Grandpa met her at the train station. Sasha saw him even before the train pulled to a stop, from her compartment, through the haze of the locomotive smoke and window grime. She saw him standing in the middle of the platform, trying to gauge where her car would pull to a stop, his white hair long and wispy, tangled by the breeze, his shoulders stooped. It suddenly became clear to her that Grandma was the one who cultivated his image of a commander. The power he projected, his weight, his authority Sasha was so intimidated by, his permanent seat at the head of the table—all existed because of Grandma. Like a sculptor, she molded him into a stern father and grandfather, a protector, the hard-edged face of the family everyone feared and respected, maybe so that she herself could remain gentle and kind and still survive in the heartland of their heartless motherland. And now, with her no longer there, he simply disintegrated down to his essence: an old man, lost to the point of being extinct, squinting at the numbers on the train cars, hobbling up the platform as the train chugged and clattered forward and sighed its last breath.

It only took seconds, as the front door gave a familiar creak and Sasha stepped over the threshold of the house, for memories to spill over and flood the senses. She had to prop herself up against the cupboard made from dark wood that only turned darker over the years. It was where Grandma kept the everyday plates on the lower shelf and the tea service with red roses they used for holidays—her family’s gift for their wedding—on top. The plates were all there, neatly stacked up, the holiday service probably not touched since May 9, Victory Day, when she always pulled out the cups and saucers with roses, two extra sets on the table for Sima and Kolya.

Sasha thinks of a day when she was six or seven, when Grandma took her to get their bread rations and look for lines. If there was a line, she said, you must always join it because there is food at the other end.

They walked along the tracks, away from the loop where the streetcar ended its route, past the gray wooden houses lining their street, past the fences hiding black currant and gooseberry bushes next to what in the summer would be beds with beets, carrots, and dill.

Near the center of the town, behind rows of barbed wire, a group of men in faded military uniforms was clearing debris from a square of wasteland that used to be a school or a store; Sasha was too young to remember. They were German soldiers, prisoners of war, those enemies who had invaded their land. Only they didn’t look like enemies or invaders; they looked like the rest of them: sharp-faced and hungry, exhausted by the war.