[ Vasiliy laughs with genuine incredulity—he's even humble, like the New Soviet Man should be, saying that like he truly doesn't know what a momentous occasion it was for someone like him to meet a cosmonaut and a Hero of the Soviet Union under any circumstances. ]

Please, don't apologize. I'm happy to have met you. I never thought I would meet a real cosmonaut, though I am sorry it happened when I was on duty.

[ A bit of anguish still twists at the deepest pit of his chest cavity when family is brought up: when he's reminded that he has no family to mourn him, to wonder where he is. It's better this way, so that his parents won't suffer for the actions of their son a second time, but it also imbues this situation with an added degree of hopelessness. He'll die—if they let him leave—without anyone knowing he ever returned to begin with. ]

Your mother must be proud of you. Not many people can say they raised a cosmonaut.

[ His own mother had been proud of him, her chekist son who had gone from a six-year-old-boy working in a welding factory to a uniformed officer. He'd sent her a copy of a photograph of himself seated in uniform, knowing she'd treasure it; he'd watched the bare hand of his latest interrogator slide it across the table in his direction some seventy-plus years later. ]