With a pencil I keep in the driest corner of my backpack, I draw Seryoga and our sergeant, but they come out one-dimensional and static, lacking the dark anger we’ve all acquired in the trenches. The paralyzing fear of the first German bombing, when my bowels instantly turned to water, has by now retreated into the pit of my stomach, where it lies curled up like a diseased dog. I stood in shock amid craters and burned grass, as planes were speeding toward us, filling the sky over the field with a deafening roar—alien iron machines armed with death—and Seryoga had to slap me and pull me down and shove me into the trench, where I sat shivering in a warm, stinking mess inside my pants. I’ve become angry since then, and my heart has hardened around the edges. In two months, I’ve learned to curse and down vodka, both of which would make my mother clutch at her heart and wipe her dampened glasses with a handkerchief, both of which would make my father proud.

“Hey, Da Vinci,” calls the sergeant, looking over my shoulder. “Make sure you finish that masterpiece before the next attack. The Hermitage can’t wait.”

The sergeant knows nothing about the Hermitage. He is from a small town on the other side of the Urals where he probably failed drawing in middle school because of his contempt for anything that isn’t real, and I know he has never been to Leningrad.

“Never read any fiction,” he boasts, picking his teeth with a finger and sucking down bread crumbs that got stuck there when we chewed on our rations.

“Come on,” says Seryoga. “You never read Pushkin in school? They never made you read Turgenev’s ‘Mumu’?” He pleats his eyebrows into a pitiful wave as he says “Mumu,” a story we all read in fourth grade about a heartless landlady who forces a poor peasant to drown his dog. I remember fighting back tears as I was approaching the end of the story when the peasant cuddles the little mutt for the last time before tossing it over the side of the boat.