“I didn’t do anything. And I’m not a hooligan,” she says, knowing that this makes Andrei the hooligan. As hooligans do, he crossed the threshold into danger, and now Marik is lying behind this door, and her mother is probably already on her way here because she works on the hospital ambulance on Sundays, and her medical institute is only two blocks away.

Andrei slaps his hands over his ears to show that he can’t hear what the pot-warmer woman is saying. She looks at him suspiciously, fists on her hips. “Sit here and wait,” she says and points to a bench.

They don’t even have time to sit down before she sees her mother running down the hallway, scooping her in her arms, moving her fingers over her head and shoulders as though checking to see that she is in one piece.

On the way home, they pass a babushka with a baked-apple face who is weeping on a bench next to a house made from brown logs, dabbing a white handkerchief at her eyes, and a stubbled man in a wool hat wiping his nose with his sleeve behind the liquor store where he usually waits for a drinking companion. They should indeed both be crying, Sasha thinks, although she doesn’t know how they could have found out that Marik is dead. No vital signs. This is what the doctor with the thin neck, who had probably been her mother’s student, said when she opened the door they were not allowed to open. No vital signs, he said, as if he were still in her class and this was a test. Sasha has been to the morgue before, so she knows what this means. It means that the shell Andrei handed to Marik exploded with such ferocious force that its fragments pierced Marik’s padded coat and made little holes in his belly and intestines. Only this time, her mother couldn’t save him, as she had saved the boy at the frontline hospital, because it took them too long to drag Marik through the woods back to town. Would Marik still be alive if she hadn’t left the two of them by the bonfire? Would he be alive if her heart hadn’t raced each time Andrei’s sleeve inadvertently brushed against hers?

Since the word war first sputtered on her mother’s lips, death has been all around them. Her uncle Volya, who was arrested in 1937 for telling a joke. Uncle Volya’s daughter Nina, who volunteered for the front in 1942, a futile attempt to avenge her father’s death. Uncle Sima, who had been stationed on their border with Poland when German troops crossed into Russia on June 22, 1941, and was buried in Ivanovo a few weeks before she was born. Her father. Probably her uncle Kolya, who is still missing in action twelve years after the war.