Her mother pulls her down from her shoulders, takes out a handkerchief, and starts wiping Sasha’s cheeks. “She’s tired,” she says to Katya, patting Sasha on the head. “Getting up at six and all that walking.”

Katya opens her arms, and Sasha jumps up and wraps her legs around her, clutching at her shoulders and flattening herself against her polka-dot dress. Katya knows Sasha is not tired, and she rocks in rhythm with Katya’s steps, still wailing. She thinks of the three sisters, who wouldn’t be so desperate to get to Moscow if they could see the spectacle of the whole politburo shaking on sticks. She thinks of the tiny man against the granite wall, their father who could never be her father. She thinks about another life, at the only place where it is possible, Theater. She sobs on the trolley, in the courtyard, on the stairs; she sobs on the landing and in the apartment’s long, murky hallway.

“Nu, nu,” says her mother, but Sasha still clings to Katya, sniffling into her shoulder. As long as she is in Katya’s arms, the Red Square teeth will not be able to get her. Katya is her shield because she is from Moscow and she knows what they, living in Ivanovo, are too far away to see.

Then an old man comes out of Uncle Seryozha’s room, peels her off Katya, and carries her somewhere in his tobacco-smelling arms. She lets him because he is also from Moscow so he also knows. He puts her on the divan in Baba Yulia’s room and sits next to her and brushes her head with his hard hands full of calluses. But they feel good, these hands, so she stops crying and for the first time looks into his face, unshaved and ravaged, into his colorless, unsmiling, frozen eyes. It seems strange, the difference between his hands, warm and alive, and his dead eyes, but it isn’t stranger than the eternally dead, birdlike Lenin lying under glass or Stalin, their leader and revolutionary glory, who turned out to be an ant.

They sit like this for a long time, Uncle Seryozha and Sasha, not saying a word, not moving. His face is hard and pitted, like their roads in Ivanovo when there is no rain. She doesn’t know what he is thinking. Maybe about this place Magadan, where he was lucky to have spent only ten years; maybe about his illness that makes him hate all holidays; maybe about the ten special screws that got him sick in the first place.