The loft is packed with piles of old magazines full of pictures of elegant women in long dresses, holding open fans, parasols, and leashes attached to small dogs in their long, ringed fingers. The pages also show plump jars of cream to make your skin soft as velvet, right alongside elongated bottles of liquid guaranteed to turn your hair thick as a horse’s mane. She sits straining her eyes in the scarce light that sifts from the entranceway, stooping over articles describing the best way to handle your maid’s lack of sewing ability when you’re invited to a ball or the least expensive menu for a formal Christmas dinner to hand to your cook. The words maid and cook, she knows, are bourgeois and retrograde, atavisms of the tsarist past that the Revolution extracted from their society, like a cancer. She couldn’t hear her grandfather use these words without irony, but Grandma somehow seems to fit in with those parasols, hats, and long, flowing skirts, and Sasha often imagines her free of glasses and wrinkles, giving instructions to cooks and maids in her low, patient voice.

There are also poems in these magazines by writers whose names, although she is almost eleven, she has never heard before, names absent from their literature textbooks and even from the catalog of the entire Ivanovo library. It is, she knows, because those poets wrote about unsocialist things, devoting every line to feelings rather than the workers’ accomplishments, which was clearly selfish and individualistic from the point of view of their new progressive communist collective.

Since they both learned how to read at five, Sasha has shared all these books and magazines with Marik in the loft, where the two of them have crouched for hours in the dusty murk. She often wishes she could share these hidden stories with Andrei, too, so that all three of them would play Robinson Crusoe or Mowgli or Don Quixote, but she knows this is only a dream, because Andrei, who does not come from an intelligentny family, is not allowed into their house.