Sasha shakes out a few pillowcases, which make a loud slurping noise. “I never know if the play we’re rehearsing will be closed by the Ministry of Culture because someone high up thinks that the playwright’s words are aimed directly at those in power.” She pauses to help her mother spread the sheet over the rope, so there is now a wall of wet laundry between them. “Look, I know it’s probably better now than it was under Stalin, but this is not enough,” she says, her words addressed into a barrier of wet cotton. “How am I supposed to live in a country where everything is based on lies? Our national game isn’t hockey. It is lying and pretending.”

“You’ve said enough to get yourself ten years in the camps, back under Stalin,” says her mother from the other side of the sheet, and Sasha can hear that she has a rueful smile on her face. “But these are vegetarian times, thank God,” she adds. Neither of them believes in God, but they both know that the vegetarian times of Khrushchev are the times of milder, less brutal repressions than the carnivorous times of Stalin. She bends over the tub, moving slowly, as if trying to avoid what she is going to say next.

“Do you remember the head of the Ivanovo anatomy department, Moisey Davidovich Zlotnikov?” she asks.

Sasha remembers. She was a little afraid of him when her mother took her to her institute, where she sat among jars with organs floating in formaldehyde, copying a diagram of lungs with blue-and-red vessels tangled up inside a faceless man’s chest. Dr. Zlotnikov always greeted her with a handshake, as if she were an adult. He had a small, graying beard, a balding forehead, and a pince-nez, too old to be anyone’s father, too unsmiling, too stern.