Tatiana’s family lived in the back. It was better to live in the back. The rear kitchen was the bigger of the two, and it had stairs leading up to the roof and down to the courtyard; Tatiana liked taking the rear stairs because she could sneak out without passing crazy Slavin’s room.

The rear kitchen had a bigger stove than the front kitchen and a bigger bath. And only three other families shared the rear kitchen and bathroom with the Metanovs — the Petrovs, the Sarkovs, and crazy Slavin, who never cooked and never bathed.

Slavin was not in the hall at the moment. Good.

As Tatiana walked down the corridor to the front door, she passed the shared telephone. Petr Petrov was using it, and Tatiana had time to think how lucky they were that their telephone worked. Tatiana’s cousin Marina lived in an apartment where the telephone was broken all the time — faulty wiring. It was difficult to get in touch with her, unless Tatiana wrote or went to see her personally, which she did not do often, since Marina lived on the other side of town, across the river Neva.

As Tatiana neared Petr, she saw that he was very agitated. He was obviously waiting for a connection, and though the cord was too short to allow him to pace, he was pacing with his whole body while standing in one place. Petr got his connection just as Tatiana was passing him in the narrow corridor; Tatiana knew this because he screamed into the phone. “Luba! Is that you? Is that you, Luba?”

So unexpected and sharp was his cry that Tatiana jumped away from him, knocking into the wall. Getting her bearings, she passed him quickly and then slowed down to listen.

“Luba, can you hear me? We have a bad connection. Everyone is trying to get through. Luba, come back to Leningrad! Did you hear? War has started. Take whatever you can, leave the rest, and get the next train. Luba! No, not in an hour, not tomorrow — now, do you understand? Come back immediately!” Short pause. “Forget our things, I tell you! Are you listening to me, woman?”

Turning around, Tatiana caught a glimpse of Petr’s stiff back.

“Tatiana!” Papa was glaring at her with an expression that said, if you don’t come here right now . . .

But Tatiana dawdled to hear more. Her father yelled across the corridor, “Tatiana Georgievna! Come here and help.” Like her mother, her father said her full name only when he wanted Tatiana to know how serious he was. Tatiana hurried, wondering about Petr Petrov and about why her brother couldn’t open the front door himself.

Volodya Iglenko, who was Pasha’s age and was going to the Tolmachevo camp with him, walked downstairs with the Metanovs, holding his own suitcase and opening his own door. He was one of four brothers. He had to do things for himself. “Pasha, let me show you,” Tatiana said quietly. “It’s like this. You put your hand on the handle, and you pull. The door opens. You walk outside. It shuts behind you. Let’s see if you can do it.”

“Just open the door, Tania,” said Pasha. “Can’t you see I’m carrying my suitcase?”

Out on the street they stood still for a moment.

“Tania,” said Papa. “Take the hundred and fifty rubles I gave you and go and buy us some food. But don’t dawdle, like always. Go immediately. Do you hear?”

“I hear, Papa. I’ll go immediately.”

Pasha snorted. “You’re going back to bed,” he whispered to her.

Mama said, “Come on, we better go.”

“Yes,” Papa said. “Come on, Pasha.”

“So long,” Tatiana said, knocking Pasha on the arm.

He grunted unhappily in reply and pulled her hair. “Tie your hair up before you go out, will you?” he said. “You’ll scare off the passersby.”

“Shut up,” Tatiana said lightly. “Or I’ll cut it off completely.”

“All right, let’s go now,” said Papa, tugging at Pasha.

Tatiana said good-bye to Volodya, waved to her mother, took one last look at Pasha’s reluctant back, and returned upstairs.

Deda and Babushka were on their way out with Dasha. They were going to the bank to get their savings out.

Tatiana was left alone.

She breathed a sigh of relief and fell onto her bed.

Tatiana knew she had been born too late into the family. She and Pasha. She should have been born in 1917, like Dasha. After her there were other children, but not for long: two brothers, one born in 1919 and one in 1921, died of typhus. A girl, born in 1922, died of scarlet fever in 1923. Then in 1924, as Lenin was dying and the New Economic Plan — that short-lived return to free enterprise — was coming to an end, while Stalin was scheming to enlarge his power base in the presidium through the firing squad, Pasha and Tatiana were born seven minutes apart to a very tired twenty-five-year-old Irina Fedorovna. The family wanted Pasha, their boy, but Tatiana was a stunning surprise. No one had twins. Who had twins? Twins were almost unheard of. And there was no room for her. She and Pasha had to share a crib for the first three years of their life. Since then Tatiana slept with Dasha.

But the fact remained — she was taking up valuable bed space. Dasha couldn’t get married because Tania took up the space where Dasha’s prospective husband would lie. Dasha often expressed this to Tatiana. She would say, “Because of you I’m going to die an old maid.” To which Tatiana would immediately reply, “Soon, I hope. So I can marry and have my husband sleep next to me.”

After graduating from school last month, Tatiana had gotten a job so she wouldn’t have to spend another idle summer in Luga reading and rowing boats and playing silly games with the kids down the dusty road. Tatiana had spent all of her childhood summers at their dacha in Luga and on nearby Lake Ilmen in Novgorod, where her cousin Marina had a dacha with her parents.

In the past Tatiana had looked forward to cucumbers in June, tomatoes in July, and maybe some raspberries in August, looked forward to mushroom picking and blueberry picking, to fishing on the river — all such small pleasures. But this summer was going to be different.

Tatiana realized she was tired of being a child. At the same time she didn’t know how to be anything else, so she got a job at the Kirov factory, in the south of Leningrad. That was nearly adult. She now worked and constantly read the newspaper, shaking her head at France, at Marshal Pétain, at Dunkirk, at Neville Chamberlain. She tried to be very serious, nodding purposefully at the crises in the Low Countries and the Far East. Those were Tatiana’s concessions to adulthood — Kirov and Pravda.

She liked her job at Kirov, the biggest industrial plant in Leningrad and probably in all of the Soviet Union. Tatiana had heard that somewhere in that factory workers built tanks. But she was skeptical. She had not seen one.

She made silverware. Her job was to put the knives, forks, and spoons into boxes. She was the second-to-last person in the assembly line. The girl after her taped the boxes shut. Tatiana felt bad for that girl; taping was just so boring. At least Tatiana got to handle three different types of utensils.

Working at Kirov was going to be fun this summer, Tatiana thought, lying on her bed, but not as much fun as evacuation would have been.

Tatiana would have liked to get in a few hours of reading. She had just started Mikhail Zoshchenko’s sadistically funny short stories on the ironic realities of Soviet life, but her instructions from her father had been very clear. She looked at her book longingly. What was the hurry anyway? The adults were behaving as if there were a fire. The Germans were two thousand kilometers away. Comrade Stalin would not let that traitor Hitler get deep into the country. And Tatiana never got to be home alone.

As soon as Tatiana had realized there was going to be no immediate evacuation, she became less excited about the war. Was it interesting? Yes. But Zoshchenko’s story “Banya” — “The Bathhouse” — about a man going to the Soviet bathhouse and washing his clothes there, too, and losing his coat checks, was hilarious. Where is a naked man to put those coat checks? The checks were washed away during the bath. Only the string remained. I offer the string to the coat attendant. He won’t take it. Any citizen can cut up string, he says. There won’t be enough coats to go around. Wait until the other customers have gone. I’ll give you whatever coat is left.

Since no one was evacuating, Tatiana read the story twice, lying on the bed, her legs up on the wall, weak from laughter by the second time.

Still, orders were orders. She had to go out and get food.

But today was Sunday, and Tatiana did not like to go out on Sundays unless she got dressed up. Without asking, she borrowed Dasha’s high-heeled red sandals, in which Tatiana walked like a newborn calf with two broken legs. Dasha walked better in them; she was much more used to them.

Tatiana brushed out her very blonde long hair, wistfully wishing for thick dark curls like the rest of the family’s. Hers was so straight and blah blonde. She always wore it tied back in a ponytail or in braids. Today she tied it up in a ponytail. The straightness and the blondeness of her hair were inexplicable. In her daughter’s defense, Mama would say that she herself had had straight blonde hair as a child. Yes, and Babushka said that when she got married she had weighed only forty-seven kilos.

Tatiana put on the only Sunday dress she owned, made sure her face and teeth and hands were sparkling clean, and left the apartment.

A hundred and fifty rubles was a colossal amount of money. Tatiana didn’t know where her father got that kind of money, but it appeared magically in his hands, and it was not her place to ask. She was supposed to come back with — what did her father say? Rice? Vodka? She had already forgotten.