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overlarge for the few facts it contained as a widower’s bed for its revised list of occupants. He could have expanded its contents, it occurred to him once, by inventing or imagining something—the house Grandmother came from, the way the few working streetlights shone over her and Grandfather’s heads on their way back to her house. Hadn’t Slava invented a ruse to make her tell the story in the first place? But all that felt shameless now that he no longer saw her. On the pages of his notebook was the truth, and it would be impaired if he invented around it. He wasn’t going to lie the way Grandfather did, the way they all had to. His mother had earned the valedictorian slot at Belarus State, but the honor was given to the number two person, a Slav, because how could you have a Jew at the top; Belarus State admitted only two Jews per thousand, and one of them was going to win valedictorian? Invited to say something at the ceremony, a silver medal around her neck, Slava’s mother had merely smiled into the microphone and said: “I want to thank the committee . . .”
    Stories like these, Slava had too many of. They went around the dinner table with no difficulty. For every story that his grandmother refused to tell, Slava’s grandfather told three. He could talk until morning. The usual dinner talk when they all lived together—shopping lists, doctors’ appointments, even Slava’s doings—bored Grandfather, and he would slink off to make eyes at the television. However, if the conversation touched something from their Soviet life, his eyes would quicken and he would launch into a ceaseless description. These stories were without beginning or end, without the context that would have helped his listeners remember who was who, how things worked. Despite trying his utmost, inevitably, Slava lost the thread, feeling like a failure because he was letting gold slip away in a fast-moving river. But his inadequacy with the details left him free to observe how Grandfather told stories, like a rushing river, indeed. On zakhlebyvalsya . He was choking on everything he wanted to say.

–4–
MONDAY, JULY 17, 2006
    E verybody’s on shpilkes ,” said Arianna Bock, Slava’s cubicle neighbor, the dimes of her eyes appearing above the fiberglass divider between them.
    “Big day,” Slava said, trying to sound casual.
    “Big day for Slava Gelman?” she said, flitting the tips of her fingers over an imaginary keyboard.
    “Did you see what I wrote?” he said. “It’s in the database.”
    She nodded, a flicker of disagreement passing over her face. He noticed her: pale skin, a slash of red lips, a frizz of charcoal hair. A large birthmark spanned both halves of her right eyelid. It reunited and broke again when she blinked.
    “What is it?” he said.
    “Nothing, it’s great,” she said.
    The deception cut into him, but he didn’t pursue it. “It’s time for your walk,” he said drily. Every morning at eleven, Arianna vanished for a constitutional, as she called it. Cannons could be firing on the palace, but everything would wait until her return. He admired and resented her skillful oblivion.
    She smiled, forgiving the sharpness in his voice.
    “And where today?” he said.
    “You don’t know until you get outside,” she said. “That’s the point. You should come.”
    The thought of wandering without editorial purpose filled Slava with anxiety. Unlike Arianna, he had things to do. Slava owed laughs to “The Hoot.” Upon ascending to the editorship two years before, Beau Reasons had decided the magazine needed humor, and so Slava was assigned to scour regional newspapers for slipups, flubs, and double entendres, to which Century appended a wry commentary (the rejoinder, in Century talk). Slava would find in the Provincetown Banner :
    The dog Claude Monet, who was lost last week and whose disappearance has been extensively covered by this newspaper, was found yesterday by the banks of the Pamet