With her mother trying to feed her, Sasha can see she is at a disadvantage, just like when she was pinned to the bench, so she relaxes her lips and lets the spoon spill its contents into her mouth. She holds it there, warm, salty water with potato chunks and grains of barley, as her mother repeats the motion three times and then goes back to her seat. Maybe she realizes Sasha is not going to swallow it, or maybe she is simply tired and hungry after work and wants to finish her own food. When all the plates are emptied but Sasha’s and she is finally released from the table, she goes outside and, her body still aching from the policeman’s shove and her grandfather’s belt, spits out the soup into Grandpa’s gooseberry bush.

3

3

Marik is intelligentny, a word Sasha’s mother uses to characterize people. It is a salad mix of education, culture, intelligence, and manners, and all their neighbors and acquaintances have been divided into intelligentny and not intelligentny. Somehow the first group always comes out much smaller than the second. Not intelligentny: the three families who live in the other half of their house; every saleswoman in every grocery store, including Aunt Dusya from the bakery, with her carbon-penciled eyebrows and a kitchen voice; Sasha’s friend Andrei because his mother is a janitor who finished only the seven compulsory grades of secondary school and now wears a burlap apron over her cotton dress when she sweeps the yard with a bunch of twigs attached to a stick. Intelligentny: Irina Vasilievna, who gives piano lessons in her house two blocks away; Marik and his mother, pale and freckled and, as rumor has it, a Jew.

Sasha doesn’t know what Jews are and how they are different from the rest of them, but from the way people lower their voices when they say yevrey, a word that is spat out like a wormy chunk of apple, she guesses Jews are worse than they themselves are in some dark and hidden way they cannot discuss in public. She knows only one other Jew—Moisey Davidovich Zlotnikov, the head of the anatomy department of her mother’s medical institute and the adviser of her dissertation. Sasha has seen Dr. Zlotnikov only once, when her mother took her to work because Grandma’s heart was hurting, and he didn’t look different from any other person in Ivanovo. He had glasses and a goatee, and he rose from his desk and bent down to shake Sasha’s hand as if she were an anatomy professor and not a first grader with two skinny braids.