Marik is marked by another scar everyone knows about, an event Sasha can still see in her mind as if it happened only yesterday. In addition to being a Jew, he is now the son of a prisoner. After that morning, Sasha thought that Marik’s father had missed a bell and come late for work—solid grounds for an arrest, according to her mother—but then she heard her attach the word politichesky to his name. Her mother uttered the word in a low voice when they were all at the table slurping cabbage soup.

“They don’t put innocent people in camps, Grandpa said. Stalin knows who is with us and who is against us. Stalin—our leader, our father, the successor of our great Lenin. The engineer of our thunderous victory over Germany.”

Andrei expressed a similar view, only in less pompous words. “He must have done something if he got arrested,” he muttered, sharpening a branch with his pocketknife as they sat on the roof of the shed after Marik’s mother called him home.

Andrei’s father is not here, either, but according to Grandpa, he has a better chance of coming home than Marik’s father because he is not a politichesky. Maybe Andrei’s mother, as she sweeps the yard, also turns her head at the creak of the gate, just like Grandma has done since the end of the war, still waiting for her son Kolya to come back from the Leningrad Front.

It is her grandpa’s birthday, which means a samovar is puffing on the dining table and Grandma is standing over a frying pan, her hands white with flour, making pancakes. Marik and Sasha are under the table, where the old linoleum is torn, revealing boards worn through by many prewar and maybe even prerevolutionary feet. While the guests, all intelligentny, are busy eating boiled potatoes with pickled cabbage, the children are out of their sight, playing a game while waiting for tea, when they can load slices of bread with spoonfuls of strawberry and apple jam from the fruit in Grandpa’s garden.