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Gleb Vaganov’s memories of Dmitry Sidorov were brief and simple. He had only seen the man twice. Once in Leningrad and once in Paris, long ago, in 1927. But the memories were bright and vivid and beautiful, because Anya had been in them, and everything associated with Anya was beautiful. So it was no miracle that he recognized Dmitry sixteen years later, in a frozen and starving camp somewhere in the forests of Germany. He had been revisiting the bright and painful days of 1927 ever since he had lost himself in Paris, fled back to Moscow, and tried to build a gray and dreary life for himself.

The first time had been in Leningrad, in the golden days of winter. He had believed in the glorious socialist dawn, just around the corner. And within him, he had harbored a strange and sweet connection to Anya, the young worker who he had comforted on the street. But his suspicions had grown. There were unfortunate reports that the girl was involved with some plot involving impersonating a dead Romanov. So he had reported her and he had ordered her arrested, because he was a man who did his duty. And then there had been a shining, awful moment, when he revealed too much about his own past and his father and his mother, and he had looked into her troubled face and thought ‘Romanov eyes’ and had fallen in love at the same moment.

And then he had let her go.

And then, in fury at himself and full of regret and half-realized frustration, he had rushed to the window to watch her leave, and looked out onto the snowy street, a floor below. She had walked out with dignity, her head held high, and a delighted smile appeared on her face when she saw who was waiting for her: a young man, handsome and a little rakish, changing in an instant from anxious pacing to sweeping her up in his arms and laughing with joy. The young man had swung her around and Gleb could see the laughter on her face. The two set off down the street at a brief pace, but the young man had looked back. Although he could not seen Gleb through the window, an uncomfortable feeling of being seen, and a strange surge of jealousy, struck Gleb nevertheless. The image of the young man’s face, youthful but somehow noble, with dark brown eyes, remained in Gleb’s mind.

The second time was in Paris, at the ballet.

He had been bewildered by it all, then, no longer sure of himself. The luxury of France was unlike anything he had ever seen in Russia. It disgusted him with its sinful opulence. But he noticed other things, also, though he did not assign them meaning for many years. The children of Paris, for instance, almost always wore shoes. There were no bread lines.

More troubling was his heart, trembling at the thought of seeing Anya again. He had dedicated his life to serving his homeland, to his duty, and to the long, hard slog of a fight for workers everywhere. It was what had driven him since childhood: work hard enough, obey the will of the Soviet people, and one day there will be no more weeping mothers giving away their own part so that their children might eat. And now, at last an opportunity to do something real, something more than make speeches on corners (because a doubt had already crept in, hadn’t it, about whether all the speeches and the propaganda and newspapers were necessary?). He could end the hated Romanov dynasty, that brutal imperialist legacy that had held Russia in its grip for centuries...And yet there was something about her that was ethereal, some quality of perfection. She was beautiful, and kind, and strong, so strong...Surely no woman could be any more Russian than Anya.

And so he had sat in the theater, his shaking hand on his pistol beneath his coat, surrounded by the worst excesses of the capitalists and imperialists, scanning the crowd for a blonde and beautiful figure. The music was Russian: the great Tchaikovsky. The dancers and the lights kept confusing him. The villainous theme, the theme of the liar, the black swan in disguise, kept ringing in his ears. But the love theme, the swan’s dance, seemed to stick and catch in his throat.

At last, toward the end of the performance, he saw her, a balcony up, enraptured in the story. Or perhaps not: her gaze was fixed, unmoving, and her hands looked stiff. A fierce impulse to protect her rose up in him, and he almost cast the pistol away, foolishly into the crowd. Instead he just stared at her, admiring her profile and her bright eyes, until the lights came up. Then he saw the young man rise before her and help her up: the same one he had seen in Leningrad, weeks ago. This time, though, instead of feeling jealousy, he felt a strange sense of shared responsibility. He could not protect Anya, Romanov or not. He had his duty. But perhaps this young man, evidently very much in love with her, could. He felt as though he was entrusting Anya to the man, although of course he wasn’t, because he barely knew Anya and the young man not at all, and if everything went according to plan, within a few days they would both be dead by Gleb’s hand.

And then he saw Dmitry a third time, in 1944- halfway through the Great Patriotic War.
It had been an agony of years for Gleb. In the immediate aftermath of Paris, he felt nothing more than the weight of his failure. The loss of Anya, and his inability to ever see her again, had been secondary. He was better off without her. It was, after all, his love for her that had caused his downfall. He had wrestled with his duty and his love, and concluded that for a righteous man, duty must come first. And then at the last moment he failed: he gave in to weakness. And she was kind, and forgiving, though she owed him nothing but hatred. And he fled Paris in shame, imagining faintly that she would go and live in America somewhere with the young man from Leningrad.

He threw himself even more devotedly into his work for a few years. He grew out of his youth, and slowly his idealism as well. Times were hard, and became worse. Russia lost the beauty, hope, and strength he remembered from his childhood.

A strange and shadowy realization over years crept into his mind. At first he blamed it on Paris: the lights, the music, the money, his lost love. All were causes for disillusionment back home; it was natural that he should question the Soviet people a little as he readjusted. But questions he had never thought to ask before now lingered. Memories of Anya resurfaced after years of repressing them: her calm defiance of the state, her insistence that there was more than one way to be Russian. Her image grew in his mind: he was not a religious man, but it had a saintlike quality about it. She represented the one time in his life he had actively defied the state. He had made a choice for himself, to protect his heart and most importantly to protect another human being, and it had worked. The rumors of Anastasia Romanovna were, like so many other things, finally dead. But 1927 became a blessed period in Gleb’s life: something he could remember in the dark times.

And the dark times came, and they were darker than ever before. Poverty and hunger raged across the land. But worse than anything, than the Tsar’s secret police or the battlefields of the Great War or any of the horrors in Russia’s long history, was the terror of the state. Peasants were forced off the land at gunpoint, subversives shot. Gleb, his mind and heart awakened by Anya (though they had taken years to truly open), looked at his beloved homeland and saw a nation destroyed by fear and evil.

So when the purges came, they were almost a relief, because surely now one of two things would happen: the Russian people would rise up again and overthrow the overbearing state, or Gleb’s own stirring political tendencies would be noticed, and he would be shot. Either would end the limbo he now lived in, as a minor party official trapped in the system and by his own conscience. But neither option occurred. Instead, countless other men were gone, shot or sent to Siberia. Men he knew. Many friends, and many enemies.

When his own time came, he was not shot. He had made a disparaging mark about the new pact with Germany, to someone he thought was a friend. And so he was shipped off to a frozen work camp in the east somewhere. There, he lost himself in work and thought.

After two years, Gleb’s suspicions about Germany were proven correct. The older men in the camp, the ones who had fought in the last war, looked at each other grimly. This war was a mirror image of the last: Russia and Britain and France against Germany, and would the Americans join or wouldn’t they?

This war went worse, though. The Leningrad he remembered was destroyed by starvation and siege. The machine of the Soviet Union chewed up and spat out men faster than they could be replaced. There was soon a desperate need for more manpower. When the prisoners were given the option of a pardon in return for military service, Gleb volunteered.

On the front, he found clarity. For the first time in fifteen years, he was confident he was doing the right thing. He was protecting Russia, and fighting a great evil.

After two weeks on the front, he found himself captured and abruptly shipped off to another frozen camp, much like the one he had just left. This was where he met Dmitry.

He knew there was a Frenchman who spoke Russian, and sought him out to discuss something or other of the news from the front, the news they tried to patch together from holes in the official German reports and their hidden radios. A Frenchman might know something he and his fellow Russians had missed.

The man, strangely familiar, had invited him in with a cigarette stolen from somewhere, and they sat on the floor. There were no beds.

“It’s good to hear the old language again,” said the man, and Gleb had recognized him suddenly, although he had never before heard the man’s voice. He had aged, of course: grey now flecked his temple. But his distinctive, warm eyes were the same.

“It’s you! The young man!” said Gleb.

“Sorry?”

“You were- with Anya. In Paris,”

Realization dawned on the man’s face. “The Russian,” he said.

We are both Russian, thought Gleb.

The man was looking at him in wonder. “And here we are, at the end of the world, all these years later… I’m Dmitry Sidorov.” He thrust out his hand.

“Gleb Vaganov,” said Gleb, and they shook. Dmitry looked at Gleb critically.

“You tried to kill my wife,” he said.
Gleb had already seen the band on Dmitry’s left hand. He said nothing. It was, after all, true.

Dmitry seemed to forgive him quickly, though, now that they were both prisoners in another, greater war. “Oh, well. We’re on the same side now, comrade.” He paused, then said, “Russia must be doing badly if they’re calling up old men like you,”

Was this an attempt to needle him? Long ago, it might have worked. “ And political prisoners too,” said Gleb.

Dmitry gave him a long, searching look. Gleb thought he saw approval in it.

“What about France? Aren’t you too old, as well?” said Gleb.

Dmitry smiled and shut his eyes. “Yes. I was in what you might call the resistance, I suppose. Not that I managed much of anything,”

Gleb nodded. “And Anya? She is alright?”

Dmitry, his eyes still shut, responded: “Yes. She and the children are with a friend in Lyons.”

“Children?” said Gleb, surprised. He found himself pleased, delighted even. So they had been happy after all. “That’s a great blessing.”

“Yes,” said Dmitry, “Yes, it is.” But his face appeared, now, as though he were in pain. Gleb supposed being separated from one’s children would be a great burden. But a smile appeared a moment later, and Dmitry said: “Maria’s the eldest, almost a young woman, and then two rowdy boys. Pierre is nine, and,” his eyes found Gleb’s face, “little Gleb is turning four.”

Gleb started suddenly.

“I’m kidding,” said Dmitry. “We named him Trotsky, after the other famous Russian exile....” he trailed off. Gleb realized that this was, indeed, Dmitry needling him: a test.

“You know,” he said slowly, “I haven’t been a Stalinist in a long time,”

Dmitry looked at him, and grunted acknowledgment. “Good,” he said, and paused. “The boy’s Jean, actually. We wanted to give him a French name. Wanted him to be French, I suppose,”

Dmitry’s expression softened into sadness again. Gleb said, “They will be very happy to see you again, when all this is over.”

“Yes. Anya blames herself. It was her idea. I wanted to leave France.” His eyes darted to Gleb’s suddenly and then away, as though searching for approval. “I thought, I abandoned my homeland before, I can do it again. But I think that’s why she wanted to stay. She felt it was our duty,”

“We’re all paying our debts, one way or another,” said Gleb, and Dmitry nodded.

“And then once the Germans came- I knew she was right, and I was glad we hadn’t run. But then we got caught up in,” he waved his hand vaguely, “all this, and I told myself I was doing it for France. But I think really- I think I was doing it for Russia,”

“It’s good to know what you’re fighting for,” said Gleb, and tugged his coat more tightly around him. They smiled at each other faintly, and they were comrades: two Russians a long, long way from home.