Then one week, he was not there at all, and her mother announced at dinner that Lyosha had been sent with his air squadron to an overseas military mission. She said this staring into her borscht, and from Grandma’s deep and silent sigh, Sasha knew that she didn’t believe her.

The war aftermath is what Sasha and Lara both remember, not the war itself. The time of women, children, and old men; the time of nettle soup in the summer and cabbage soup in the winter; the time of waiting for fathers, sons, and brothers to return. The time of the gradual realization of how many wouldn’t.

One evening, when Sasha searches for words to bandage around their postwar wounds, words she cannot find, she turns to Kolya’s journal and reads to Lara what she herself doesn’t know how to express. She is still astonished, after all these years, by the grace of his sentences written in the trenches.

February 19, 1942

It’s the end of February, eight months since the beginning of the war, and our division is hobbling toward the front, which has been recently pushed half a kilometer west by a few hundred men from the provinces. Bowlegged, sinewy, and short, they threw themselves over the German machine-gun bunkers with the same irrational abandon that propelled them, in the steam of a peaceful bathhouse, to down tin cups full of undiluted spirits and then jump naked into the snow. A platoon of sharpshooters followed over their bodies, and now it is our heavy artillery division, with six cannons pulled by tractors, which has been tossed into the maw of battle.

We step out of the woods to cross the railroad tracks, which are still under bombardment—no longer from machine guns but from heavy artillery—farther away. The forest on the other side of the tracks looks like a broken comb, with sharp, uneven teeth of splintered tree trunks against the sky.

“Run over the tracks, don’t walk,” Seryoga instructs. “Hurry.”