By dawn, we’d walked about ten kilometers. The road went up a hill covered with rickety aspen and birch trees. On the other side sat an empty armored car with a 45 mm cannon, and an artillery lieutenant, who looked no older than twenty, announced that we were going to set a trap for the advancing Germans. He was a professional soldier, not an NKVD officer, and his mind was attuned to war. I had no doubt he had received high grades in his military classes, too diligent to have allowed himself to receive anything less, impatient to get to the real battle he had studied for in class. We were all in the middle of a war, but we were amateurs, trying to avoid a bullet or a land mine, trying to balance our weight on the wire between life and death.

Just beneath the road, there was an abandoned water pipe, and inside it, the soldiers stretched a cable all the way to the armored car behind which we all hid. The sun was rising, and there were columns of smoke on the horizon. Aside from the armored car and the cannon, it looked like any mushroom-hunting morning at the edge of the woods near our house in Ivanovo.

It was around six when we heard the engines, and out of the morning smoke emerged motorcycles with sidecars. They stopped now and then, and the riders peered into binoculars and shot at whatever they thought looked suspicious. The sidecars were carrying MG 34s. The Germans wore metal helmets and large glasses covering half their faces. Martians, I thought, they look just like Martians. Round metal heads, big glass circles for eyes, all black. An unpatriotic thought rose to the surface of my mind: This is the war of the worlds, just as in H. G. Wells’s book, and our world is losing. There was something invincible and mighty about the Germans’ movements, in their bizarre, alien appearance, in the way they sliced through the damp air over the fields. There was an arrogance and a luxury in the way the machine guns occupied the sidecars as though they were passengers, as though those iron contraptions were human beings deserving to spread their weight across the black leather seats, hitching a ride along a dusty road of an alien country.

Then in a desperate, teenage voice, the lieutenant shouted, “Fire!” and the road exploded into a mash of body parts and twisted steel.

Sasha stops reading and examines a drawing penciled in the middle of the page: a man with a long, thin neck, yelling.