She took a path that ran past a kiosk where a round woman in a stained apron and henna hair presided behind cones with fruit drinks, and that was when she saw him. He stood by the kiosk with a glass of golden liquid in his hand, his resplendent uniform cinched by a belt with a shining buckle, his black boots reflecting the sun. Two women on a nearby bench undoubtedly saw him, too; they whispered to each other, covering their faces with their hands as they spoke, and each gave him a quick, furtive glance. But Sasha had an advantage: she was already on the path, skipping toward him, pretending to be drawn to the multicolored drinks sparkling in their vats.

When she was about a meter away, she stopped. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that the women ceased whispering; they were now silent, their hands sternly in their laps, their eyes latched onto her—cold and hostile, like the eyes of behind-the-wall neighbors who didn’t have an indoor toilet.

“Zdravstvuite,” she said politely, as if he were her teacher. The man swallowed what was left in the glass, and she saw the sharp bone in the front of his neck move up and down. He looked at her, and his eyes crinkled, golden and liquid, as if the juice he’d just swallowed, instead of going down his throat, went up and lit his eyes from within.

“Do you want to be my father?” she asked, and from the way his smile spread across his face, she knew he did, even before he could open his mouth. “Come,” she said and grabbed him by the hand. “I’ll take you to Mama.”

They walked past the two women on the bench, stiff and silent, past the empty-sleeved invalid and the drunk sleeping under a tree. She saw her mother on a bench near the sandbox, where a bunch of nursery-school girls in berets were digging a ditch that looked like a war trench.

She clasped her mother’s hand and set it down onto the man’s broad palm. Her mother’s face was open and unprotected, lit by surprise. “Here,” Sasha told her. “I want him to be my father.”