Summary

Chapter 12 opens a year after Marik's death. Sasha is 16 and is studying a novel that examines “The moral conflict … between personal happiness and duty” (68). Sasha feels conflicted as well, driven to choose between “her own personal happiness and duty, between Andrei and Marik's memory” (68). Sasha meets Andrei after school and shows him Kolya's journal. Because of the journal, Sasha now understands that “The war narrative they learn in school … is crammed with as many fairy tales as the stories in Grandma's prerevolutionary book about saints they no longer believe in” (70). She tells Andrei what Kolya wrote and about his paintings that hang in her home. One of those paintings features Kolya's face, a violin, and the skeleton of an unborn child. Sasha was afraid of that painting until Grandma explained the violin was art, the skeleton was death, and Kolya was between the...