Our little goats had been living for a while now with my father-it was safer there-and the trail to his house had almost disappeared, especially as my father never took the same path twice with his wheelbarrow, as a precaution, plotting for the future. Lena stayed with us. We would pour her off some milk, feed her berries and our mushroom soups. Everything became a lot more frightening when we thought of the coming winter. We had no flour and not a single grain of wheat; none of the farms in the area was operating-there hadn’t been any gasoline or spare parts in ages, and the horses had been eaten even earlier. My father walked through the abandoned fields, picked up some grain, but others had been by before him, and he found just a little, enough for a very small sack. He thought he’d figure out how to grow wheat under the snow on the little field near his house in the woods. He asked Anisya when he should plant and sow, and she promised to tell him. She said shovels were no good, and as there weren’t any plugs to be found anywhere, my father asked her to draw him a plug on a piece of paper and began, just like Robinson Crusoe, to bang together some kind of contraption. Anisya herself didn’t remember exactly how it worked, even though she’d had to walk behind a cow with a plug a few times, in the old days, but my father was all aflame with his new engineering ideas and sat down to reinvent this particular wheel. He was happy with his new fate and never pined for the life of the city, where he’d left behind a great many enemies, including his parents, my grandmother and grandfather, whom I’d seen only when I was very little and who’d since been buried under the rubble of the arguments over my mom and my grandfather’s apartment, may it rot, with its high ceilings and private bathroom and kitchen. We weren’t fated ever to live there, and now my grandparents were probably dead. We didn’t say anything to anyone when we left the city, though my father had been planning his escape for a long time. That’s how we managed to have so many sacks and boxes to take with us, because all of this stuff was cheap and, once upon a time, not subject to rationing, and over the course of several years my father, a farseeing man, collected it all. My father was a former athlete, a mountain climber, and a geologist. He’d hurt his hip in an accident, and he’d long ago dreamed of escape, and here the circumstances presented themselves, and so we did, we left, while the skies were still clear. “It’s a clear day in all of Spain,” my father would joke, literally every morning that it was sunny out.

The summer was beautiful. Everything was blossoming, flowering. Our Lena began to talk. She’d run after us into the forest, not to pick mushrooms but to follow my mother like she was tied to her, as if it were the main task of her young life. I taught her how to recognize edible mushrooms and berries, but it was useless-a little creature in that situation can’t possibly tear herself away from grown-ups. She is saving her skin every minute of the day, and so she ran after my mother everywhere, on her short little legs, with her puffed-out stomach. She called my mother “Nanny”-where she picked up that word we had no idea; we’d never taught it to her-and she called me that, too, which was very clever, actually.

One night we heard a noise outside our door like a cat meowing and went outside to find a newborn baby wrapped in an old, greasy coat. My father, who’d grown used to Lena and sometimes even came during the day to help around the house, now simply deflated. My mother didn’t like it either and immediately went over to Anisya to demand who could have done this-with the child, at night, accompanied by the quiet Lena, we marched over to Anisya’s. Anisya wasn’t sleeping; she had also heard the child’s cries and was very worried. She said that the first refugees had already arrived in Tarutino, and that soon they’d be coming to our village too, so we should expect more guests from here on out. The infant was squealing shrilly and without interruption; he had a hard, puffed-out stomach. We invited Tanya over in the morning to have a look, and without even touching him she said he wasn’t going to survive-he had the infant’s disease. The child suffered, yelled, and we didn’t even have a nipple for the bottle, much less any food for him. My mother dripped some water into his dried-out mouth, and he nearly choked on it. He looked like he was about four months old. My mother ran at a good clip to Tarutino, traded a precious bit of salt for a nipple, and returned full of energy, and the child drank a little bit of water from the bottle. My mother induced stool with some softening chamomile brew, and we all, including my father, darted around as fast as we could, heating the water, giving the child a warm compress. It was clear to everyone that we needed to leave the house, the plot, our whole functioning household, or else we’d be destroyed. But leaving the plot meant starving to death. At the family conference my father announced that we’d be moving to the house in the woods and that he’d stay behind for now with a rifle and the dog in the shack next door.

That night we set off with the first installment of things. The boy, whose name was now Nayden, rode atop the cart. To everyone’s surprise he’d recovered, then began sucking on the goat’s milk, and now rode wrapped in a sheepskin. Lena walked alongside the cart, holding onto the ropes.

At dawn we reached our new home, at which point my father immediately made a second run and then a third. He was like a cat carrying more and more of his litter in his teeth, which is to say all the many possessions he’d acquired, and now the little hut was smothered in things. That day, when all of us collapsed from exhaustion, my father set off for guard duty. At night, on his wheelbarrow, he brought back some early vegetables from the garden-potatoes, carrots, beets, and little onions. We laid this all out in the underground storage he’d created. The same night he set off again, but limped back almost immediately with an empty wheelbarrow. Gloomily he announced: “That’s it!” He’d brought a can of milk for the boy. It turned out our house had been claimed by some kind of squad. They’d already posted a guard at the plot, and taken Anisya’s goat. Anisya had lain in wait for my father on his escape path with that can of milk. My father was sad, but also he was pleased, since he’d once again managed to escape, and to escape with his whole family.

Now our only hope lay in my father’s little plot and in the mushrooms we could find in the forest. Lena stayed in the house with the boy-we didn’t take her with us to the forest now but locked her in the house to keep her out of the way. Strangely enough she sat quietly with the boy and didn’t beat her fists against the door. Nayden greedily drank the potato broth, while my mother and I scoured the woods with our bags and backpacks. We no longer pickled the mushrooms but just dried them-there was hardly any salt left now. My father began digging a well, as the nearest stream was very far.

On the fifth day of our immigration we were joined by Baba Anisya. She came to us with empty hands, with just a cat on her shoulder. Her eyes looked strange. She sat for a while on the porch, holding the frightened cat on her lap, then gathered herself and went off into the woods. The cat hid under the porch. Soon Anisya came back with a whole apron’s worth of mushrooms, though among them was a bright-red poisonous one. She remained sitting on the porch and didn’t go into the house; we brought her out a portion of our poor mushroom soup in a can from the milk she used to give us. That evening my father took Anisya into the basement, where he’d built our third refuge, and she lay down and rested and the next day began actively scouring the forest for mushrooms. I’d go through the mushrooms she brought back, so she wouldn’t poison herself. We’d dry some of them, and some we’d throw out. One time, coming home from the woods, we found all our refugees together on the porch. Anisya was rocking Nayden in her arms and telling Lena, choking on her words: “They went through everything, took everything… They didn’t even look in on Marfutka, but they took everything of mine. They dragged the goat away by her rope.” Anisya remained useful for a long time to come, took our goats out for walks, sat with Nayden and Lena until the frosts came. Then one day she lay down with the kids in the warmest place in the house, on the bunk above the stove, and from then on got up only to use the outhouse.