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Lidya shared a bedroom with their parents, the second room serving for all other purposes, including the tool shed from which, every day, her father brought out his equipment to wrestle with the planting, which, when it yielded crops, yielded them to the Soviet monitor pacing alongside. He would seize them—barley, wheat, vegetables—roughly and stack them in the truck nearby. She and Lidya shared a single piece of bread in the morning, on which a kind of gruel was poured, something boiled from what seemed like leaves stripped off a neighboring tree. Her mother ate nothing, waiting until the afternoon for hot water and tea leaves, and the dried wheat soaked in water on which she and their father gnawed at sundown.
    It was the day when her mother could not lift her head even to take the cup of tea that her father acted. It was the habit of orderlies from the army detachment in the officers’ recreation room across the road to bring out the leftovers from the midday meal and pour them into a barrel right by the barbed wire that protected the enclosure from the surrounding farmers’ cottages. From their little window, Titka’s father, Fyodor, could see poured into the barrel in a single deposit, as garbage, enough food to keep his family healthy for a month. He looked back at his wife, lying motionless on the cot. He grabbed the pitchfork in the corner, opened the door, and moved with determination toward the barbed wire. He asked the orderlies please to pass him the refuse they were throwing into the barrel. They answered with laughter and taunts. Using his pitchfork as a kind of rough shield, Fyodor threw himself against the barbed wire, seeking to reach a hand into the barrel.
    The rifle sound came from back at the officers’ quarters. A single shot fired by a lieutenant sitting on a bench outside. He had been fondling the rifle, and found now something quite unexpected, something practical to do with it.
    He was a good marksman. Fyodor was dead, straddling the barbed wire. His widow did not have the strength to rise to help pull him away—she did not leave the cot until she was placed in the rude coffin. Titka and Lidya did their best, finally recapturing their dead father with the help of a neighbor who labored with the corpse at half strength because he was weak from starvation.
    â€¦ Titka would not be the one to tell Nikolai about the death of his grandparents, though someone in the community of course eventually would. Everyone knew about those terrible days and months in 1933. The grandparents of a half-dozen boys and girls in Nikolai’s class had been victims of the great kulak purge.
    All in good time , Titka reflected, looking over at young Nikolai, buried, as ever, in his books. What, after all, was the hurry?
    Nikolai advanced quickly in school, so much so that when he was fifteen the principal reported to her superiors in Kiev that the boy was two, perhaps three years advanced beyond his fellow students and that she had nothing more to teach him. Either, at age fifteen, he would join the farm work force, or else he would go to Kiev and attend the university.
    He was summoned to an interview. The rector, peering over his eyeglasses, studied him carefully. The boy sat respectfully on the bench at the far end of the office while the rector attended to random paperwork. Nikolai Trimov, like so many Ukrainians, was blond, but his features were not those of the typical peasant. The fine nose and chin were more Mediterranean. His lips were thin, his expression sober. He looked more nearly seventeen or eighteen than fifteen, the rector thought as he lowered his eyes and turned his attention to the folder supplied by the Chief of Section at Brovary.
    It told the story of Nikolai’s parents, of the dramatic events of September 11, 1965. But there had been no adverse notation on the boy’s own record. Nikolai had been elected president of his class, he was skilled in chess—in