I had to blot those thoughts out of my mind, for they spawned monstrous images of humiliation and medieval torture, of fingers broken in doorjambs, of nipples stabbed with sharpened pencils, of hot irons sizzling the skin. Had I allowed my mind to wander along this path, I know I would have gone mad. So I kept trudging along the streets and circling whole blocks in a pointless search for answers. My thoughts were racing; I couldn’t focus; my mind was a toxic tangle of awful possibilities.

I thought of Volya, my uncle arrested in 1937 for telling a joke. I thought of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in the camps for doing his job, writing poetry. I thought of my art professor, the one who showed us Picasso’s work that seemed to challenge the laws of socialist realism yet was so charged with life, who one day simply failed to show up to teach our seminar. “Do not try to investigate his disappearance,” cautioned the dean, a dire warning to my class of twelve that we obediently followed.

I thought of my mother: of her round glasses, her hair pulled back in a bun, her soft cotton dress. She wasn’t at all as steely and tough as our motherland; she was, in fact, the opposite—forgiving and kind. She was someone I would die for, without hesitation. She and Nadia.

I turned and walked along the canal embankment, cutting through the fog that began to feel like drizzle. On the other side of the street, the door leading to a store was open. I crossed and walked inside.

On the shelf to my right, a few candlesticks made of jade and brass stood next to a lamp with a flowery cloth shade. In a cabinet of dark wood with glass shelves, a tea service with round cups and a teapot boasted its cobalt net of classic imperial design. A pile of spoons glimmered beside the saucers. Bigger pieces occupied the space in the back of the store: a set of four chairs with curved legs stacked up before a round dining table, a couple of mismatched stools, two nightstands with the surface of polished wood. The secondhand shop, selling the contents of people’s former lives.

Behind the first room was another, to the left, and I made my way there without thinking, as if someone had grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me forward. I stepped inside and froze in place. Against the wall, between two lamps with hideous curlicues, stood a divan I remembered so well. I hoped that the vision would disappear, but there it was still, an object whose pattern of wear was forever imprinted in my brain, whose scratches and bumps I knew with every fiber of my body—our divan, Nadia’s and mine.