Like Sasha, Lara has seen her father only in photographs, but she mourns him nevertheless. “Had he been there, he would have protected me,” she says quietly, staring at the blanket. “He wouldn’t have let that happen.” That is a secret she hasn’t told anyone in Pskov, but now she is far enough from home to have the courage to uncage it. It is as dark as that Sunday in Ivanovo, the day Sasha and Andrei don’t talk about, either.

“It was my mother’s fortieth birthday,” Lara says and as she speaks, Sasha can see her friend’s apartment crowded with at least twenty guests: her mother’s coworkers from the local cafeteria, all women; and their neighbors, three war widows from the first and second floors; and a married couple, Zina and Oleg, from across the hallway. Oleg is the only man they know who returned from the front. He drags his left foot, which was struck by shrapnel, and he yells and flings things when he gets drunk, but his wife is grateful that he is back home, alive.

The night before the party, Lara says, Gennadii, her older brother who just graduated from high school, lugged in a case of vodka and a case of wine, stacking them up in the corner of the kitchen. A half a bottle of vodka per person, the standard calculation for any celebration.

After all the potatoes, beets, and carrots were boiled, chopped, and drowned in mayonnaise, after trays of pirozhki were pulled out of the oven, brushed with milk, and covered with towels to soften—just as they were in celebrations in Sasha’s house—Lara teased her hair and outlined her eyes with coal. She was still in ninth grade, but that night, she remembers she was feeling very grown-up. The sounds of the doorbell announcing guests buzzed joy into her heart. The two tables were pushed together, the eating surface extended with several boards propped on boxes. Every guest had to stand up and deliver a toast—to her mother’s health, to success in work and private life, to happiness, which seemed to everybody abstract and elusive—and Lara quickly drank two glasses of wine, or was it three? After two hours of toasts and chasers, of vodka and pirozhki, the tables were pushed against the wall, and someone put on a record of a popular song Lara liked.