There is nothing Sasha can say to this. It’s useless to tell him that Stalin killed as many millions of their own people as Hitler did, that their motherland is nothing but a colossal mountain of lies. Her Bolshevik grandfather, ardent in his self-righteousness, will remain here until the end of his days, tending to his radishes and apple trees, dusting the branches of black currants with DDT, cranking the handle of the well, leafing through the four pages of Pravda. Fossilized like an ant in a piece of Baltic amber. Sasha finds perverse satisfaction with the image she has conjured up in her mind—her grandpa as a relic—but she can see he isn’t yet ready to fossilize and give up his power. His nostrils flare, and he draws in breath as he used to do before he flogged her.

“You’re nothing but an arrogant fool,” he thunders. “You think you know things, but you don’t. You think you’re like one of those pundits who live in the capital and see the truth.” He straightens his spine, pulls his shoulders back. “The truth is that you know nothing. You’re blind, just like your mother. You don’t see that all these years, you’ve been pining for a murderer. A man who killed his own father.”

His words strike her with the stinging force of nettles whipped across her face, and now it is Sasha’s turn to grab the bedpost. The day of the fire flashes in her memory, the figure of Andrei crouched in front of the smoldering heap of wood that used to be his house, a smell of wet ash hanging in the air.

“Everyone knows that his father was nothing but a drunken convict. A man who threw a Molotov cocktail through the window of his house to trap his wife inside. That was his way to get back at her for all those times she dragged him back home, his shirt stained with vomit and his pants soaked with piss. All those bystanders, the crowd that watched, think they know the truth, but what they saw was what became the official story. I was in the garden, and I saw what really happened. I saw it all.”

Sasha lowers herself onto the other end of the bed. They are both sitting now, facing each other.