-read a crumbling paperback novel, turning the pages at intersections. Cars honked and pedestrians shoved her aside. She didn’t look up. Her mother pleaded with her to read at home. But every day after school, she filled her pockets with sunflower seeds and rambled into the streets, balancing her book like a shield. Smiling grocers and bakers were used to her route. They offered bits of bread and apples when she passed.

In winter, when the ice made walking difficult, Anna constructed a sunny burrow at the foot of her bed. Dragging her father’s unframed canvases across the apartment, she arranged three paintings into an incomplete square. Sitting with her back against the wall, she had a blue lake on her right, a blue lake on her left, and a viridian forest in front. Hidden within her private summer, she read. Slava called it a city. The word for city, he said, came from the Proto-Indo-European gherdh—walled enclosure. Home is only what you can protect. Beyond that, there are foreign barbarians and homelessness.

Slava’s rejected passion did not turn bitter but wilted into a comfortable friendship. He, too, became a teacher. In the same school, they taught tenth graders. Together, they underlined passages in novels. They dangled their feet from his fifth-floor window, arguing about Tennyson and tossing cigarette ashes into the street. In loud bistros, they shared sausages and bragged about bright students. They liked European and American writers. With youthful arrogance, they mocked Russian novels for being sad, dark, and old. It seemed to them that American literature, still testing the range of its trumpets, had a future. Their ignorance basked in this borrowed light.

During the summer session, Slava shared her teaching schedule. Every morning, he knocked on her door. Her mother poured him coffee while Anna finished combing her hair. The Tuesday after meeting Nick, Slava stood in her hallway as usual. Pins in her mouth, Anna kicked at her wardrobe door and snapped, “You’re early.”

Slava, who was exactly on time, looked at her calmly. “You’re in a bad mood.”

“I’m not!”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing, nothing! Good God, do you absolutely have to stand there and stare like that? Go in the kitchen, mama made marmalade.”

When they stepped into the street, Anna took his arm and whimpered, “Slavik, forgive me. When they say love is great, they’re all liars. Because it’s terrible!”

He tried not to be hurt. “Who is he?”

“I don’t know his name.”

Slava listened to the story about the laughing American on the bus. He understood and was afraid for her. “Did he say he’ll come back?”

“Of course he’ll come back.”

“But did he say so?”

Anna looked at him imploringly. He left it alone.

But she never doubted that Nick would return. She trusted in him completely.

Fifteen days after their first meeting, he came. Later, to her superstitious faith, the number became an omen. After all, she was born on the fifteenth. And they met on the fifteenth of July. And Nick and Anna Orfanov had fifteen letters in it, once you took the and out. Surely, it meant something. Maybe they would be married in fifteen months. Or for fifteen years. She giggled girlishly, imagining it to be fifteen children.

She and Marina were running to her apartment to make a sparse lunch before afternoon classes began. Nick was standing where she saw him last, by the iron gate. His bright hair was longer.

She said only, “Oh.”

Marina twittered and darted into the building.

His smile was expansive and generous, including everything. It lit the gate, the courtyard, the pale flower struggling through the concrete at her feet.

Here, amidst her very own life, Anna was solemn. “What took you so long?”

And Nick understood that it was to be forever. “I was in New York. Got back just morning.”

She accepted this explanation with childlike simplicity and invited him inside. And then, summer rushed up and everything was easy. Through July and August, they were together. In her mother’s cramped, cluttered apartment, Nick looked preposterously out of place. The wallpaper, with tiny blue flowers, was a stifling background for his long legs and spacious smile. Each time he gestured or turned, something fell. He tripped and scrambled and apologized, but there was nowhere else for them to go. His hotel was watched, and Nick was reluctant to take her where they would be followed.

He lied that he had no pocket money, so they stayed home. The elevator had been broken for a decade and they soared up the narrow, unlit stairway with quick, cheerful steps, the staccato of Anna’s plastic high heels interrupting the sure fall of Nick’s Italian driving loafers. Inside, they commandeered the kitchen, stirring tea and chopping potatoes, not minding the smell of fried onions for the fourth night in a row. Anna’s mother retreated silently, her mouth a straight, thin line.

“Why don’t you like him?” Anna asked on the rare evenings he was absent.

Besides the bedroom, the kitchen was the only room. So, they cleared plates after dinner and boiled water for tea, read, sewed, and talked at the table until they went to bed.

Her mother sighed. “Not like him? How can I not like him? He is a handsome and poor foreigner.”

“Papa was poor.”

“Do you suppose I want that for you?”

“Perhaps he won’t always be so poor.”

“Then he won’t stay. He will go home and marry an American girl.”

“Goodness, no, mama! We’ll be married later. We talked about it.”

“You talked about it. Oh, Anya, how stupid you are.”

The weary mother pitied Anna’s faithfulness, but Anna only smiled and stirred more sugar into her tea.

Some nights, they clattered down the flight of stairs to Slava’s apartment. Marina was there, twisting prettily in clinging, transparent blouses. Teachers from the academy came to flirt with her, scramble eggs, and pour shots of vodka. They were young and they had nothing. Although the cuffs of their sweaters were frayed, and Chechen rebels were raising flags in southern Russia, and unemployment rates crept higher, they chimed their glasses and sang while Slava strummed a guitar.

They watched Nick with uncertainty. He was different. He didn’t always recognize slang, songs, or jokes. Sometimes, his Russian was rigid and formal.

Anna tried to explain him. “Nick is researching our economic crisis.”

A history teacher was curious. “Crisis? What crisis? I own two pairs of pants. That’s one hundred percent more pants than last year. Isn’t that progress?”

Nick was indulgent. “Sure, it’s progress.”

Slava laughed from across the room. “I think you’re underestimating the old vanguard.”

Nick turned to him. “You mean the Soviet regime?”

“I mean the people.”

“The people overthrew it.”

“Nobody overthrew anything. It collapsed from exhaustion.”

“Yeltsin made a speech from a tank to thousands of people.”

Rising from the windowsill, Slava lit a cigarette. “With American funding. So?”

Nick shrugged at the obvious. “The Soviet Union wasn’t destroyed by outsiders or violence. It was destroyed by its own people. And economic reforms have been enacted by the legislature. That’s legalized capitalism.”

“There was no destruction and no revolution. We simply couldn’t afford to keep building nuclear weapons just to please Reagan.”

Anna intervened. “Boys, let’s have another drink. These arguments are uninteresting.”

Slava was irritated. “Anya, don’t protect him. He’s not a little boy.”

Relaxed and confident, Nick smiled. His perfect teeth shone. “You’re right. I’m grown up enough to see that your paranoia represents the inertia that keeps this country from greatness.”

“Oh, ho! Greatness! You, just like Herr Marx, forget that humans have a very insistent way of refusing to be perfected.”

“Nobody is talking about perfection. We’re talking about basic freedoms and values which have been accepted for centuries. The Russian spirit has always—”

Slava interrupted. “Don’t talk about the Russian spirit. You don’t know anything about it. You’re American to the bone and Americans have no spirit. They don’t know what suffering is. That’s why they lecture so complacently, sticking their idiotic opinions on everything, from bread to politics to love. We have no need for your tyrannical mercy.”

Anna sprang forward. “Let’s go, Nick.”

Nick didn’t move. “You want to talk about foreign affairs? Sure thing. Why has Russia has slaughtered 24,000 civilians in Grozny?”

Anna turned away. The rest of the party waited in frightened silence.

Slava, who always spoke quietly, suddenly roared, “Chechnya is not a foreign affair! It’s been part of the Russian empire since 1859!”

“They have a right to independence.”

“Cuba! Chile! Nicaragua! Did they have a right to independence? Your Uncle Sam ground their democratic dreams beneath his heel, destroyed entire populations, and is revered as a saint for protecting democracy. When my country aims to preserve her territories, it’s because she’s an enemy of freedom, it seems. I reject this idiocy.”

“But Chechnya doesn’t want you there.”

“Do you think Latin America wants you?”

“Conquest is out of date.”

“How modern! The noble hero doesn’t like conquest! I suggest you lead a campaign to return Texas to the Mexicans. And while you’re doing that, return California. In fact, repatriate the whole goddamn United States. Every centimeter is stolen land.”

“The Chechen people—”

“There are no Chechen people. They’re animals.”

“I guess that’s why Russian conscripts indiscriminately kill and rape these animals. Burning entire villages. My colleague reported there. You can’t know the horror of it.”

“I don’t know the horror?”

“The war’s there. You’re here, discussing books with sixteen-year-olds. Too afraid to live your principles?”

Lurching herself against him, Anna hauled Nick’s resisting weight toward the door.

Slava spoke quietly, without looking up from the floor. “I was drafted after graduating. Got beaten in the barracks. I couldn’t chew because my teeth were loose. And that was easy. That was nothing. After a month, you don’t notice the pain. Sent to Chechnya in December. My mother threw herself on the tanks, trying to stop them. We got to the first village, looked around, found a field of crosses. They’d crucified dozens of our soldiers. Nailed up by their hands. Bullet holes in their chests. Every single one of them castrated. While I vomited, I watched what was left of my friend’s body get shredded like ground beef. Maybe it was just because we were very badly trained. I wanted to laugh when the American press broadcast that the Chechen victims had no organized resistance.”

Nick stammered. “I—I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“I was lucky enough to get myself shot. Just the leg. Sent home. My mother died of stroke two weeks earlier, so she didn’t get the good news.”

The next day, Anna met Slava in the teachers’ lounge. He was a stranger with soft eyes. “I’m sorry. But he’s not one of us. You don’t belong with him.”

Her voice was pale with distance. “There is no wisdom in your words, only bitterness.”

“You see, Anya, this bitterness comes from experience.”

“Experience that hasn’t been overcome is just self-indulgence.”

“That’s good. That’s very good. Did you get it from a book?”

She was thinking of her father. “No. From experience.”

His pride led him away.

Their friendship was over. Her red plastic cigarette lighter lay on his windowsill. Seven of his books were stacked beneath her bed. But she forgot about it by September, when Nick was given an assignment in Switzerland. “Something about Verlassen, a Swiss financial company,” Anna hastily explained to her mother. Before his departure, he suggested a trip to St. Petersburg, where he hoped the FSB had more important things to do. Besides, he wanted to be near her without the mother’s suspicious eyes.

Anna was surprised. “But how will you afford it?”

Effortlessly, Nick lied. “Advance on the story.”

“What if we go to Sochi, instead?”

“Sochi?”

“Yes, Nick, it’s very beautiful. I spent my childhood summers there.”

He kissed her smile. “Let’s go.”

Accepting, excited, Anna spent her savings on a new suitcase. She hadn’t had a vacation in years. She galloped through the apartment, yanking skirts from hangers and ferreting through cupboards for lotions, combs, sandals, and that old magazine with the face mask recipe. Was it better to pack two dresses and one pants suit, or one dress and two pants suits? Oh, forget the pants! But which dresses? The blue goes with everything, but the yellow has a bow. She sang and spun in circles, blouses and socks tumbling from her arms. Falling on the bed in a crescendo of gratitude and tears, she whimpered into the blankets, “Papa, if you could see him, just once!”

In Sochi, where the old forest loved the young sea, Nick rented a one-room cottage. An energetic elderly man had built it, and six others exactly like it, years ago. He also constructed a shed, painted it blue, and equipped it with a wood stove and a refrigerator. This was the communal Blue Kitchen where summer renters cooked and gossiped. They ate together at a long, wooden table beneath a creaking awning, reaching for shared bowls of cherries. Nick laughed at the “communist arrangement.” The elderly proprietor’s own white-brick house stood nearby, beside carefully weeded rows of potatoes, cucumbers, and beets. Raspberry groves blossomed beneath apple trees. White roses clung clustered into cottage windows. An enormous orange cat, his green eyes narrow with criminal thoughts, scavenged mice beside the outhouse. There were no telephone lines or television screens. They carried water in pails from a well. Nick had never known anything like it. As far as Anna could remember, this was summer.

The other renters introduced themselves. There were two families with children, a quiet elderly couple, three women dieting together, and a solitary engineer from Moscow. To Anna, these strangers became beloved because they were participants in her bursting happiness.

She rose early, when the tiny room brimmed with morning. Crossing the wooden floor on quick, bare feet, she leaned into the light. Children scuttled by with pails and towels, hurrying to the sea. The orange cat slept in the shade. Anna brought Nick apricots. He blinked through his tangled hair while she kissed him.

Without time or effort, they lived. They walked in the forest, stooping to pick wild blueberries. Pines, gold in the summer light, rose serenely above rustling birch trees. Anna braided white daisies into her hair and wove dandelion wreaths. Crowning herself queen of the forest, she leapt over jutting roots. Nick sprang after her, seizing her wriggling body against his own.

They swam in the sea, splashing and calling for mermaids. Dripping and shivering, Nick spread his striped I Love New York towels on the grainy sand. Then they dug tunnels to America and decorated sand towers, running to the water for pebbles or shells. Hair wet and salty, swinging damp sandals in their hands, they walked barefoot to the market where Anna squeezed peaches and argued about the price of potatoes.

Behind tall, slender stalks of gooseberries, Nick filled an aluminum tub with warmed well-water. Then he stood on guard, picking berries while Anna took a bath. Once, they got caught in a storm and ran to take shelter under an oak tree. Hilariously entangled together in Nick’s white windbreaker, they stood kissing and laughing without regard for the thunder above. After the rain, the pines were violet beneath a lemon sky.

In the evenings, they sat at the long table with their neighbors, playing cards, slapping mosquitoes, and drinking black tea from tin cups. A fire scattered sparks and the smell of potatoes roasting. The old man played an accordion while the two mothers sang. Even the engineer came out of his room.

Alone in their bed, Nick’s exuberance overwhelmed her dark pride. His hair smelled like the inside of seashells and grains of sand stuck to the skin of his thighs. At first, she didn’t know what she wanted. But he always found her, even when she longed to stay hidden. Coiling her black hair around his fist, he pulled her head back slowly, slowly, and she laughed aloud into the darkness.

One cool evening, they gathered twigs for the fire. Chewing on a reed of grass, his jeans rolled over bare feet, Nick looked very young. He asked suddenly, “What were you reading this morning?”

She flushed with pleased surprise. “Portrait of a Lady.”

“Another Henry James.”

“Have you read it?”

“In high school. Didn’t like it.”

“Why?”

“Because the main character, what’s her name? Isabel? Isabel married that disgusting man.”

“Gilbert Osmond.”

“Yeah. And the other guy—”

“Lord Warburton.”

“Yeah, him. He could’ve made her happy. She should’ve married him.”

“But Isabel loved Osmond.”

“I just don’t believe something like that would happen in real life.”

“It happens all the time. James knows that remarkable women are constantly sacrificed to dull men who can’t understand them.”

“But for what?”

“For no reason at all.”

“See? That’s unconvincing.”

“It convinced me.”

Nick was tying a bundle of dry branches. He said, “That’s because you live in books without doubting their internal logic. You’re a pretty fiction, just like Isabel.”

“I’m a fiction?”

His eyes, a limpid indigo, were very still. “Yes.”

Anna lowered her head. He heard her muffled sob.

Instantly, he was beside her. “Anya, kitten, don’t cry. It’s wonderful not to be real. You can’t be touched or moved or ruined. You won’t know the world everyone wallows in—yes, wallows—like your friend Marina. People are busy accepting or fighting things you don’t even know are there.”

“But aren’t those things important?”

“There’s a lot of important stuff that only petty people notice.”

She sniffled. “Nick?”

“What?”

“You’re the only thing I love that isn’t in a book.”

He held her while she cried.

Then they sat on a sagging tree trunk and, for the first time, he talked about his work. He told her everything. About the bragging criminals, the smirking government officials, the police officers with cash in their fist. About lies and drugs and murders. About an Italian man with two missing fingers who showed him a list of unfamiliar, frightening names. And about the story he was hunting through bars, clubs, board rooms, hotel lobbies, air-conditioned offices, the back seat of a new Mercedes, and his own flailing conscience.

He had promised someone something.

Look, in some cases, keeping your mouth shut isn’t an option. Interaero, Russia’s largest airline company, began privatizing profits and property last year. The company’s general director proudly announced his plans for purchasing new engines, renovating the fleet, and signing new lease agreements. Viktor Zykov, an obscure auto manufacturer, became interested in Interaero’s promising future. He sought a management position. After a conversation with the Minister of Transportation, he got it. A Swiss financial company was selected to serve as Interaero’s foreign treasury. All this had been in the papers for months. But, in early June, Nick discovered a very odd thing: the financial company was owned by Zykov.

Anna closed her eyes. “What does that mean?”

“It means Zykov is guilty of grand larceny.”

“What will you do?”

“Fly to Geneva next week. To visit Verlassen’s office.”

“And then—and then you’ll write about it in a newspaper?”

“And then I’ll write about it in a newspaper.”

The images and phrases he conjured did not belong in the hushed, darkening meadow. They could hear the clang of the metal gate, the gurgling laughter of women, the notes of the old man’s accordion. A gull chirruped above them.

Nick took her shoulders. “You can’t tell anyone about this. Do you understand? Not your mother, not Slava, not Marina. Nobody.”

“But why are you doing it?”

“I have to.”

She pressed the back of her hand against her forehead, crying, “Oh, why did you tell me?”

He looked at her with pity but without understanding.

The following evening, anxious about events in Moscow, Nick went searching for a newspaper. Anna sat on the steps of the white-brick house. She had finished the James novel. It was true: Isabel had married the cruel, cunning Gilbert Osmond. It hadn’t convinced Nick because he recognized only the well-lit paths of historical progress. He had faith in reason and examined everything by its torch. But Isabel’s doom had been irrational. She didn’t marry Osmond for anything. She just married him.

Anna looked from the book to the world. For the first time, with painful lucidity, she grasped the impossibility of knowing.

“Hey.” Nick sat beside her.

“What’s the news?”

“Zykov is in London.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means he knows something’s coming.”

She sighed. “It won’t change anything.”

He shook his head. “Our country is poised on the precipice of something great. It won’t happen if nobody leaps. My eyes are open. I believe in it.”

Leaning closer, Anna pushed a strand of his hair behind his ear. “What a boy you are.”

“You think it’s hopeless?”

“I think it’s arrogance.”

He moved away from her stubbornly. “Russia wants democracy.”

She smiled sadly. “No. It doesn’t. Russia is a paradox. It longs for contradictory things: anarchic wildness on one hand and a bloody chieftain on the other. Russia is a superstitious and irrational land that will reject everything except power.”

“Is that the Russian spirit that Slava thinks I lack? Mysticism and brutality?”

She looked at him carefully. “Do you believe in any kind of spirit?”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t think humans have souls?”

“No.”

“But that’s as bad as not believing in God. Where would we be without a god, any god?”

“Right here.”

“Or in a Dostoyevsky novel. You don’t mean it.”

In that moment, he glimpsed something that rent him with sudden fear. “Anna, what does it mean to be Russian?”

But she had already given up, rising, nodding at the old man with the accordion. “Who knows? Look, they’re setting up dominoes.”

Her easy surrender might have answered his question. But he was thinking of himself.

Nick woke her before sunrise. In the pale light, his movement was luxurious and slow. She felt his cool breath. He whispered, “I think you’re the only being on earth who has a soul.”

Anna twisted and arched toward him. “And you.”

“Anna.”

Her eyes widened. “What?”

“Marry me. Today. We’ll have the wedding when I get back from Geneva.”

“Where will we—"

“Say yes.”

“Nick, my mother, she—”

“Say yes.”

She gasped. “Yes.”

They drove to the city center in the morning. The young engineer from Moscow came as a witness. A red-headed woman in a glass booth snatched Nick’s hundred-dollar bill and gave them a stack of papers to sign. They signed. The engineer signed. Grumpily, she passed them a certificate. They were married. 

Eight days later, he was dead.

~

Anna felt October’s fever, felt its sweating dampness in her bones. She thought of September, which she had worked so hard to save. But October came. Every time.

She had tried Florida, where there were no seasons. But she needed winter. She relied on its arsenal of snow and slow forgetting. How she hated autumn, that pitiless decline when the bride couldn’t get used to having become a widow.

In October, all classes must be held indoors. Students slung jackets and scarves over the backs of chairs. She assigned mid-term essays and waited for the unreflective and the mundane. She didn’t want to know what they were thinking.

But Nauris came to her office with good questions. Usually, she waited for him to answer them himself. Crossing her arms, she listened to him with careful pleasure. He understood intuitively what the older, more experienced students labored to see. And he, too, learned to love Henry James for revealing the incoherence of human behavior. There they all were, James’s generous and foolish characters, bewildered by the inability to make a moral choice. No, not because they were afraid. It was because fully informed judgment isn’t possible.

At first, she wanted Nauris to get out. She was used to her reflection. Her scars bounded the range of her possibilities and prevented her from straying far. So, their conversations were formal and brief. But he returned every morning, his impatient knock interrupting her work. Naively, he always expected to be welcome. He fell into the chair across from her desk like an uncalled cat leaping into someone’s lap.

Pointing to a highlighted paragraph in his book, he’d say, “Check this out. Chad lives better than Strether, right? But he’s also ruder, dumber, and more selfish.”

Anna twisted her pen, irritated but curious. “Is there an opposition between them?”

“They aren’t opposite. It’s like Chad highlights Strether’s virtues, even when Chad is supposed to be the better dude.”

“How is that accomplished in the text?”

He thought. “Irony.”

He was good. Anna smiled. Without surprise, Nauris saw that her smile was beautiful.

Once, he careened into the classroom before the others. “Guess what?”

She was writing on the chalkboard. “What?”

“There’s a movie out. About an actress. It’s based on James’s The Tragic Muse.”

“If they don’t ruin it, it might be very interesting.”

“Yeah. It will be. Want to go?”

She paused. “Where?”

He laughed impatiently. The sound was like a river. “To the movie.”

She put the chalk down. Could she? Oh, of course not. “Don’t be silly.”

“Why’s it silly?”

“Because it is. Have you read the assigned chapters?”

“What’s wrong with seeing a movie? We both like Henry James. It’ll be fun.”

“Drop the subject.”

Nauris pouted. “Fine.”

He forgot his bad mood as soon as the lecture began. After class, she surprised them both. In line at the ticket office, she was cold and happy. Big, transparent snowflakes lived for an uncertain instant on the sleeves of her black coat. Nauris wore his backpack and rubbed his red nose. Festive lanterns glittered in the moist night. People stamped their feet, smiling and pointing at bright signs. Stepping back liberally, Anna let Nauris buy her ticket. He dug in his pockets for folded, rumpled bills and smoothed them proudly on the shining counter. He held the door for her. When she ducked under his arm into the warm, dark theater, something behind her ribs stirred and stretched and rose to its full height. She let it.

The next afternoon, Anna worked late in her office. The October light filtering from the window was dirty. Bent over papers, she thought she ought to switch on a lamp when someone knocked. She hoped it was Nauris. “Come in.”

It was the chairman of the literature department. Not ready to make up his mind whether he had reached adulthood, he wore pressed slacks and smudged skating sneakers. He also had an earring. She admired the slacks but mistrusted the earring. He waved a white, ringed hand. “Good afternoon.”

She put her chin on her fist. “Hi.”

He settled on the arm of a chair, glancing around the dim office. Everywhere, books were stacked into high, messy towers. There were fluttering papers and folders bulging from open cabinets. A calendar from four years ago drooped above her desk. “How’s the semester?”

“Fine.”

“Good. Look at this.” He handed her a folded sheet.

Without curiosity, she glanced at the hand-written names of twenty-two students. They had signed up for the study abroad program. A week in St. Petersburg, visiting museums and reading Dostoevsky.

She had expected it. “So?”

“I would like you to consider going.”

“I’ve considered. I’m not going.”

The chairman crossed his arms. “You have not considered. And you refuse every year we offer the program. Why?”

She tossed the paper on her desk. “I don’t want to do it.”

“But you’re the only Russian speaker in the department. We have all discussed it. It simply makes sense for you to lead the trip.”

So, she said the same thing she always said. “Leave the list here. I’ll think about it.”

Willing to bargain, he rose hastily. “That’s all I’m asking. Just consider it.”

He left. Turning from her keyboard, she saw only the muddy sky beyond her windows. October was the cruel month, not April. Everything ended. Not wanting it, Anna picked up the sheet the chairman had left. And there was Nauris, fifteenth from the top, his name scribbled in hasty pencil. He wanted to go to Russia. Of course he did. But—

~

She hadn’t been back in thirty years. When Nick left for Switzerland, she had remained in Sochi. He’ll be back very soon, he said. Then they’ll fly up to Loretsk and have a real wedding.

Alone in the yellow cottage, she had luxuriated in missing him. She lay on their bed, twisting herself into the scent of him. His absence was everywhere. His razor, tossed among her combs. His shirts, expensive and carelessly crumpled into drawers. And his towel, still damp from the last time he used it. She held it against her mouth and thought of his body.

Four houses away, a neighbor had a telephone line installed the previous summer. A few days after Nick’s departure, Anna was arranging linden blossoms to dry in the sun when the neighbor panted into the yard, shouting, “Is there an Anna Orfanova here?”

She stood motionless. Tiny, yellow flowers scattered from her hands.

The owner of the white-brick house rose from his crossword puzzle. “What’s wrong?”

The neighbor gestured incoherently. “There’s a man calling from—from—”

Barefoot, without breathing, Anna dashed along the dirt path toward the neighbor’s house, his heavy footsteps clopping behind her. She attacked the telephone in the hallway, crying, “Nick?”

His voice crackled. “Anna, listen—”

The connection broke. She sobbed into the receiver. “Nick! Nick, what—”

“Anna—”

“What? My god, what is it?”

He spoke quickly. “There are papers in my briefcase. By the bed. You have to get rid of them. Now. Tonight. Take them into the forest and burn them. Do you understand?”

“But why? What happened?”

“There’s no time. You have to do it. Make sure nobody sees you. Do you understand?”

“But what are you—”

“Jesus Christ, Anna! Just say that you understand!”

She never heard him be afraid before. She didn’t think he could be. “I understand. But Nick—”

His voice sputtered and broke. She strained to hear the silence. Then, just the dull whine of the dial tone. They had been disconnected.

Anna waited until everyone had gone to bed. The yard was bright with moonlight. Carefully, she withdrew the papers from a brown leather briefcase. Cradling them in her arms, she ran into the trees beyond the garden.

She walked far, far. It had to be done right. It had to be done perfectly. If Nick couldn’t—or if he didn’t—. She won’t think of that. He’ll be back in a week. The whole thing was stupid. When he comes back, she’ll tell him exactly how stupid it was. She’ll tell him how scared she’d been. He’ll laugh, of course, and tease her for being such a mouse. But she’ll make him give it up. After all, they were married now. He had to take things seriously.

Through the looming trees, cobwebs and branches skimming against her legs, she walked on and on. Finally, among threads of frosty moonlight, she stopped. In the silence, her heart beat. She fell to her knees and dug the earth with her nails. Dropping the papers into the hole, she struck match after match after match. The wildness of fire flared and died. The papers struggled. She lit more matches. Then she threw soil over the ashes, strangling the smoke. It was done. Nick was safe.

She didn’t realize how far she’d walked. When she returned to the cottage, a tentative pink glimmered on the other side of the sky. The front door was ajar. At first, she couldn’t understand where she was. The drawers gaped open. Her books were scattered. The mattress was ripped in half. Goose down floated like snowflakes in the still air.

Nick’s shirts were on the floor. His expensive shirts! Confused, she reached for them.

“Anna?”

She turned. Her face and shoulders and throat caught fire.

She screamed, just once.

Anna never asked what happened after that. Someone must have put her on a train to Loretsk. When she opened her eyes, her mother was pushing a spoon of apple sauce into her mouth. It hurt. She spit and howled and writhed in sheets sticky with sweat.

For days, there was only fear and fire and linden flowers. And the goose down drifting, drifting, just like snow. Snow in summer? But where was Nick?

Her mother held her and rocked her and told her a hideous story. Someone had broken into their room and thrown sulfuric acid on her face. The left side of her body was badly burned. The police, who came just six hours after it happened, didn’t know anything.

Anna’s mouth opened painfully. Her eyes were black and wild. “Mama, but Nick? Where is Nick?”

Her mother was crying. Nick had been found right away. He arrived in Sochi on that morning’s first flight. He was running into the arch of a metro station when five bullets fired from a beige sedan. The investigator says it was a Makarov pistol. Nine-millimeter bullets. He died instantly.

His article was printed, and it roused a storm of trials and inquiries. Zykov was in prison. Nervous government officials tried to convict Nick’s informant, but the evidence proving his guilt had disappeared.

Nick had sacrificed her face to protect a criminal. He was loyal in his own way. Who knows? Maybe he had done all he could. It was fate. Sleep now. Sleep. It’ll be okay.

Two months later, Anna sat on the floor of her mother’s bedroom. A shawl was bunched over her bent back. The curtains shuttered the gray light of a wet October. Her long black hair fell forward in uncombed, unwashed coils. Balancing her father’s painting on her lap, she stared at the floor while her fingers roamed blindly over the textured strokes of paint.

Earlier, her mother had wailed into the phone for an hour before finally pushing the receiver into Anna’s indifferent hands. It was Nick’s parents. They had just learned of their dead son’s marriage. He left a young wife god only knew where and they didn’t know what to do about her. His mother shrieked, “You killed him! Your country killed him!”

Anna couldn’t understand what they wanted from her. They were asking if they could have the remains sent to New York. What remains?

Gently, Anna put the receiver on the table and walked away. There were no words. At the last, language was impotent. She sat on the floor and wondered. Remains? Were they talking about Nick? Is that what they called his bright body?

The door opened cautiously, and yellow light poured in. She didn’t look up.

“Anya, dear?”

Her tongue was thick. She blinked.

“You have a guest. Look!”

Slowly, Anna dragged her gaze across the floor. Against the doorway’s yellow square, a man stood in sharp outline. She recognized him. She had known him once. Slava.

Crouching beside her, he looked into her face. Unconscious of the ravaged skin on her cheek and jaw, she did not turn away. The left corner of her mouth drooped, and her left eye was half-closed in perpetual suspicion. She wasn’t beautiful anymore.

She couldn’t see his tears, but his breath was swampy with alcohol. “Why are you sitting in the dark?”

Anna shrugged and the shawl slipped. Shyly, Slava draped it over her shoulders. She waited for him to leave. But he sat down, his black boots creaking, and tried to talk. “Do you remember the boy from last year, the one with the ridiculous hair? Well, he hasn’t been on time once. Twenty minutes into my lectures, he wanders in like a king. And Marina? She teaches geometry now. Can you imagine? She was never very good with numbers.”

Anna listened. Somewhere, people were late to lectures and bad with numbers. Somewhere, there was life. But what was left for her? What remains?

She felt the pressure of Slava’s hand on her arm. His voice rose higher. “I’ve been asked to teach in St. Petersburg. They even gave me an apartment. Big. The elevator works. Come with me, please come with me. Leave all this. It’s so dark in here, but you’re so young. You can teach if you want. Or you can read novels until I come home. Then we’ll go for walks and argue about Coleridge and Tennyson. Remember? Remember when we did that? You always proved me wrong. Remember when you said that Tennyson’s Ulysses has to be read aloud? We’ll read it aloud. We’ll go dancing. Anya, can you hear me?”

Inside, there was only silence and linden flowers. And the goose down falling like snow.

But he had to try. “Since I was eighteen, I’ve loved only you. Even now, even now—just say you’ll come. There is time to make a new life.”

Anna looked at him. He was offering her shelter. Without him, there was only homelessness—after all, paradise is a walled enclosure. But she knew that she could never choose that kind of redemption. Nick, who didn’t believe in souls, was dead. In his quest for paradise without enclosures, he had been torn from arrogance at last. And here was clarity.

Slowly, she opened her wounded mouth. “Do you remember our French literature course?”

Encouraged, Slava chuckled. “Sure, I do. It was spring.”

“We had to read The Hunchback of Notre Dame in French. Do you remember, after Phoebus was killed, Claude Frollo visited Esmeralda in her cell? He told her that he could set her free if she promises to leave with him. He told her that they could begin a new life. Do you remember what Esmeralda said?”

He understood. They were silent for a long time.

When Slava finally spoke, his voice was heavy. “Phoebus is dead, so why do you speak to me of living?”

He bowed his head to press his wet cheek against her hand. His boots creaked when he left the room. She heard him murmur, “May God bless you!”

~

Anna sat in her dark office and struggled against memory. She couldn’t go back. She had always couldn’t. But Nauris. In childish pencil, Nauris had scratched his name on the list of students who wanted to study in St. Petersburg. He would eagerly follow the mad jaunts of Raskolnikov in Sennaya Square and take photos of the stone nose of Mayor Kovalev and inhabit Pushkin’s mirrors with his own transparent reflection. He would see the enlightened sadness of Dostoyevsky’s study, where he wrote the Brothers Karamazov. And St. Isaac’s Cathedral, where Sergei Trubetskoi abandoned his revolution.

Wise, untamed Russia sorrowed along the cobblestones of the Nevsky Prospect and grated its teeth in the shadowy waters of the Neva River. Russian literature, which she and Slava had turned from conceitedly, had caught up to her at last. For the first time in thirty years, she remembered Slava. Was he still in St. Petersburg? The old arcade indeed. What we have most outgrown is always what’s waiting most patiently around the final bend. Whether it ends in vanquishment or acquiescence, facing origins is courage.

She knew how to show what Nauris knew how to see. Born of Lethe, the boy poured forgetfulness into her open palms. He flew the same magic carpet Nick had once piloted. It was a ride for children, and too late for her to clamber on. She couldn’t unlearn her fear of heights, of passion, of human objects too close to her skin. It was simply too late for some things.

But she could give him maps and snacks for the journey. There were labyrinths and great white whales and the arrow always spinning toward Polaris. There were fatal train rides and surging tides and spring rain on cobblestones. These, at least, were hers. Besides, who would lead the program if she didn’t? Probably Dr. Harrison, who knew as much about St. Petersburg as she did about cave painting. Unhesitatingly, she strode to the department chairman’s office and rapped on his door.

His welcome was thin. “Yes?”

Anna surrendered graciously. “I’ll go.”

His earring glinted in the light of the desk lamp, and he rubbed his hands merrily. “You will? That’s great! That’s just great! Very glad to hear it, very glad. I’ll have the papers on your desk first thing tomorrow.”

She walked home. Nearing Pascal’s Charcuterie, she saw Anton’s bulk scurrying outside. He was transferring tomatoes from an outdoor display into cardboard crates.

She stopped. “Hello, Anton.”

He patted her shoulder vaguely. “You look nice. See, I’m taking the tomatoes inside. Frost damage. And what sunshine this morning! Ah, too bad, too bad.”

White icicles had burst the delicate skin of the deep red fruit. Cold twinkled on the frozen green leaves. Anna helped him, carefully lifting the narrow stems of tomato clusters, feeling their timid weight. Clucking with disappointment, Anton wiped his forehead with an apron.

She said, “But it can’t always be summer.”