“Don’t be so dramatic,” says her mother. “This isn’t the theater.” She shakes out the duvet and adjusts it over the rope. “Mistakes were made; we all know that. There was an abuse of power, a cult of personality. But look what we’ve built: a country that the whole world respects.” She hangs the pillowcase over the rope and clips it with a wooden clothespin. “And they admitted their mistakes,” she says. “Don’t you remember Khrushchev’s speech in 1956? They admitted they were wrong, and they released political prisoners. That was a start.”

Sasha smirks, but she feels the anger tightening her chest. “This is laughable. Uncle Volya, Marik’s father, Nadia and her parents. I’m twenty-one, and I know of five people who were murdered by the state. And Uncle Seryozha. He survived, but he might as well have died. It was all in his face, the camps. He had the face of a corpse.”

“You have to have patience,” her mother says, her usual refrain. “This is what Russia has survived on, century after century—patience and perseverance. We work, we wait, and we hope. And we believe. We have to believe in something. Before the Revolution, there was God. Now it’s our better future.”

She has heard all this before—from everyone in Ivanovo, even from Grandma—a pitiful excuse that absolves nothing.

“I work hard, but I don’t know what I’m waiting for.” Sasha wants to show her mother that she is wrong, to let her know that she now lives in Leningrad, where such views are as provincial as chickens in a courtyard or piles of firewood stacked under the roof of a shed. “I swear, it’s no different from the pretending I learned from Aunt Polya at the lunch counter in first grade.” Aunt Polya is still as clear in her memory as she was fifteen years ago, pouring milk and dispensing soup, ordering them to chew and swallow and not waste a single crumb. Sasha remembers how she watched them to make sure they finished the bread and the milk and the soup. “I knew she was watching me, and she knew that I knew, and I knew that she knew that I knew. We played this little game every day: she would give me an unexpected glance, and I would chew diligently, pretending I didn’t know she was looking.”