In Quiet Dawns, she is on a reconnaissance mission, making her way through the swamp, carefully stepping from one mound of earth to the next, feeling the ground before her with a pole made from a thick birch branch. The swamp is vast, several kilometers in any direction, but from the sun that is beating into her right cheek, she knows she is going north. When her sergeant gave her this assignment, she felt terrified of walking alone across the swamp that is rumored to have claimed many lives, but the war has taught her a shifting sense of danger: what seems frightening at first is often recalled later as safe as your Ivanovo home.

She is in cold water up to her ankles, but she knows she is safe as long as she is standing on firm ground. The birch pole is her guide. When it sinks, there is nothing in front of her except the bottomless sludge of death; when it meets resistance, she pokes around for a minute to make sure the ground is solid and takes the next step. There are trees and spindly bushes rising from the mud, and between them are the cold cauldrons of the bog, with bubbles floating up from their black depths. She tries to imagine those who drowned here, sucked into this abyss. She thinks about all who were killed in the war, all who died in the camps, millions of snapped, diminished lives. She thinks of the totality of death. She thinks about Uncle Kolya, who is not listed among the dead or alive, and Uncle Sima, who died in their Ivanovo house three weeks before she was born. She thinks, reluctantly, about her father.

Sima, the youngest in the family, had been stationed on the border with Poland before the war began, writing only one letter home when the post delivery still functioned, a triangle of gray paper Grandma still keeps in the bottom of a drawer. “They feed us well here, thick soup and boiled potatoes,” he wrote for Grandma’s sake. “Yesterday the sergeant said they might soon issue us guns.” Her mother says she could never understand why soldiers on the Polish border, right before the German blitzkrieg into Russia, did not have guns.