“After the war, when you were nine or ten, I was summoned to the Ivanovo NKVD headquarters,” her mother says from the other side of the sheet. “He was my PhD adviser, and they demanded that I inform on him.” Sasha hears a sharp intake of breath. “Every month, I would come to this secret apartment and write the most mundane, innocuous things I could think of: a conversation about the percentage of enlarged thyroids at the Ivanovo textile factory, a shortage of scalpels at a dissection class, a lab assistant’s alcoholic son.” She pauses, and Sasha waits. “Those were still Stalin times, carnivorous times. I couldn’t refuse. Once a month, I came to that apartment, as though to an illicit, sordid rendezvous that had to be kept secret from the honest world. A young, plain-clothed man sat there, on the other side of the room, and watched me write. He always smiled when he saw me, a wide, open smile that dimpled his cheeks. But even though what I wrote was harmless and benign, I was always afraid that something I wrote would be twisted and used against Dr. Zlotnikov. Every day at work, I waited for them to come and arrest him, and then he would only need to take one look at me and he would know who was to blame.” She pins the last nightshirt on the rope and wipes her wet hands on the apron she is wearing. “This lasted for one year. Then Stalin died.”

Sasha follows her mother to the kitchen, her hefty figure leading the way through the hallway, past the refrigerator and the coatrack. She has always led the way, but Sasha hasn’t always followed. She has escaped from Ivanovo, and for all these years, she has wanted to think that its provincialism had not left a permanent mark on her soul, that the air of Moscow and Leningrad allowed her to draw a clear line between truth and pretense, between the heroic textbook story of the war and what Kolya lived through at the front.