“You… you didn’t mention you had a, um, son,” was all she could muster.

“Who, him? It’s Oksana’s bastard,” replied Petya, with a jovial wink.

For the following five months, living arrangements in our two-roomer were as follows: The gloomy youth lived on a cot in the five-meter kitchen. Big Rex, as the largest and most pedigreed member of our strange kollektiv, had the run of the premises, sometimes leaping onto the lightweight aluminum cot in my room where Mom now slept. For fear of being crushed by the canine truck, Mother stopped sleeping. Or perhaps she didn’t sleep because Oksana and Petya, taking after their owl, led a mysterious nocturnal lifestyle. Most of the day they dozed away on Mom’s ex-bed in the living room. At night they rumbled in and out of the kitchen, brewing tea and cursing when they bumped against the teenager’s cot. “Their tea,” as Mom called their brew, contained an entire packet of loose Georgian tea leaves for one mug of hot water.

My innocent mom. She had no idea that this was the hallucinogenic chifir that got inmates high in the gulags. She didn’t know either that the grassy-sweet smell that now mingled in our apartment with the animal odors was anasha, a Central Asian hashish. Violent arguments followed the couple’s intake of anasha and chifir. The whole building quaked from the pounding of neighbors on our walls, floor, and ceiling. The couple and the owl took turns disturbing the sleep of hardworking socialist households. The owl’s guttural screeching curdled the blood.

But the biggest dilemma was getting in and out of the house. Because Igor the serpent lived in the hallway. Anyone entering and exiting was treated to the sight of a python devouring albino mice procured by the youth from Medical Institute No. 2, where Oksana’s cousin worked in a lab. I spent most of the five months barricaded inside my room. The only person who still visited us was the double bassist upstairs; he enjoyed borrowing Igor to frighten his mother-in-law. Baba Alla, my grandmother, schlepped her bags of chicken and other tasty tokens of grandmotherly love all the way to Davydkovo and left them down on the doorstep. Usually Rex ate the chicken.

It was Dad who finally ended all this. He missed having a family. Hinted that if Mom cleared the coast, he’d come stay, at least on weekends. My father was, and would remain, my mother’s only true love. Oksana, Petya, Rex, Igor, Oleg, and the gloomy boy were exiled immediately, a sullen departing procession of people and cages and four thudding paws leaving behind a stench of zoo and hashish. Every flat surface of our brand-new dwelling space was scarred by burn rings from their kettle. I now acquired a semi-father in place of a python and an owl, one who delivered high-quality weekend offerings from a store called Dieta, a prestigious purveyor of cholesterol-laden items meant for the young and the infirm. Every Friday evening I listened impatiently for the turn of Dad’s key in the door, leaping into the hallway to greet Dieta’s buttermilk jellies and rich, crumbly cheese sticks. Recently Mom asked me whether I ever felt my father’s abandonment. Flashing back to the cheese sticks and especially to the white, quivery, scallop-edged jellies, I had to say no.

Mom and I never did recover our intimate idyll. In 1961 the Supreme Soviet of the USSR had passed a law branding as “parasites” any citizens who refused to engage in socially meaningful labor. Punishment: up to five years of exile or internment in camps. The law acquired some notoriety in the West in connection with Joseph Brodsky, the dissident poet convicted of parasitism and forced into international exile. Although she was still technically married, with a young child, and thus exempt from the law, Mom felt afraid and uneasy about not working. And so finally, on a brittle December day in 1968 when I was five years old, she reengaged in socially meaningful labor. She began a job teaching English at the Ministry of Merchant Marines, and I went to my very first Soviet kindergarten. I don’t remember all that much of the place, only that it was located across desolate train tracks from our khrushcheba, and that on my first morning there I soiled myself, I guess from separation anxiety, and for the entire day nobody attended to me. Mother discovered my shame on the way home. I still retain an image of her crying on the train tracks.

It never got any better. My fellow kindergarten inmates began falling ill from the spoiled meat in the borscht. Then on the bus Mother overheard my teacher instruct a younger colleague on how to reduce class sizes: “Open the windows—wide.” It was minus thirty degrees outside, and gusting.

Reluctantly, Mom turned to her father.

By the time I knew him, Colonel Naum Solomonovich Frumkin, my granddad the spy, looked nothing like the dapper, dark-eyed charmer we met in the 1940s chapter. Now long retired, Dedushka Naum had scant hair and heavy black-framed eyeglasses, and did morning calisthenics to patriotic songs. And he bellowed—he bellowed all day.

“I SALUTE YOU AND I CONGRATULATE YOU!!!!” he would thunder into the phone. “My dear, esteemed Comrade… [insert name of appropriate admiral of Soviet fleet].”

It amazed me how Granddad always found reasons to congratulate somebody—until I discovered the squat tear-off calendar he kept by the phone. Each new page announced a fresh, bright Soviet day, a new joyous occasion. Aviation Day, Baltic Fleet Day, Transport Policeman’s Day, Tank Driver’s Day, Submarine Officer’s Day. And let’s not forget the all-out lollapalooza of Victory Day on May 9, which Granddad began observing with his customary barrage of salutations in April.

The bombastic Brezhnev-era myth of the Great Patriotic War and its cult of the veteran animated Dedushka’s retirement. When he wasn’t shouting felicitations, he was bustling about on some all-important veterans’ business. Much of this bustle involved Richard Sorge, the half-German, half-Russian master spy we left two chapters ago, betrayed by Stalin, hanged in Tokyo, and long since forgotten—until a fluke led to his miraculous resurrection. In the early sixties the French made a feature film about Sorge’s story and tried to sell it to Russia. The Soviet Ministry of Culture deemed the whole thing a malicious falsification, but Khrushchev’s bodyguard tipped his boss off to the film. The Bald One demanded a screening.

“This is how all art should be made!” pronounced the excited Khrushchev when the lights came up. “Even though it’s fiction, I was on the edge of my seat.”

“Um… Nikita Sergeevich,” he was told, “Sorge wasn’t, um, fiction, he was, um, actual.” Khrushchev instantly rang the KGB. They confirmed both Richard Sorge’s actuality and his intelligence record. Without further ado, Khrushchev anointed him a posthumous Hero of the Soviet Union and ordered that he be celebrated as Soviet Spy Number One.

Sorge books, Sorge scholars, long-lost Sorge relatives, Sorge films, Sorge buttons and postal stamps… Granddad was in the eye of this never-ending Sorgian typhoon. A few times I accompanied Dedushka Naum in his uniform and medals to his Sorge talks at rest homes or trade union concerts. Granddad was usually stuck on the entertainment program between an amateur folk songstress in a cornflower wreath wailing about the unrequited love of a factory girl, and, say, an amateur illusionist. People stayed for the cornflower lady, left to smoke when Naum came on, then returned to see the illusionist.

“Disgraceful! Nobody respects the veterans!” some bemedaled audience member would grumble. My palms would grow sweaty and my face would turn the color of summer tomatoes.