“They broke me,” Gavriil said, staring sightless at his memories. “Go on home, Yefim. I stay here”

Gavriil said we should wear the dress uniforms.

I said maybe we should wear the regular ones instead — come humble. But he said it’s not a time for being humble, it’s an occasion, and occasions must be honored. It’s only right, he said, after all the years they waited, to show that we’ve been waiting, too.

Corporal Turgenev, he solved it for us in the end. When he called us for discharge, he got his smile on. A chillingly beautiful smile: chalk-white teeth, oiled mustache. I felt cold to my bones, and I feared straight away there was a problem with our papers, or they’d found out my real age — I’m confused what it is myself, but it’s younger than it’s supposed to be — and they wouldn’t let us go.

But this time I was wrong. “You’ve served your duties to the Czar,” Turgenev said, “but no more than that. So you can go now — but no more than that either. Your uniforms and weapons stay here.”

Discharged soldiers always keep their uniforms and we had no other clothes, but Turgenev, he would only be smugger if we begged. So we signed the discharge papers, and in the pile with all my army documents I caught a glimpse of the old yellowish one with my little-boy thumbprint from when I was conscripted. Something crinkled inside my throat and I had a strange thought: So what else is different between Yankush and Yefim, besides Yefim knowing how to write Russian?

Somehow, Gavriil scrounged us some old kosovorotkas, though the sleeves on mine barely passed my elbows, and that was that. Dress uniforms, regular — the greatcoat always ended above my knees anyway, and the seams nearly burst if I tried buttoning it, so maybe it’s for the best I’ll meet Papa and Mama this way.

The only thing is we couldn’t find caps any way we tried. Between when I was Yankush and now, there have been lots of things I thought I could never do. Each time, I turned out to be wrong. But to come before Papa bareheaded — this, I can’t.

We arrived in Vitebsk to late winter weather. I’d pictured discharge drenched in sun but of course it wasn’t like that. Even the clouds were no lighter than usual for the time of year.

It was cold and we found a tavern with a room to spare, but after a while in the smoke we found ourselves again at the door, leaning against it and looking out, like we had to prove to ourselves that we could walk off whenever we wished.

It was there, on the doorstep, that Gavriil said goodbye to me. It is hard to explain what it was like, except maybe losing a brother. “Come with me,” I said. “Come to Peruzhin. Do you have anywhere else to go? No, you don’t.”

Gavriil, he put his hand over his eyes, like he was saying Shema, the one thing we both still knew how to do. “No, I don’t,” he said. “My parents are long gone. There is nothing to return to.”

But still he wouldn’t come to Peruzhin with me. Maybe here, he said, in the big city, there would be some opportunities for him.

The loneliness. That is all I heard when he carried on about his opportunities. “What kind of opportunities can you have, Gavriil?” I asked him. “Maybe a little business, maybe a small room to live in. But nothing of what we’ve waited for, sung of, dreamed about all this time. No family. No Yiddishkeit, even now. Will you let his Excellency the Czar take that away from you even now he’s grudged it back?”

“They broke me,” Gavriil said, staring sightless at his memories. “Go on home, Yefim. I stay here.”

“You never broke, my brother!” I said. “They bludgeoned you senseless, you refused baptism. They smeared lard on your lips, you rubbed them raw to get it off. They drew crosses on your clothes, you ripped great gaping holes in them. You, broken?!”

“What do you fear?” he asked, looking up suddenly to inspect me. “You travel home now, to the Papa and Mama you ached for all these years. Why do you hesitate?”

I dropped down beside him. “It is not Mama and Papa,” I affirmed, gazing at the memories alongside him. “It is Avreimel.”