For a few moments, her mother pats the hanging towel, ironing the wrinkles. “A man came to our door in 1943. He may have been in the same platoon with Kolya; I don’t know. The man was demobilized; he had been wounded in the head. He could barely remember his own name, but he had our address written with indelible pencil on the inside of his shirt. Kolya Kuzmin asked me to give this to you, he said and handed me the notebook. Of course, we immediately brought him into the house, Grandma boiled tea, pulled out every scrap of food we had. He didn’t touch a thing. He didn’t even sit down. He paced the room from corner to corner, shaking, his teeth clattering, as if he had a high fever. Then he would suddenly stop and look around. We asked him where he had been; we asked about Kolya. He didn’t answer any questions. He only mumbled about some peasants from a tiny village he’d been ordered to shoot in the woods.”

“What was his name?” Sasha asks.

“Anton, he said, after we repeated the question five times at least.” It wasn’t Kolya’s pal Seryoga. No easy coincidences here, no missing pieces conveniently fitting into an unfinished puzzle. “His shoes were all torn, and his feet were bloody. I tried to clean and bandage them, but he pushed me away. He gave us his address, somewhere on the other end of the town, but when I went there a month later, there wasn’t a trace of him. A family, evacuated from Kalinin, had just moved in, a woman with two children and a sharp-elbowed mother-in-law. They hadn’t heard of a wounded man who returned from the war. They had their own two men still fighting, the woman’s husband and brother, and they didn’t want to hear anything about someone who had just been demobilized and sent home.” Her mother pauses. “After that, we sent Kolya several letters addressed to the Leningrad Front. I don’t know if they ever reached him. We wrote that his brother Sima had died. We wrote that you were born. But we never received anything from him again.”

Her mother picks up a duvet cover twisted like a rope and begins to unwind it.

“So what do we do now?” Sasha asks. “After we both know what Kolya went through at the front, after what they did to Nadia’s family, after all those arrests and murders? How many? Thousands? Millions? And for what?”