He pauses as they walk past a house with two babkas on the bench, whispering. “I’m not a master of anything yet,” he says, “but the glorious dream and the shining future—what Vadim promises—sound good to me. Wouldn’t you want to live in the shining future? Not like my father, who only lived in the rotten past.”

Sasha feels odd jealousy rising inside her, a jealousy toward Andrei’s boss she has never met, the person who has been next to him after the fire, soothing his grief with vodka, helping him heal. This is something she should have done, without the vodka part. All she can give Andrei now, it seems, is sympathy.

“I am so sorry about your mother,” she says. “And your father. You must feel so much pain . . . I’m terribly sorry.”

“Don’t feel sorry for my father.” Andrei’s face suddenly cringes with hatred. “He didn’t deserve your sympathy. He was a drunk and a criminal, and I wish he’d stayed in the camps where he belonged. I wish he’d never come back.” They turn onto a footpath leading to the river, and as they walk on the hardened dirt, the expanse of still water opens before their eyes. “All my father ever did was spout stories about his time in the camps, about the savagery and atrocities, stories I never believed even for a moment.”

Andrei falls silent. She watches his jaw tense as he swipes his hair off his forehead. They are now standing at the bank of the Uvod’ River, over the little beach carved by the water from the thicket of reeds and tall grass.

“Do you want to hear any of this?” he asks. “It’s gruesome, like some of your uncle’s war journal.”

Sasha nods. She is not sure she wants to hear it, but she knows Andrei is entrusting her with something he won’t share with anyone else. Probably not even with his boss. This may be Andrei’s response, she thinks, to her entrusting him with Kolya’s journal.

They sit down on the grass and stare into the water, black from peat.

“My father came back from the camps with no teeth and no forgiveness. He boiled with hate, and he unleashed that hate on us, but mostly on my mother. It was as if it were her fault that a quarter of his life had been stolen from him, as if she didn’t try hard enough to glue together the pieces of the wreck he had become. He said he told me those stories to teach me a life lesson. There is no friendship in the camps, he said. It’s always you against them. As if I needed a lesson from a thug. As if I was going to end up behind barbed wire, like him.”