Illya Kuryakin smiled as he listened to the clacking sound the old women made as they walked down the street. He was in Holland with Napoleon. The old women in their sabots reminded him of his babushka trudging through the countryside wearing her lapti (a Russian peasant shoe woven from bark). He smiled as he remembered her telling him to hang his worn out lapti on the fence in front of their dacha to ward off evil.

Illya sighed, it wasn't often that something brought back his childhood so strongly.