Summary:

He doesn’t know how he ends up in the downstairs coat closet.

No memory exists of moving, of going down the staircase and shedding his ruined clothing until he’s only in his underwear, or opening the door and ripping all of Mama’s coats down to the floor. Vaguely, he recalls trembling in the cloud of her scent, stale and unhappy under the haze of old cigarettes.

What he remembers is flashes. Alexei, furious tears in his eyes, telling Papa he’d found Ilya. Papa, scowling down at him, snapping, “Ilya, get out of this closet right now.” One of Papa’s cop friends, saying, “Jesus, Grika, look at him. He’s in h—” and Papa replying coldly, “Not another word.”

Papa, kneeling in front of the closet, saying in an uncomfortable, painfully false, soft voice, “Synok, come out now. You cannot nest here.”