You clench your teeth and shoot your foot through a loaf of bread. You turn your head away and fire at your wrist through the arm of a soldier with a funnel in place of where his stomach had been only a few minutes earlier. You are desperate enough to jump into a bomb crater and detonate a grenade that will rip off your arm at the elbow. And then what? Then there is an NKVD officer with a heavy jowl from extra rations and an unflinching communist gaze who has seen all this before and who can tell in an instant a real wound from a self-inflicted one. There is no hesitation in his eyes because the front allows no benefit of the doubt for the cowardly and the weak, for those who have to think about whether they are ready to die for their motherland. If you are weak, you are killed like a rabid dog, like a horse infected with anthrax, to keep other dogs and other horses healthy and in working order. The verdict is quick: you are a deserter, so you stand in front of your platoon, your belt taken away, your pants falling down, the commissar aiming his gun at your head.

I walk along the road back to the front, back to Seryoga, into the rapidly descending winter night.

Sasha is at the rehearsal for Quiet Dawns, and she is feeling the swampy water before her with her birch-tree pole, trying to distinguish land from morass, life from death. Everything is absolute: if you make a mistake, there is no second chance. One wrong step is your destiny. You have one moment to make a decision that will define your life, whatever is left of it. A single moment can either leave you balanced on ten centimeters of firm land or open a void under your feet, a bottomless quagmire of cold muck ready to suck you in and swallow you whole. One moment Marik was standing by the fire, his feet dug into the mud, and the next thing she saw was blood from the corner of his mouth leaving a red stain on the snow.