“Eat your soup,” says Grandma and pushes another slice of bread toward her.

Back in the under-the-blanket murk, Sasha decided she would not eat, so she shakes her head and presses her lips together to show she is serious.

“Eat,” demands her mother.

She sits with her hands on her knees, listening to her ailing backside.

“Are you deaf?” asks Grandpa.

“Just a couple of spoonfuls,” says Grandma in her regular soft voice.

“Did you hear me?” asks her mother. “What did I just say?”

“When I eat, I’m deaf and mute,” she answers, quoting one of Grandpa’s house rules.

“Then I’ll have to feed you like a baby,” says her mother and gets up. She sits next to Sasha on the bench, lifts a spoonful of soup from her own plate, and pushes it against Sasha’s lips. She tenses her mouth, but her mother pushes harder.

“Next time, it’s nettles,” says Grandpa and gives her a hard look from across the table. His eyes are blue, the color of the forget-me-nots he grows around the gate, with grooves of deep wrinkles radiating into his white hair. He was a peasant before the Revolution, but after 1917, when the people rose up with hammers and scythes to liberate themselves from the yoke of tsarist oppression, he became an engineer. Grandpa’s peasant ancestry is the reason they have three rooms and a kitchen all to themselves. Before the Revolution, the entire house belonged to Grandma’s father. He was a factory supervisor and because he hadn’t been exploited like workers or peasants, he didn’t deserve to keep the place where he lived. Now one half of the house is theirs, with three families of neighbors sharing the other half, one family in each room. Grandpa must have been a pretty important peasant because they have an indoor toilet on their side of the house, while the three other families all troop to the outhouse in the back. Sasha doesn’t understand why Grandma’s father deserved to be thrown out of his own house and then shot for supervising factory work, but she has a sense no one wants to talk about this, so she doesn’t ask.