She tells him about a painting that used to frighten her when she was little. A tiny skeleton of an unborn child her mother brought from her anatomy museum stands next to a mirror where Kolya’s face is reflected, a violin leaning against the mirror’s frame. She was afraid to enter her grandparents’ room when she first saw it, until Grandma said she shouldn’t be. The strange painting, she explained, showed Kolya as he saw himself, between the violin that was art and the skeleton that was death. As soon as she said it, the picture snapped into focus in Sasha’s mind, and she felt stupid that she hadn’t seen it herself. It became transparent, but it didn’t stop being eerie. With his pencil and his brush and his own proximity to death, Uncle Kolya infused it with power, as dark and insidious as the word front.

She tries to imagine Leningrad, where Kolya studied painting, with the Neva flowing through its center, the river shackled in its granite embankments. She tries to imagine the Winter Palace, the home of the tsars who, by their staggering opulence and their indifference toward the workers, had oppressed the country for centuries before they were deposed as a result of the workers’ revolutionary intervention. Dictatorship of the proletariat, Grandpa says in a deep, proud voice, although she is not sure, since he used to be a peasant, how he fits into this dictatorial plan.

She can’t see Kolya talking proudly about the dictatorship of the proletariat, or about any other dictatorship. She knows this from her mother’s portrait, from the light in her eyes and her ironic smile she sees only on Kolya’s canvas. She knows this from Grandma’s effervescence in the family painting, where her grandfather needed to hold her down so that she wouldn’t sail into the sky. Kolya was an artist and could see things others couldn’t see. His soul, his dusha—the word Sasha learned from Grandma—was exposed, unprotected by the things they all wrap around themselves like winter clothes. This is what probably killed him: the war and his naked soul.