At night, lying on the divan next to her mother, Sasha thinks about the three sisters and the actresses who played them. She thinks about how they believed the words Chekhov had written, pretending to be Olga, Masha, and Irina. But it isn’t the same as pretending to want to be a teacher or an engineer so that no one suspects that she really wants to be an actress. This is the true pretending. It is Theater, the real make-believe, exciting and magical, not at all like the everyday make-believe they all have to live by.

In the morning, Katya takes them to see Moscow by trolleybus, and they get off in front of the central food store. Inside, behind the heavy doors of glass and oak, it feels like the rooms of Ivanovo’s only art gallery. But it doesn’t have the odor of a museum. It smells of the flour that hangs in the air of the bakery department, where bricks of black bread and loaves of white bulka are stacked on shelves like firewood, of milk that an aproned saleswoman ladles into aluminum vats that people pass to her over the counter, of cookies with patterns of the Moscow spires embossed on the front. The glass displays show three different kinds of cheese: a dense brick called Soviet, an anemic-looking wheel of Russian, and a cube of punctured Swiss—all real, all for sale. In front of the glass, as if guarding all this treasure, are chocolate bars called Soviet Builder in paper sleeves with a picture of a muscular man brandishing a hammer.

Even Sasha’s mother, who was a surgeon during the war and doesn’t surprise easily, stops in front of a meat counter to gawk at the signs for beef and pork, at the bones piled in rows, at livers and kidneys, dark and glistening, perfect for the sour pickle soup they haven’t had since Sasha was four.

But the most unbelievable thing of all is not how much they have in Moscow. It is how little they buy. In Ivanovo, when Grandma and Sasha have stood in line from noon until her mother returns from work, they always buy kilograms of whatever it is they are standing in line for. They buy as many kilograms as the store is willing to dispense, as many as they can carry home. That’s why when Grandma goes to the store, she always takes Sasha and sometimes even Grandpa. Here a woman in a felt hat is frivolously asking for a hundred grams of ham, sliced, please. A hundred grams? If ham magically turned up on the counter of their Ivanovo store, Grandma would never think of buying only a hundred grams, and their saleswoman, Aunt Dusya, certainly wouldn’t waste time slicing it.

“You have a good life here,” concedes her mother, who doesn’t usually have an opportunity to talk about good things. “All this food and no lines.”