But Andrei doesn’t talk about his father. He doesn’t talk to him, either, at least outside: when his father smokes on the bench by the shed, Andrei is nowhere to be seen, although the shed has been the place for the three of them to meet for years. Maybe Andrei was expecting a different father, someone taller and shaved, someone less scary and more heroic. Maybe he thought that his father would immediately go to work and break all records, like those workers in street posters: coal miners with faces dusted in soot or steelmakers peering into a furnace, a red glow of liquid metal reflected in their goggles. Andrei’s father’s only occupation seems to be rolling cigarettes, smoking by the shed, and yelling curses at Andrei’s mother, who every day beats the dirt of the courtyard with a broom, muttering to herself and whipping up clouds of dust as she nears the shed.

Sasha notices that Andrei is now a head taller than she is, and when he stands next to her, her eyes are at the level of his mouth. For some strange reason, she notices his mouth, the way it curls when he speaks or wraps around a cigarette he steals from his father and smokes behind the lilac bushes at the end of the streetcar route. She notices the thick, stubborn curl of hair that falls across his forehead and makes him jerk his head to get it out of his eyes, which makes him look cavalier and almost grown-up. She notices that when she grabs his arm or holds her hands around his neck in their old game of War, he tenses as if in pain, as if she stepped on his injured toe.

She notices that her other friend, Marik, no longer looks or sounds like the old Marik. His voice doesn’t seem to know if it wants to remain at the height of hers or descend to the depth of Andrei’s, and when it dips and soars in the course of a single sentence, Marik often tears his glasses off and starts wiping them in a nervous, angry movement. She also notices that Marik’s forehead has erupted in pimples, and his bones seem to have grown too big for his skin, bulging at his ankles and his wrists. Thinking about the changes in her friends, Sasha wonders if they also notice changes in her.

More and more often, when no one is home, Sasha steals into the storage loft, where Kolya’s journal is telling her about forbidden things, about what her mother and her teachers refuse to talk about.

February 7, 1942