Sasha looks down at the boards of the floor, scuffed almost white by their feet, by the intertwined lives now all happening at once. She sees her five-year-old mother in a navy dress, a picture she remembers from Grandma’s photo album. Did Sasha also have a dress like this, with a white sailor’s collar stretched over her shoulders, complete with the canvas shoes rubbed with chalk? She begins to feel the weight of its thick, heavy cotton on her arms. Was it her mother’s dress or Sasha’s? She lifts her eyes and through the window she sees Kolya standing by the apple tree, in round glasses that make his features even softer, trying to reach an apple dangling on the highest branch, laughing at his own clumsiness when the branch he is holding slips out of his hand and whips him in the face. As images flood her consciousness, the present and the past jostle for space, crowding the room like pieces of furniture from her childhood, bending and breaking the paths of their lives she has always assumed to be linear. She stares down at the letter in her hands, at her and her mother’s names written twelve years ago with such fierce urgency somewhere on the other side of the world.

When the Leningrad Front moved west, I moved with it. So much death had passed before my eyes by then that I couldn’t comprehend how my soul could still take more in. I was almost numb, and yet we had to keep walking, pulling our cannons and machine guns and carrying our backpacks filled with rations, ammunition, and unsent letters home. I walked and pulled cannons, like everyone around me. As the Germans retreated, they mined the roads, and we had to move carefully, inching forward. In my mind, I can still see an armored vehicle twisted into a tangle of metal parts, bodies of soldiers blasted out of the truck. A wounded cow baying by the side of the road, the image of a burning building reflected in its eyes. I still see a dog running across a charred field, a human bone in its mouth.