By impregnating his wife, Lent’s plan to secure his investment through marriage had backfired—or so it seemed. At the hospital where Julia gave birth, Lent met a Professor Sokolov of Moscow University. Sokolov was an expert on embalming, and had recently pioneered a technique that blended mummification with taxidermy, creating corpses that still looked rosy and alive. He and Lent struck a deal, in which Sokolov would buy the bodies of Julia and her son, preserve them, and put them on display at the university’s Anatomical Institute. Sokolov kept the details of the embalming to himself, although we know the process took him six months. When the bodies were sufficiently infused with decay-arresting chemicals, Sokolov posed both mother and child standing up, the baby perched on a rod with an alert expression on his face, his mother standing with hands on her hips, feet wide apart, face turned to one side. The confident pose makes it possible to imagine Julia, just for a moment, as being like any self-possessed young woman standing on the corner waiting for a friend, a bus, a taxi, the end of the day to come.