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that strong.” She smiles, patronizing, and clears her throat. “I am speaking of enemy agents. Your fellow classmates—at least in casual passing. Your thoughts and feelings flow far too freely. You fling them at me when I’m not even trying to peer inside.”
    I look away, trying not to think how much I hate her, so of course it’s foremost in my mind.
    “Yes, always troublesome, that. Someone tells you not to think about elephants, and you can do nothing but.” She bares her ragged teeth in a grin. They remind me of the metal tank traps along the Moskva River that held back the fascists. “But there’s a simple way to guard them. It’s easy enough to understand, but takes a lot of effort to master. Try peering into my thoughts.” Major Kruzenko steps closer to me and reaches for my wrists. I instinctively yank my hand back. “Come now, I know it’s easiest for you when you’re making physical contact. Tell me what you hear,” she says.
    I rest two fingers on her arm, close my eyes, and listen. The river flowing beneath us—fluid, glassy, not raging today. The wind whispering through the birch trees and rustling the occasional sparrow from its roost. Cars sputtering on a faraway road.
    Then I hear that melody: catgut balalaika strings and a mournful, keening voice. Notes with hooks in them to yank out your heart and make you bawl. A gypsy song, one that sprouted from the dark Russian earth long before the Communist Party took root.
    Not so far away from here, the River Volga flows
    Among the ripe and golden wheat, among the pure white snow
    The River Volga flows past me, when I am but a child
    “I hear an old folk song,” I say. “Is there a radio somewhere?”
    “No, no.” She shakes her head with a smile and drops her arm. The music dissipates like steam. “It’s how we guard our thoughts, you see. We can’t redirect them, so we must shield them instead. Straighten up.” She taps my hip. I scowl and stand upright, but fold my arms protectively across my chest. “Now choose a song—one you won’t get sick of.”
    I mull over the possibilities. Tchaikovsky’s oeuvre is bursting with loud, ponderous music, perfect for concealing thoughts, and I pause on the dark, heavy opening to his piano concerto. No, it’s too much. What have I heard on the radio? A few snatches of American pop songs—wonderful sunny songs, about girls in California and shining chrome-trimmed cars—but I’d only caught a few bars before the static curtain of the radio jammers closed on the frequency.
    The radio triggers another memory—huddled in Aunt Nadia’s kitchen with Mama, Cousin Denis, and Zhenya just a few months back. The new voice of Russia, the poet Yevgenni Yevtushenko, was reading his poem that decried the Nazi slaughter of Jews in the Ukraine. But there was more than just words. Dmitri Shostakovich conducted his Thirteenth Symphony live, set to the reading, in a delirious and dangerous waterfall of violent strings, blunt elbows of brass, slow bleeding drums.
    The melody rises in my mind, and Yevtushenko’s words guide it along. No monument stands over Babi Yar. A steep cliff only, like the crudest of headstones. My gaze drifts down the cliffs to the Moskva River below us.
    “Interesting choice,” Kruzenko says.
    I lurch forward, startled by her voice, and the melody falters, slipping through my thoughts as if it’s turned to sand. I try to catch it, but the farther away it goes, the more thoughts pop up in my head. Everything I wouldn’t want Kruzenko—or anyone—to know. How long until my next period. Where Mama hid our rubles. The more I reach for the melody, the more absurd my thoughts turn. Sergei’s luscious muscles. Cleaning up after Zhenya when he’s been too lost in his own world to visit the toilet. Valentin skewering me like a reindeer kabob with that gaze of his. How I’m already memorizing the patrol routes of all our guards. The time I walked in on Cousin Denis kissing his best friend