Unarmed and dazed by the sudden invasion of German planes and tanks on June 22, 1941, Sima, unlike most of his comrades, managed to survive. Six months later, he was wounded at the Belorussian Front and made his way back home to Ivanovo in 1942. This is how her mother remembers that day: It was January, and there was a knock on the door. When Grandma opened the latch, there stood Sima—in a military coat with burned bullet holes, on crutches, a torn ushanka hat tied under his chin. The hospital could no longer do anything, so they released him. Sima decided not to write home because he wanted to surprise everyone with his arrival. Grandma, wiping under her eyes and making sniffling noises, boiled water for him to wash, as Grandpa ordered Sima to take off his clothes immediately—everything down to the rags inside his boots—so he could throw the dirty heap outside, where it was minus twenty degrees Celsius, to save the rest of them from typhus and lice.

A piece of metal lodged in Sima’s lung had created an abscess and was beginning to cause an infection in his brain. It made her mother furious to think that a doctor at a front hospital had failed to operate properly, leaving a shard of a grenade in her brother’s body. Although Grandma spoke of his recovery, her mother was a doctor and knew he wouldn’t survive. But she had to pretend for the sake of her parents, and as Sima, blind and delirious, lay in the room where Sasha would grow up, she sat by his bed, with her big belly resting on her knees, taking his temperature and peering into his throat, making believe that whatever small medical procedures she performed could make a difference.

Was Sasha’s father lying in bed in their house, too, with his wet cough rolling in his chest like the cannonade they heard at least once a day? And when he began spitting up blood, was he admitted into the Ivanovo hospital, her mother’s alma mater? She must have consulted the head of the TB clinic, her former professor, who probably told her that after his release from the hospital, her father must leave, since he could not stay in the house with a newborn. Was her father relieved to leave Ivanovo and go back to his other daughter and his other wife? Or did he try to fool the doctors into letting him stay to see the arrival of his new daughter? And then, after he left, did he ever wonder about her?