Andrei leans forward, staring at his shoes. “Toward the end of the war, they chose Vadim to work at the NKVD. The Party trusted him to do important work, he said, as important as killing Germans at the front. He hated Germans. They were the enemy who had to be killed. And when he killed them, they screamed in German, in their foul language of bandits and invaders. But his prisoners, the ones he interrogated in the NKVD cellars, screamed and begged in Russian. Not in that alien language he couldn’t understand. The language he was speaking to me, our mother tongue.” Andrei speaks evenly, almost monotonously, not allowing any opening for an interjection.

“Every day by noon, he was covered in blood. He reeked of blood, despite a bucket of cologne they brought in at the end of the day. Even his dog refused to come near him at home. He had to wipe his hands on his hair to keep the gun from slipping out of his grip. But that was his work. That was his duty, he said, and he was a soldier. They told him to serve, and he served. They told him to execute, and he executed.

“Every day, by the end of the shift, he had pulled the trigger so many times that his index finger became numb. It hung limp as a whip, completely useless. But they had a monthly plan, like any factory, a plan that had to be fulfilled. So they brought medical experts to advise them what to do. Physicians in white coats armed with notepads sauntered along the hallways, furrowing their brows and watching them interrogate the prisoners. The result? Twice a week, each of them was to get a massage of the right hand. A massage of his trigger finger, as my father-in-law called it. So after that, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, during lunch hour, a terrified-looking woman slinked into his office. A new one every time. I’ll spare you the details. But at the end of the month, the quotas were met. The NKVD even gave him a plaque for ‘living up to the special task of the Party.’ He has a cabinet full of those plaques.”

Andrei stops, and she sees he isn’t going to say more.

They both remain silent for a minute or so. What is Sasha going to do with this story? What is she going to do with the fact that Andrei did not walk away from that conversation, from his father-in-law and his dacha, from that life? What kept him there, drinking and listening?

“Congratulations on being related to someone who can brag about such a glorious Soviet past,” Sasha says. But what she really wants is something much more selfish than this grand moral condemnation. “So you allowed yourself to be bought for a cushy job and a pair of nice shoes,” she says.