The sergeant spits out a black glob; the soot from burning telephone cable we use to thaw the ice in the trench has sifted down and settled in our lungs. “Next time the Fritzes come with their tanks or their planes, they’ll show you ‘Mumu,’” he says and stabs his finger toward the Germans’ positions. “This is what’s real.” He is a man of utter concreteness, and this time he is right. No Michelangelo or El Greco can shield you from machine guns. No Pushkin, or Turgenev, or even Tolstoy, who knew all about war, can protect you from a shell fragment piercing your back or a tank crawling over your trench. When the sergeant yells, “Attack!” we attack, even if we are ordered to run up a hill where a German machine gun sits buried in a cemented bunker, spewing fire we can’t extinguish. We attack, and after the first waves of us are mowed down, there are always more bodies to throw into the maw, more amateur soldiers to be fed to the meat grinder of battle by the decisions of our military commanders. They yell, “Attack,” and we attack. And those who don’t, those who are afraid to die, those who retreat toward the rear, are mowed down by machine guns of our own domestic making. Our own troops stationed in the rear, shooting all of those with weak nerves, those whose minds are clouded by seeing too many human guts wound around tank turrets, too many bodies with heads blown off, a bloody mess instead of legs, too much death. For fleeing death, they get death. Traitors is the word now attached to their corpses. What’s real is the only thing that matters at the front.

The words in the last sentence are smudged, and Sasha has difficulty making them out, but traitors is pressed into the paper. Was she also a traitor, she wonders, when she didn’t feel upset, like everybody else, at the news of Stalin’s death? Was she a traitor when she didn’t cry, along with all the teachers and other students?

On March 5, 1953, when Marik and Sasha were both ten, Marik’s mother interrupted her literature class and announced that everyone must proceed to the Pioneer meeting room without delay to listen to important news. She said “important,” not “sad” news, but as Sasha shuffled down the stairs next to Marik, she saw their math teacher on the stair landing, leaning on the wall, her shoulders trembling, her hand wiping tears from her face with a checkered handkerchief. This looked strange because Sasha never imagined their math teacher capable of any emotion beyond an angry frown when one of them couldn’t recite the multiplication table without tripping over 6 x 9.