• • •

Tanya and Vasili went to the hospital to visit Tanya’s aunt Zoya, the physicist. Zoya was seventy-four and had breast cancer. As the wife of a general, she had a private room. Visitors were allowed in two at a time, so Tanya and Vasili waited outside with other family members.

After a while Uncle Volodya came out, holding the arm of his thirty-nine-year-old son, Kotya. A strong man with a heroic war record, Volodya was now as helpless as a child, following where he was led, sobbing uncontrollably into a handkerchief that was already sodden with tears. They had been married forty years.

Tanya went in with her cousin Galina, the daughter of Volodya and Zoya. She was shocked by her aunt’s appearance. Zoya had been head-turningly beautiful, even into her sixties, but now she was cadaverously thin, almost bald, and clearly only days or perhaps hours from the end. However, she was drifting in and out of sleep, and did not seem to be in pain. Tanya guessed she was dosed with morphine.

“Volodya went to America after the war, to find out how they had made the Hiroshima bomb,” Zoya said, contentedly indiscreet under the influence of the drug. Tanya thought of telling her to say no more, then reflected that these secrets no longer mattered to anyone. “He brought back a Sears Roebuck Catalogue,” Zoya went on, smiling at the memory. “It was full of beautiful things that any American could buy: dresses, bicycles, records, warm coats for children, even tractors for farmers. I wouldn’t have believed it—I would have taken it for propaganda—but Volodya had been there and knew it was true. Ever since then I’ve wanted to go to America, just to see it. Just to look at all that plenty. I don’t think I’ll make it now, though.” She closed her eyes again. “Never mind,” she murmured, and she seemed to sleep again.

After a few minutes, Tanya and Galina went out, and two of the grandchildren took their places at the bedside.

Dimka had arrived and joined the group waiting in the corridor. He took Tanya and Vasili aside and spoke to them in a low voice. “I recommended you for the conference in Naples,” he said to Vasili.

“Thank you—”

“Don’t thank me. I was unsuccessful. I had a conversation today with the unpleasant Yevgeny Filipov. He’s in charge of this kind of thing now, and he knows that you were sent to Siberia for subversive activities back in 1961.”

Tanya said: “But Vasili has been rehabilitated!”

“Filipov knows that. Rehabilitation is one thing, he said, and going abroad is another. It’s out of the question.” Dimka touched Tanya’s arm. “I’m sorry, sister.”

“We’re stuck here, then,” Tanya said.

Vasili said bitterly: “A leaflet at a poetry reading, a quarter of a century ago, and I’m still being punished. We keep thinking that our country is changing, but it never really does.”

Tanya said: “Like Aunt Zoya, we’re never going to see the world outside.”