She stood with her head down, thinking of that fishing trip, staring at the back of a chair in front of her where “Igor + Tanya = love” was scratched with a nail into the wood. With almost all the teachers and students weeping, she felt a strange mix of fear and curiosity, as if something overpowering had just ended. The entire assembly was now waiting to see how life could possibly continue after this tragedy that had reduced their intrepid principal to tears. Or maybe it wasn’t as tragic as the principal thought. Maybe the absence of Stalin from their lives would bring back Marik’s father after the three years of absence and uncertainty. Maybe it would make Sasha’s mother less anxious about Uncle Kolya’s journal and curl her lips back into a smile that had been wiped off by the war, a smile Sasha only knew from the portrait on the wall of their room painted by her uncle before Sasha was born.

9

9

Andrei’s father comes back in 1955. Short, with gray stubble sprouting through his cheeks and a nose like a wilted red potato forgotten in the cellar, he sits on a bench by the shed all day long, smoking unfiltered cigarettes that he rolls in his gnarled fingers before he lights them.

Where did he return from? The war ended ten years ago, and Sasha is old enough to know he didn’t return from the war. Their neighbors who live in the other half of their house sometimes whisper the word ugolovnik, a convicted criminal, when they pass him on the way to the store.

She waits for Andrei to say something about his father, to tell her where he has been all this time, to let her know if his father’s return has made her friend happy. Would she be happy if her own father came back? She is not sure. From the way Grandma pursed her mouth when Sasha asked about his photo in the album, she sensed that there was something disreputable about him, something not to be discussed around the dinner table, something slippery and shameful.