A Hero's Daughter

A HERO'S DAUGHTER
1

HOW FRAGILE AND STRANGE EVERYTHING IS down here

on earth…

What his life had depended on was a fragment of tarnished mirror held in the fingers, blue with cold, of a medical orderly, slim as a young girl.

For there he lay, in this vernal meadow churned up by tanks, amid hundreds of greatcoats, all solidified during the night into an icy mass. The jagged ends of shattered beams bristled upward from a dark crater to the left of them. Close at hand, its wheels sunk into a half collapsed trench, an antitank gun pointed up at the sky.

Before the war, from reading in books, he used to picture battlefields quite differently: soldiers carefully lined up on the fresh grass, as if, before dying, they had all had time to adopt a particular significant posture, one suggested by death. In this way each corpse would be perceived in the isolation of its own unique encounter with mortality. And each of their faces could be studied, this one with his eyes uplifted toward the clouds, as they drifted slowly away, that one pressing his cheek against the black earth.

Which is why, when he was first skirting that meadow covered with dead, he had noticed nothing. He walked along, painfully heaving his boots out of the ruts on the autumn road, his gaze fixed on the back of the man in front of him, the faded gray greatcoat on which droplets of mist glistened.

Just as they were emerging from a village – skeletons of half-burned izbas - a voice in the ranks behind him called out: "Holy shit! They sure had it in for the people!"

Then he took a look at the meadow that stretched away toward a nearby copse. He saw the muddy grass piled high with gray greatcoats, Russians and Germans, lying there at random, sometimes bundled together, sometimes isolated, face down against the earth. Then something no longer recognizable as a human body, a kind of brownish porridge, clothed in shreds of damp fabric.

And now he was one of these dead lumps himself. Stretched out there. Trapped in a little puddle of frozen blood beneath his neck, his head lay at an angle with his body that was inconceivable for a living being. His elbows were so violently tensed under his back that he looked as if he were trying to wrench himself up from the ground. The sun was only just glinting on the frost-covered scrub. In the forest, where it bordered on the open land and in the shell craters, the violet shadow of the cold could still be observed.

There were four medical orderlies: three women and a man who was the driver for the field ambulance into which they loaded the wounded.

The front was receding toward the west. The morning was unbelievably still. In the frozen, sunlit air their voices rang out clear and remote. "We must finish before it thaws out, otherwise we'll be up to our knees!" All four of them were dropping with weariness. Their eyes, red from sleepless nights, blinked in the low sun. But they worked effectively and as a team. They treated the wounded, loaded them onto stretchers, and slowly made their way to the van, crunching the lacework of ice, turning over the dead and stumbling in the ruts. The third year of the war was slipping by. And this springtime meadow covered in frozen greatcoats lay somewhere in the torn heart of Russia.

Passing close by the soldier, the young orderly hardly paused. She glanced at the puddle of frozen blood, the glassy eyes and the eyelids distended by an explosion and muddied with earth. Dead. With a wound like that no one could survive. She continued on her way, then went back. Averting her gaze from those horrible bulging eyes, she took out his service record.

"Hey, Manya," she called out to her comrade, who was tending a wounded man ten paces away from her, "he's a Hero of the Soviet Union!"

"Wounded?" asked the other one.

"Afraid not… dead."

She bent over him and began breaking the ice around his hair so as to lift up his head.

"Well, then! Come on, Tatyana. Let's carry mine."

And Manya was already slipping her hands under the armpits of her wounded man, whose head was white with bandages.

But Tatyana, her hands moist and numb, hastily sought out a little fragment of mirror in her pocket, wiped it with a scrap of bandage and held it to the soldier's lips.

In this fragment the blue of the sky appeared. A bush miraculously intact and covered in crystals. A sparkling spring morning. The glittering quartz of the hoarfrost, the brittle ice, the resonant, sunlit void of the air.

Suddenly the whole icy scene softened, grew warmer, became veiled with a little film of mist. Tatyana jumped to her feet, holding the fragment aloft, as the light cloud of breath rapidly faded, and called out: "Manya, he's breathing!"

The hospital had been improvised in a school building on two floors. The desks were piled high beneath the staircase, the bandages and medicines filled the cupboards, the beds were lined up in the classrooms; it had been made ready in great haste. When he recovered consciousness after four days in a deep coma, what he made out through the whitish veil that shrouded his eyes in a viscous and painful fog was the portrait of Darwin. Below it he made out a map on which could be seen diffuse patches of three colors – red for the Soviet Union, green for the English colonies, and purple for those of France. Then the torpor began to be dispelled. Little by little he came to be aware of the nurses and to feel a burning pain when they changed his dressings.

A week later he was able to exchange a few words with his neighbor, a young lieutenant, who had had both legs amputated. This young officer talked a great deal, as if trying to forget, or to keep boredom at bay. Sometimes he would reach out with his hand toward the bottom of his bed, feeling for his missing legs and, getting a grip on himself, would almost jovially and with a certain bravado come out with something the Hero of the Soviet Union had heard before and would hear again from the mouths of soldiers: "Goddamn it! My legs are blown to hell but they're still itching. Now that's a miracle of nature!"

It was this lieutenant who had told him the story of the mirror. He had caught occasional glimpses of the woman who had saved his life. From time to time she helped to bed down the wounded, or brought lunch around, but most of the time, as before, she was traveling over the fields in the ambulance.

When she came into their ward she often glanced timidly in his direction and, with his eyes half closed, as he felt the pain easing and giving way to periods of relief, he would smile lengthily

He lay there, smiling, and what occupied his mind was very simple. He was reflecting that he was a Hero of the Soviet Union; he was still alive, his legs and arms were intact; yesterday they had for the first time opened the window to the warm spring air, with a dry earsplitting noise of coarse paper being torn, tomorrow he would try to get up, to walk a little, and, if he could manage to do so, he would get to know the slim young girl who kept stealing glances at him.

The next day he got up and made his way across the room toward the door, savoring the bliss of these still clumsy first steps. In the corridor he stopped by the open window and gazed with joyful hunger at the pale haze of the first greenery, the dusty little courtyard where the wounded were exercising, some of them on crutches, others with their arms in slings. He rolled a cigarette, lit it. He was hoping to meet her that very day, catch her eye ("On your feet already, after a wound like that!") and speak to her. He had given it much thought during those long days and long weeks. He would give her a little nod as he inhaled a mouthful of smoke, screw up his eyes and remark carelessly: "I have a feeling we've met somewhere before…"

But occasionally it struck him that he should start the conversation quite differently. Yes, begin with the words he had one day heard in a play his class had gone to see. The actor, swathed in his black cloak, had observed to the heroine who was clad in a pale, frothy lace dress: "So it is to you, Madam, that I owe my life…" Words that struck him as splendidly noble.

Abruptly she appeared. Caught off his guard, he hastily rolled a cigarette and screwed up his eyes. He had not even noticed she was running. Her big boots and skirt were spattered with mud, her hair clung to her brow in moist locks. The Chief Medical Officer was coming out of the room next door. He saw her and stopped, as if to say something to her. But she rushed up to him and, with a sob that burst out like a laugh, she exclaimed: "Lev Mikhailovich! The van… It's hit a mine. Near the stream… The stream's burst its banks… I'd already got out to look for the ford…"

The Chief Medical Officer was already steering her into his office in the teachers' room. She went on jerkily: "Tolya tried to drive across the field. It was packed with mines… It was such a blaze you couldn't get near it… Manya… Manya was burned as well…"

There was a rapid commotion in the corridor. The nurses came running, their first-aid kits in their hands. The Hero of the Soviet Union leaned out of the window. The Chief Medical Officer rushed across the school yard, dragging his leg that had been injured in a bombardment. You could hear the throbbing sound from the engine of the van, with its slatted sides reinforced by planks of green wood.

They only became acquainted later. They talked and listened to each other with feelings of joy they had never experienced before. Yet what did they have to talk about? Their two villages, one near Smolensk in the west, the other far away to the north in the marshlands of Pskov. A year of famine lived through in their childhood, something that now, in the midst of the war, seemed quite ordinary. A summer long ago spent in a Pioneer camp, fixed forever in a yellowed photograph – thirty little urchins with close-cropped heads, caught in a tense, somewhat wary pose, beneath a red banner: "Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood!" He was seated to the right of a robust Pioneer who was frowning behind his drum and, like all his comrades, stared spellbound at the camera…

One evening they walked out of the school, strolled slowly through the half-burned village, talking all the time, and stopped beside the very last izba. All that was left of it was a blackened carcass, a charred tracery in the cold spring air. Discernible within it was the gray shape of a great stove, covered with half-burned timbers. But all around it on the ground you could already see the blue gleam of new grass. Above a smashed-in fence the pale branch of an apple tree in bloom glowed timidly in the dusk.

They did not speak. He studied the inside of the izba, as if curious. She stroked the white clusters of apple blossom distractedly. "That's quite a stove!" he said finally. "It looks like ours. Ours had a shelf on the top just like that." Then, without further ado, he began talking, his gaze fixed on the izba's charred entrails.

"Where I lived it was summer when the Fritzes came. They occupied the village, took up their quarters. Two days later the partisans attacked in the middle of the night. They blew up the Fritzes' storehouse and killed several of them. But no chance of driving them out… They weren't well-enough armed. They fell back into the forest. In the morning the Germans were furious. They set fire to the village at both ends. The people who tried to escape were killed on the spot. Even though there were only women and children left. Plus old men, of course. My mother had the baby with her – that was my brother, Kolka. When she saw what was happening, she pushed me out into the vegetable patch. 'Save yourself she said. 'Run toward the forest!' I started running but I saw the whole village was surrounded. So then I turned back. And they were already coming into our yard. There were three of them with submachine guns. In a little meadow near our izba there was a haystack. I thought: 'They'll never find me under that!' Then, just as if someone had whispered in my ear, I see a big basket next to the fence. You know, an enormous basket, with two handles. And I dive under it. I don't know how long I stayed in there. The Germans went into the house. And they killed my mother… She screamed for a long time… I was so scared I lay there stock still… then I see them come out. One of them – I couldn't believe my eyes – he's holding Kolka head downward by his feet. The poor kid started to yell… What saved my life then was my fear. If I'd had my wits about me, I'd have gone for them. But I didn't even catch on to what was happening. At that moment I saw one of them take out a camera and the other one skewers Kolka with his bayonet… He was posing for a photo, the dirty bastard! I stayed under the basket. And that night I ran for it."

She listened to him without hearing, knowing in advance that his story would contain all the horror that surrounded them, that they encountered at every step. She was silent, remembering the day their van had entered a village recaptured from the Germans. They had begun to tend the wounded. And from somewhere or other a shriveled, half-dead old woman had appeared like a ghost and wordlessly tugged at her sleeve. Tanya had followed her. The old woman had led her into a barn; there on the rotten straw lay two young girls – both of them killed by a bullet through the head. And it was there, in the dim light, that the peasant woman found her voice. They had been killed by their own countrymen, the Russian polizei, who had shot them in the head and violated the still warm bodies as they writhed in their death throes…

They remained for some moments without speaking, then took the road back. He lit a cigarette and gave a little laugh, as if he were recalling something funny.

"When they left the yard they passed close by the haystack. I watched them. They stopped and began sticking their bayonets into it. They thought someone was hiding there…"

Twenty or thirty years later, when May 9 came round, Tatyana would often be asked this question: "Tatyana Kuzminichna, how did you come to meet your Hero?" On that particular day the whole varnishing workshop – ten young girls, three older women workers, including herself and the foreman, a bony man in a blue overall caked with varnish – holds a little celebration. They crowd into an office piled high with old papers, out-of-date wall newspapers, pennants celebrating the "Heroes of Socialist Emulation," and hastily begin to eat and drink, proposing toasts in honor of the Victory.

The office door leads out onto the rear courtyard of the furniture factory. They keep it open. After the noxious acetone fumes it is absolute heaven. They can feel the sunny May breeze, still almost unscented, light and airy. In the distance a car can be seen, raising a cloud of dust, as if it were summer. The women produce modest provisions from their bags. With a knowing wink, the foreman removes from a small battered cupboard a filched bottle of alcohol, labeled "Acetone." They all become animated, lace the alcohol with jam, add in a drop of water, and drink: "To the Victory!"

"Tatyana Kuzminichna, how did you meet your Hero?"

And for the tenth time she embarks on the story of the little mirror and the hospital in the school that springtime long ago. They already know how it goes but they listen and are amazed and touched, as if they were hearing it for the first time. Tatyana does not want to go on remembering the village burned from both ends or the old, silent peasant woman leading her toward the barn…

"That year, my friends, it was one of those springs… One evening we walked to the end of the village. We stopped. All the apple trees were in bloom, it was so lovely it took your breath away. So what do apple trees care about war? They still blossom. And my Hero rolled himself a cigarette and smoked it. Then he screwed up his eyes like this and said…"

It seems to her now that they really did have these meetings and long, long evenings together… As the years have gone by she has come to believe it. And yet there was only that one evening in the icy spring, the black carcass of the burned-out roof. And a hungry cat sidling warily along beside the fence, staring at them with an air of mystery, as animals and birds do at twilight when they seem to stir things up in people's minds.

They had one more evening together, the last one. Warm, filled with the rustling and chattering of swifts. They had gone down toward the river, had stayed stock-still for a long while, not knowing what to say to each other; then, clumsily, they had kissed for the first time.

"Tomorrow, that's it, Tanya… I'm returning to my unit… I'm going back to the front," he said in somewhat somber tones, this time without screwing up his eyes. "So, listen carefully to what I say. Once the war's over we'll get married and we'll go to my village. There's good land there. But for now you must just…"

He had fallen silent. With lowered eyes she was studying the footprints made by their boots in the soft clay of the bank. Sighing like a child breathless from long weeping, she had said in a subdued voice: "It doesn't matter about me… but you…"

In the summer of 1941, when he escaped from the burned-out village to join the partisans, he was just seventeen. He could still picture the face of the German who had killed little Kolka. It had stayed with him, the way the pitching of a staircase collapsing beneath your feet in the pallid terror of a vivid nightmare stays with you. This face stuck in his memory because of the scar on one cheek, as if bitten from inside, and the sharp stare of the blue eyes. For a long time the notion of an appalling vengeance obsessed him, a personal settling of accounts, the desire to see this man, who had posed for the photograph with the child's body impaled on his bayonet, writhing in terrible torment. He was absolutely convinced he would encounter him again.

Their detachment of partisans had been wiped out. Miraculously, by spending a whole night in the reeds up to his neck in water, he had managed to escape with his life. When he reported to the regional military committee, he had added a year to his age and two days later had found himself sitting on a hard bench with other boys in fatigues, lean, with cropped heads, listening to a noncommissioned officer's very military language, blunt but clear. He was talking about "tank phobia," explaining that there was no need to be afraid of tanks and that running away as they approached was a sure way to be had. You had to be smart. And the sergeant had even drawn a tank on the old blackboard, showing its vulnerable points: the caterpillar tracks, the fuel tank…

"In a nutshell: if you're scared of tanks, you've no place in the ranks," the sergeant concluded, highly pleased with his own wit.

Two months later, in November, lying in a frozen trench, with his head raised slightly above the clods of frozen earth, Ivan was watching a line of tanks emerging from the transparent forest and slowly forming up. Beside him lay his rifle – it was still the ancient model invented by Mossin, a captain in the czarist army – and two bottles of explosive liquid. For the whole of their section, as they clung to this scrap of frozen earth, there were only seven antitank grenades.

Had it been possible to stand up, they could have seen the towers of the Kremlin with the aid of field glasses, through the cold fog to the rear of them.

"We're an hour's drive from Moscow," a soldier had said the previous day.

"Comrade Stalin's in Moscow," the officer replied. " Moscow will not fall."

Stalin!

And suddenly the temperature rose. For him, for their Country, they were ready to take on the tanks with their bare hands! For Stalin's sake it all made sense: the snow-filled trenches, their own greatcoats, which would soon stiffen forever under the gray sky, and the officer's harsh cry as he hurled himself beneath the deafening clatter of the tank tracks, his grenade in his hand, with the pin removed.

Forty years after that bitterly cold day Ivan will find himself seated in the humid dullness of a dimly lit bar chatting amid the hubbub from neighboring tables with two newly encountered comrades. They will already have slipped the contents of a bottle of vodka into their three tankards of beer on the q.t. and embarked on a second, and will be in such good spirits that they don't even feel like arguing. Just listening to the other guy and agreeing with whatever he has to say.

"So what about them, those men of the Panfilova Division? Were they heroes? Throwing themselves under tanks? What choice did they have, for God's sake: 'What stands behind us is Moscow,' says the political commissar. 'No further retreat is possible!' Except that what stood behind us wasn't Moscow. It was a line of machine guns blocking the way, those NKVD bastards. I started there, too, Vanya, the same as you. Only I was in the signal corps…"

Ivan Dmitrevich will nod his head, embracing the speaker with a vague and almost tender gaze. What's the use of talking about it? And who knows what really happened? "And yet," the words form silently in his mind, "at that moment the thought of a line blocking the way never occurred to me. The lieutenant shouted: 'Advance! For Stalin! For our Country!' And in a flash it all went. No more cold. No more fear. We believed in it…"

It was at the battle of Stalingrad that he won the Gold Star of a Hero of the Soviet Union.

And yet he had never seen Stalingrad. Just a streak of black smoke on the horizon, above a dry steppe so boiling hot you could feel the crunch of sand in your mouth. He never saw the Volga, either, only a grayish void in the distance, as if poised above the abyss at the end of the world. Sergeant Mikhalych gestured in the direction of the black smoke on the horizon.

"That's Stalingrad burning. If the Germans cross the Volga the city's a goner. We'll never be able to hold it."

The sergeant was sitting on an empty shell case, drawing on the last cigarette of his life. Half an hour later, amid the din and dust storm of the battle, he would emit a gasp and slowly collapse onto his side, clapping his hand to his chest, as if to pluck from it a tiny, jagged sliver of shrapnel.

How had they come to find themselves with their gun on this high ground between that sparse woodland and a ravine full of brambles? Why had they been left on their own? Who had given the order for them to occupy this position? Had anyone actually given such an order?

The battle had lasted so long that they had become a part of it. They had ceased to feel separate from the heavy shuddering of the 76-millimeter antitank gun, the whistling of the bullets, the explosions. Pitching and tossing like ships, the tanks surged across the devastated steppe. In their wake the dark shadows of soldiers were moving about in clouds of dust. The machine gun rattled out from a little trench on the left. After swallowing its shell the gun spat it out again, as if with a "phew" of relief. Six tanks were already smoldering. The rest of them drew back for a time, then returned, as if magnetically attracted to the hill stuffed with metal. And once again, in a fever of activity, completely deafened, their muscles tensed, the artillerymen became indistinguishable from the gun's frenzied spasms. They had long since ceased to know how many of them were left, as they carried up the shells, even stepping over dead men. And they would only become aware that one of their comrades had died when the rhythm of their grueling task was broken. At intervals Ivan looked behind him and each time saw the red-haired Seryozha sitting comfortably beside some empty ammunition crates. Each time he wanted to yell at him: "Hey! Sergei! What the fuck are you doing there?" But just then he would notice that all the seated man had left of his stomach was a bloody mess. And then in the din of the fighting and the racket of gunfire he would forget, would look back again, would again be on the brink of calling out to him and would again see that red stain…

What saved them was the first two tanks burning and blocking a direct attack by the Germans. The ravine protected them on the left, the little wood on the right. Or, at least, so they thought. Which is why when, with the sound of tree trunks smashing, a tank loomed up, flattening the scrub, they did not even have time to be afraid. The tank was firing at will but the person huddled within its stifling entrails had been in too much of a hurry.

The explosion flung Ivan to the ground. He rolled into the trench, groped around in a hole to find the stick grenade's handle, removed the pin, and, bending his arm back, hurled it. The earth shook – he did not hear the explosion but felt it in his body. He raised his head above the trench and saw the black smoke and the shadowy figures emerging from the turret. All this amid a deafness that was at once ringing and muffled. No submachine gun to hand. He threw another grenade, the last one…

Swathed in the same hushed silence, he left the trench and saw the empty steppe, the smoking tanks, the chaos of plowed-up land, of corpses and trees torn to shreds. Seated in the shadow of the gun was an aged Siberian, Lagun. Seeing Ivan, he got up, signed with his head, said something and – still in an unreal silence – went over to the machine-gunner's little trench. The latter was partly lying on his side, his mouth half open and twisted in such pain that, without hearing it, Ivan could see his cry. On his bloodied hands only the thumbs remained. Lagun began to dress his wounds, bathing his stumps with alcohol and binding them tightly. The machine-gunner opened his mouth even wider and rolled over on his back.

Ivan stumbled around the tank covered in leaves and broken branches and made his way in under the trees. Two ruts left by the tank tracks gleamed darkly vivid in the torn-up grass. He crossed them and headed toward where the shade was deepest.

Even in this copse the forest could be sensed. Midges swirled around in the slender, quivering rays of sunlight. He caught sight of a narrow rivulet brimming with water the color of tea, dizzyingly limpid. Water spiders skated about on its smooth brilliance. He followed its course and after a few steps found the tiny pool of a spring. He knelt down and drank greedily. His thirst quenched, he raised his head and lost his gaze in the transparent depths. Suddenly he noticed his reflection, the face he had not seen for such a long time – this young face turned slightly blue with the shadow of its first beard, the eyebrows bleached by the sun and devastatingly distant, alien eyes.

"It's me" – the words formed slowly in his head – "me, Ivan Demidov…" For a long time he contemplated this somber reflection's features. Then shook himself. It seemed to him that the silence was becoming less dense. Somewhere above him a bird called.

Ivan got up, leaned over again and plunged his flask into the water. "I'll take it to Lagun, he must be baking back there under his gun."

From the citation drawn up on the orders of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union he was to learn that that day they had "contained the enemy's advance in a direction of vital strategic importance" and had "resisted more than ten attacks by a numerically superior enemy." In this text the names of Stalingrad and the Volga would be mentioned, neither of which they had ever seen. And how little these words would reflect what they had lived through and experienced! There would be no mention here of Mikhalych and his gasp of pain, nor of Seryozha in his blackened and reddened battle dress, nor of smoking tanks amid trees stripped bare and drenched in blood.

There would be no mention, either, of the little pool of fresh water in the wood reawakening to all the sounds of summer.

Throughout the war he had received only two brief letters from Tatyana. At the end of each of them she wrote: "My comrades-in-arms, Lolya and Katya, send you warm greetings." He kept these letters, wrapped in a scrap of canvas, at the bottom of his knapsack. From time to time he reread them so that he came to know their naive contents by heart. What he particularly cherished was the handwriting itself and the mere sight of those regulation folded triangles of creased writing paper.

When victory came he was in Czechoslovakia. On May 2 the red flag was hoisted over the Reichstag. On May 8 Keitel, his eye furious behind his monocle, signed the deed of Germany 's unconditional surrender. The next day the air resounded with Victory salvos and the postwar era began.

Yet on May 10, Hero of the Soviet Union, Guards Staff Sergeant Ivan Demidov, was still seeking out the dark silhouettes of tanks in his sights and urging on his soldiers, yelling his orders in a cracked voice. In Czechoslovakia the Germans did not lay down their arms until the end of May. And, like stray bullets, the death notices kept winging their way back to a Russia that might have expected that after May 9 no one else would die.

Finally this war, too, came to an end.

Two days before demobilization Ivan received a letter. Like all letters written on behalf of someone else, it was a trifle dry and muddled. Furthermore it had taken more than a month to reach him. He read that in April Tatyana had been seriously wounded, had recovered, following an operation, and was currently in the hospital in Lvov.

Ivan studied the hastily handwritten note for a long time. "Seriously wounded…" he repeated, feeling something grow tense within him. "The arm? The leg? Why not spell it out clearly?"

But along with pity he felt something else that he did not want to admit to himself

He had already exchanged the hundred Austrian schilling gold pieces for rubles, had already breathed the air of this Europe, devastated but still well ordered and comfortable. On his tunic the Gold Star shone, and the deep red enamel of the other two orders and the bluish silver of the medals "For gallantry" glittered. And, passing through liberated towns, he was aware of the admiring looks of young women throwing bunches of flowers on the tanks.

He was already dreaming of finding himself as quickly as possible back in a railroad freight car among his newly discharged companions, amid the acrid smell of tobacco, looking out through the wide-open sides at the dazzling greenery of summer, running out at halts in search of boiling water. Apart from his knapsack he had a little wooden coffer reinforced with steel corners. In it a length of heavy moiré material, half a dozen wristwatches found in a ruined store, and, best of all, a big roll of first-class leather to make boots from. The mere scent of this leather, with its fine grain, made his head spin. Just imagine putting on creaking boots and strolling down the village street with your medals jingling… And indeed a comrade from his regiment did invite him to go and settle with him, in Ukraine. But before that? It would be an idea first to visit those of his nearest and dearest who were still alive, before seeking his fortune in a new place. "I could find a pretty girl down there, and besides the people there are much wealthier and more generous…"

Again he read that letter and the same voice whispered to him: "I promised… I promised… Well, so what? We weren't married in church. I did go a bit too far, it's true… But that was what the situation called for! And now what? Do I have to commit myself for the rest of my life? This letter's a riddle. Let the devil make head or tail of it if he can. 'Seriously wounded…' What does that mean? After all, what I need is a wife, not a cripple!"

Very deep within him another voice made itself heard. "You're pathetic, Hero, that's what you are. All mouth and no action. You'd have been a dead duck without her. You'd be rotting away in a communal grave with a Fritz on one side and a Russian on the other…"

Finally Ivan decided: "All right! I'll go there. It's pretty much on my way in any case. I'll do the right thing. I'll go see her. I'll say thank you to her one more time. I'll explain to her: 'Look, this is how it is…' " And he decided to think about "this" on the journey.

When he walked into the hospital ward he did not notice her right away. Knowing she was seriously wounded, he pictured her lying there, swathed in bandages, unmoving. It had not occurred to him that the news was two months old.

"There she is, your Tatyana Averina," said the nurse who showed him in. "Don't stay too long. The meal's in half an hour. You can go into the little garden."

Tatyana was standing at the window; her hand hung at her side, holding a book.

"Good day, Tatyana," he said in rather too jovial a voice, offering her his hand.

She did not stir. Then she put the book down on the windowsill and clumsily offered him her left hand. Her right arm was bandaged. From all the beds curious stares focused on them. They went down into the dusty little garden and sat on a bench with peeling paint.

"So. How's your health? How are you? Tell me," he said in the same overly cheerful voice.

"What's there to tell? You can see. I was hit just toward the end."

"Hit, hit you say… but that's nothing at all. And there was that nurse talking about a serious wound! I thought you…"

He lost his composure and fell silent. She gave him a long look.

"I've got a piece of shrapnel lodged under my fifth rib, Vanya. They don't dare touch it. The doctor says the shrapnel's of no account – a cobbler's nail. But if they begin tinkering with it, there's a risk it could make things worse. If they leave it alone maybe it'll give no trouble."

Ivan seemed to be on the brink of saying something, but simply sighed and began to roll a cigarette.

"So there it is… It has to be said that I'm disabled. The doctor's warned me: I won't ever be able to lift heavy weights. And no question now of ever having children…" She pulled herself up short, afraid that might have sounded like an untoward allusion, then continued hastily: "My left breast's all scarred. It's not a pretty sight. And I'm missing three fingers from my right hand."

Tight-lipped, he puffed at his cigarette. Both of them were silent. Then, with bitter relief, she finally let fall what she had perfected at length during long days of convalescence: "Look, Ivan, that's how it is… Thank you for coming. But what's past is past. What sort of a wife would I be for you now? You'll find a good healthy one. Because, in my case… I'm not even allowed to weep. The doctor told me in so many words. For me emotions are even worse than carrying heavy weights – if the splinter pierces it, the heart's finished…"

Ivan studied her out of the corner of his eye. She sat there, her head lowered, not taking her eyes off the gray sand of the avenue. Her face looked so serene… There was just a little bluish vein throbbing on her temple, where her closely cropped hair began. Her features were softened and, as if lit by an inner light, utterly different from the radiant, rosy-cheeked girls throwing bunches of flowers on the tanks.

"She's beautiful," thought Ivan. "What a tragedy!"

"Now listen! You're wrong to take it like this!" he said at last. "Why are you so downhearted? You're going to get better. A fine dress and you'll find as many fiances as you want!"

She flashed a quick look at him, stood up and held out her hand.

"Well, Vanya, it's time for the meal. Once again, thank you for coming…"

He went out through the hospital gates, walked down a street, then swiftly retraced his footsteps. "I'll give her my address," he thought. "Then she can write to me. It won't be so hard for her."

He went back into the hospital and started climbing the stairs.

"Did you forget something?" the caretaker called out to him in a friendly way.

"Yes. That's right. I forgot something."

Tatyana was not in the ward, nor in the canteen, either. He was about to go back downstairs and ask the caretaker. But at that moment he spotted her dressing gown tucked away in a corner behind a pillar.

She was weeping silently, for fear of the echo between the floors. Behind the pillar a narrow window looked out over the tiny garden and the hospital gates. He went up to her, took her by the shoulders, and said to her in muted tones: "What's going on, Tanya? Look, here's my address, so you can write to me…"

She shook her head and murmured with a gulp through her tears: "No, no, Vanya. There's no point. You don't want me around your neck… What use can I be to you?"

She sobbed still more bitterly, just like a child, turned toward him and pressed her brow against the cold metal of his medals. This frailty, these childish tears, suddenly stirred something within him and prompted a surge of joyous gallantry.

"Listen, Tanya," he said, shaking her gently by the shoulders, "when are they going to sign your discharge note?"

"Tomorrow," she murmured, drunk with tears and misery.

"Good! Well, tomorrow I'm taking you away. We'll go to my home and we'll get married there."

Again she shook her head. "What use can I be to you?" But without asking himself whether it was his head or his heart ruling him, he happily barked out a laughing order: "Silence in the ranks! To your duties, dismissed!"

Then, leaning forward, he whispered in her ear: "You know, Tanya, I'll love you all the more with your wound!"

His native village, Goritsy was almost deserted. He saw the charred ruins of the izbas standing there and the useless wooden uprights beside abandoned wells. The head of the kolkhoz, who had the emaciated face of a saint on an icon, welcomed them like his own kin. They walked together to the place where the Demidovs had lived before the war.

"Well, there it is, Ivan! It'll have to be rebuilt. For the moment there are only four men here, including yourself. There's a horse of sorts. But that's how it goes. I think we can have a housewarming before the fall."

"The first thing to be done, Stepanych," said Ivan, gazing at the weathered remains of his father's izba, "is for you to marry us."

The marriage was celebrated at the kolkhoz soviet. Everyone who lived in Goritsy – twelve people in all – was there. The bridal couple were seated, a trifle awkward and solemn, beneath the portrait of Stalin. Everyone drank samogon, the rough vodka made in the village. Merrily they cried out: "Gorko!" inviting the couple to kiss. Then the women, with voices somewhat out of tune, as if they had lost the habit, began to sing:

Someone's coming down the hill, My lover true, my handsome boy! Yes he's the one, now heart be still, Beating madly in my joy!

He has his khaki tunic on: The star shines red, the braid shines gold. Why did we meet on life's long road? Now tell me why. It must be told.

The dense summer night grew deeper outside the uncurtained windows. Two oil lamps glowed on the table. And the people gathered in that izba, far away in the heart of the forest, sang and laughed; and wept, too, happy for the young couple but bitter about their broken lives. Ivan wore his tunic, arefully washed, with all his decorations; Tatyana a white blouse. It was the gift of a tall woman with a swarthy complexion who lived in the ruins of an izba at the end of the village.

"This is for you, bride-to-be," she had said in a harsh voice. "It's for your wedding. When you came here, we thought you were a town girl. We said: 'Well there's one who's landed Ivan, a good catch and a Hero, too.' Then he told us your story. Go ahead, wear it and be beautiful. I cut it out myself. I knew you'd find it difficult with that hand of yours. My mother was keeping the material for her burial. The borders were all embroidered with crosses. She kept it in a little chest in the cellar. When the Germans burned the village my mother was burned, too. No more need for a winding sheet. I poked around in the ashes and found that chest there, still intact! Go ahead, wear it. You'll look lovely in it. It comes with all my heart…"

Toward the end of August the frame of the new izba could be seen rising up beside the ruins, filling the air with the scent of resin from freshly cut wood. Ivan began covering the roof. From the little shack they were living in they moved into the corner of the izba that was now roofed over. In the evening, dropping with exhaustion, they stretched out on sweet-smelling hay scattered over planks of pale timber.

Lying there in the darkness, they stared up through the framework of the roof at late summer stars as they soared and skimmed away in a dazzkng dance. All through the village the wispy blue scent from a wood fire in a kitchen garden hung over the earth. The already familiar scratching of a mouse could be heard in one corner. The silence was so intense you could believe you were hearing the shooting stars brushing against the heavens. And in one corner, above a table, you could hear the tick tock of an old chiming clock. Ivan had found it in the ruins, all covered with soot and rust, the hands stopped at a time frighteningly long ago.

Slowly they got used to each other. She no longer trembled when Ivan's calloused hand touched the deep scar on her breast. He did not even notice the scar anymore, or her little crippled fist. On one occasion she held on to his hand and drew it over the folds of the wound.

"You see. It's in here, in this little hollow, that it's lodged. The devil take it!"

"Yes. It's bitten deep."

Ivan drew her to him and whispered in her ear: "It doesn't matter. You'll make me a son and give him the right breast. The milk's the same…"

The izba was completed in the fall. A little before the first snow they harvested the potatoes, planted late, as well as some vegetables.

The snow fell, the village went to sleep. But from time to time they could hear the tinkling of a bucket in the well and the old dog coughing in the yard that belonged to the head of the kolkhoz.

In the morning Ivan went to the soviet, then to the smithy. Together with the other men he was repairing tools for the farmwork in spring. On his return he would sit down at the table with Tanya. He blew on a red-hot cracked potato, stole quick glances at his wife, unable to conceal a smile. Everything afforded him a secret joy. It was clean and tranquil in their new izba. They could hear the regular sound of the clock. Outside the windows etched with ridges of frost a mauve sun was setting. And close beside him sat his wife who was expecting a child, radiant, a trifle solemn, and more attractive than ever in her sweet and serene seriousness.

After the meal Ivan liked to stroll slowly through the rooms of the izba, listening to the creak of the floorboards. He patted the stove's white walls and would often remark: "You know, Tanyushka, we'll have a whole brood of children. And when we grow old we'll keep warm lying on this stove. It's true, just look at it. It's no mere stove, it's a real ship. The shelf on top is even better than the old one."

The winter grew severe. The wells froze right down to the bottom. The birds, stricken in midflight, fell to the ground as little lifeless balls. One day Tanya gathered up one of these birds just outside the house and put it on a bench near the stove. "It may recover in the warmth," she thought. But the little bird did not stir. The hoarfrost on its feathers simply glistened in fine droplets.

In April they had their son. "He's so like you, Ivan," said Vera, the woman with the swarthy complexion. "He'll be a Hero, too." The child was crying and she had picked him up and handed him to his father.

Toward evening Tanya began to feel breathless. They opened the window to let in the cool April dusk. Vera gave her an infusion to drink but nothing brought her comfort. The nearest doctor lived in a village a dozen miles away. Ivan put on his overcoat and set off at a run on the deeply rutted road. He did not return till the early hours of the morning. He had borne the old doctor on his back the whole way.

The injections and medicines brought Tanya some relief. Ivan and the doctor, both of them light-headed with weariness after their sleepless night, sat down to drink some tea. Vera brought a little crock of goat's milk, warmed it and fed the child.

Before going on his way the doctor downed a small glass of samogon and said: "Now then, if ever her heart falters you must give her this powder. But, strictly speaking, she shouldn't have had a child, she shouldn't even knead dough… Yes I know, I know, soldier… when you're young… I was young once myself!" He winked knowingly at Ivan and set off toward the main road.

They called their son Kolka, like Ivan's baby brother who was killed by the Germans.

In the spring, as ill luck would have it, the kolkhoz's only horse died just before plowing time. Of late they had had nothing to give it but rotten hay and dried stems.

One morning they saw the Party's local boss, the Secretary of the District Committee, arriving in a jolting jeep. No sooner had he jumped down from his vehicle than he pounced on the head of the kolkhoz.

"So that's your game, is it? Sabotage, you son of a whore? You want to screw up the entire grain plan for the region? Well, I'm warning you. The perpetrators of deeds like that get shot as enemies of the people!"

He inspected the whole kolkhoz, cast an eye over the smithy and the stable. "Where's the horse?" he demanded. "What? Dead? Don't give me that crap. It's dead? You're a saboteur!"

They went out into the fields. The Party Secretary continued to fulminate. "Oh! So now he hasn't enough land for sowing… There's no end to his whining, this son of a dog. Look there. What's that? Isn't that land? Left in your hands, you filthy kulak, land like this is land gone to waste."

They had stopped beside a muddy field that ran down to the river. It was strewn with large white boulders. "Why don't you clear away those rocks?" the Secretary yelled again. "Well? I'm talking to you."

The head of the kolkhoz, who up to that moment had not opened his mouth, absently tucked the empty sleeve of his tunic into his belt with his remaining hand. In a hoarse voice he said: "Those are not rocks, Comrade Secretary…"

"So what are they, then?" yelled the other. "Are you telling me they're sugar beets that grew there all by themselves?"

They went closer. Then they saw that the white stones were human skulls.

"That's where our men tried to break through the ring of enemy troops," said the head of the kolkhoz in a dull voice. "They were caught in crossfire…"

Choking with fury, the Party Secretary hissed: "All you can do is give me goddamned stories. You're a fine bunch of Heroes here in this neck of the woods. You're sheltering behind your past exploits, the lot of you!"

Ashen-faced, Ivan advanced on him, grasped him by the lapel of his black leather jacket, and shouted in his face: "You filthy scum! At the front I shot down bastards like you with my submachine gun. Would you care to repeat what you said about Heroes…?"

The Party Secretary gave a shrill cry, wrenched himself free from Ivan and flung himself into the jeep. He leaned out the window and yelled above the sound of the engine: "Better watch out, head man! You'll answer for the plan with your life. And as for you, Hero, you've not seen the last of me."

The vehicle made the spring mud fly as it bounced along over the ruts.

They went back to the village in silence. The cool, acrid smell of humus wafted across from the forest where the snow had melted. The first plants were already appearing on the little hills. As they parted, the head of the kolkhoz said to Ivan: "Vanya, you were wrong to give him a shaking. You know what they say, don't touch shit and it won't stink. In any case, what we have to do tomorrow is start plowing. And not on account of that idiot's orders…"

The next day Ivan was making his way forward, leaning on the plow, stumbling over the ruts, slithering on the glistening clods of earth. With the aid of ropes fixed to the draft beam, the plow was being drawn along by two women. On the right walked Vera, in big sagging boots, that looked like elephants' feet on account of the mud. On the left Ivan's childhood friend, Lida. She still wore her schoolgirl's skirt, which left her knees bare.

The morning was limpid and sunny. Busily the crows were taking off and settling again on the plowed land. Fluttering past, hesitant and fragile, the first butterfly shone in a brief yellow flurry.

Ivan kept his eyes on the backs and feet of the two women as they struggled forward. Sometimes the plowshare dug in too deeply. The women braced themselves against the ropes. Then Ivan manipulated the handles of the plow, trying to help them. The steel plowshare sliced through the earth, wrenched itself free, and they continued their walk. And again Ivan saw the elephants' feet and the jackets discolored by the sun and rain. "The war…" he thought. "Everything stems from there… Take Lidka, hardly married and her husband sent to the front. Straight into the front line, into the mincing machine. A month later the death notice and there she is, a widow. A widow at eighteen. What a crying shame! And look how much she's aged! You'd scarcely recognize her. And those varicose veins! Like dark strings on her legs. She used to sing so well. The old folks would climb down off their stoves to listen to her, while we, young idiots, used to fight over her like cocks…"

They stopped at the end of the furrow and straightened themselves up. "Take a rest, girls," said Ivan. "We'll have lunch." They sat down on the ground, on last year's dry, brittle grass, unwrapped their sparse meal from a cloth. Unhurriedly they began to eat.

Spring had come. What lay in wait for them was the great drought of 1946.

By the month of May they had already reached the stage of boiling up the half-wild orache plants that grew by the roadside, tossing in a little scrap of rancid bacon and eating this brew in an attempt to cheat their hunger.

In June the burning wind of the steppes began to blow. The new grass began to shrivel and the leaves began to fall. The sun scorched the young corn to a cinder, dried up streams, struck down the starving people who went out in the fields. Even the wild strawberries that could be found at the edge of the forest had hardened into bitter, dry little balls.

At Goritsy one of the peasants arranged with the head of the kolkhoz to go and see what was happening in the neighboring villages. He returned five days later gaunt, with staring eyes, and very quietly, as if he were afraid of his own voice, and constantly looking over his shoulder, began to tell his story: "At Bor there are only two men still alive. At Valyaevka there's not a soul in sight. No one to dig graves: when folks die they just stay in their izbas… . You sure get the jitters going into one. Every time you push open a door it's a nightmare. I met a peasant on the high road yesterday. He was heading for the city. The hunger drove him to it. He told me that where he came from they were eating the dead, like they did on the Volga in the twenties…"

Ivan had become afraid to look at his wife of late. She hardly got up anymore. Lying there with the baby, dipping her finger into a brew of orache and old crusts, she tried to feed him. Her face was marked with dry brown spots; dark rings burned around her eyes. Kolka hardly moved on her breast. He no longer even cried, simply uttering tiny moans, like an adult. Ivan himself had great difficulty in standing upright. At length he woke up one day at the crack of dawn and reflected with mortal clarity, "If I don't find anything to eat all three of us will die."

He kissed his wife, put two gold watches, the spoils of war, into his tunic pocket, hoping to be able to trade them for bread. And set out toward the main road.

The village was dead. The noontide furnace. Dry, dusty silence. Not a living soul. Nothing but music blaring from the black loudspeaker above the door of the soviet. The radio had been installed by the Secretary of the District Committee, who had ordered that it should be switched on as often as possible, "to raise the political consciousness of the kolkhozniks. " But now the radio was simply blaring because there was no one to turn it off.

And from dawn till dusk, delirious with hunger and hugging the tiny body of her child with his great head, Tatyana listened to rousing marches and the commentator's voice almost bursting with glee. He was reporting on the industrial achievements of the Soviets. Then the same voice, but now in harsh, metallic tones, began hitting home at those enemies who had perverted Marxism and lambasted the agents of imperialism.

That day, the last before her long collapse, in the stifling heat of noon Tatyana heard the song currently in vogue that was played every day The flies buzzed against the windowpanes, the village was mute, poleaxed by the sun, and this song rippled out, as sweet and tender as Turkish delight:

All the world turns blue and green about us,

Nightingales at every window sing.

There's never love without a touch of sadness…

Ivan walked along taking great strides. In his old knapsack he carried two loaves of black bread, a paper bag containing millet, twelve onions, and a piece of bacon wrapped in a scrap of cloth. But most precious of all, the liter of milk, that had long since turned sour, he carried in his hands. "With this we can feed the kid and then we'll see…" he thought.

A dense, dry heat hovered over the fields, like the exhalation from the mouth of an oven. A burning copper sun was plunging down behind the forest but scarcely any evening cool could be felt.

He passed through the deserted village flooded with the violet light of the sunset. The radio above the soviet was still blaring away.

As he crossed the threshold he had a premonition of disaster. He called out to his wife. All that could be heard was the incessant buzzing of the flies. A fine golden ray of light pierced the gloom of the izba as Ivan rushed into the bedroom. Tatyana lay there on the bed, the child in her arms, and appeared to be asleep. He lifted the cover in haste and pressed his ear to her breast. Beneath the rough scar he heard her heart beating faintly. He heaved a sigh of relief. "Thank goodness! I've arrived in time…" Then he touched the child. The cold, rigid little body already had a waxen sheen to it. Outside the window the sweet voice was unflaggingly pouring out these words:

All the world turns blue and green about us

In the forest gaily purls the stream.

There's never love without a touch of sadness…

Ivan bounded out of the house and ran over to the soviet. Blinded with tears, he began hurling stones at the black disk of the loudspeaker, without managing to hit it. Struck at last, the loudspeaker screeched and fell silent. A vertiginous stillness ensued. Only, somewhere at the edge of the forest, like a well-oiled machine, the cuckoo flung out its insistent, plaintive call.

The next day Tatyana was able to get up. She went out on the doorstep and saw Ivan driving nails into the little coffin's pine planks.

After burying their son and gathering together their meager luggage, they took the road to the station. Ivan had heard that in the small town of Borissov, some sixty miles from Moscow, they were recruiting drivers for the construction of a hydroelectric center and providing them with accommodation.

That was how they came to settle in the Moscow region. Ivan found himself behind the wheel of an old truck, whose side panels bore the inscription in flaking paint: "Next stop: Berlin!" Tatyana went to work at the furniture factory.

And the days, months, and years followed one another, calmly and uneventfully. Ivan and Tanya were content to see their lives following this ordinary, peaceful course. The same as everyone else, that of decent people. They had been given a room in a communal apartment. There were already two families living there, the Fedotovs and the Fyodorovs. And in the little room next to the kitchen lived Sofia Abramovna.

The Fedotovs, still a young couple, had three sons whom the father beat frequently and conscientiously. When their parents were out at work these rascals would take their father's heavy bicycle down from the wall. With a hellish din, running over the other tenants' shoes, they careered up and down the long, dark corridor, where there hovered a persistent and bitter smell of stale borscht.

The Fyodorovs were almost twice as old as the Fedotovs. Their son had been killed just before the end of the war and the mother lived in the hope that the death notice had been sent by mistake: there were so many Fyodorovs in Russia! Secretly she hoped he had been taken prisoner and that some day or other he would return. Fyodorov, the father, had himself been in the war from the first day to the last and was under no illusions. Sometimes, when he had been drinking and could stand it no longer, exasperated by his wife's daily expectation, he would yell right through the apartment: "Oh sure, you can count on it. He'll be coming back. But if he's discharged from the POW camp he's not coming back here to you. He'll be sent beyond the Urals – or even farther!"

Sofia Abramovna belonged to the old Moscow intelligentsia. In the 1930s she had been sent to a camp and had only been released in 1946, subject to a ban on living in Moscow and some hundred other cities. During her ten years in the camp she had lived through what human language was incapable of expressing. But her neighbors guessed it. When a quarrel broke out in the kitchen Sofia did not try to stand on the sidelines but lost her temper, cursed and swore, using surprising language. Sometimes she hurled turns of phrase at her adversaries contemptuous in their exaggerated politeness: "I give you my most humble thanks, Comrade Fyodorov. You are the very pinnacle of courtesy." On other occasions she would suddenly come out with expressions she had picked up in the camps: "See here, Fedotov, you keep your damned thieving hands off the stash in my sideboard. You're wasting your time casing it. There's no liquor in there."

But even at the height of these neighborly quarrels Sofia 's eyes were always staring into space to such an extent that it was clear to everyone: she was still back there beyond the Urals. Which was why arguing with her was not very rewarding.

Whether they liked it or not, the Demidovs used to find themselves drawn into these conflicts. But their role was generally confined to acting as conciliators between the Fyodorovs and the Fedotovs when they squabbled and calming the wives as they sobbed noisily.

Life would have been somewhat lacking in savor for all of them without these altercations. For three days after a quarrel the neighbors would edge by when they met without exchanging greetings, glowering at one another. Then they would make up around a communal table and, after drinking a few vodkas, would begin to embrace, swearing eternal friendship and abjectly begging one another's forgiveness with tears in their eyes. The Fedotovs had an old windup phonograph. They would bring it down into the courtyard, put it on a small stool, and all the inhabitants of their little building would gather in the mauve dusk of spring. They would shuffle around to the strains of a languid tango, forgetting for an hour or two the lines outside the communal toilets every morning, the squabbles over the disappearance of a piece of soap, forgetting everything that made up their lives.

The Demidovs enjoyed these evenings. Tanya would put on her white wedding blouse, Ivan threw a jacket over his shoulders with all his medals in a row. And they danced together, smiling at each other, letting themselves be carried away by the sweet dreaminess of the words:

Do you remember how we whispered, On those summer nights so blue, Words of tenderness and passion   dearest lover true…?

The years rolled by at once slowly and rapidly. Imperceptibly the Fedotov sons had grown up, developed into hefty young men with bass voices. They had all married and left in one direction or another.

Some records had had their day, others came into vogue. And now it was the younger generation who played them on their windowsills, commenting: "That's Lolita Torrez… Oh, this one's Yves Montand."

The only event that stuck in Ivan's memory during those years was the death of Stalin. And, in fact, not the death itself, because on that day they had drunk and wept buckets and that was all. No, it was another day, already under Khrushchev, when they removed the statue of Stalin. Why did they choose him, specifically him, Demidov, for this task? Was it because he was a Hero of the Soviet Union? The head of the motor pool had called him in. Ivan found himself among the local Party bosses. They explained to him what it was all about. He had to take his Zis truck that night and work some overtime.

This was how the memory of that spring night had stayed with him. They worked in darkness, simply lighting the monument with their vehicle headlamps. A fine rain was falling that had the bitter smell of poplar shoots. The cast-iron statue of the Great Leader glistened like rubber. The pulley on the crane began to do its work: Stalin found himself hanging in midair, somewhat askew, gently swaying, staring hard at the people scurrying about beneath him. And already the workmen were tugging him by his feet toward the Zis's open side panel. The foreman of the team, close beside Ivan, grunted: "Sometimes we were lying there on our bellies at the front and they were throwing so much at us you couldn't even lift your head up from the ground. The stuff was whistling over. A hail of bullets like a shower. Then the political commissar jumps to his feet with his little revolver, you know, like those kids' pistols. And once he yells: 'For our Country, for Stalin, forward!'… then it grabbed us, you know, goddamn it! We jumped up and went over the top… All right, you guys! Steer the head toward the corner. Otherwise it won't fit in. Steady she goes…"

A fresh breeze could be sensed in the air, with something sparkling and joyful about it. In Moscow, it appeared, passions were being unleashed. Things were coming to the boil in kitchens at the highest level. Ivan even acquired a taste for reading newspapers, which he had never looked at before. All about them everything was relaxing, gaining a new lease of life. An endless procession of Fidel Castros, bearded and smiling, marched through the newspapers, as well as drawings of blacks with great white teeth, smashing the chains of colonialism, and the engaging faces of Belka and Strelka, the pioneer dog cosmonauts. All this added savor to life and caused joyful hopes to be reborn. As he sat behind the wheel, Ivan often hummed the song that could be heard everywhere:

Cuba, my love,

Isle of purple dawn…

And it seemed as if both Fidel and the blacks on the posters, breaking free from colonialism, were intimately linked to the life of Borissov, to their own existence. It seemed as if the world was about to be shaken and an endless festival would begin, here and everywhere on earth.

To crown it all, Gagarin had taken off into space.

And at the Party Congress Khrushchev made the pledge: "We shall build Communism in twenty years."

At the end of this happy year two important events occurred in the Demidov family. In November they had a daughter and just before the new year they had bought a Zaria television set.

At the maternity ward the doctor said to Ivan: "Now listen, Ivan Dmitrevich, you may well be a Hero here, all the town knows you. But I'm going to speak frankly. With a war wound like that no one should have children! Her heart missed a beat three times during the birth…"

But it was a time for optimism. They had no thoughts of anything troublesome. On New Year's Eve Ivan and Tanya sat in front of the television, their arms around each other's shoulders, to watch Carnival Night, starring the popular actress Gurchenko, then in the flush of youth and trilling away merrily. They were perfectly happy. In the dim light the dark green glint of a bottle of champagne glowed on the table. The snow crunched under the feet of passersby outside. From the neighbors' rooms could be heard the hubbub of guests. Behind the wardrobe in- a little wooden cradle their newborn was sleeping silently and diligently. They had called her Olya.

In the spring of the following year they were given an apartment of their own with two rooms.

During these years a whole generation who had not known the war came into the world and grew up. Ivan was more and more often invited to the school at Borissov just before the national celebration on May 9, Victory Day.

Now they addressed him as "Veteran." This amused him. To him it seemed as if the war had only just ended and he was still that former Guards staff sergeant, recently demobilized.

At the entrance to the school he was met by a young teacher, who greeted him with a radiant smile and led him into the classroom. He followed her in, his medals tinkling on his chest, and thought: "How quickly time passes! The truth is I really am a veteran now. She's young enough to be my daughter and she's a teacher already!"

As he entered the noisy classroom silence fell. The pupils stood up, exchanging glances, whispering and staring at his decorations. They were impressed by the Gold Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union. A Hero. You don't meet one of those every day!

Then the teacher made some appropriate remarks about the great national celebration, and the twenty million lives sacrificed for the sake of the radiant future of these pupils, distracted as they were by the May sunlight, taking as her text: "No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten." After that her voice adopted a warmer, less official tone and she addressed Ivan, who was standing somewhat stiffly behind the table: "Honored Ivan Dmitrevich, on your chest shines our country's highest award, the Gold Star of a Hero of the Soviet Union. We should like to hear about the part you played in the war, your achievements in battle, and your heroic contribution to the Victory."

And Ivan cleared his throat and began his story He already knew by heart what he would tell them. Once he had started receiving invitations he had grasped what he had to say so that the class remained attentive for the regulation forty minutes, much to the delight of the young teacher. He even knew that at the end of his talk – after which there would be a tense silence for several seconds – she would rise nimbly to her feet and pronounce the expected words: "Now then, children, put your questions to Ivan Dmitrevich." Once again there would be an embarrassing silence. But in obedience to a look from the teacher, a radiant girl would stand up in the front row, wearing a smock as white as whipped cream, who would say, as if she were reciting a lesson: "Honored Ivan Dmitrevich, please will you tell us what qualities of character you valued most in your wartime comrades?"

After the reply, to which no one paid much attention, the most presentable boy would stand up and ask Ivan, in the same conscientious tones, what advice he would give to future defenders of their Country.

At the end of this patriotic-military demonstration there would often be an unexpected diversion. Urged on by the whispers of his fellows, a great scruffy youth would rise to his feet in the back row. And without any preliminaries would stammer out: "So how thick was the armor on the German Tigers? Thicker or thinner than on our T-34?" "The gun. Ask him about the gun…" his neighbors prompted him. But the boy bright red, was already collapsing on his chair, proud of his excellent question. Ivan answered him. Then the bell rang and the much relieved teacher congratulated the veteran once more and gave him three red carnations, taken from a vase that stood on the desk. Impatiently the whole class jumped to their feet.

On the way, Ivan Dmitrevich always had a few confused regrets. Each time he wished he had told them about a small detail: the wood he went into after the battle and the spring water that had reflected his face back at him.

Journalists sometimes came to see him as well, most often for the anniversary of the start of the Battle of Stalingrad. The first time, responding to a question about the battle, he began to talk about everything: Mikhalych, who would never know his grandchildren; Seryozha, who looked so serene, so carefree in death, the machine-gunner who had only one digit left on each hand. But the journalist, adroitly seizing the moment when Ivan was drawing a breath, interrupted him: "So, Ivan Dmitrevich, what impression did the ' Heroic City on the Volga ' make on you in that year of fire, 1942?" Ivan was disconcerted. Admit that he had never seen Stalingrad, never fought in the streets there? "All Stalingrad was burning," Ivan replied evasively.

After that he got used to this innocent untruth, which suited the journalists very well, for at that time Stalin was coming back into fashion and " Stalingrad " had a good ring to it. Sometimes Ivan was surprised to realize that even he was increasingly forgetful about the war. He could no longer distinguish between his old memories and the well-worn tales told to the schoolchildren and the interviews given to journalists. And when one day he was speaking of a detail that fascinated the boys: "Oh yes, our seventy-six-millimeter gun was powerful but it couldn't pierce the Tiger tank's frontal armor…" he would think: "But was it really like that? Maybe it's something I read in Marshal Zhukov's memoirs…"

The Demidovs' daughter, Olya, was growing up and going to school. She already knew the ancient story of the little mirror. To her it seemed legendary and alarming – her father lying in a frozen field, his head all bloody; her mother, whom she could not manage even to picture, choosing him from among hundreds of soldiers lying all around. She knew that once upon a time there had been a battle, for which he had received his Star – thanks to which he could buy train tickets without having to stand in line.

They had also told her about her mother's injury, which meant she was not supposed to carry heavy loads. But this did not stop her mother from lugging heavy wooden panels around, and Olya's father used to scold her for her lack of concern.

When Olya took her entrance exams for the Maurice Thorez Institute of Foreign Languages she experienced the reality of this legendary wartime past in a quite specific way. The friend with whom she had come to Moscow said to her with ill-concealed jealousy: "You're bound to pass, of course. They'll take you just because of your civil status. It's a foregone conclusion. You're the daughter of a Hero of the Soviet Union…"