In the kitchen, her mother boils water for tea and spoons out of a jar the strawberry jam from Grandpa’s Ivanovo garden. Frankly, Sasha doesn’t know how to react to her mother’s story. She thinks she would feel better if she hadn’t told her, if she didn’t know that her mother was an informer. She wonders if having this knowledge makes her a coconspirator, if she is now complicit in the deed. This knowledge has raised more questions than she knows how to answer. If she were in her mother’s place, would she have done the same thing? Would she have come to an NKVD apartment every month and concocted reports about her teacher, no matter how benign? And although she wants to think that she would never succumb to spying, how can she know this for certain? And if she refused—if her mother had refused—what would have happened then, to her and to Sasha?

Her mother drops two cubes of sugar into her cup and slowly circles her spoon around until they dissolve. Kolya’s journal is between them at the center of the table, a stark reminder of their past, marking the gap between their ways of thinking.