Chapter 157

“Not exactly,” I replied, hesitating, “but I don’t think you’re lying.”

“I assure you that it is a part of my life that I am not proud of.”

The truth is that I was frozen. He spoke with such affectation, with so much pain, that I wondered if a part of him wasn’t back in the mountains of China, reliving those days.

“I suppose not,” I had to respond. “Why are there no official records of that?”

“There are. Your mother herself wrote them; I related them to her and only her. Nobody has access to that book, only Ekaterina and me,” he answered me, and I felt in every fiber of my body the sadness that overwhelmed him, more intense than any other feeling he had shared with me. I wanted to take a look at those books; I was going to have to talk to Mom when I was calmer. “I had no right to do anything like that to them, but they left me no choice. When the difference between doing one thing well and doing everything wrong is as thin as a hair, there is no satisfactory