Day after day, her mother sat by Sima’s bed thinking about her brother and her husband, both dying. She couldn’t cure them, so she concentrated on doing what she could do. She sold her ration of four hundred grams of bread and with that money bought fifty grams of butter, which, she hoped, might boost her brother’s and her husband’s chance for health.

Sima died at home on November 1, 1942. Her mother washed him and shaved him and dressed him for the funeral. Since she was eight months pregnant, Grandma and Grandpa decided that she should not go to the funeral, an invitation to premature labor. Her mother stood on the porch, watching Grandpa crack a whip, watching the horse snort and jerk forward as the cart with Grandma, slumped against Sima’s coffin, slowly bumped onto the road, rutted by recent rain.

Sasha’s father left soon after Sima’s funeral, probably on November 7—three weeks before she was born—on the day of the Great October Socialist Revolution, which in peaceful times is an occasion for a citizens’ parade, for people marching in rows and banners flapping in the wind. But before he left, he took both the butter and the bread, added a few bars of soap from Grandma’s closet, and sold them to buy himself a jar of moonshine. In the gray air pocked with drizzle, Sasha sees her parents walk through the ruins of the town and stand waiting for the train, her big-bellied mother and her husband, who would die of TB in his hometown on the other side of the Urals five years later, never having seen his daughter. When a plume of smoke billows out of the train’s stack and a spasm lurches through the cars, her mother takes a step toward the clattering wheels and raises her arm in a last goodbye. She waits until the train shrinks to toy size, until the only smoke she can see is a streak of soot rising from an apartment building bombed the day before.

Sasha feels affection for Liza and the Quiet Dawns story, but Liza, so far, is reluctant to let her close, to grant her the proximity she requires to become her. Sasha knows she hasn’t earned this closeness yet; she needs to do more work. The work unspools images from her Ivanovo childhood, from war descriptions in Kolya’s journal, the scarred pages that she hopes will help her find some solid ground underneath her feet.

January 31, 1942