Behind the books is a round box, upholstered in fabric that was shiny many years ago, but is now the color of muddied cream. She undoes the faded ribbon that is tied around the box and lifts the top, placing it on the pile of books. Inside there is a woman’s wide-brimmed hat, white with a green ribbon and a small white rose, a hat from a time when women worried about their hair and gave their cooks instructions for formal Christmas dinners. She carefully places the hat on her head and sits for a few minutes in its soft prerevolutionary embrace, wishing that she had a mirror to see what young Grandma might have looked like. She imagines her stepping out of a carriage, holding up her skirt so that the hem wouldn’t sweep against the wheel of the droshky covered with Ivanovo dust; she imagines her asking a maid to set up a samovar for family friends, thinking of a different life. Has she ever dreamed of a life other than the life she has lived in Ivanovo? Has Sasha’s mother?

She puts the hat back into the box, closes the lid, and ties it with ribbon, as if she had never been here to let the tsarist past crammed with unnecessary luxuries invade their simple unaccessorized present.

Behind the hatbox with Grandma’s prerevolutionary hat, she sees something else, something that looks like a school notebook. Its light-blue cover is faded and frayed, pocked by stains and streaks, as if it had been lying somewhere by the road in a ditch, splashed with mud by passing horse carriages and trucks. She weighs it in her palm: there is a lot of heft to these crinkled pages with their torn-off corners, which look as though they had been dropped in water and dried more than once, which look as though they had been scarred by fire. On the front page, in an angular, masculine hand, are the words that almost stop her heart, Kolya Kuzmin, her uncle missing in action.

She opens the notebook and begins to read.

January 9, 1942

The first time I saw a German up close was three months ago, in October. The five of us were retreating from the enemy advancement when a band of our soldiers, the remnants of an artillery battery, emerged from the woods after sunset. That’s how I met Seryoga. He took a sip from a flask with a Bronze Horseman on the cap, and right then I knew he was from Leningrad. He’d studied chemistry at the university, he said, a few steps away from my art academy. Now, instead of walking along the Griboyedov Canal, we were trudging through the woods loaded with a rifle, six grenades, a handgun, two cans of sprats, ten slices of dried bread, and a flask with water.