Outside the station, Moscow explodes around her with stone facades that rise into the sky and block the sun; with rivers of asphalt that radiate in five different directions; with the whistle of a militiaman who wields a zebra baton to freeze the four lanes of traffic and then, like a magician, make them move again; with buses and trolleys circling around a statue of Lenin, as if performing a ritual dance, and then, on cue from the militiaman’s baton, vanishing into the tunnels of streets. It stuns her with its energy and bustle; it invades her senses; it pumps into her ears a loud, brazen invitation to a different life.

They are staying with Grandma’s cousin Baba Yulia, who is short and wide and has a puffy face. She lives with her son, Uncle Seryozha, and his twenty-year-old daughter, Katya. The apartment is a dark, long corridor with a kitchen attached to the one end and two rooms to the other. Instead of a pail and dipper, the kitchen has a faucet, and the stove blooms with the gentle petals of gas when her mother holds a lighted match to a burner. Their bed is set on a divan in the room where Baba Yulia and Katya sleep behind a yellow curtain that disperses dust and a smell of mothballs.

On the first day, they don’t even see Uncle Seryozha. The door to his room is shut, and no one is allowed in. “It’s his illness,” says her mother, but her eyebrows are mashed together, and Sasha knows that this illness is not as simple as measles or the flu.

In the evening, Baba Yulia and Katya set the table, on which, like in a fairy tale, appear pink slices of bologna, a hunk of perforated cheese, and a loaf of bread so soft, it gives under the weight of the butter she slathers on.

Baba Yulia, in an apron over a housedress, speaks somberly, but Sasha can see that she is happy to have them as sympathetic listeners. She tells them about Uncle Seryozha, who was an engineer at the Moscow automobile factory before the war. He was more than an engineer, Baba Yulia says; he was an inventor. He was the author of something called a patent that advanced the Soviet auto industry.