The next few weeks were light and breathless, like the anticipation of a New Year’s Eve. The man’s name was Alexei, Lyosha for short, and he was a military pilot. On his first visit, he came to their door dressed in his uniform, which temporarily melted the icy blue stare of Grandpa, who didn’t trust strangers. His word for strangers was chuzhoi, as opposed to svoi, our own. The same words Vera in their drama school uses to separate actors from those on the other side of the curtain. You can only trust svoi, said Grandpa, a small bunch that included their immediate family here and Grandma’s sister who lived in Kineshma, ninety kilometers away. Sasha was not sure she liked Grandpa’s philosophy. If what he said was true, she couldn’t trust Marik, or Andrei, or Marik’s mother, who taught them about Pushkin. If they couldn’t trust anyone but their family, how could they even get on a streetcar without risking their lives? And what about those radio reports of tons of grain they never saw? When it came to the radio, did Grandpa not trust the news, either?

The reason he wasn’t sure if he could trust Lyosha, she thought, was the melting gaze in her mother’s eyes when Lyosha looked in her direction. That was when she forgot about Grandpa, which instantly stripped him of his command status because, as they all knew, a commander could never be ignored.

Sasha liked Lyosha’s strong arms that lifted her onto his shoulders, from where everything seemed smaller. Surveying the familiar from above, she sailed over their yard, past the envious eyes of Andrei and Marik sitting on the roof over the garbage dump; past the babushkas on a bench, who stopped chewing on sunflower seeds and burst into furious whispers; past the fences bleached gray by the winter and the rain that had recently turned their street into an alley of mud. Even at seven, she knew that what drove the babushkas to flap their arms and fuse together into what looked like a murder of crows was envy. Lyosha was not an invalid and not a drunk, with arms and legs intact, and that made him a rare commodity in postwar Ivanovo. He could have been the only man with extremities and a smile to roam their streets in the last five years.

But after four months of this privileged, man-infused existence, something happened. Her mother’s eyes were no longer liquid, because Lyosha only stopped by once a week and was not there long enough to lift Sasha onto his shoulders so she could parade around the yard. He smoked by the porch, taking long and deliberate breaths so he didn’t have to say anything. Her mother stood next to him, waiting for something other than a nicotine cloud to emerge from his mouth, her eyes surveying the ground around her feet.