Her mother gives out a little gasp, then tightens her mouth. She hasn’t expected opposition in such close proximity to the time Sasha’s key scratched around the lock and didn’t find the keyhole. She is usually the one doing the lecturing; she is the master of dispensing guilt-provoking tirades and unsought advice.

“Your father perished in the Great Patriotic War,” she says in a wounded voice. “You know that.”

Sasha knows. His sepia photograph is on the first page of their family album in Ivanovo. Until she was seven or eight, she had been hopelessly waiting for him to walk through their gate, despite his “perished in the war” status, but then something snapped her waiting vigil. Was it her mother’s reluctance to share any memory of him, or was it Grandma’s inevitable sigh at the rare mention of his name? Or maybe it was an old neighbor, one of those who had to line up to use the outhouse, a babka with sharp eyes and a bent spine that made her look like a question mark, who one day coughed up the real story of Sasha’s father to her neighbor on their courtyard bench, making sure Sasha was close enough to hear every word.

“He didn’t perish in the war,” Sasha says. “He died of TB, two years after the war ended, in the town of Atkarsk, where he lived with his common-law wife and a ten-year-old daughter.” She sees her mother swallow hard, her face tightening. She remembers that afternoon in their Ivanovo courtyard, the babka’s coarse voice marking the moment when her mother’s heroic war-perishing story turned out to be nothing but another lie. Lying, their way of life, the stubborn abscess oozing into the cells of their system, infecting everyone.

Strangely, Sasha feels removed from this whole scene, watching the action from the wings, like a director during a performance. Her mother, the tragic heroine of the second act, admonishing her prodigal daughter who, in turn, admonishes an untruthful mother.

“I wanted to protect you,” her mother says, sniffling. “I only wanted to keep you safe. That’s all I ever tried to do.”

She wishes her mother would stop protecting her from danger, from experience, from life itself. She wishes she would stop protecting her from Theater.

Her mother wipes her eyes before she cranks the handle of the meat grinder, and its iron face erupts in red twists of meat squeezing out into a bowl underneath.