“No lines?” says Katya, laughter dimpling her cheeks. “I’ll show you a line.”

They meander along a narrow cobblestone street that deposits them next to a wall made of shining granite panels. A half a block away, where the granite turns a corner, a thick line of people hugs the wall and disappears into the next street. They join the line, which moves in slow thrusts, like a purple rainworm across their compost pile, and wait with everyone else.

“It’s Lenin’s mausoleum,” says her mother. “You must behave.”

She must have forgotten that Sasha has been behaving since December.

Two hours later, they reach the doors guarded by two soldiers with guns. The line heaves forward and around the platform on which lies Lenin, eternally alive. Only he doesn’t look alive. He looks dried up, with the head and face of a bird. He looks eternally dead.

“His body was preserved with formaldehyde,” her mother whispers into her ear, “the same way they preserve bodies in our anatomy department.”

She thinks of the dissection room at her mother’s medical institute, with its tall tables on which lie brown bodies—not at all frightening, full of revelations about what was previously hidden—with every nerve and capillary and membrane exposed by her mother’s skillful hands.

When they pass the table where Lenin lies under glass, her mother pushes her through the crowd to the first row. At this close range, Lenin is as uninteresting as she saw from a distance, yellowish skin stretched over his bony head, dead and undissected. But she must display proper solemnity, like the rest of the people who wrinkle their brows and pleat their mouths into mourning lines, as if he died only yesterday and not in 1924, when her mother was only seven.

It is early morning on May 1, and they are walking toward the Moskva River, behind Red Square, where Katya’s group from the telephone center is assembling before the demonstration. It is sunny and warm, perfect weather for International Workers’ Day, and the streets have been washed by blue trucks that Sasha saw earlier spraying water in heavy, blazing arches. She is between her mother and Katya, holding their hands, jumping over the puddles left by trucks. They are wearing their best dresses—a sunflower cotton shirtwaist for her mother and red polka dots for Katya. Today they don’t mind her jumping, and they hold hands and swing her over the wet pavement as long as she wants.

The people from Katya’s telephone center look as confident and bold as the workers with thick muscles from the poster of a Five-Year Plan they passed on the way here. They unfurl red banners on long wooden sticks and hoist up huge portraits of stern, unsmiling men.