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nothing to eat there either. All we had was Tolik the Hog. A big fellow—we ate him for five years. We even bartered jars of lard for yarn and kerosene. The whole household ran off that hog.” He looked sadly at his son as if he wished he had saved a tailbone or some other memento. Then he had another idea.
    “Mother!” he shouted to Vladimir’s grandmother, dozing in her wheelchair underneath the giant oaks that delineated the Girshkins’ property from that of their supposedly megalomaniac Indian neighbor. “Remember that hog we had? Tolik?”
    Grandma lifted the brim of her floppy straw hat with her good hand. “What did you say?”
    “Tolik the Hog,” shouted Vladimir’s father.
    Grandma’s eyes widened. “So how come that swine never writes me, that’s what I want to know,” she said, waving a little fist at the doctor and his son. “Boston is close enough, you’d think he’d come down and visit me. I practically raised that bastard after his mother died.”
    “No, not Cousin Tolik,” Dr. Girshkin shouted. “I’m talking about Tolik the Hog. Remember, during the war? In the Urals? He got so big we rode him into town. Remember the hog?”
    “Oh,” said Grandma. “Oh, yes. I remember a beast. But it wasn’t a hog, it was a cow, and her name was Masha.”
    “Masha was after the war!” shouted Dr. Girshkin. He turned to Vladimir. Father and son briefly looked at each other and shrugged, each in his own way.
    “Why would we have a hog?” reasoned Grandma, slowly wheeling herself over from her self-designated post, leaving the oaks defenseless before the Indian and his mythical power saw. “We’reJewish, aren’t we? Sure, your wife eats that pork salami from the Russian store, and I do too sometimes, because that’s what’s in the refrigerator. But an entire hog?”
    She settled her bewildered gaze on the tomato patch.
    “She’s nearing the sunset, slowly but surely,” said Dr. Girshkin. “Sometimes she thinks there’s two of me. The good Boris and the evil Boris. If I let her guard the oak trees until she falls asleep, and that can be as late as eight or nine o’clock, then I’m the good Boris. The one that’s not married to your mother. If I take her in early, she’ll curse at me like a sailor. And you know that in the autumn it gets damn cold no matter how many jackets I put on her.”
    “That’s what awaits us all,” Vladimir said, which was the Girshkin family’s definitive pronouncement on aging and mortality. It was a perfect time to say it, too, for there they were now, assembled in a perfect row—three generations of Girshkins in sad decline: Grandma getting ready to say good-bye to this world, his father already with one toe in the grave, and Vladimir, the third generation, going through all the motions of a living death.
    But the first to go would be Grandma, that devoted country baba who had once bought Vladimir his first American cotton windbreaker—the only grown-up to realize that his trendy Hebrew school chums were making fun of his ill-fitting overcoat with its inherent East Bloc smell; the only one to understand the pain in being called a Stinky Russian Bear.
    Grandma’s first stroke happened five years ago. For some time she had suspected Tselina Petrovna, her clueless neighbor, of a dastardly plan to denounce her to the Social Security Administration and steal her subsidized apartment. One quiet, snowy night it would happen. The Black Marias would roll up to her building, there would be a knock on the door, and the Social Security Police would drag Grandma away.
    Grandma begged Vladimir to translate a letter ofdenouncement against Tselina, citing her for being a British spy. Or was it an East German spy? A Russian, French, or Finnish spy? Everything was topsy-turvy in this country. “Tell me what kind of spy!” Grandma shouted at Vladimir.
    Her grandson tried to humor her, but Grandma wept and accused the family of abandoning her. That same night she had