They entered the town; at first Galina thought that they had stumbled upon a secret underground prison, but the people seemed too well fed and lacked that haunted spiritual look she usually associated with political prisoners.

Except one man. Dressed in a thick sailcloth jacket, hol-low-cheeked and old, he stopped in the middle of the narrow street, his deeply-set eyes catching Galina's. “New here?” he asked in a low rumbly voice.

Galina was about to answer, but Yakov interrupted her. “Yes,” he said. “We are searching for missing people…"

"My sister,” Galina interjected quickly.

"Yes. People turning into birds-do you know anything about it?"

The old man chewed the air with his empty mouth. “Birds,” he said. “Don't know about them. Sovin's my name. I can show you around.” He looked over Galina and the rest, as if appraising them. “Funny we don't see more young people around here these days."

"Here?” Yakov said.

He motioned around him, vaguely. “Yeah, here. Where the fuck else? You're underground, and that's all anyone ever needs to know. As I was saying, not many young people come here these days; I'm really surprised."

"Why?” Galina asked.

"It's always more when things turn shifty on the surface,” Sovin said. “I hear in the thirties and forties we were getting refugees in droves. In the sixties it was better for a bit, but then in the seventies and eighties, there's always been a steady trickle. We were taking bets on how much the traffic will increase in the nineties, what with all the fucking insanity that's going on. But nothing, imagine that."

"What about birds?” Yakov said.

"That's the errant magic, and I really don't know much about it. Don't care about that shit-I'm a scientist."

"Who can we ask about them, then?” Galina asked.

Sovin spat a long stream of foul, brown saliva. “Ask David Michaelovich, the pub owner. He sells booze to everyone, even the freaky things."

Galina turned to Yakov to ask his opinion on what those freaky things might be, but was struck by the sudden change in his demeanor. He swallowed repeatedly, as if there were a fishbone stuck in his throat. “That's an unusual name,” he finally said. His voice came out stilted, unnaturally calm.

"Yeah,” Sovin said. “His last name is Richards, a naturalized Englishman-not many foreigners here all and all, but some. He used to live in Moscow, worked as a radio announcer or something. The stupid ass moved here in 1937, to help build communism, of all things. Guess three times how long until he was accused of espionage."

"That's dumb,” Fyodor said.

"Yeah,” Sovin agreed. “Still, the man had ideals, and you gotta admire that."

"He's dead,” Yakov said suddenly. “Dead and buried."

"That's what we all are, in a sense,” Sovin said. “We are underground."

"Do you know him?” Galina whispered to Yakov.

Yakov nodded, still swallowing the nonexistent bone. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down. “He's my grandpa, I think."

"Well, come along then,” Sovin said, and moved with great speed and decisiveness down a side road, his rough military boots clanking on the wooden pavement like charging cavalry. Only then did Galina notice that he had a pronounced limp, which didn't seem to affect his agility.

Galina thought that the town looked surprisingly normal, if one was willing to ignore the glowing, weeping trees, and the buildings designed by fancy rather than a robust engineering sense. The houses, coquettishly hiding behind wild tangles of weeds and brambles, winked at her with the warm buttery eyes of their windows, all different sizes. “You have electricity?” she asked Sovin.

"Of course we do; what the fuck do you think it is, the Middle Ages?” He spat again, but this time a small blue skeletal shape scuttled from under the wooden planks of the pavement and licked the brown, lumpy spit clean with its feathery tongue. “We have electricity,” Sovin continued. “You must've passed the station on your way here, haven't you?"

Galina remembered the cement and sailcloth monstrosity. “So that what it was. What does it run on?"

"Whatever falls from the surface,” Sovin said. “Never you mind that; now, go talk to David Michaelovich."

He stopped before a low brown building, sprawled like a giant starfish; one of its rays jutted into the street, halting any passerby on his way. The building bore a terse inscription made in bright yellow paint. “Pub” it announced to the world in Russian and English.

"Come on in,” Sovin said. “Don't be shy. It's like a fucking Casablanca in there, only with more beer and less music and pointless talk and shit."

Galina thought that for a scientist Sovin cursed an awful lot, but followed him through the heavy door, with Yakov and Fyodor behind her. On the threshold Galina turned to Yakov and whispered, “It's going to be all right."

"I know,” he said. “It's just… I've never even met my father, but here I am, about to be introduced to my grandpa who's been dead for fifty years. My mom comes to his grave every weekend."

Galina struggled for words, but failed to find anything appropriate. She followed Sovin inside, stepping carefully on the thick carpet of sawdust.

There were wooden tables and stools, and a few people drinking and talking in low voices. She thought that the place looked just like an English pub imagined from an occasional bootlegged movie and Dickens’ novels.

The low bar, covered in round traces of glasses forming a complex fractal pattern, held up an impressive battery of variously shaped and sized bottles, bearing homemade labels with careful handwriting and simple but expressive ink drawings.

The man behind the bar looked young-no more than thirty-five; his muscular forearms shone with droplets of water from recent dishwashing. He wiped his hands on the towel tucked into his belt, and smiled at Galina. He had a thin face, and his eyes looked at the new guests attentively through a pair of wire-rimmed round spectacles perched on a long arched nose. He nodded at Galina and smiled wider, showing white uneven teeth. “New recruit,” he said in strongly accented Russian. “Welcome home, dear. Can I get you anything to drink?"

"Stop flirting with the broad,” said Sovin, and pulled Yakov, suddenly shy and blushing, in front of the bar. “That's your relative, or so he claims. I'll leave you to your tender reunion as soon as you get me a beer on the house."

David watched Yakov over the rim of his spectacles as he poured Sovin a generous glass of amber beer from one of the bottles. “All right,” he said after Sovin shuffled off in the direction of one of the tables, where two old men played checkers. “And who exactly are you?"

5: David

"I am your grandson,” Yakov said. “I think.” He couldn't quite accept that this man, barely older than Yakov, was removed from him by two generations.

David's eyebrows steepled sharply and his face paled. “Oh no,” he whispered. “Tanya was pregnant?"

"Grandma Tanya.” Saying these words brought to memory a tall stout woman with the strong voice of a schoolteacher and long-held suffering in her eyes. “She was pregnant with my mom. When you didn't come home, she thought that the NKVD got you. She packed a bag the same night and caught a train to Serpuhov; she had relatives there."

David nodded. “Smart. How is she?"

Yakov was not very good at telling people that someone they cared about died. No matter how much practice in bearing bad news his line of work threw at him, he still stammered and averted his eyes. “Dead,” he said, studying the patterns on the surface of the bar. “Twenty years. I remember her though."

"So do I,” his grandfather said. “I am so sorry."

"She thought you were dead. She wrote to the NKVD, but they wouldn't tell her anything. In the sixties, they finally sent her a letter of apology-the standard form they sent to all families of those repressed.” Yakov chewed his lip, remembering the letter his grandmother kept in a small cigar box with happy Cuban women on the lid. Photographs and letters, some yellowed, some new. Photographs of baby Yakov and his mom, passport photographs of his grandmother looking resolutely into the black eye of the camera as if it were a gun. One photograph of his grandfather, making a silly face, smiling. So yellow and brittle, she didn't let Yakov touch it, especially since his fingers were usually covered with sticky goo of one origin or another. But she let him look. And letters from her grateful students, birthday cards from relatives in Serpuhov, diplomas, dry flowers, and that one letter on government letterhead. Posthumously cleared of all charges, it said. Rehabilitated. Even now, Yakov tasted the bitterness of the word on his tongue, doubly now, when the man exonerated in the letter stood before him, absentmindedly wiping a beer glass.