Hans Voigt had established a simple system for the Lark House residents to judge the performance of each member of staff, and he was intrigued by the fact that Irina always obtained an excellent report. He guessed her secret must be her ability to listen to the same story a thousand times over as if she were hearing it for the first time, all those tales the old folks keep repeating to accommodate the past and create an acceptable self-portrait, erasing remorse and extolling their real or imagined virtues. Nobody wants to end their life with a banal past. However, Irina’s secret was in fact more complicated: to her each one of the Lark House residents was a replica of her grandparents Costea and Petruta, to whom she prayed every night before going to sleep, asking them to accompany her through the darkness, as they had done throughout her childhood. They had raised her, toiling on a thankless patch of ground in their remote Moldovan village, where not even the slightest breeze of progress blew. Most of the locals still lived in the country and continued working the land just as their ancestors had done a century earlier. Irina was two years old in 1989 when the Berlin wall came down, and four when the Soviet Union collapsed and her country became an independent republic. Neither of these events meant anything to her, but her grandparents lamented them, as did their neighbors. They all agreed that under communism they had been just as poor, but at least there was food and security, whereas independence had brought them only ruin and abandonment. Anyone who could leave did so, including Irina’s mother, Radmila, so that the only ones left behind were the old and children whose parents could not take them with them. Irina remembered her grandparents bent double from the effort of growing potatoes, faces lined by the August sun and freezing Januarys, with little strength left and no hope. She concluded that the countryside was fatal to health. She was the reason her grandparents kept on struggling, their one joy—with the exception of homemade red wine, a drink as rough as paint stripper that gave them the chance to escape their loneliness and boredom for a while.