The following Wednesday the three of us drove to the Academy. It was the first family visit in six months: Lia had outgrown the preschool regime, Kira had signed up to lead Noma’s morning seminar, and I... I, honestly, just wanted to take Lia out of Moscow after Elsa Brenn’s visit. For a week and a half I, like a professional paranoiac, monitored whether some other polite woman would appear at the doorstep, and on the tenth day understood that no one else would — Elsa had completed her visit, her next visit by regulation was in six months. But the air in the apartment still felt surveyed, and I preferred to take the family out of surveyed air into unsurveyed, three hundred and forty kilometers north.