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showed thinbut happy families sitting down for dinner together. The pamphlets, which made a virtue out of eating less, were not warmly received. Within a week, they could be found littered around public spaces, defaced with drawings of corpulent politicians, overinflated balloon faces with Dracula-like fangs.
    Thinking of food was excruciating; Andrei fantasized about bright red tomatoes, buttered bread, spiced meat, honey loaves with centres as soft as cotton. At night the craving was overpowering, and he would chew on his leather watchband, twisting the straps between his teeth to extract some imagined meal.
    Andrei and his mother and brother fished from the river and grew their own food when they could. They relied on a small garden plot of hardy root crops, tucked discreetly behind the house. Sturdy beet leaves, feathery carrot tops, and pale-green onion stalks; a sweet earthy fragrance filled the air when the muddy harvest was pulled from the ground. Each morning Andrei would kneel to pat down the soil, delighting in its wet heaviness on his hands. Before she left for work at the dressmaking shop, his mother, Sarah, prepared an evening meal for the family, creating soups and stews from the meagre supplies. Pearls of barley sinking into vigorously boiling pots of liquid, adding a bit of thickness and bulk.
    They had the mountains to thank, Andrei once said.
    The Carpathians. Their snow-capped peaks were visible from the kitchen window. The mountains were their blessing, their shield. Foothills were strewn with tough bushes and wildflowers. Mechanized farming was impossible on this kind of land. In other parts of the country, bulldozers were razing villages to pave the way for agroindustrial complexes. Throughout the early 1980s, high-rise housing projects shot up everywhere, an endless horizon of concrete conformity. The dictator Ceausescu crushed homes and carted families off asif he were forklifting boxes in a warehouse. Anyone who asked questions or resisted found themselves summoned by the Securitate.
    Unlike villages to the south, Andrei’s village had been preserved for centuries. Some of the houses still had their original wooden mouldings and fixtures. Andrei’s house had belonged to his mother’s family since before the deportations in 1944. Nearly four decades later, it was still identified by locals as an Evreica, or “Jew,” house on the basis of its design. Blue walls the colour of robins’ eggs and pale yellow trim. Filigreed borders. Large arched windows. “The house that still stood” was what his mother called it.
    Not that their house had always been so intact. Not that the villagers had watched out for it. Quite the reverse. Andrei’s mother, Sarah, was Jewish. The only member of her family to survive the war.
    Back in 1945, piles of overturned earth surrounding former Jewish homes and gardens were pitted with deep holes where neighbours had dug, searching for any valuables hidden by Jewish families in their final hours. Many deportees had committed their cherished possessions to the earth—wrapping jewellery, photos, silver, paintings, everything they hoped one day to rescue.
    So when Andrei’s mother returned alone at the end of the war at the age of fifteen, a survivor of Ravensbrück and a twelve-day march out of the camp, her family house was empty but filled with traces of uninvited company. The delicate film of dust that should have accrued in the family’s absence had been disturbed. The sheer range of footprints and fingerprints suggested that the house had been searched exhaustively on several occasions: scratches and dents on the remaining vandalized furniture, dark yellow rectangles on the pale yellow walls indicating absent pictures, water stains weeping across the dining-room table. Where once there had been light fixtures, there were now only naked bulbs with broken insides, hangingfrom wires. Holes where windows used to be. Chairs repositioned. Bare bookshelves. Cabinets with