[ Yes. The way he woke up bleeding with no visible cuts, first from his cuticles and now intermittently from his palm instead, when nobody else is—but Vasiliy doesn't disclose that. This conversation is already getting into potentially dangerous territory, and it's the kind of conspiratorial discussion a man like him is smart enough to abstain from having with a stranger. For all he knows, she's not one of the new arrivals. She could easily be a mole this Mayor sent to watch them. ]
This place seems normal. Only arrival was weird. And the door lock, with blood. ...I think we are in nineteen-eighties.
[ He knows they're in the Eighties, because the first thing he did upon waking up in an unfamiliar place—after hunting for styptic powder for his hand—was locate a newspaper. It's not the first time he's woken up in a different time, but it is the first time others have been there with him, which leads him to wonder if he didn't die in his sleep despite that initially seeming a likely explanation given the events of his paused-and-resumed life thus far.
Seeing a wall of replicas of Gorbachev's face moving in sync across a dozen TV screens in a store window at the mall also helped grind in the point. ]
yes! he definitely does.
This place seems normal. Only arrival was weird. And the door lock, with blood. ...I think we are in nineteen-eighties.
[ He knows they're in the Eighties, because the first thing he did upon waking up in an unfamiliar place—after hunting for styptic powder for his hand—was locate a newspaper. It's not the first time he's woken up in a different time, but it is the first time others have been there with him, which leads him to wonder if he didn't die in his sleep despite that initially seeming a likely explanation given the events of his paused-and-resumed life thus far.
Seeing a wall of replicas of Gorbachev's face moving in sync across a dozen TV screens in a store window at the mall also helped grind in the point. ]