“What’s the NKVD?” Sasha asks, the ominous letters from the journal clanging on her tongue like sounds of a latching padlock.

“Where did you hear about the NKVD?” her mother asks suspiciously.

“From someone at school,” Sasha lies.

“The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs,” her mother says, tossing the potato peels into a waste bucket. For a minute, she is silent. “Grandma’s brother Volya used to live with us before the war,” she says, having decided to bring the NKVD to life with her uncle’s story. “In 1937, they arrested him for telling a joke. He lived in this house, with Aunt Lilya and their fifteen-year-old daughter.” Her voice now is stern, as if she were delivering a lecture. “There was a knock on the door in the middle of the night. I can still hear it, the kind of knock that only comes at two or three in the morning. Two men in black coats announced that Uncle Volya was under arrest. They didn’t bother to say why they were taking him away. Weeks later, Aunt Lilya learned that as part of his job in a propaganda agency, Uncle Volya had taken a stranger from Moscow to a restaurant. There, not knowing he was sitting next to a good citizen dispatched by the NKVD to listen to conversations with strangers, Uncle Volya told a joke. It wasn’t even a political joke,” she says and shakes her head. “But he should’ve been more careful around strangers. He shouldn’t have babbled. Babbling is dangerous; it’s only one step from treason.” Sasha knows what her mother is referring to: they’ve all seen the poster of a woman in a red head kerchief with a finger across her lips and the caption NE BOLTAI in big red letters.

“But how could they arrest him for a joke?” Sasha asks, glad that she didn’t tell her mother about the journal she found. “Even if he babbled.” She thinks about the early morning when they took away Marik’s father, almost four years ago. Did he also tell a joke? Did he babble? “I babble; my friends babble at school. We babble all the time. Babbling is just speaking. Does this mean that we can’t speak? Should we all be deaf and mute, as Grandpa demands when we sit at the table to eat?”

Her mother opens the door of the kitchen stove and shoves the remaining kindling inside. She lights a match and holds it to the thinnest pieces until they catch fire. The flickering flames are dancing on her face, and Sasha sees the anger rising in her eyes.