His words are hardly a revelation. This is what Sasha expected to hear, but she knows this is only the beginning of their battle.

“You had no right,” he sputters. “Who gave you the right?”

Sasha leans toward him, the pages with Kolya’s handwriting in her hand like a weapon. “Did you have the courage to tell Grandma about this letter?” she demands, although she already knows the answer.

He is silent, and she is livid, sparks of rage spewing in her throat. “Did you tell her that her son was alive?” she shouts.

“This”—he stabs his index finger at the letter—“would have killed her.”

“This?” She lifts the letter. “This would have killed her?” she yells. “This?” She shakes the letter, a piece of damning evidence that sprang to light twelve years too late. “This would have given her a reason to live! She waited for this letter her whole life. For this piece of paper. For proof that Kolya was alive.”

Her grandfather grips the bedpost behind him, leans on it, and sits down, his hand clutching at his chest. A terrible thought rises in her mind: if he died here, right in front of her, it wouldn’t even make her cry. It wouldn’t make her feel anything.

“I did write back,” he says, his voice muffled, as if it came from an empty barrel. “I wrote back that we were ashamed of him. I wrote that he was a coward. That we no longer have a son.”

“You wrote we?” she says. “You wrote we, without ever showing the letter to Grandma?” In her mind, Sasha can see her grandfather carefully inscribing the foreign address in Latin letters, sealing the envelope by spitting on the glue and holding it with two fingers, as though it were a worm.

“You know nothing about the war,” he growls. “You know nothing and have no right to judge me. He should have died like a soldier. Instead, my son was a traitor.”

“You’re right. I only know about the war from what Kolya wrote in his journal. And from what Mama told me. But that was enough for me to know he was not a traitor. Enough to know that he was a hero in a country that betrayed him.”

“We fought, we lost millions, but we won,” he says, the old fire sparkling in his eyes once again. “We saved the world. Soviet Russia, the first socialist state, under the leadership of Stalin, saved the entire world.”