All her life, Olga Konstantinovna had received and given care. Coming to terms with solitude was going to be hard. Her husbands had died. Her friends were dropping off one by one. But she was not one to complain. Never. Her pride wouldn’t allow it.

The lift jolted to a stop at the ground floor. She made the sign of the cross: “God bless my daughter.”

Olga Konstantinovna had over her lifetime witnessed two eras and the death of four husbands. None of this weakened her resolve, even if nobody needed her anymore; not the country, not her daughter. In her youth, though, she was stunning, not pretty like Maria, but truly beautiful. For a quarter century, her photo in profile hung in the display window of a photo studio in Salamander House, on the city’s main drag. Golden sepia. Wavy hair, a long neck and a smooth aristocratic nose stood out against a matte black background. Passers-by stopped to look.

Her first husband was a talented composer, and he had been a soldier. Boris. Dear Borenka.

Handsome and young. But rotten and selfish, often ill and depressed. They lived in an interwar building, in a small apartment. They were full of hope for the promised bright Communist future, but all they got was need, a way of life embroidered by red flags, quarrels, and cockroaches running across the kitchen table. He left.

“Don’t be so quick to marry a soldier,” Olga Konstantinovna sighed. “They bring war home with them. You’re making the same mistakes I did.” Maria, of course, refused to take any notice.

Her next husband, Maria’s father, was a mechanical engineer at a design institute, where she was the head of a department. But he left too. He got mixed up with some other woman and abandoned his daughter and left behind only a folder of inventions in her name. Olga was livid, and yet proud of what was in this thick folder: a blade for an axial flow turbomachine, an impeller for an axial fan, an improved air conditioner. The entire design institute was abuzz. He really had achieved a lot for a puny child from a perennially starving peasant family. Later she learned he had died of cancer. May he rest in peace.

A third husband at forty-five was a bid to quash the loneliness as Maria grew up and pushed back against her mother’s all-consuming care. That attempt too ended in failure—he died of diabetes after five years. The fourth . . . A good man, like all the others. And like all the others, he died.

A woman of steel, they called her.

She was respected, loved, envied. And pitied by those who knew her better. Because she was as unhappy as she was self-sufficient. In her selflessness and her surfeit of unrequited love, she soured the lives of those near her, those weaker than her, multiplied her own sadness by pushing them away. Their dismal fates unfurled even faster than they might have done.