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down to the knuckles, waggled them.
    His brother lifted a hand in a wave, started back to work.
    “Come here!” Dima shouted, his fingers beckoning.
    But only the workers around his brother looked: the tops of their hats, their faces glancing up, the tops of their hats again. He watched Yarik’s yellow hard hat, waiting for the moment when it must tilt back, too, waiting to glimpse once more the small blue spots of his brother’s eyes.

“You have to stop doing that,” Yarik said.
    They were playing Zmei, the five of them stretched out in a line held hand to hand to hand: Yarik’s five-year-old, Timofei, followed by Yarik’s wife, Zinaida, then Yarik, then Dima, and their old mother, Galina Yegorovna, tugged along as the last swishing joint of the serpent’s tail. It was Dima who suggested the game (“Oh,” he’d told the pouting boy, “I’m pretty sure even Timofei—maybe especially Timofei —couldn’t manage to shake loose my grip!”) and, as they zagged and whipped around the apartment complex playground, he squeezed Yarik’s hand a little tighter. Three links of hands ahead Timofei was all loopy laughter, jerking the line sharply as he could.
    “Squeeze, Yarik,” Dima said.
    “You have to stop it.”
    “I’m just saying hello.”
    As Timofei wound them around the spring-mounted animals—the bear, the hedgehog, the goose with the broken bill—Dima loosed his grip on his brother’s hand just enough to clasp his fingers farther up and grip again.
    “It’s distracting,” Yarik told him.
    “You don’t want—”
    “I do , Dima. That’s why it’s distracting.”
    The boy led them through the cut-out fuselage of a rocket ship, all climbing bars and rusted fins, Dima stooping as he pulled their mother behind.”You aren’t even trying,” he told his brother.
    “Bratishka—”
    “Mama can grip better than you.”
    “You’ll lose your job.”
    The line whipped; Yarik’s hand jerked loose.
    “So?” Dima said.
    In front, Timofei whooped, “Break! Break! Dyadya Dima’s the Chudo-Yudo!” Behind Dima, still clinging to his hand, their old mother blew exasperation through her lips, leaned over, spat.
    Yarik stood, still holding Zinaida’s fingers in his, separated from Dima by a black tractor tire half-buried in the dirt.
    “So?” Yarik said. “So, I’ll lose my job.”
    From the city center the booming began, the kettle drums and bass drums and snares, the tromping soldiers’ boots. It was May ninth, Victory Day. Soon the guns would fire—still celebrating the surrender of the Germans so long ago—and they had come back early from the parade, before the cannon could scare the baby into a fit. Galina Yegorovna hadn’t understood why they’d had to leave; she had gotten dressed in her old uniform—green jacket pinching the loose skin of her arms, buttons unbuttonable around her belly, gold epaulettes frayed as old rug tassles, hammer and sickle pin aslant, the kosinka with which she always covered the massive bun of her white hair replaced today by an army cap—and she wanted to stay to see the salutes.
    “What will the Party think?” she’d hissed at Dima as they had left.
    “The Party’s dead, Mama.”
    “Oh!” She’d thrust her wrinkled papery palm against his lips.
    “Mama,” he’d said, “you don’t want to make Polya cry on her birthday, do you?”
    And, on cue, his mother’s eyes had begun to tear up instead.
    Polina Yaroslavovna Zhuvova had turned one year old two weeks ago, but now that International Workers’ Day had been de-recognized by the Consortium, deemed tied to the worst backward ways of the past, Victory Day was the closest to her birthday that Yarik could get time off. Zinaida had made a cranberry pie. Their mother had brought blini. Dima had worked the last hour of his twelve, climbed down from the Oranzheria as the zerkala sank out of sight, boarded the bus just as the new sun rose to warm the back of his neck. But there had been no Yarik to