Bath day, so today we wash. Lyusya and Vitalik came on comm. They look good. Vitalka showed his school diary on TV. Amazingly, all fives. I asked: is this for the quarter? No, he says, for the week. Clever boy — he knows how to make his father happy.

Lyusya invited my friends Gena Lvov and Seryozha Dudkin to the comm session. Seryozha’s question surprised me: “Valya, what happened to your smile? It’s become kind of unnatural, strained.” I answered, you can’t explain that from up here. Today Lyusya spoke well and responded to situations correctly; she sensed my mood, our difficulties. She knows, apparently — Zhenya told her about the recent conversation with management. I asked Vitalik to keep studying music. That’s my longtime small dream — for him to play.

Then we washed. During bathing, the old callused skin on my heels split open and peeled off completely, like potato peel. We don’t walk on our feet up here, and now they’re like a baby’s — pink, with thin parchment-like skin. Though it’s a hassle to take a bath in space — you have to assemble it, fill it with water, and then after washing, take it apart, pump out the dirty water, and clean the shell — it’s worth the pleasure you get. After the bath we put on clean underclothes: shirt, long johns, socks, and just like that prepare hot food, grab something tasty, eat with relish, have some tea, and there’s such bliss in the body from the cleanliness, the lifted fatigue, the fresh clothes, the pleasure from the food, the relaxation from the drink, that everything accumulated is forgotten, and you think: “Nothing terrible, we’ll fly some more.”