“What is it like working for the Young Communist League?” she asks instead. After delivering mail and unloading freight trains, Andrei now has a respectable job, working in the center of Ivanovo, where he takes a streetcar every morning six days a week. This new job makes Grandpa, for the first time in his life, greet Andrei when he crosses paths with him outside. “Good morning, young man,” he says, looking up from an apple tree branch he is dusting with DDT and nodding, but barely, not to let Andrei think he is too special. But Andrei is special. He now wears a navy sports jacket he bought at the secondhand store near the bus station, which sharpens his shoulders and makes him look handsome and important.

“Much better than carrying sacks. I shuffle papers and sometimes the phone rings, so I answer it. Sometimes I go to meetings. Not a bad job overall.” He fumbles in his jacket pocket and shakes a cigarette out of the pack. It is a filtered cigarette, not like the rough filter-less Belomor that hangs on the lip of every Ivanovo man. He strikes a match and blows out the smoke, letting her breathe in its vaguely pleasant, adult smell. “They have accepted me, just as you did. It didn’t matter where I came from, as long as I believed in them.”

Sasha thinks of Grandpa, who believes all the news he hears on the radio, and of her mother, who believes that the war was all heroism and valor. Or maybe she doesn’t completely believe it. After all, she worked in a hospital one kilometer from the front, and she must have seen what Kolya saw. But she is no longer sure what Andrei believes in. He has become a mystery, and maybe this is precisely why she is here, lying in the grass next to him. He is like a tough equation she has to solve in math class. She knows she has to unravel the variables that will allow her to learn who he really is, to get down to the X he harbors at his core.

He looks down, shakes the cigarette ash into the grass. “The Young Communist League has saved my life. I was going nowhere, and they gave me a sense of purpose; they made me one of them.” He pauses and peers down into the grass teeming with grasshoppers and ants. “My whole life, people have been looking at me and smirking. I’m not stupid; I know what they whisper behind my back: There goes the loser, the son of a street cleaner. The one who is likely to end up in jail, just like his alcoholic father. But with them, for the first time in my life, I have a future.”