When Sasha slinks in through the open door, she doesn’t see Marik right away. Instead, she sees an unfamiliar man in a black coat and ushanka hat ripping apart the bed, turning the mattress over, tearing off the sheet, and yanking the blanket out of its duvet cover. She sees another man shaking out every book from the shelves, cutting out the binding, and squinting down its spine, which must be taking a long time because Marik’s mother is a literature teacher and has a lot of books. Sasha sees her standing by the table, next to her husband, clutching the back of a chair with both hands as though she would collapse if she didn’t. The veins on the backs of her hands are swollen, thick as ropes. No one speaks, and the only sounds in the room are of tearing and slashing, the sounds of destruction. When the contents of the entire bookcase have finally been violated, another man, short and stumpy as a fireplug, snatches the briefcase of Marik’s father off a chair and rips it open. He scans the sheets of paper with mathematical formulas scrawled in a hurried handwriting, as if he could understand any of them. Then he lifts his eyes and stares at the wall.

“Citizen Garkovsky, you are under arrest,” he announces.

This is when Sasha sees her friend. Marik is crouching in the corner behind an armchair where he and Sasha usually read together after school. His head is between his knees, his red hair sticking out in all directions like taut little springs, so Sasha cannot see his face.

“For what?” asks Marik’s mother in a ragged voice.

“You’ll find out,” says the fireplug, avoiding her eyes.

Marik’s mother gives him a hard stare, as though she were facing a student who had misbehaved the entire year and failed the course. “You were in my class a few years ago, weren’t you?” she says. “I remember you. You were a good student. You liked Lermontov.”

The guard turns away and bangs the briefcase with papers on the table, as if it were the papers’ fault that in eighth grade, he liked Lermontov, that he was a good student, that now he is here to arrest his former teacher’s husband.

“It’s all a mistake, just a misunderstanding,” Marik’s father says. He tries to speak in his usual manner, but his voice is cracking. It is a voice Sasha hears every morning, a voice of a mathematician from the Academy of Sciences, a voice that has always made her feel secure. She wants him to be right; she wants it all to be a mistake. She is in first grade and hasn’t read Lermontov yet, but how can someone who likes poetry, she wonders, arrest her best friend’s father? How can a good student of literature arrest anyone?