Suddenly there are several explosions: first in the distance, then closer, then only a few meters away. On the ground, I see a soldier crouching in a puddle of blood, but all I feel is relief that it isn’t me. An older man who was walking in front of us is now on his knees, clutching his thigh. Next to him is a nurse, a girl who looks no older than sixteen, helpless, dribbles of tears streaking down her dirty face unwashed for days. She doesn’t know what to do, and I see that her hands are shaking. The older man lowers his pants, plugs the bloody hole in his thigh with a bandage, and tries to console the girl. “Don’t be afraid, dochka, don’t cry.” Dochka, he calls her, my little daughter.

We reach the hospital at dusk. The bandage around the sergeant’s throat is all red now, but he is still hanging on to my shoulders, dragging his feet in the dirty snow. The hospital is not really a hospital; it is a train parked on an auxiliary track. There are scattered bloodstained rags and too many men to count. The young doctor with a face drained of color and short chestnut hair has lost her voice. She looks as if she could faint at any minute, but she tries to project authority. She looks a little like my older sister, Galya, who is also a surgeon at the front line, near Kalinin. I carefully lower the sergeant to wait in line with the other wounded sitting on the floor of what used to be a corridor when this train was a train, when there was no war. Then I turn around to take the road back to the front. This is the closest to Nevsky Prospekt I’m going to get for a while.

And what if I didn’t go back to our trench carved in the frozen flesh of the field? What if I stayed right here and got lost among the scraps of life swarming along the war road? A seductive thought, a dangerous thought. A thought that has crossed my mind more than once, that has crossed the mind of every private who wanted to survive. A desperate attempt to stay alive that usually fails.