This meticulous inquiry into the ways that ideological evil can infect, and ultimately destroy, the intimacies and small pleasures of daily life is beautiful, thoughtful, and almost unbearably sad. A widowed grandmother, mother, and daughter are facing starvation. Since the foreign doctors have been driven away, the mother's employment at the hospital ends. Thus the young daughter, at the risk of being discovered and killed, masquerades as a boy in...