Muratov returned with a thick, yellowed piece of paper on official letterhead bearing the profile of the “greatest of all men.” It read “Letter of Commendation.” Muratov thrust the document right under the Captain’s nose, holding it so close that Popov couldn’t read it.

Muratov’s wife, pale against her blue robe, looked at her husband imploringly. His mother-in-law, Maria Nikolaevna, poured tea as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.

“Read it from where I hold it, please,” Muratov said. “From where I hold it.”

The Captain read it. He understood. He walked away and took his boys with him.

Muratov threw his salvation document aside.

Maria Nikolaevna set a teacup and a sandwich on a plate in front of Boris Ivanovich. Muratov loved his mother-in-law, in whom he saw traces of his wife, Natasha, although the mother was more decisive. He also saw his mother-in-law in his wife: the beginnings of plumpness, the future folds along the sides of her mouth, and a soft second chin.

Natasha picked the document up off the floor.

“What is this, Boris?”

Boris gestured toward the ceiling—they’re listening.

“Well, Natashenka, I got that certificate because in my modelling plant I fabricated the sarcophagus of the leader and teacher of all eras and peoples, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Take a look at the signature. The powers that be are eternally in my debt.”

Maria Nikolaevna smiled. Natasha placed her white hands on her even whiter neck.

“What now?” she asked meekly.

“Would you pour me another cup of tea, Maria Nikolaevna?” he asked, clinking his cup.

Natasha sat down, unable to come to her senses. Muratov embraced his wife. She picked up a pencil and some scrap paper and wrote, “You’re going to be arrested.”

“I’m going to leave in half an hour,” he wrote back. Then he ripped up the paper and set it on fire. He waited for the flames to graze his fingertips, and then threw the remains in the ashtray.

He picked up a fresh piece of paper and wrote “train station” and showed it to Natasha and Maria Nikolaevna.

“Right now,” Muratov said.

“Alone?” Natasha asked.

Muratov nodded.

Then Muratov went into the closet and took out the folder that held what Captain Popov had come for. He removed a stack of illustrated pages and returned to the kitchen.

Muratov took a baking sheet from the oven, placed several pieces of paper on it, and brought a match to them. Maria Nikolaevna grabbed the match out of his hand.

“How many times have I asked you, Boris Ivanovich, to leave the household duties to me.” Maria Nikolaevna squeezed into the corridor, where she lifted up the edge of the worn linoleum. She pushed the drawings under the linoleum and then inserted the edge of the strip back under the threshold.

“He’s lost his mind, he’s lost his mind,” Natasha said. Her mother pointed at the phone—like Boris, she was convinced that they were listening. Loudly, she said, “Boris, I’m going to make you meat patties for lunch, all right?”

Twenty minutes later, Muratov left the house by the back door. He had shaved his beard but left the mustache. He went through the courtyard, which had been flooded by a storm the night before. Broken branches stuck up from an enormous puddle, which Boris trudged through, carrying a large shopping bag that held a change of linens, a sweater, his favorite little pillow, and every bit of money that there was in the house.

Sivtsev and Emelyanenko, who had been left outside the front door, sat on the bench smoking, trying to decide whether to go and get some beer.

Captain Popov came back with the necessary stamp at ten-fifteen. Natasha opened the door immediately and said that Muratov had gone to work. Popov threw a fiery glance at his goons.

“But he doesn’t work! What’s his job?”

His mother-in-law intervened: “He’s an artist. He doesn’t go to an office, but he works a lot. You saw yourself—he constructed Lenin’s sarcophagus.”

“He’s been fired since then,” Popov said.

Maria Nikolaevna rebuffed him: “So he went out to look for work.”

“Will he be back for lunch?” the Captain asked.

“Of course he will.” They’d bought the story about the meat patties. They hadn’t dragged their feet bugging the apartment! “He asked me to make him meat. We’re expecting him back soon.”

The Captain got to work sorting through mountains of papers. The samizdat was the stuff that everyone had; anyway, it wasn’t samizdat Popov had come for.

The Captain was looking for drawings that were already lying on his desk, in the form of photocopies from Stern, the West German magazine. One was a caricature with giant letters that spelled “Glory to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” The letters were made out of bologna, and under the letters was a crowd of people and dogs trying to get up close to them. There was even a price tag hanging from the letters: “2 rub. 20 kop.”

Another caricature showed the mausoleum, also made out of bologna, but with “Lenin” written in hot dogs.

Agents had searched for the artist for a long time before uncovering his identity. The final touch was getting the originals, or something that resembled them.

Captain Popov stayed until late that evening. He confiscated three sacks of samizdat, but the drawings were never found.

“Just because I have thick skin doesn’t mean I’m not sensitive.”

By then, Muratov was at the house of an old woman who had been trying to sell green onions and parsley at the Kimry port. All she’d come home with was a traveller who’d missed the last boat to Novo-Okatovo. Muratov paid a ruble to spend the night in a small barn, sleeping on a bale of hay covered with a sheet. At dawn, he washed up at the well and took the 6 a.m. ferry. The old woman turned out to be a saint—she never reported him.

That evening, he was in the distant and inaccessible village of Danilovy Gorki, sitting in an old peasant house that belonged to his friend Nikolai Mikhailovich, who was also an artist. He explained his situation and asked if he could stay either there or in the bathhouse for a period of time, posing as a cousin or something of the sort. Nikolai Mikhailovich shook his head and groaned, but didn’t refuse him. That’s how Boris Ivanovich’s life on the run began.

Danilovy Gorki wasn’t so much a village as a tiny settlement of five houses. One was Nikolai Mikhailovich’s; another was abandoned, empty since the death of its owner, two years earlier; the other three housed summer vacationers along with their year-round owners. Hardly anyone stayed on for September.

Nikolai Mikhailovich’s mother had come from an aristocratic line, and his father was a priest who had been executed in 1937. Thus, Nikolai was always prepared. He said that it would be safe to stay for the summer, while there were plenty of strangers around, but afterward Boris would be dangerously visible.

Nikolai Mikhailovich’s house was packed with people. Children, the elderly, two single female relatives, and some long-term house guests. Everyone did a bit of work, though it wasn’t compulsory. They were busy from morning till night, but they were also free.

For Boris, country life was a novelty. He was a city man. His grandfather had been a serf who started working at Sytin’s print shop in 1883. And his father was a skilled proletarian artisan, a true Muscovite.

Before his escape, Boris had never even laid eyes on a village. Suddenly, the beauty of the secluded little settlement opened up before him. Danilovy Gorki stood on the banks of a large river, among swamps and forests. His hosts, the descendants of an aristocratic family, were also to his liking. They had never known palaces or had a whiff of luxury, having spent half a century between poverty and destitution, exile and prison. Those who’d survived were hardy. They had become so simple that they didn’t even know any foreign languages. Nonetheless, there was still something special about them, even if Boris Ivanovich couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

Nikolai’s daughters stirred kasha on the stove, baked hearth cakes, worked in the garden, and washed the linens in the river. His grandsons caught fish, and his granddaughters and the two aunts foraged for berries and mushrooms. All of them sketched, sang, and put on plays for the little ones.

Soon after Boris’s arrival, Nikolai Mikhailovich’s loud and restless cousin Anastasia came to stay for three days. She immediately set her sights on Boris Ivanovich. He was a tempting and easy mark; they lost no time, although their first night together would have lasted longer if the whole family hadn’t spent so much time singing at the table. Anastasia was a good singer, with a kind of Gypsy chic in her voice. She had small, girlish breasts and a long nose, and was not as beautiful as his wife. But Boris remembered her for a long time afterward; she seemed to have purified him completely, picked him down to bone and tendon and then put him back together. Boris didn’t remember ever having had that kind of power and stamina. Anastasia, a doctor, left by boat on the fourth day of their affair, since she had a twenty-four-hour shift at the hospital, where she was the head of her department. The whole family saw her off, and as they stood on the shore she sang “Marusenka Washed Her White Feet” and waved to them with her handkerchief from the boat.

She’s so educated. But such a slut! Boris Ivanovich thought, both impressed and confused.

As though he’d read his friend’s mind, Nikolai Mikhailovich told him, “That’s in Nastya’s blood. Her great-grandmother or great-great-grandmother fooled around with Pushkin.”

On Transfiguration Day, they all went to church in Kashino. First by ferry, then by bus. The trip was exhausting.

“Your life is so anti-Soviet,” he remarked in admiration.

“No, Boris, it’s just a-Soviet,” Nikolai Mikhailovich said, laughing.

All summer, Boris watched the sun rise and the water lap the sandbank, which was covered in the empty mussel shells and decorative grasses that he had previously seen only on icons. He hadn’t known that they really existed; moved by everything he saw, he was happy. Everyone foraged for mushrooms in the forest. There weren’t many in July, but by August they sprouted up after the sweet rain showers.

The days were long, the evenings, with their endless tea drinking, were pleasant, and the nights passed in an instant. He fell asleep and woke up in the same moment, as though nothing had happened.

A month and half had gone by, and he still had no news from home; he did not seek out ways to get in touch with his wife. He was more comfortable not imagining how worried she was about him—her desires, anxieties, and fears.

A relative of Nikolai Mikhailovich’s tossed a single postcard from Boris Ivanovich into a Moscow mailbox. The card said everything is fine, don’t worry, I love you and miss you.

In August, Nikolai Mikhailovich’s wife, the daughter of a famous Russian artist, came to the house with their oldest son, Kolya. Her daughters buzzed around her, doting on her as if she were an honored guest, all “Mamochka, Mamochka,” while Kolya, who was thirty years old, tailed his father wherever he went. Boris Ivanovich, who was a virulent opponent of child-rearing, began to doubt his beliefs. Long ago, he had decided that giving birth in this inhumane and shameless state—into a meaningless life of poverty and filth—should not be done. He had told Natasha that this was his condition for marrying her.

Their marriage had lasted for eight years, and the problem wasn’t that she wanted children. She lacked a sense of humor—or maybe the way that her husband’s mind worked had begun to wear her down. She cringed at his drawings as they became angrier and more acrid. Compared with other couples, they had been rather well off. He had graduated from the crafts department of the Stroganov school. Because he was a fabricator, he made more money than the “real” artists at the plant; he got bigger orders—for, say, a thousand rubles.

Sometimes he worked off the books, as an assistant to famous artists. He helped create the decorative metalwork for various palaces of culture, those for railways or metalworking; no matter the trade, the culture was always socialist. This work filled him with a rage that manifested in increasingly acerbic caricatures of the socialist life, which was allegedly always on the verge of transforming into a Communist utopia.

His love for drawing had intensified. He was invited to participate in an art show in someone’s apartment. Many people admired his drawings. His first real success depicted the statue “Worker and a Kolkhoz Woman” made out of bologna. Thanks to his friend Ilya, this bologna made it to West Germany and was published in Stern. After that, Boris grew indifferent to filling his large orders, preferring to spend time sketching.

In Danilovy Gorki, Muratov lost all interest in drawing bologna. There was none in the village, and no one missed it. The quiet sketches of gentle nature that Nikolai Mikhailovich’s entire clan, young and old, loved to make were similarly unappealing to Boris Ivanovich. He ended up not drawing anything all summer long.

“How much do we have to leave to avoid a social-media incident?”

September was coming, and people started preparing to return to the city. They filled pillowcases with mushrooms and put raspberries and wild strawberries in the oven to dry. That year, they didn’t make jam. There wasn’t enough sugar, and, besides, jars were tough to transport. They stashed pickles and mushrooms in the cellar and buried the early potatoes.

When their departure was imminent, Nikolai Mikhailovich finally asked, “So you’re set on spending the winter here, Boris Ivanovich?”

“I’m scared, Nikolai Mikhailovich. Not of the police. I’m scared of your stove, your house. These are the kinds of things you have to have known about since childhood. It seems like it’s too late for me to learn them.”

Nikolai Mikhailovich scratched his meagre beard, fell silent for a moment, and then made a proposal.

“Baba Nura’s vacationers have left, and she’s gotten rather feeble in the past year. You should stay at her place. I’ll talk to her. You can help her through the winter. I’ll come in December. God willing, you’ll survive until then.”

Muratov assigned Nikolai Mikhailovich two tasks in Moscow. The first was to go to Muratov’s house sometime—without calling ahead or providing any warning—and give his wife and his mother-in-law a letter from him, but not tell them where he was. The second was to meet with Muratov’s friend Ilya and say a single word: “Forward.” Ilya would know what it meant. Before returning to the country in December, he should meet with Ilya again, take the money that Ilya would bring, and give half of it to Muratov’s family; the other half he should bring back to Muratov. He did not know how much money there would be—maybe there would be a lot, maybe not very much, maybe nothing at all.

Muratov moved in with Nura, a stooped-over old lady with a crooked little face, gnarled fingers, and giant, hideous wrists that she held in front of her chest when she walked. It seemed as if she were always carrying a cup or a pot. Her wrists never unbent, and she used her hands as though they were two large claws.

In exchange for letting Muratov live with her, she asked not for money but for vodka. The old woman turned out to have a passion for drinking, and was a merry hooligan. She woke up early in the morning, crawled out of her cot with a loud creak, crossed herself in the holy place in the corner where there was a large blackened icon, and then tossed back her first thimbleful. At noon, she had her second. In the middle of the day, she would eat kasha or potatoes. Later, three thimblefuls would serve as a replacement for all other necessary fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. Nura went through a bottle a week, a ration she had established years earlier. In the morning, she was barely there, but by evening she was full of life and even did some housework, all the while muttering gibberish under her breath.

Several years before, the village had got radio and electricity. Nura ignored the electricity—she never turned on the light, going to bed when it got dark and getting up when the sun rose—but she took a liking to the radio. When Muratov finally learned how to decipher the old woman’s stream of babble, he discovered that it was a merciless running commentary on the radio programs she listened to in the morning.

“Listen, lodger, that new Stalin they have today, they praise him so highly, he’ll be even worse than the old one,” she once said to Boris Ivanovich.

“Why is that?”

“The old one took everything, and now this one is picking at the leftovers. Oh, they liberated us from everything, those dearies. First they freed me from my land, then from my husband, my children, my cow, and my chickens. Now they’ll liberate me from vodka, and I’ll finally be completely free.”

Nura’s husband had perished in 1930, during collectivization. Her three sons, who came of age toward the beginning of the war, had died in combat one after another—the eldest in ’41, the middle in ’42, and the youngest in ’45.

“And they liberated us from God,” she mumbled, peering toward the darkness of her altar. “Although perhaps He decided to cast us off Himself. Who can tell . . . ”

Some evenings, her neighbors would stop by: Marfa and Zinaida, both of them younger than Nura but just as bitter. They drank Boris Ivanovich’s tea, and Nura bragged to them, “God sent me a goodly lodger. He brings me vodka, puts the tea on.”

It had been ages since Boris Ivanovich had thought about the bologna drawings. In the village, mass-produced meat products had completely lost their symbolism, like long-forgotten relics. The old women here could not afford to take the train to Moscow just to buy bologna, and they wouldn’t have seen an orange as long as they lived had it not been for Nikolai Mikhailovich bringing them such unheard-of curios from time to time.

Muratov started drawing the old women and their surroundings. In the midst of this poverty and squalor, a treasure trove materialized before his eyes. The crooked little potatoes cooked in their skins, the pickles disfigured in their barrels, and all the mushrooms—from the little slippery Jacks to the ugly milkcaps. The queen of the spread was a cloudy bottle of hooch, stopped with a homemade cork. Sometimes, if they were lucky, it was vodka. In winter, bread wasn’t delivered to the store in the larger settlement of Kruzhilino, which was six kilometres away from Gorki, so the old women took turns baking.

Boris Ivanovich quickly went through all the paper in Nikolai Mikhailovich’s house. Then he found ten rolls of wallpaper intended for the attic. The redecorating had been put off for several years before being abandoned entirely. At first, he drew on the back of the paper, and then he started drawing on the front, which provided his drawings with a stippled yellow background that made the old women’s faces come alive.

They were the last people remaining in the village: worn out as their old clothes, humble as the potatoes that were their only food, and free as the clouds.

Drinking cheered them up. They would sing, reminisce, and laugh, covering their toothless mouths with their blackened fingers. There were two teeth among the three of them. Toothaches were treated with sage and nettles. Leshka, the village shepherd, had been the only one who could extract teeth, and after he died their remaining teeth had fallen out of their own accord.

Boris Ivanovich drew his sitters in thin pencil lines, with their amazing conversations flowing out of their mouths in ribbons. What stories they told! They talked about how, before the war, the Party bosses had showed up to incorporate everyone into a kolkhoz, and the people protested and protested but finally signed up, having nowhere else to turn. Nura’s impish eldest son, Nikolai, played a trick on the bosses with some spoiled eggs. There had been a hen who was so clever at nesting that it was hard to take her eggs away. They would go bad and explode in her hiding spots, and you couldn’t get rid of the stink for a month afterward. Nikolai found some unexploded eggs to put into the newcomers’ wagon so that they would sit on them with their fattened asses. You wouldn’t believe it, but the very first boss who sat down broke the rotten egg. There was a quiet shooting sound, and the stench spread through the whole town. It was so funny!

“I’ll be walking by your door in a second if you want to try to get my attention.”

They reminisced about their husbands and fought over unsettled scores. Marfa reminded Zinaida that she’d messed with her man in 1926. Zinaida retorted that Leshka the shepherd stole milk from other people’s cows. Leshka happened to be Marfa’s brother, and she didn’t take kindly to the accusation. Their argument escalated until Nura sang a dirty little ditty about who snuck into where, and both of the women laughed. Again, they cast their minds back to things that had happened long ago but were not forgotten. About the “Communits” who had starved the village and taken away its men. Periodically, they would fall silent and knock back a thimbleful; then they’d laugh and drink some more.

Snow fell, and the poverty and dejection of the sodden and stormy autumn months were replaced by a white winter, which stayed with Boris Ivanovich as a bright patch, a sunny idyll in his gray life.

He spent the few available daylight hours wandering around the village. The swamps had frozen over, and you could go farther out on them than before. There was so much snow that it reached over his felt boots.

One day, upon returning home, he found all the old women making a fuss in the front yard. They had decided to undertake a major cleaning on the occasion of the following day’s holiday.

“It’s the Feast of the Presentation of Mary,” they told Boris Ivanovich. Presentation to what or whom they couldn’t explain. But they had decided to wash themselves. It had been a long time. The last time they had bathed was for the Feast of the Intercession, when the first snow had fallen.

Nikolai Mikhailovich had the only decent bathhouse; the old women’s bathhouses had all fallen apart long ago. But there was so much snow in Nikolai Mikhailovich’s yard that it would have taken a day to clear it. They decided to wash in Nura’s house.

Boris Ivanovich wheeled in the tub, brought them water from the well, chopped enough firewood to fill the entire porch, and brought it inside. In the morning, they started heating the water. It got so hot in the house that the little glass panes in the windows wept with condensation, cleaning themselves as well.

Everything was ready to go—they had even steamed the birch switches—and then it occurred to them: where would the lodger go? Even the goat was freezing in the yard. How could they kick him out? You couldn’t hide him in the stove—he’d burn up. The house didn’t have separate areas, and there were no walls, only a hiding place behind the stove. He wouldn’t dare to look from behind there. Then they laughed: What would this stud want with our old bones?

They put Boris Ivanovich behind the stove and strung up a curtain. He sat there with a book, but he didn’t read. The lamplight was hardly brighter than a candle. He could have moved it closer, but, instead of reading, he listened to what the old women talked about in the bath.

At first they joked about how they’d grown so dry that the dirt didn’t stick to them anymore. Then Zinaida said that they had even stopped stinking. When they were young, they’d smelled like pussy, but now it was just dust and mold. Finally, the washing began: they moaned and groaned, pouring water and knocking the tubs around. Suddenly, one of them slipped, fell with a slap, and yawped. Boris Ivanovich leapt up, ready to help. He peered over the curtain. Zinaida and Marfa were pulling Nura off the floor, spilling over with childlike laughter.

Boris Ivanovich froze. He’d grown accustomed to their craggy faces, their dark disfigured hands, their stomped-out feet, everything that showed through their ancient faded clothing, but now—Dear Lord!—he was seeing their naked bodies for the first time. He couldn’t take his eyes off them. Their long gray hair flowed over their bumpy spines. Their wrists and feet looked even heavier and more horrible than usual—broken from working the land, gnarled like the roots of old trees. Their fingers were the same color as the earth they’d been digging up for decades. Their bodies were pale, so white that they were blue, like skim milk. Marfa still had her breasts, with their dark animal-like nipples, while the other women’s seemed to have melted away, leaving behind flaccid translucent bags that drooped down to their bellies. Zinaida had long beautiful legs, or what remained of them. All of their butts had been rubbed down to flat spots, with only folds of skin left to mark where the cheeks had once been full.

“I’m telling you, Nura, I can’t pick up heavy things anymore. Whenever I try, my uterus starts falling out,” Marfa said provocatively, with a hint of pride. Boris Ivanovich saw that there was a gray sac dangling between her legs like a tobacco pouch. He cringed, but couldn’t turn away from these three Harpy Graces.

Marfa squatted and nimbly pushed the sac back into her hairless, crinkled lump, into the depths of what had once been a woman’s body.

Boris Ivanovich was not ignorant—he’d graduated from art school and had the genes of a master engraver. In his adolescence, he’d studied Doré’s illustrations for the Divine Comedy, keenly interested in the female body. These contorted creatures stirring two metres before him were the living remains of those bodies. It took an effort of imagination to see any vestiges of woman in their twisted bones and hanging flesh.

Old age has no gender, Boris Ivanovich thought, growing terrified. What about me? Will this happen to my body? I don’t want that—I’d rather go out on my own terms than be nullified!

Suddenly, there was a burst of laughter. The old women had caught him staring.

“Oh! Your lodger’s peeking at the girls, Nurka!”

“Let’s beat him with a birch broom so he doesn’t get any ideas!”

Nura squealed. “With the stinging nettles! We used to beat the boys who peeked with stinging nettles!”

“Come on, you hags. Like I need you! I was just trying to help whoever fell down, and you’ve gotten all excited!”

With that, he hid behind the curtain. Afterward, he spent several days sketching the Bath of the White Swans, which was what he called this scene, on the remaining wallpaper. He was able to draw about twenty versions before he ran out of paper.

Just as Boris began to get bored, Nikolai Mikhailovich returned with his son, Kolya, to check on the house and take the reserve stores back to Moscow. The winter route was arduous: unable to use the frozen waterway, they had to take the train, the bus, and then travel six more kilometres through the forest on a tractor.

Nikolai Mikhailovich brought a large amount of money from Ilya, more than Boris Ivanovich had expected, as well as a letter from his wife.

They went to the neighboring village, to the store.

The shopkeeper, Verka, who had a deep respect for Nikolai Mikhailovich, pulled the forbidden vodka out from under the counter. Nikolai Mikhailovich had brought two bottles from Moscow, but Boris Ivanovich did not want to miss an opportunity to spend some of his new pile of cash. He had avoided the store, fearing the locals.

They fit the store’s entire shabby stock into two backpacks—a bounty of cookies, sticky hard candies without wrappers, oil, barley, a packet of dried peas, briquettes of cherry kisel, blocks of processed cheese, and two packets of salt. Boris Ivanovich kept scanning the shelves for real food. Verka eyed him to see if he was looking for more than groceries. To her dismay, his hungry eyes sought out goods and not her, the beauty.

Straightening his back under the weight of his bag, Nikolai Mikhailovich shook his shoulders to better distribute the weight of their purchases, which made the bottles give out a pretty clink.

“Are you staying for a while? Come visit us!” Verka propped her round cheek on her beet-red fist.

“No, Vera, thank you. I don’t think I’ll be coming back. I’m only here for a day. I haven’t even started warming the house—I just chopped some wood. We’ll spend the night at Svistunikha’s and then head back.”

“Frances, where did you ever find such similar others?”

“Well, you should at least tell your friend to come see us.” Verka giggled. “We’re bored, us girls. He’s been living here for so long, but he hasn’t made any friends at all.”

It turned out that the country telegraph had been functioning all along: Muratov’s presence was known for villages around.

“We’re leaving tomorrow. You can get to know each other when we come back in the spring,” Nikolai Mikhailovich said.

In anticipation of the men’s return to Danilovy Gorki, Nura had baked potato pies and then retreated behind the stove. Out of politeness, Zinaida and Marfa weren’t around.

“Maybe we should invite them over,” Boris Ivanovich said, having finally decided to leave this fantastical sanctuary where he’d stayed too long.

“No, they won’t come today. They’re well-mannered countrywomen—they would never come on the first day I’m back. I don’t know why—probably to stay out of the way, or so that they won’t seem like they’re asking for gifts. They were raised well, not like the women today. Verka the shopkeeper steals and parties. She’s Zinaida’s niece, which means she is supposed to come visit her and bring her presents, but she just doesn’t want to. Zinaida’s son has been in prison for the past two years. His wife is a drunk. The grandson drowned last summer, and now all she has left is that slow-witted girl.” Nikolai Mikhailovich gestured dismissively. “But what do you need our country dramas for, Ivanovich?”