Now, the protection was stripped away, and the image of her face tore at his heart like a splinter. He reminded himself that she had grown old, that she raised a daughter and watched her grandson grow big while she aged, something he didn't think much about-everyone underground remained like they were when they first got here, until eventually they faded away, all of them, except the old ones. He tried to imagine how she would look after the years of war and privation, but the image in his mind's eye remained the same-a young woman with serious eyes and a stubborn chin, the woman who tried to keep him alive despite his best efforts, and in the end denied any knowledge of her success. Then it occurred to him that he hadn't seen her in so long that he doubted the accuracy of his recollection. For all he knew, he had constructed the face from his vague dreams and longing. With the doubt, the image in his mind wavered, fell apart, and disappeared.

He lost her again that night, as he lost her every night, ever since he had fled underground. Belatedly he felt regret for never trying to find her or send a word; then again, what good would it do? His mind went over and over the familiar track, each rut honed by fifty years of the same old regrets. And yet, tonight he knew for sure-even though he had a daughter and a grandson, Tanya was dead. Alone in his room, David wept.

Fyodor couldn't sleep-he thought about his childhood in Zvenigorod, about long and dusty provincial summers he usually spent riding his bicycle down local roads. The smell of heated asphalt and tar became forever associated with those summers, when the cheap tinny bicycle bell drowned out the singing birds.

The summers when everything but the road and the bicycle disappeared, and he could ride it downhill, the pedals spinning so fast he sometimes had to lift his feet off them, to the sun, orange and huge, that waited for him at the bottom of the slope. In those days, he half believed that if he rode fast enough, gained enough momentum, he would catch up to the sun and sizzle and become one with the angry red semicircle that set faster than he could pedal.

He was pleased to recognize this old belief in his current adventure-apparently, the ability to ignore reality and to take things for what they appeared, not what they were, was the key to entering the underground kingdom. Everyone here, Fyodor learned from Sovin, had been desperate enough or confused and hurt enough to believe that the doors appearing on solid objects would open and admit them inside, that the reflections were the same as their originals. This is why there were so many madmen here, Fyodor decided. He wasn't sure he should count himself among them. But certainly not Sovin-that man, as Fyodor learned, was stone cold sober, and it was really a miracle that he had managed to make it in at all.

Fyodor could not sleep, even though Sovin's house was comfortable in the way of an old-fashioned wooden village house, with its warm dark walls and low ceiling, each beam distinct and blackened with soot. He lay on the bed (a straw mattress covered with a blanket), and thought about their host, the stories he told while Yakov was yammering away with his youthful grandfather.

Sovin had fought in two world wars, earned three PhDs, and spoke five languages fluently. He was born in St Petersburg into the family of a fur merchant, studied philosophy in Germany, and returned to Russia in 1914, to fight. The world war quickly graded into the civil one, and Sovin chose the red side, surprising even himself. It wasn't any shrewdness in the face of soberly weighing his circumstances; it wasn't the realization of the inevitable victory of the proletariat. It was a desire for fairness, for equality. He tried to like his comrades.

After the war, he went back to the Petrograd University to get a degree in agricultural science. He traveled with Vavilov, he collected seeds; Fyodor could not even imagine the sights he had seen and asked about Tibet and the Himalayas, but Sovin was determined to stay on the subject of seeds. “You have to understand,” he said. “There's that thing, a grain of rice or wheat, and it's small. But everything, everything every stalk of wheat or rice has ever known is packed inside it. It knows where it lives, it knows whether it's cold or warm; it is perfect in how it suits the place. And every one of them is the same yet different-Asia, East, West, the Andes, any given place. How can you not love such a thing?"

Fyodor recognized that the question was rhetorical, and kept his indifference to grains of anything to himself.

"Anyway,” Sovin continued, “you probably know what happened after."

"Repressions?” Fyodor said.

"Lysenko,” Galina offered.

Sovin seemed amused by their answers. “You're both right,” he said. “But before all that, there was the Genofond and Vavilov's Institute."

Sovin went home to Leningrad, where he worked on cataloguing and classifying the seeds, studying their genetics, crossbreeding strains. His philosophy training not forgotten but rather dormant, he focused all his energy on understanding the seeds and the plants that grew out of them, on defining and describing their traits. The collection of the seeds, the Genofond, embraced all of the variety of cultivated crops and held great promise. Until Vavilov was arrested.

Sovin and others continued their work, apprehensive about the war and Lysenko's crusade against genetics and other sciences with a suspicious foreign whiff about them. Sovin confessed that it was the fear of the labor camps that compelled him to join the army again-he was over the draft age, but they took him. His division was just outside Leningrad when the siege started.

Sovin was tormented by the visions of starving people and the precious grains from all over the world, and their close proximity worried him. He felt deficient when he prayed at night that the Genofond survive. “I didn't want anyone to die, understand,” he said. “It was just-I wanted the grains to survive too. To the people, it was just bread. But it was the entirety of human history in there. Even as we moved East and then back West, I kept thinking about it. Some things are just too important."

"It mostly survived,” Galina said.

Sovin nodded. “Mostly. But not the people."

He wasn't inside the city under siege, but he had nightmares about frozen streets littered with corpses, snowdrifts building over their hollow faces. He started thinking about whether the present was worth sacrificing for the history.

When the war was over, he could not go back to Leningrad. Instead, he joined the faculty of Moscow State University, teaching introductory biology and plant science; he experimented with plant genetics in secret-Lysenko had already labeled it the bourgeois pseudo-science, and Sovin had to mind his own bourgeois origins. Nonetheless, in 1948 he was sent to a labor camp in Kolyma.

When Fyodor was young, he met some of the men who went through the labor camps-they were recognizable, those craggy old men with gunpowder prison tattoos, foul language, and incessant smoking. No matter how mild-mannered and educated a person had been when they first went in, by the time they emerged they had been transformed by the harsh living and hard labor, by the life stripped to the essentials of survival, its most basic formula: if you work, you eat. The fact that they emerged alive meant that they had worked hard enough not to starve, and Fyodor tried to imagine how he would do in such circumstances. The unavoidable conclusion was that he would perish, and he respected those who were better at living than he. Maybe even envied them a little.