"This is the 'Vse GDZ' compendium," the man said, sliding it across the wood. "It has the answers for every exercise from Brest to Vitebsk. But remember, boy—the solution manual tells you the 'what,' but it never explains the 'why.'"

The bookseller sighed and reached under the counter. He pulled out a stack of books bound in the familiar, austere style of the Narodnaia Asveta publishing house. The covers were clean, but the edges were softened by the frantic thumbs of a thousand students before him.

The air smelled of old paper and the damp Belarusian spring. Behind a counter stacked high with yellowing almanacs sat an old man with spectacles thick enough to be magnifying glasses.

The old man didn’t look up. "You mean the GDZ? The solutions? You know the teachers at Gymnasium No. 1 say those books are cursed. They say if you use them, you forget how to think."

"I don't need to think," Maxim countered, his voice cracking. "I need to pass Physics and Calculus by Monday, or my mother will send me to work at the tractor factory before I can even say 'diploma.'"

On Monday morning, he sat in the exam hall. The sun hit his desk, illuminating the blank white paper. He looked at the first question—a problem involving the velocity of a train leaving Minsk-Passazhirsky.

Maxim grabbed the books, paid his rubles, and sprinted back to his apartment near Victory Square. He spent the night in a fever dream of copying formulas. He watched the answers to complex trigonometric equations flow from the page to his notebook like liquid gold.