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Page 27.

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With my companions, that evening in 1992 when peace and levity floated across the water, I was still attractive, but the paparazzi had long gone from my life. I drove them out like a plague of rats. Not even a shade of pale beside Mama’s long ago beauty, I stood at that same spot and looked across the sea. I looked west toward Siberia, where I knew a little girl of four once stood on that other beach, near Anadyr, holding her mother’s hand. That little girl looked eastward into eternity, above the sea and under the stars, to where her mother pointed. Her mother said in a low voice while the waves of the North Pacific Ocean thundered under a sliver moon: “That way is America, and San Francisco, and your father. That way are all good things, and I don’t know how to get them back if ever again. I meant well, but I made such a mess of everything.” She may have been sad, but I remember not much guilt about her—everything she did was as it had to be done. Optimists and boosters will say that is the greatest excuse of all time, while those given to fate and tragedy will say choice is only an illusion; that the wheel of events turns, and our lives cascade like water on a mill stream. And don’t the stars and even the galaxies of the universe do just that as well? And the atoms in their tiny forge? It was the one clock my daddy could not fix—the cosmos itself, but what a magnificent ambition if he even thought of such a thing. If I am his daughter, his meat and blood, and I think this, then is it not likely that Daddy did? I never got to ask him that, though when I finally found him, we did talk about the weather, and about love, and about life—and always about his beloved, lost Anna.

That little girl was filled with wonder—feeling none of her mother’s sense of loss, or her tragedy. My mother was just 30 years old then, and dying of tuberculosis, so young, and some would say she was one of the most beautiful women who ever lived. But then, any man in love will say that. Of that I am convinced. Despite the betrayals, and the engines of state grinding inexorably, she was the great love of his life. That I know in my heart. That is why I close now, having buried them together at last. But now, at the end, I return to the beginning. I must tell my story from the start, as best I can, filling in what details I continue to learn.

I had best let the story tell itself.

My father as a young man was washed ashore on a forsaken coast along the western bow of Africa, where lions roamed under blue sky dotted with pinfeather clouds, where eternal sea weeps upon infinite sand, where the warriors and empires of mankind lie down to die…