People would sometimes speak of Perelman as a cruel nutcase, willing to deprive his mother, now an almost elderly woman, of a million dollars. Olga, on the other hand, wonders what that woman, Lubov, was like [...] there's nothing about her that suggests a helpless woman. It seems likely to Olga that her way of being might scarcely be different from Perelman's, or that the need to believe in an honest and transparent place might be one of Madame Lubov's qualities, which she passed on to her son. Why attribute to him the desire for a million dollars that would change his life and, in addition, force him to shoulder the fate of strangers, lives attached to each one of those dollar bills?