I walked because I had to walk, cursing the secretary of the philology department, cursing the two men who had arrested Nadia’s father. I cursed the neighbor and the vigilant friend who ratted on Naum Semenovich for something he didn’t say. I cursed everyone who denounced Nadia and her mother because they were Jews or because—as a reward for being vigilant—they hoped to get their apartment that was so brazenly better than their own communal hovels.

If I believed in God, like Raphael or Michelangelo, I would have cursed God. In the absence of God, I cursed my motherland. It was supposed to nurture and protect us, the people it had inspired to its revolutionary ideals of a meager life and hard work, and while we had been busy keeping our end of the bargain, our motherland, like a courtyard thug, had turned around, pulled out a switchblade, and stuck it under our ribs.

I walked past the peeling facades of French classicism and Italian baroque draped with the red banners of our bright future. I thought of those in the stratosphere of the Kremlin, dressed in generals’ uniforms and party suits, puffing on pipes at their desks, debating the fate of our lives between sips of cognac, issuing search warrants, signing decrees of death. Sitting like judges at their engineered trials, pounding gavels with their meaty hands: death, death, death. What made their hearts beat, what pushed through their veins instead of blood was the sludge of paranoia and betrayal. Who is not with us is against us, their eyes instruct us from the portraits hanging in every office. We do not arrest good people, they say. We’re simply protecting our motherland from its enemies with the help of other good people, all those neighbors with properly attuned ears, insufficient living space, and healthy socialist envy.

I thought of the night when they came for Nadia. How terrified she must have been, how desperate and lost. I saw the two men stalking around their apartment, picking out things they liked, packing them into their bags. “You won’t be needing this anymore,” one may have said, lifting a bronze writing set off her father’s desk. “And this,” said the other thug, taking off the wall an old pendulum clock that belonged to Nadia’s grandmother. They had probably cut the pillows open, as they always do, so feathers must have been flying everywhere in a surreal blizzard in early May.

And where was Nadia now? In a stone coffin of a solitary confinement cell? On the third tier of plank beds among fifty other suspected traitors and spies? Being interrogated by a sadist in an NKVD uniform, who is shouting that she is automatically guilty because she didn’t inform on her father?